November 05, 2008
It just keeps getting better
It just keeps getting better and better… now I can post from Microsoft Word directly to a blog…. YAHOOO!!! …. Here goes the first try… if you’re reading this you’re seeing a big change in the way we blog… Microsoft is adding the post to blog capability in Word 2007… just read a post by one of the developers on this issue….
Well I've discovered that my posting from Word did transfer to here... but in draft form.. it didn't post it... could be because of the word verification system that is now being used... but that is awesome as now I can work in Microsoft Word... and have it sent to the blog with one click of the mouse...
eLearning Links for Sept 17th
Things to discuss with students to help them learn:
Reading for Learning [From Eric Zückerman’s Study Journal for OneNote http://www.aug.edu/%7Eezuckerman/SJ.pdf]
Skim reading: a quick, perusal of the material to acquaint yourself with the terminology of the section and any diagrams or graphs that are potential classroom material. You might find yourself reading a sentence or two hear and there, but mainly you should be investigating the overall structure of the pages you skim read.
Deep reading: reading where you approach each paragraph as if it must be mastered in order to progress to the next paragraph. It is often wise to restate each paragraph in a single, grammatically correct sentence. Every equation you come across should be described in a sentence or two, as well. Many of you will also find taking notes as you read helps, or, as an alternative, that you correlate the reading with the notes from class ( filling in any gaps from the notes that you come across).
Review reading: a deeper skim reading to be done after the deep reading and in preparation for the exam. I advocate doing reading from the text in small, 'digestible' chunks. From my experience, there are three forms of reading that most students can utilize to their advantage I recommend only skim reading before the material is covered in class. This is especially important if the material is being covered in the form of a guided inquiry activity.
For English Teachers.... A poem a day @ Poetry180.... http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html
On the topic of Tablet PC's
TabletPCPost.com connects Tablet PC users with Tablet PC Software Vendors, offering you the most complete and reliable Tablet PC Software catalog today. Not sure ow up to date this catalog is... but worth a look ... http://www.tabletpcpost.com/index.php
Using tablet pc's to adance individual learning... http://tabletpceducation.blogspot.com/
Have you been wondering "Is a Tablet PC a genuine alternative to pen and paper?"... some thoughts on the subject at http://studenttabletpc.com/2006/09/question_is_a_tablet_pc_a_genuine_alternative_to_pen_and_paper-2.html
A beginner's guide to the Tablet PC for students (and us teacher newbies).. http://studenttabletpc.com/beginners_guide/
Physics .... Vector Pad for adding subtracting vectors.... http://www.ee.vt.edu/%7Ejgtront/tabletpc/vector_pad.html
How can we use technological tools to assist student learning and promote student success.
Sometimes when looking at how technology may be used to help our students, as educators we can become handicaped by a lack of creativity - how can these things work. So I'd like to open a discussion and invite people to share their creative insights, experiences, awareness of happenings, and foster thought provoking comments. Let's not put barriers on what could be, let's open the brainstorming session and invite all within CLA to share their thoughts. I sense many of us are ready to move forward with using some of the tools we have in our organization and that are readily available to them.
eLearning links for Sept 29
Youth are all abuzz about them, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger, Classmates Online, Six Apart TypePad, Xanga.com … a whole 'nother' hip language for today's generation of technology savvy teens. Take a Teacher's Tour of YouTube....http://www.edutopia.org/community/spiralnotebook/?p=150
Wondering what young people are doing…. Maybe what your own children are up to … Social Networking Sites are growing exponentially…. What are the top 10… http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/17/top-10-social-networking-sites-see-47-growth/
Technology Grants Available
The School District has put aside funds for technology grants in two areas. Project proposals must be submitted by March 31st.
The first category is "Exploring best practices in supporting SPSS implementation through the innovative use of technology".
Project Purpose
This project is intended to allow groups of teachers to explore innovative uses of technology to support student achievement. Project proposals should be linked directly to some aspect of the school SPSS. The intent of this project is not to support current practices but to genuinely explore new areas of the application of technology to teaching and learning.
The second category is "Enhancing two way communication with parents through the innovative use of technology".
Project Purpose
This project is intended to allow groups of teachers to explore innovative uses of technology to support communication between home and school. Project proposals should be focused particularly on the development of two way communication rather then the school simply passing information to parents. The intent of this project is not to support current practices but to genuinely explore new areas of the application of technology to communication with parents.
Details and more information are available (pdf file). If you have any questions contact Richard Giroday.
