Assignment

Jan 22 2009

Wiki Wiki Wiki – Inset Training…

Welcome on board the wiki wiki bus? Below are links to a variety of resources and the basic presentation I am giving on the use of Wiki’s within the MYP and IB curricular, to view the presentation full screen click on this link.

Wiki Tools – Links to the best

Examples of Wiki’s for different subject areas:-

Wiki Wiki bus at the Honolulu International Ai...
Image via Wikipedia

Other Presentations:-

Here is a great but very simple way of explaining what a wiki is to your students:-

Common Craft do some other great videos including one about Wetpaint over at their website.

Finally a much better presentation than I can ever produce from a Wikiexpert:-

Wikis in the Classroom

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: education teaching)

By drtech • Assignment, Delicious Links • Comments Off on Wiki Wiki Wiki – Inset Training…

Nov 27 2007

The MAC arriveth…Digalo and E-Facilitation…

Well a big cardboard box popped through the school letterbox today with a shiny new mac inside it. So the revolution has continued although my first step was to use BootCamp to install Windows XP on the Mac as well – it felt a little rebellious in a sad geeky way. As I am sure I have said before there are pluses and minuses to both systems, but when you mix them together if you are not careful if it can get into a right mess. Although maybe that will teach me, to so early set up BootCamp and then Vmware and then start altering the boot setup until I could not boot in either Windows or OSX. Lol….well you live and learn.

Eventually with a bit of Linux on board it should be the perfect setup, although after one failed try have put the idea of Ubuntu on my Mac on hold for the time being. I must say however that Leopard has won me over to some degree with its ease of use; their are still the old niggles including the lack of a maximize window and that media player wise the Mac suffers dreadfully in comparison to XP’s surfeit of media players with every codec known to man.

Over at the Thinking Stick Jeff, has created a really interesting series of articles on the issue of school wide information systems, that do it all from assessment, reporting, course management, parent involvement, teachers websites and weblogs and much more. The article is interesting as ACS-Egham is about to begin a review to incorporate a school wide system called Ultranet. Ultranet being a new word in my vocabulary but generally meaning that the Intranet and external websites are connected in one whole management system, so as not to duplicate information and to give access to wll stakeholders in the system. A search on the word shows up a few Ultranets the most interesting being in New Zealand. I think these developments will be extremely interesting as I am almost pessimistic that all that a total system do is restrict the users and different stakeholders too much and so ends up not being used, along with the fact that it is often management centred rather learning/student centred. This could be a route I take for my Critical study, especially as setting up Social Networking for the language department is going to take a long period of time due to issues of time within departments for such initiatives and developments.

Finally in this rare round up the web facilitation course at Exeter University is beginning to take shape, however discussion are often stilted within WebCT although maybe my inability to follow threaded discussions is to blame. The introduction of a guest lecturer is interesting – Professor Robin Mason of the Open University. Some interesting discussions have begun, and the ideas about whether online learning communities can be as effective in a face-to-face classroom environment as much as a distance learning environment is an interesting one. As I have mentioned if I remember correctly I have been using multi author weblogs (with students as the authors) in an IT IB course, which works effectively as the discussion through both posts and comments is often different and adds to the discussion held in class. Also the course is meant to focus on global issues, and finally we have begun to find that other students from IT IB courses around the world are looking into our weblog and we are now looking into theirs. Students are now beginning to get the idea of what is all about, and love the idea that typing into google will come up with their article or discussion, or embedded slideshow…etc

The issue of assessment raised in the paper discussed by Mason is a crucial one, as on the recent Masters distance learning I have done. It was obvious that the discussions were interesting but never assessed, and also any collaborative activities were never assessed – so as a consequence it was noticeable that most collaborative activities which take so much time and motivation soon shattered and that discussions were often used by a certain style of student while others popped by on occasion. And as said for a Masters course with adults 100% participation is not needed but for school and sixth form students it is – which can raise issues unless areas such as assessment are addressed. The comments raised about a course being problematic if their are too many messages, was interesting. Maybe is it not to do with how these messages are shown e.g. these threaded forum messages are a nightmare in WebCT (and why do they give you such a small box to see your message in as you are writing…lol) – I find it desperately hard to follow and might indicate why my messages often seem a little incoherent.

