Educational Discourse

I like to use wikis for much of the work that I do. I think that they allow me a great deal of freedom to be creative in their construction without being overwhelming, give me just enough gadgets and plug-ins to keep me busy and suit my purpose when it comes to organization and access. Right now I use one for my planning, another I used with my class last year to gather information about Medieval Europe, a third we use as a staff to organize information and I have others that I started for a book club (which didn’t go too well but I think I’ll give it another shot), another for my admin group to organize ideas about supervision and yet another for a group dealing with web2.0 tools from the summer.

Now, because I use a wiki quite a lot, I think they are one of the best things to show someone who is doing work online. There’s no pressure to post and you can make them private, which is what I have done with my planning wiki plus some others. You can upload information that is accessible from anywhere, collaborate as a group, keep track of what is going on and so much more.

My reason for discussing this is because Clay Burell has been organizing an inservice day, using a wiki to put together the different components that he thinks are essential for a teacher in today’s world. I haven’t looked at the wiki yet but I know that I will when I get some time. The great thing is that I can link from the staff wiki to Clay’s and they will then have all that information at their disposal which is an awesome thing. I now that the Horizon Project was using a wiki to organize their work and share discussions and I think it was a great tool for doing that cross-continent collaborative work.

So, as I thought about this, I wondered who was checking in on ourstaff wiki, which has a link on Clay’s blog. Well, guess what? We’ve had visitors from California, Glasgow City, West Lothian and Lombardia as well as Saskatchewan. I’ve been blogging for about 8 months and our wiki gets more hits from different locations than this blog! Pretty amazing that people from all over the world are looking at how our staff uses this tool to stay in touch, learn together and be organized. My hope is, that as we become more comfortable and grow in our familiarity with technology, we will be able to share more information such as what we are doing in our Professional Learning Teams and our School Community Council. Because of it’s ease of use, people can use it with minimal pd time and, with the save each version feature, if you mess up, you just go to the version before and start over.

Clay had a post that asked what web2.o tool people would suggest for a pd day such as he was designing. My suggestion was something like iGoogle, Pageflakes or Netvibe - a homepage type arrangement where you can add pages and widgets to keep you organized, get news, keep up with the sports or whatever you want. However, the more I thought about it, the more I suggest the use of the wiki. It gives you a chance to be putting things together, in private as I mentioned, and then to branch out. It might even be somewhere you begin to express your ideas before you go to the blog. Now, I really do suggest using a homepage aggregator to assist with organizing all the different tools that one might have online. I also suggest something like Claimid where you can gather links together so you have one stop to get a page. I’ve made it my homepage so I just click and go. Of course, one needs a RSS aggregator to keep track of all the interesting blogs out there. As I think of it, you could use a wiki page to do some of this but it wouldn’t have all the bells and whistles.

I’m not going to suggest any one wiki provider although, after visiting my wikis you’ll know which one I prefer. I suggest you try out a few and go with the one that suits you the best. Whatever you do, get wikiing!

I’ve been looking at a few online desktops over the past few weeks. One of the reasons is that I’d like to see if these could provide our students with an alternate way to work and save their work. Right now, students cannot access their work from anywhere but the school. What I’d like to try is to have them work with an online desktop so that they can access their work from any computer. I’d also like to have them build up some RSS feeds and have a place to keep a calendar and other things. I figure that an online desktop would be the easy way to go. So, I’ve been looking at a few of them.

Desktoptwo - this desktop has all the things that I’ve been looking for in an online version. The nice thing is that students can save here, go home, download the work or, if they wish, work online. There is an RSS reader, notepad, calendar and many other utilities. It’s free and it looks like it could have some tools that students might be able to use for things unrelated to school. I’m going to be giving this one a complete workout because the others aren’t quite as developed.

eyeOS - I like this except it lacks productivity apps. The writer is okay but there is no spreadsheet. I like the games that come with it - better than solitaire! I’m getting pretty good at the tubing one! There is RSS and email.

Zimbra -This one I came across recently. It looks promising with it’s online/offline functions. I’m having a bit of trouble with the setup but once done, I’ll let you know how I like it.

Zoho - I like each of the apps. I’m waiting to use the desktop version. If it works as well as the apps, it will definitely give desktoptwo a run. I like their wiki page!