We encourage you to discuss with your colleagues, personally and on this forum, your thoughts and ideas how we might undertake one or both of these projects at CLA. This is a fantastic opportunity.
eLearning Links for Sept 14, 2006
Podcast on using Wiki's in education... 1 hour long... turn it on while your marking... http://educationbridges.net/k12opensource/?p=10
Weekly AudioCast interviews by Miguel Guhlin and Steve Hargadon on Free and Open Source Software in K12 Schools at
K12 OpenSource Webcasts.... http://www.educationbridges.net/k12opensource/
We've all heard about the new "Virtual School" for British Columbia... what is it ... where is it... how do you find it.... check out http://www.mybcschool.com
eLearing Links for Oct 3
What does it take to be a k-12 distributed learning, online teacher... a good insight and summary is available at http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/TeachingOnline.htm
eLearning Links for Oct 28
Everything and anything you would ever need to know about builiding web sites ... a suite of tutorials on everything web for creating and developing web site.... free, comprehensive, tutorials. Start with simple html or learn about rss in detail... move on to more advanced materials... for novice and experts.... http://www.w3schools.com/
Online Resources - Sharing
Speaking with different staff members throughout my time as POSR, I have discovered that many of you have identified and are using various online resources, that you make available to your students, to help them in their studies.
I have for some time pondered how could we best share those "link" so others could take advantage of them for the benefit of their students as well. Here is our opportunity to do just that. I encourage everyone in our organization to share their collection of "favourites" that they have been using, or have found useful for students in their site or program.
The long term goal is to build a set of resource pages for our entire organization that students will be able to use to increase their learning and success. To share with others and help build a "collection" of resources for our students, you are encouraged to click on the comment button and share your "golden nuggets" with everyone.
Our first stage is to compile resources on a single web page that will be accessible to all staff and students. The second stage, will be subject specific resource pages. Some are already under construction. The third stage will the correlation of online resources with course specific lessons, modules, sections, activities, test preparations, etc, etc.
CLA staff have many, good resources that our students can use. The develop of a resource page for each subject will aide us in directing students to learning resources that can provide deeper understanding in an engaging way, especially for those students who are often isolated in their work. They will aslo help students in their validation of knowledge and negotiation of meaning as they struggle to understand.
eLearning Links for September 21
Todays emerging students and teachers... a glimpse into the future of what students and teachers will/are expect/expecting... http://terrya.edublogs.org/2006/09/21/33/
Collaborative Tools in cyberspace - success or failure... view of the challenges...:
http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2006/09/why_people_dont.html
Would you like to sit in on a Yale or MIT course... http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/06-09-19-01.all.html
Wikipedia in the classroom????.... possibilities... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
Community, Networking, Personal Learning Environments are the buzz... how important is community... interesting reflections... http://elgg.net/csessums/weblog/129615.html
Quality Learning Globally at the Center for Learning Alternatives
Welcome to the Center for Learning Alternatives communications blog. The title for our blog has been taken from an initiative that occurred in School District 57, Prince George, BC in the school year 2004-2005. This initiative was headed by Rob Lewis and Val Kilby, and drew 30 teachers together throughout the year to learn about technology and its application to education, increasing student success and engagement, bring teachers up to speed on a cutting edge technological developments, and sharing expertise within the group across the group and hence across the School District for the betterment of student educational programs.
It is the intent of this blog to facilitate the same for the Center for Learning Alternatives, which administers a collage of programs - Continuing Education, Central Interior Distance Education School, and 15 Community Alternative Programs - with sites spread throughout the city of Prince George, throughout the region of responsibility of School District 57, and providing services into other school districts.
eLearning Links for Sept 30
Ressurrecting dead links… possible??... have you ever been stymied by an important link that was dead??… did you know a digital archive of web pages was created and been running since 1996. With over 55 billion pages now archived!… believe me… it works!!… The next time you encounter an important link that is dead… try out the "Wayback Machine" (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) at the Internet Archives (http://www.archive.org/). Just amazing. It just keeps getting better.
Online support for learners - many questions
Ongoing Research (Paulson, 2006) into best practices for different categories of learners that exist in self-directed, self-paced learning programs, (as often used in Distance Education, Continuing Education and Community Alternative Programs), have much insight for the teachers of such programs today. Three categories of students have been identified . The first category is "Last Resort Learners, who often have poor self-management skills and poor independent learning skills. The second category is "Alternate Choice Learners ",the biggest growing group of online learners due to changes in technology and adaptability of online learning environments to their needs. The last category is "First Choice Learners", who prefer the flexibility and independence of learning in self-directed, self-paced courses.
An important question to ask when considering the important factors for each category that can promote student achievement is the value of technology to help, engage, and support these varied categories of students.
Will students within each category utilize technologically available support sites to the same degree that another category of students will use it? Do students under each category use technology in the same way? Do the various students find web based support sites advantageous to them? Are the technological skills of students within these three groups relatively the same? Do they present barriers to the usefulness of web based resources for students? Does web based supporting resources favour one group over another?
Beyond comparisons and commonalities of learners in the different categories are broader questions. Do students advantage themselves by using available online resources? What determines the value of online resource for students?