My final thought is in agreement about the “the value of building up working relationship” within a distance based learning environment rather than trying to mix everyone around. A facilitator’s role to judge this is crucial as otherwise a student who maybe is contributing well through knowledge of his co-students can end up back at the start of Gilly Salmon’s model…

By drtech • Assignment, Delicious Links, Egham, ExeterUniversity, Featured • Comments Off on The MAC arriveth…Digalo and E-Facilitation…

Jul 30 2007

New Webtool Development and Finally That Assignment

Things have been very busy recently, moving schools has led me to havign to revamp my web-tools for learning, and its actually been quite fun. Now there exists the following web-tools which will hopefully expand on the successes and failures I had at my last school in Cairo:-

  • Techbribe – A weblog for MYP technology, to act as a portal and publishing site for students project work in design and technology as well as IT.SplashPic
  • ITGSonline– A weblog for Information Technology in a Global Society students, who will also have permission to post their work and relevant stories related to it.
  • hURL– A trial site based on Pligg, which acts as kind of a mini DIGG site – not sure about this one as whether we can get a critical mass of students posting and voting on sites?
  • IB Egham – Moodle– Aaahhh yes a revamped Moodle, which will need a variety of new courses, when I get organised but will mostly be used for ITGS students in the first instance.
  • Wiki and Eghs– Finally managed to install MediaWiki rather than TikiWiki to my server, and although Tiki was very flexible it seems that MediaWiki is much more stable and so should be able to be used for a collaborative project in the near future, although still like Pligg thinking that maybe a Web 2.0 version would be better.

Very busy indeed, and there is still a bit of skinning and quite a few courses ot iron out in Moodle to keep me busy but hopefully all will be up and running for the 23rd of August.

As promised last post here is a link to a very large .pdf –Social Networks in Language Learning – of the final assignment document. Still waiting on the result from Leeds University, but I cannot grumble after havign a two week extension.

By drtech • Assignment, Egham, Moodle, Wiki, WordPress • Comments Off on New Webtool Development and Finally That Assignment

Jul 20 2007

Athens IB Conference and the Assignment

Well the usual weblog post apology will come forth – yes it has been a while but if you excuse me moving country, moving school, finishing (YES I DID!) the assignment, buying a car and finally going to the IB conference on ITGS – Information Technology in a Global Society has all taken its toll not to mention time.

The assignment ended well, with a thorough analysis of how the Social Network – The French Connection worked within a MFL secondary school environment. The conclusions were not all positive but indicate that their is a future for the use of social networks within schools under certain conditions. Over the next few posts are will place extracts of the paper, along with a link to its entirety in .PDF format.

The IB conference in Athens was very interesting mainly for being able to meet so many IT teachers in the one environment. The course itself was run by Gordon Mathewmann from the International School of Vienna. Gordon was an excellent course guide, able to fend off the many criticisms about the course and other areas while maintaining a sense of humour! Over four days the course was outlined with many practical examples of ideas for teaching and learning. The ITGS course is from first glance an interesting one which focuses on ethical and social issues as well as the technical and applications side. It seems as if there have been many changes and many more to come, but considering it is the ONLY ICT based course apart from a hardcore programming course it seems as if it will suit my conversational facilitation style. I am the moment setting up new weblogs to focus as the background the ITGS and MYP Technology courses and feel free to have a look as they are setup.

My new school starts on the 9th of August so expect more posts and research information to start coming again soon……I promise.

By drtech • Assignment, Social Networks • Comments Off on Athens IB Conference and the Assignment

Jun 13 2007

FC Ning Results are in – What can I make of them?

Was the French Connection a success? Well more of a flawed success looking from both teachers and students points of view. I guess the possibilities of using a social network in a way which would aid teaching and learning but also in the students ‘eyes’ be fun is more complex than it first seems. Beyond this from my point of view the network had to aid students understanding of Web 2.0 technologies and there possible use for learning as well as fun and communication.