Google desktop - I’ve loaded it but it’s not what I was expecting. I haven’t tried any of the other Google productivity apps yet. I use Google Reader and have set up a Google page and I’m going to give Google Notebook a try.

What does this mean? Well, I’m going to be linking to the different blogs and using the different apps to see how they function in real time. So, if you see my blog with a link to another, it’s my way of trying out some of these different things. This link to my desktoptwo blog is my first attempt to use one of them. I wrote a little article to see how it worked.

As I’ve disclosed in my last post, I have a Communication Production Technology class that consists of students who really don’t want to be in school. They remind me of the Welcome Back Kotter class. Now, they’re not bad or anything like that it’s just that school isn’t their thing. Pete Reilly talks about a similar class that he had when he was teaching. These students find school to be more like a prison than a place that offers them opportunity.

Now, the class I teach really has a very open curricula which allows for some very interesting opportunities with technology. Specifically there is the opportunity to do different things with audio and video. This semester we are focusing on video with added audio. We began by doing some examination of audio programs, specifically we examined the various sound effects that were part of War of the Worlds and how tension, atmosphere and mood were created using voice and other sound effects. This went okay. I then had them do something similar with a reading or they could do a newsreport of their own. We brainstormed how this might work and we went over the process - plan, storyboard, script, material (sound effects) gathering, reading and editing. They were then given time. This is where the wheels come off the cart. It was much conjoling on my part to get anything done. The final products were done at the last moment with two of them being very late.

We’ve moved on to video in the meantime. We have watched a few really bad 80’s music videos and compared them to what is produced today. I had them find the videos we watched so we could compare them to the 80’s videos. We discussed the reasons for the improvement in quality - digital equipment, sound recording, computer effects and editing. They then did some reading on the effects of YouTube and had a written assignment. We are at the stage where we are doing some practice taping and then will be adding audio to the shots to practice the meshing of the two formats. They have ideas for their still-life that they are tape to practice various camera shots. Still like pulling teeth on a charging rhino.

We are working up to their doing a documentary on a topic that they have a passion about. I am going to show a brief documentary type video from YouTube, brainstorm ideas that they can do. We’ve been through the video pre-production and production process and will go over it again. I hoping that something will spark their interest and they’ll get away from listening to music and watching trailers.

These are the students that see no use in school. They feel no one is listening to them. I was hoping that this would be something that they would get into. Instead, they just want to watch trailers or videos and listen to music. They’ve fully embraced apathy. Now, maybe with another teacher, this might be different. As principal, I’ve seen all these students in my office for various reasons. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they see me as the disciplinarian and can’t get past that. I’m really not sure. Any ideas?

We are approaching the final days of our CPT class and things are really starting to get interesting. The students are suppose to be finished their ten minutes of recording, getting thing ready for editing. So, what is going on? They’re reviewing the early work we did where we downloaded various sounds off the internet  and sounds they made with the effects and combined them to make a composite production. They spent a bit too much time doing this, although some of the productions were rather humorus. Check out the Podomatic badge - Blended Monkeys. This was one that just kind of came together by accident. We all had a good chuckle!

I’m finding that the students don’t want to do the scripts or storyboards. They want to get straight into  producing, which doesn’t bother too much except that we don’t have anything to turn to if we run into time problems or editing difficulties. I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas for this. I’ve thought of using writeboard to have them do their story boards. Any ideas for this part?

My other class, grade 9 social, has begun using their blogging efforts. Some of them are really into it. I began with the blogmeister setup just for the start. I’m going to try it for the first assignment. Now that we have done a few, things are really coming along. My next little tech trial will be a wiki that will list the work they are doing on importatnt people, events or inventions during different periods of time. We do this as an introduction to the study of the Romans, Medieval times, the Enlightenment and then Native Canadian culture. This is sometimes a bit hard to tie together but we’ll see how it goes. This class is pretty excited about the blogs and they keep asking about the wiki.

My third goal is to get the staff and administrators going with blogging. So far it has been a big dud! I haven’t given up and I’m going to through Scott MacLeod’s project out to my admin group to see what happens. I’m hoping that a few of them will jump on board. I may even get to do a session for opening day next year. Pretty scary!!!!

Well, take a listen to the monkey. Let me know if you have any ideas. Off to coach basketball against our archrivals - the Eagles.

Go Mustangs Go!!

Kelly