Having considered some of these questions, what are the questions that are missing, and do any of us have insights into the answers to those posed.
Collaborative Work Spaces
Talk about being on the edge of technology... just came across a new set of tools for collaborative work (presented to me by my two partners in the online course I'm taking this semester) . The first is Writely (http://www.writely.com), a site that provides the ability for more than one person to work on the same essay through a web interface. The whole concept of co-authoring an essay.
The second is a tool provided by PBWiki (http://www.pbwiki.com ) that makes a collaborative wiki space, so that you can build web pages that are created collectively using once again a web based interface. For those who are familiar with Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com ) you'll know what I mean.
eLearning Links for Sept 24
Take a break from education today and visit the BBC's Documentary Archive. Best of the best... choose the podcast on Google... facinating... or the podcast on Infinity... interesting... or check out the series on the Communication Revolution... on the head... http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/documentaryarchive/rss.xml
If you listened to documentary on Google... you'll know that Google is making books available and readable online... check out http://books.google.com/ and click on the Full view books search selection... did you find a book you've wanted to read.... did you find a book you'd like to read... Google... where's it all going...
eLearning links for Sept 25 - Wikis?!
A quick 15 year history of the web http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm
Want to know more about Wikis and their implimentation in courses... or find out if there are any good wikis around for your subject matter you are teaching... (found some more good resources for math)
http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wikis
Another good article on Wikis... what they are, how they work, and what their uses may be. Excellent and extrensive discussion of WIKI attributes for educational use with many examples
http://www.profetic.org:16080/dossiers/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=110
eLearning link for Oct 29
Ran across this excellent online resource for math teachers/tutors/supporters... worth the look http://www.onemathematicalcat.org/ Check out the table of contents... and the Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry courses.
eLearning links for Sep 18th
How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly (by Stephen Downs)... short quick article worth a read for all of us who spend a lot of time online writing... http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-write-articles-and-essays.html
Digital Tools in a Socially Networked Classroom... an interesting site... hosted in an elgg environment... worth a read and an explore...
http://elgg.net/julielindsay/weblog/130241.html
eLearning Links for Oct 8 - happy Thanksgiving everyone
Hot Potatoes..... most appropriate for Thanksgiving... wink... a must have program for creating interactive activities for your students. Incredibly easy to use. http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ And its FREE. Created at UVIC.
Another great tool by the same group is Quandry .... check it out. [Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it.]
The purpose of the Hot Potatoes is to enable you to create interactive Web-based teaching exercises which can be delivered to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a browser. The exercises use HTML and JavaScript to implement their interactivity, but you do NOT need to know anything about these languages in order to use the programs. All you need to do is enter the data for your exercises (questions, answers, responses etc.), and press a button. The program will create the Web pages for you, and you can then upload them to your server.
There are five basic programs in the Hot Potatoes suite:
The JQuiz program creates question-based quizzes. Questions can be of four different types, including multiple-choice and short-answer. Specific feedback can be provided both for right answers and predicted wrong answers or distractors. In short-answer questions, the student's guess is intelligently parsed and helpful feedback to show what part of a guess is right and what part is wrong. The student can ask for a hint in the form of a "free letter" from the answer.
The JCloze program creates gap-fill exercises. Unlimited correct answers can be specified for each gap, and the student can ask for a hint and see a letter of the correct answer. A specific clue can also be included for each gap. Automatic scoring is also included. The program allows gapping of selected words, or the automatic gapping of every nth word in a text.
The JCross program creates crossword puzzles which can be completed online. You can use a grid of virtually any size. As in JQuiz and JCloze, a hint button allows the student to request a free letter if help is needed.
The JMix program creates jumbled-sentence exercises. You can specify as many different correct answers as you want, based on the words and punctuation in the base sentence, and a hint button prompts the student with the next correct word or segment of the sentence if needed.
The JMatch program creates matching or ordering exercises. A list of fixed items appears on the left (these can be pictures or text), wth jumbled items on the right. This can be used for matching vocabulary to pictures or translations, or for ordering sentences to form a sequence or a conversation.
In addition, there is a sixth program called the Masher. This is designed to create complete units of material in one simple operation. If you are creating sequences of exercises and other pages that should form a unit, you may find the Masher useful. The Masher can also be used to upload Web pages not created with Hot Potatoes to the www.hotpotatoes.net server.