Below are a list of recommendations from teachers, students and myself as to how to improve the social network for MFL use:-

  • Time – Three weeks was not enough from questionnaires it seems a year or more would work much better, maybe throughout a course at GCSE or Diploma?
  • Participants – Must involve as many groups of students as possible within the school, so that those groups then become part of a larger network.
  • Age of Students – Vocabulary at Yr 9 was probably not enough for students to be able to converse to any great depth, Yr 10 (15 years old) and above is probably the ideal age.
  • Outside Experts – The more expert French speakers the better, especially if there were some native speakers from outside of education.
  • Cross School Exchange – The Social Network would work best if students are getting to know each other, and so an exchange program would be a great idea. Maybe between El Alsson and ACS-Egham next year – who knows?
  • Teachers – Need greater training in the complexities of a social network. Their was confusion between Forum, Blog and Comment posts and why they were different.
  • Objectives and Blending – The use of the network needs to blend with objectives within the curriculum, rather than be an addition. Vocabulary of site and menus needs support.
  • Technology Needs – The MFL department needs a number of internet enabled computers within their classrooms, this would then open this system to their students and themselves and enable them to integrate it into class time as well as home time.
  • Simplicity -The environment is quite complex, and many students found it hard to understand. More evidence we are not teaching a complete cohort of ‘digital natives’. This impeded on the use of the network and may need training or simplifying.
  • Multimedia and Video – All students need to be videoing and podcasting, the new tool will improve this greatly……

Well that is all I can think of for now….below is the usual mind-map I have produced for the outline of my assignment. Yes it is complex and will take a time to download the graphic but maybe worth a look -Mindmap NING (SECOND warning this is large and takes a long time to load….but…)

Also I have uploaded the results from the student questionnaires (anonymous) for you to view, as their are some interesting conclusions. It’s a PDF so you will need acrobat reader to view. Enjoy.

I will be publishing excerpts from the assignment soon, along with sending a summary assignment to the wonderful Miranda.net community.

NING Spreadsheet

By drtech • Assignment, Language Learning • Comments Off on FC Ning Results are in – What can I make of them?

Jun 9 2007

NING Project drawing to a close…

WhichSocialWell I am now bringing together a variety of results and observations from the use of NING to produce the French Connection Social Network. It is interesting how other students not even linked with the project are now asking for invitations. However to some extent the conversation has died which is to be expected with a niche social network that is not being led by anyone – and so the initial premise of its use has not been fulfilled.
It is interesting the spread of Facebook, to almost total domination within the school  andMemberofNetwork has led me to wonder whether trying to use another network or ‘yet another network’ would in a longer term be doomed to failure as students obviously gravitate to the network that has most friends within it. Although maybe if different schools had been involved  the ‘pull’ characteristics of the FC Network might have been more. It also must be clarified that through the initial questionnaire 24% of students are not a member of any social network. And so my reliance on the students knowledge of social networks and how they work, might have been a little too much of a jump for some students. It was notable that a great deal suggested the site was too complicated, and most only used the most basic of features.
Homework?

The students from the initial questionnaire really did seem to be interested in combining the two. That is a ‘fun’ social network and an academic /educational element to this. There are many recent articles discussing this idea especially with the ubiquitous Facebook, including the recent blog post suggesting:- ‘Facebook: A ‘School’ in the future? In reality though through observation many students could not see the educational value of conversing in French? Maybe this was down to the way the Social Network was presented by myself and probably more so by the MFL teachers as a bit of fun. When actually if objectives and aims had been set, the conversation could have been directed further into ways in which it was transparently useful to the students.

Next post will feature my usual mad mind-map with references….and some more thoughts and conclusions especially about the ‘small pieces loosely joined’ debate and how I think the FC network was beginning to do this well.

By drtech • Assignment, Delicious Links • Comments Off on NING Project drawing to a close…

Feb 20 2007

Its all over and it is now….

Short post, just to link to my 3rd Assignment – On weblogs and using them within Secondary ClassWeblogMix teaching. The assignment follows the initiative from a personal point of view and then discusses whether weblogs could be scaled up as an integral part of school curriculum’s and across departments.

