K12 Online, Allanah King, Teaching and E-learning, Twitter and more...

Nothing to report from last week, but I would like to highlight some great free ICT PD opportunities!

K12 online conference – a free online conference taking place now!
K12 Online invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2010 conference theme is "Cultivating the Future." This year’s conference began with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 11, 2010. The following two weeks, October 18 and October 25, forty presentations will be posted online for participants to view, download, and discuss.

Check out the link here to see the schedule for upcoming presentations and for links to presentations that have already taken place.

Of particular note, is the presentation by NZ’s own Allanah King which looks at ‘A Week in the Classroom 2010’. Check out the presentation above, or the full presentation and supporting info here.

Other interesting topics include: ‘Creative Commons: What Every Educator Needs to Know’ and ‘The Classroom Social Network’ – lots to check out!

If you prefer your PD to be more bite-sized, you are welcome to check out the Teaching and e-learning blog. This blog is designed to provide ICT PD support for all teachers, offering weekly updates and online tutorials. You feedback and ideas are welcome!

Twitter update
Also, Fiona Grant has been working at establishing a #tag for identifying posts relating to ICTs in English, simply add #ictinenglish to any posts relating to the use of ICT in the English clasroom, that way related posts can be easily searched! These posts will also be displayed on our ICTs in English blog

If you check out the K12 online conference, make sure you share you feedback and recommendations here!

Room 23 Waimataitai School

"We are a group of 5 year old children who love learning. Our teachers are Mrs Donaldson and Mrs Charteris. Visit our blog here..."


Room 23 Waimataitai School

PLNs, Twitter, e-learning resources and more.....

One of the benefits of moving from the classroom last year into School Support Services is that I have had the time to 'look' around and discover some of the FAB resources, ideas and links that I have been following on my own Twitter PLN. The down side is that while I can share them all with teachers that I work with, I need to be back in a classroom in order to be able to use them with students myself !!!

Thought I'd take this opportunity to share some of the tools/activities/resources that I have bookmarked to use with an English class (when I get back into one!!!!).

A great resource for poetry techniques is Patterns of Poetry .

Shakespeare plays in a Wordle .

A couple of great links for writing around comic books and superheroes are Real life superheroes and Superhero Squad .

Fun writing starters at Shortest Book Titles , UK TwitterLit , 100 best first lines and Weird things banned at school

Pairing poetry with photos at Poetry Pairing .

A fun way to differentiate tasks The Differentiator

Fun with language learning at 11 longest words ... and with photos of famous people (US Presidents) !!

Discussion around books at Banned Books

Some interesting conversations around literature Complicated relationships and Book Covers

Great editing/adapting of films 40 film speeches in 2 minutes and Film tattoos

For those of you thinking that I'm not going for any 'high brow educational theory' here's a study and thesis site for Plath and movies for Gifted Students.

The thing is of course, that by the time I have finished this there will have been approximately 60+ tweets from the 60+ (I can't keep up with too many more) tweeters that I follow on twitter :o The joy of time and a mobile internet connection!

Alison Cleary
@http://mrscsbookblog.blogspot.com/
@The Invisible Teacher
@Twitter

ICTs in English Weekly Update - Term 4 Week 1

Last Week on ICTs in English

There was a continuation of the discussion around the topic of ‘Using Twitter as a PLN’

There were several great recommendations:

From Simon Evans:

Software for Learning There is a full write up about twitter and some useful links on the Software for Learning website for teachers starting out.

From Tamara Yuill Proctor:

I have found Twitter a useful way to gather information/resources over the past couple of months. I did a collaborative paper where one of the tools I looked at was Twitter - a small section of this is posted on my blog if anyone wants to have a look.

From Fiona Grant:

A Twitteraholic's Guide to tweets, hashtags, and all things Twitter

by Sue Waters

And Allanah King:

This wiki of Twitter types may help you.

Other contributors also offered up their “Who I follow” lists for inspiration

Kelly Faulkner - @kiwispouse

Karen Melhuish - @virtuallykaren

And for those who can’t bring themselves to peruse twitter itself, I really like this software that allows you to read Twitter links of the people you follow as if it were a newspaper!

Here is my paper paper.li

You can even view twitter entries about a specific topic (posts identified with a specific keyword – referred to as a hash tag on Twitter). Here is one for #edtech

By using this, you could even follow topics from Twitter without even joining Twitter – but what fun would that be!?

This week I would love to hear from you about how you are integrating or combining software and websites for your students – do you combine Moodle and Google Docs, or wikis and blogs? What else?

ICTs in English Weekly Update, Term 3 Week 10 (and Ulearn!)

During the holidays I was lucky enough to attend the Ulearn conference (where I even got to meet a few of you face to face!). Thanks to the Core team for yet another great Ulearn! Common themes dealt with at the conference were around how quickly the world is changing and how students are changing also - the term Digital Natives was mentioned often. When it came to workshops I attended several that dealt with Google Apps. I was particularly interested in the development of Google sites, particularly when these are intergrated with other Google apps such as embedded forms and calendars.

As any good conference does, I came away with many questions.

How are we meeting the challenge of faced paced change and meeting the needs of increasingly diverse learners (I refuse to believe they are indeed all digital natives). Also, how are we starting to integrate all of the great software out there? Are you embedding apps into your wikis? Embedding forms or calendars or videos into moodle?? It feels like it is no longer about one software, but more about the effective integration of a whole range of tools and strategies to meet specific teaching and learning needs. Your thoughts (and own questions) are invited!

The last week of last term was a quiet week on the ICTs in English forum.

The following is the post I sent out during that week (any other recommendations about who to follow is also invited!).

One idea that seems to be going down well is the idea of using Twitter as a PLN (Personal Learning Network). All this really means is that you create a Twitter account for yourself and simply "follow" people or companies that can keep you updated and deliver you relevant links and readings to your home page.

You don't even have to "tweet" yourself if you don't want to. I have only recently got back into Twitter, and have found that it is really effective as a kind of personal professional development tool that can be completely tailored to my own needs and interests. Below are some of the people and places I have been following:

Considering Twitter as a PLN!

Who you could follow on Twitter:

MinEducationNZ Ministry of Education NZ
Edscapes PPTA Professional
edconnectnz Edconnect
tedtalks TEDTalks Updates
TKINewZealand Te Kete Ipurangi
educationweek Education Week
TeachersTV Teachers TV
netsafeNZ NetSafe NZ
SirKenRobinson Sir Ken Robinson Los Angeles

eschoolnews eSchool News
DigistoreNZ Digistore
Software4LnrNZ
Interfacemag Interface Magazine Auckland, New Zealand
shiftingthinkng Shifting Thinking
NZCERPress NZCER Press
CoreEducation Core Education
nzcurriculum NZC

Another good technique is to have looksy at who like-minded educators are following, and poach from their list! You could check out:

ClaireAmosNZ That's me!
virtuallykaren Karen Melhuish

fionagrant Fiona Grant

Let me know who you recommend from the Twittersphere (including yourself!) and how you use it.