Collection of Web Portals for Technologies in Education
The MDE 663 course in the Masters of Distance Education program at Athabasca University produces each year a set of web portals on "Emerging Issues in Educational Technology". The Portals on Emerging Issues in Educational Technology provide one stop shop to knowledge bases on Educational Standards, Learning Objects and Repositories, Mobile Learning, Social Computing, EPortfolios, Games and Simulations, Copyright and Free Education, Design Patterns, Next Generation LMS, and soon to be released Wikis, RSS Syndication, Net Pedagogy, Immersive Environments and Simulations. (http://cider.athabascau.ca/Members/terrya/mde663portals)
eLearning links for Nov 11
Want to "see" what young people are up to online... this 10 minute video is a powerful image of the interactivity of the Internet that young people are experiencing... don't miss it... worth every minute... http://www.bebo.com/FlashBox.jsp?FlashViewType=Personal&FlashBoxId=2432599086
eLearning link for Nov 8
Online learning requires a significant shift in pedagogy. For a deeper background and understanding of "Net Pedagogy" check out the just released Net Pedagogy Portal.
Learn about the new learning and teaching possibilities using RSS and Syndication services.
A must read book, just released by George Siemens titled Knowing Knowledge (available on the net at http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf, gives new insights into how people are learning in our digital age. In a world where many knowledge spaces have become volatile and content itself soft and pliable, shifting, changing, no longer static, how has learning changed in the digital age. What does it mean to know? What is the nature of the act of learning? What types of learning are required in different learning ecologies? What attributes do learners need to develop? How should we teach? Content, Conduit, Conversations, Context, and Control, how do these all fit together? A few quotes to spark your interest:
- Learning has many dimensions. No one model or definition will fit
every situation. Context is central. - Social tools are emerging which permit rapid exchange of knowledge,
and high levels of dialogue. Communication can now occur collaboratively
(wiki, online meetings), through individual broadcast (blogs, podcasts, video logs), and in shared spaces (social bookmarking). Knowledge, when buffeted by numerous forces and factors, is under constant scrutiny by the masses. - We are in the early stages of dramatic change—change that will shake
the spaces and structures of our society. Knowledge, the building block
of tomorrow, is riding a tumultuous sea of change. Previously, knowledge
served the aims of the economy—creation, production, and
marketing. Today, knowledge is the economy. What used to be the
means has today become the end. - To define context is to frame the solution.
Context is not as simple as being in a different space…context includes
elements like our emotions, recent experiences, beliefs, and the surrounding
environment—each element possesses attributes, that when
considered in a certain light, informs what is possible in the discussion. - A holistic, integral approach to thinking, learning, and knowledge is
required as our society grows in complexity.
If this is the only book you read on learning and teaching in the digital age this year, you will be well served with deeper understanding, provocative thought, and a sense of direction that learning and teaching is taking as we travel deeper into the digital age, living the processes of networked knowledge creation through our online activities.
eLearning links for Sept 12, 2006
Blended Courses.... interesting approach.... online into class...into online.... seamless integration between the two.... http://egram-alc.blogspot.com/2006/09/were-back-and-so-are-you.html
Wonder what other virtual schools are doing..... New Westminster School District Adult Learning Center... http://www.virtualschoolbc.ca/index_content.html
An interesting Podcast by Graham Attwell (Wales)... on Personal Learning Environments (PLE's)... in 7.5 minutes... get an oversight on the concept of PLE's... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4152559760003745761 Worth viewing.
[His personal blog on learning, knowledge, and technology is located at http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell ]
One quote sums up PLE's..... small pieces loosely connected.... will the LMS continue as the model for the future... some indicate it won't.
The online DE trend continues... http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/pennsylvania/15455614.htm
Center for Learning Alternatives
Center for Learning Alternatives
Thanks!
A big thanks to Richard for getting us started! I believe this form of online collaboration can be a powerful tool to explore a number of topics pertinent to CLA.
Bravo!!! Mille gracias!!!
mLearning lurks in the shadows
Now that eLearning has arrived on the scene, mLearning is now emerging. From personal computers as a unique specialized tool (in 1984) to a household item, are we to see personal digital assistants (pda's) today and cell phone technology that is explosive and generationally developing rapidly take a similar path - common consumer item permeating throughout society (think TV, VCR/DVD, Computer, Internet). eLearning has emerged into the mainstream with a lot of focus and increasing acceptance, and will increasingly do so, especially driven by cost savings to government. mLearning is the cutting edge of where we'll be going next.
From educational podcasting to educational vodcasting (video podcasting), education as we know it is changing and will continue to evolve via technological advancements and developments. And mLearning is one of those advancements.
mLearning - who would have thought it possible...
http://learning.ericsson.net/mlearning2/project_one/cutting_edge/
http://www.mlearn2006.org/ (5th World Conference on Mobile Learning... wow... did I miss a few years worth of developments or something.....!!!!)
http://www.mlearn.org.za/ (preceedings of the 4th world conference on Mobile Learning... links to keynote speaker podcasts, and papers presented)
Still wondering if eLearning has arrived!!?? - Here's a list of World Conferences that took place for eLearning and related topics for the last half of 2005 http://eduforge.org/wiki/wiki/eduforge/wiki?pagename=WorldConferences