The file is an Adobe PDF – have fun – Click here for Assignment

I will discuss in more detail some of the outcomes from the study, once I have recovered :)~

By drtech • Assignment • Comments Off on Its all over and it is now….

Jan 12 2007

Brainstorm outline shows the complexity of Weblog Studies within education.

Well in between playing with animation at PICTAPS below I have finally finished brainstorming and categorising the literature review for my assignment into using blogs as a particular example of how difficult ICT change and adoption management is within schools.

The amount of literature that is available both from academic research and ‘grey’ (web) research is phenomenal. Interestingly thought there is very little based on secondary school education and how blogs are implemented and used. This maybe due to the inherent difficulties of security and control that figure ,much more highly within school establishments than say university establishments. Beyond that the TIME factor seems very prevalent, and leads to such technological tools often used by highly motivated early innovators and then little uptake by others due to pressures or lack of a belief it will have any positive affect.
The areas of literature I rounded into 5 broad areas:-

  • Comments and Conversations
  • Blogging Motivations
  • Social Vs Technological
  • Educational Blogging
  • Blogs and Virtual Communities

Interestingly their was a great deal of enthusiasm and research into weblog communities, and ideas of connected networks that build virtually online. But often authors seem not to think that building a blended community of learners around one blog as of any validity or worth. I will undoubtedly disagree with this, and suggest that even within a teacher led weblog that is fully under control (as it has to be with secondary school students) levels of trust and freedom can be given to students to improve learning and motivation and lead to digitally literate students ready for the connectivist world they are entering.

Hopefully from this review I will then draw out my own motivations and rationales for starting to blog in an educational context introducing the variety of ways I have used blogs within school communities including:-

  • Sevens Vs Nines Blog – To publish work for KS3 groups of students and promote cross-curricular work
  • CreativICTism Blog- A Human portal for GCSE ICT students, which has grown with two student authors and acts as a virtual extension to the classroom. And beyond that a support mechanism.
  • AS Student Blogs – Created for their AS Applied ICT e-portfolios
  • Year 7 – Individual blogs, for a promote Egypt project
  • INSET for staff at my school, to introduce the idea of blogs and see if any teachers would take up the ideas and adopt the methods

This will hopefully lead into some of the wider issues of adopting such a technological tool within a classroom setting from an individual point of view (apart from the INSET) and how this has changed my ideas and styles of teaching and beyond….I will reflect on the successes and failures and how I have evaluated these. Mostly the review will be qualitative, with comments used from students and maybe questionnaires from teachers and students.

Click here to find my overall mind-map/brainstorm and yes it is as massive as before – but as usuals has helped me to bring connections between my research and my practice (Warning the mind-map will take a while to load and you will need to scroll around a great deal…sorry.)

  • ROXIK | PICTAPS
    Stunning Fabulous and quite fun too. While Plugging away on Dreamweaver have a look at this site, in which you can quickly draw a character and then animate them to dance to a soundtrack. Clever – huh…..post your examples as links in your comments…
    (tags: Animation design drawing 3d G)

By drtech • Assignment, WordPress • Comments Off on Brainstorm outline shows the complexity of Weblog Studies within education.

Dec 10 2006

Delicious links for 2006-12-10 – Blimey there is loads……

    Well busy times, and I seem to be back to my Del.icio.us bookmarking best……most of the links below relate to blogs and their use as communication tools with students. I have been trying to look for academic papers related to weblog use and communication – which in the end is kind of difficult as most discussion about weblogs is on weblogs which as such is part of the so called ‘grey’ research and discussion. Hopefully my assignment can focus on the fact that  weblogs can be used in a number of communicative ways including use of chatbox, comments, many authors, as portal….and how these different ways facilitate or in fact are poor at helping with communication.

    Beyond this I came across this weblog called Purselipsquarejaw which has some great papers on such things as ‘Collective Remembering and the importance of forgetting….’ This weblog came to me via the edublog awards which you can vote on at this moment in time – definitely worth a look….Edublog Awards.

    Finally related to ICT adoption and development within secondary schools there is a very good alternative perspective on looking at schools as ecosystems and how this can then effect and allow a framework to be organised on how to implement change and obviously ICT change being one of those in a far more effective way. Yong Zhao is the man, and his video even though not very invigorating is worth a long leisurely look.

    By drtech • Assignment, Education Theory, WordPress • Comments Off on Delicious links for 2006-12-10 – Blimey there is loads……

    Nov 9 2006

    CAA and sample assessment + Some Delicious Links…

    Well this Modules Units are whizzing by with an interesting if a little obvious chat about Computer Assisted Assessment last night. The talk did discuss in detail how computers can assist both in qualitative and quantitative assessment. Here is an example of quantitative CAA assessment using Hot Potatoes that I placed within Moodle. Although no-one has ever completed this within the 5 minutes time limit including ME!

    My ‘AS’ students are still bemused by the whole ‘Web 2.0’ social movement which is looked at in the above test even they are involved and have used many so called Web 2.0 tools:- Delicious, Bloglines Aggregator, MySpace, Piczo…it is almost why do you have to call it a name this is how the web is? I can see there point of view in one way, but maybe they are not quite able to step out of the picture to look at how this is affecting their lives. My experiments with using ‘Web 2.0’ tools within their course have been of limited success, probably as much to me dabbling with many different ideas as to them not understanding the principals and how this is good or bad. RSS is another of these technologies that I think will dramatically change how we can provide education and link in to ideas of ‘ubiquitous’ education e.g. education that invades into students lives through use of technologies that they use much more often than say for example their email account. Examples would obviously be their mobile phones and there MSN messenger account. Their are already services that can send out rss feeds to mobile phones as messages in the USA so its not far away…anyway I digress….here are some delicious feeds as I am back to loggin these through my delicious account…..

    After the chat seminar I had my first meeting with my tutor about the direction of this Modules assignment. It would seem the idea of me focusing on particular CMC web tools that I use for communication would be an appropriate assignment and maybe not go past that very short 6000 word mark… The idea of sticking to one web-tool for communication might be a little too much for my taste – but I definitely could look at how a variety of different tools affects and fits different users. Literature …hmmm well obviously the digital native-digital immigrant articles would be part of the discussion and maybe their lack of accuracy with practical uses and students. It would also be possible to look at how using email and other CMC tools affects the relationship between me as teacher and students on GCSE courses and maybe whether this would not be possible in different situation and schools.

    I am though still inclined to the use of and setting up of school email for teachers and how that has worked or not worked as the case maybe. Which would very much look into the rationales behind why a school wants to sue technologies and then how this when implemented is reacted to by teachers due to certain reasons.

    By drtech • Assignment, Delicious Links, Education Theory • Comments Off on CAA and sample assessment + Some Delicious Links…

    Jul 6 2006

    Development of a Connected Moodle Environment -Finished!

    Finally in the nick of time managed to finish off my assignment on the development of a web-based learning environment with Moodle. As usual the 6000 word limit was exceeded, even after a day of cutting and more cutting of surplus elements. In the end I just had to face the fact I had too much content to write about in such a large project. In some ways I don’t feel I did it justice. But beyond anything else it is out of the way and now the summer begins.

    If you are interested in reading you can view the Acrobat document here. Nothing particularly great but you might fancy a read. There is a lot of stuff about ‘connectivism’ and my take on it. And how hopefully Moodle will form part of a set of web-tools that I will develop maybe integrating Elgg. Who knows for now I know I need to concentrate on producing an e-portfolio ready for job hunting next year. And before that time for fun..a trip to London, then Mexico and then Budapest…

    Del.icio.us links will keep being added to here, otherwise you will probably see less posts until the start of my next module.

    By drtech • Assignment • Comments Off on Development of a Connected Moodle Environment -Finished!

    Jul 4 2006

    Stephen Downes and Avoiding Finishing this Assignment…

    Have just been surfing through my bloglines feeds and as usual went to Stephen Downes blog as it had an interesting introduction to ‘Identity Networks’ and the future of one sign in process for everything that you do on the web. Good Stuff. But I had never read his little aside to introduce his blog and maybe it might inspire me to change mine to:-

    “My government thinks it controls me. My employers think they own me. Corporations think they can buy me. Bullies think they can push me around.
    But for half and hour each day my life is my own. For half an hour I can write and think what I will, without regard to who is watching, who is reading. Half an hour, each day, for me.
    This is my space, and this is my time.”

    Stephen Downes

    Love it..now back grudgingly to that assignment.

    By drtech • Assignment • Comments Off on Stephen Downes and Avoiding Finishing this Assignment…

    Jul 3 2006

    Struggling along – 3 days to go…

    Well its starting to come together, but now finding it difficult to intertwine all the different threads of the design process together and also whether to not hint at some level of apathy for certain parts of that process. I have been teaching or been taught various design processes throughout my career whether it be an architectural process for a house design or a design and technology process for a furniture project design and still come to the conclusion that sometimes things are generally a lot more fluid and personal that any rigid process can describe.

    However I am quite proud of my design spiral diagram which I think sums up what has roughly happened while I was producing and developing my WBLE. Click on the thumbnail here to have a look. Funny but I  have only just realised that WordPress had this thumbnail built in function that makes life so much easier! Typical but at least I have found it now!Spiral Big

    Not much else to report, I have too many different styles of usability reports and seemingly I will be told off for numbers of screenshots within my assignment. But I find it very difficult to write about visual issues without a screenshot right next to it, so for anyone including Karon reading the assignment I would think this would be of great importance. Maybe my writing is not descriptive enough. Who knows?

    By drtech • Assignment, Moodle, Planning / WBLE • Comments Off on Struggling along – 3 days to go…

    Jul 1 2006

    Continued ‘state of partial attention’…

    Well good news, Dave Tosh reports over from Elgg that 800*600 resolution is finally on its way out -so maybe all the struggle to try and resolve those resolution issues with my Moodle CICT site might be a thing of the past? Still excited about the integration of Elgg and Moodle, although am being held back at this moment in time by the wonderful assignment. Less said about that the better, as I am ploughing through the opening paragraphs after proof reading them to make swathes of necessary changes.

    Just found a new Feedburner type site, Feedo Style that will place your feed in a fully alterable (CSS styled)Feedo Style block that can be embedded into any website…etc…which might be a better option than Feedburners rather simple options. Although as I found out with the Grazr feeds when their site goes down your site ends up hanging and that can’t be good. Another reason to think about the plugging in of all these different Web 2.0 style tools in the long term and something I will be commenting on in my assignment!

    How else can I waste time, aahh by popping the anthem of the summer for you to listen to by Peter and Bjorn – ‘Young Folks’ -go over to their website and buy it.

    Standard Podcast [ 4:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    By drtech • Assignment • Comments Off on Continued ‘state of partial attention’…

    Jun 29 2006

    Assignment – HOW many words!

    Well 8 or 9 days to go and the usual word worries are beginning to creep in. First draft, yes I know it is late is not finished and I am on 9,287 words. Oops so already will need to prune over 3,000 words and have’nt even touched accessibility or usuability issues. Have finally realised that my ideas for what this assignment was meant to cover might be a little extravagant especially when i am going into the merits of using a LMS like Moodle rather than starting a WBLE from scratch. Still very worried about my research into George Siemens work into the so-called ‘connectivist’ pedagogy and whether the very new research and linking to weblogs and various websites will be considered adequate references.

    Well beyond anything else it is a little late now I think to turn back. Still the most urgent thought going through my head is related to the ideas if todays ‘digital natives’ not multitasking but being in a state of ‘constant partial attention’. This seems the way I am while writing this assignment, as I continue to wander around the web researching for more information; found a great explanatory diagram about LMS and their position within today’s online learning from Derek Wenmoth along with the very interesting usability tool related to testing a website in over 23 different browsers at Browsershots.

    Time to get back to my state of constant partial attention, and stop writing on this blog.

    By drtech • Assignment, Moodle • Comments Off on Assignment – HOW many words!

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