EdTechSA 2015: How To Start A Class Blog

At EdTechSA 2015 I presented a workshop on the journey my class and I have taken as we went about creating our class blog. As part of this workshop I created this prezi which I am more than happy to share.

Watch this space for the sketchnote of the discussion we had about interesting elements of a class blog.

 

Choose Your Own Adventure: Digital Technologies

In term 2 of 2014, I had the pleasure of working on a new concept with the year 2/3 class that I teach as part of my role as ICT specialist at Modbury West School.

This was the concept of branching. Branching is defined in the Australian Curriculum as:

Branching occurs when an algorithm makes a choice to do one of two or more actions depending on sets of conditions and the data provided.

Now this might sound rather dry and boring, but the way we approached this new concept was very engaging and my students now have a solid grasp of some basic concepts covered in the Digital Technologies curriculum and how they can be applied in the tasks we undertook.

 

Resources

This is the unit planner that was developed for the “Choose Your Own Adventure” topic

My example of a ‘Fairy Tale’ algorithm

My example of a ‘Fairy Tale’ branching algorithm

My example of a CYOA fairy tale: The Three Little Pigs

What Do I Do?

I have been asked to present to the first year pre-service teachers who are visiting our school at the moment. When I asked our AP what they would like me to present on about ICT, I was told to tell them about what I do.

This posed the question, what is it that I do?

How have I learnt (and continue to learn) what I know about ICT?

I have put my thoughts on this into a prezi about Educational Technologies and it has been an interesting experience pulling together all of the different facets that make up this area I am so passionate about.

 

What I Learnt From ISTE – A Brief Overview

Whilst I intend to post in a lot more detail about what I learnt at ISTE2013 in San Antonio, I am going to start with a brief overview that I am also sharing with my staff about the main “takeaways” I had from this experience.

So where to now…

 

Lots and lots of resources to check out!

Videos

AdamBellowISTE

  • First and foremost the must see video from the conference is the final speaker, Adam Bellow and his keynote entitled You’re Invited to Change the World. It was a very moving and inspirational keynote and I feel very privileged to have been in the room to witness it and to meet Adam throughout the conference. If you weren’t there though it is well worth the watch.
  • The Ignite Sessions that happened before the opening keynote were fantastic – 10 speakers with only 5 minutes each to present their ideas. It was fast paced and full of great ideas!
  • ISTE also have a great YouTube playlist that showcases a wide range of presentations on topics from iPads, Digital Image, BYOD, Storytelling and much more. I know I will be going back here to view some things I wanted to see but just couldn’t get to.

 

DSCF9714Keynote 1 Jane McGonigal

Her website can be found here

Her Twitter account is here

See some of the games she has worked on here

TED Talks

Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

 

DSCF9764Keynote 2 Stephen Johnson

His website can be found here

His Twitter account is here

TED Talks

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Steven Johnson: The Web as a city

 

DSCF9904Keynote 3 Adam Bellow

Adam’s Keynote from the Google Glass POV

Adam Bellow’s Educational Tech Commandments

His eduTecher website can be found here

His Twitter account is here

 

DSCF9887

Websites

My earliest email newsletters from Kathy date back to the early 2000’s and she was one of the first education technology gurus that I followed. That is why it was such a thrill to meet her at ISTE and to see that, all these years on, she is still sharing fantastic resources to a wide audience.

Kathy Schrock’s iPads4Teaching resources

Kathy’s Website http://www.schrockguide.net/

Another website with resources for iPads

The One iPad Classroom by Jennifer Bond

 

Other People’s ISTE Resources

While I haven’t necessarily had the time to go through all these resources myself – here is a whole host of resources tweeted out by other educators during the conference that cover a wide range of topics. A miscellaneous treasure trove of resources just waiting to be explored!

http://pinterest.com/edutopia/iste-2013/

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s97/sh/4348223c-7b9a-4625-bd9e-2bfe7b6032a6/0506763e836e33b61cf61bbfd5548c81

http://www.ipadartroom.com/iphoneography-apps-ideas-resources/

http://www.drhowie.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1xSQF9/www.socialable.co.uk/16-tools-to-make-awesome-infographics/

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s95/sh/3cee1626-ed4d-4855-9874-0cee655f6fb2/d836ac758b31f1e6b93c2792df0e15cd

 

No Power, No Worries!

It never ceases to amaze me how resourceful and creative teachers can be.

As I write this post I am listening to the fascinating and well spoken Ryan Brown present on how he uses a Web 2.0 tool, Edmodo

Ryan Brown Presenting

While it is not unusual for me to be listening to IT professional development, it is unusual for the presentation to be done in a semi-dark room without the assistance of any electrical technology.

CEGSA2013 is currently in blackout mode – there is no electricity in the few suburbs around us and we have lost all access to IWB’s, data projectors, wireless access and desktop computers!

Has the conference been called off? Has there been a massive walkout of disgruntled delegates. The answer to this is a resounding NO!

What I am seeing is people with wireless data points or mobile Internet access sharing their facilities, presenters and delegates clustered around a single iPad which is showing a presentation originally intended for a larger whiteboard screen. Websites are being drawn on “non interactive” whiteboards to explain how to access different things at a later point in time.

Everyone is still engaged in the learning process. We are still upholding the conference theme of connecting with people and sharing the learning.

While it might be easier with the benefits of electricity and technology – teachers are still experts at making sure these essential elements of engagement and sharing occur!

Where’s My Backchannel?

It is amazing how quickly you grow accustomed to something and then how much you miss it when it is no longer available.

Backchannelling

Photo Credit: Michael Coghlan via Compfight

I will be the first to admit that I have not been a serious user of Twitter for very long – since July 2012 which also happened to be the date of the CEGSA 2012 conference. It was there that I was convinced by George Couros (@gcouros) that there was more to Twitter than the following of celebrities that I had been doing up until then. I was following a very standard twitter adoption path similar to the one outlined by Daniel Edwards (@syded06here (by the way I am now somewhere between step 8 or 9)

Anyhow, it was while I was recently attending a non IT related conference ( yes I do go to PD that is related to other aspects of teaching too)  that  I realised how spoilt I have been in  regards to the use social media as a major part of my professional learning.

When I first arrived at the conference I noticed that I was one of the few pulling out my iPad to take notes on. That was ok. I am used to this, though it is nice now in staff meetings since our staff have been given iPads to use, that I am not the only one taking digital notes.

The next major difference I discovered was the wifi. After being at many conferences/PD days where good quality wifi access is the norm, it was quite a shock to discover that at this venue the wifi was locked down and you were expected to pay quite a lot of money to access it!  That was overcome too though as I just hooked the iPad up to the iPhone and voilà – internet access!
(We won’t talk about how doing this caused my phone’s battery to flatten very quickly!)

However all of these are very minor problems which, as I have said, were overcome quite easily. The biggest issue I faced at this conference was the fact that the backchannel I have become so accustomed to was missing. Compare this to when I was working for CEGSA in Perth for ACEC2012, I wasn’t even in the room for most of the keynotes or sessions but I had a great idea of what was going on because of all the people in the room who were sharing their ideas/thoughts and resources along with what the keynote/presenter was putting out there. Even when I have been in the room while a session was happening, Twitter has been an invaluable provider of extra information, understanding and resources as you are able to not only have the benefit of your own interpretation of what you are learning but also that of the rest of the backchannel!

To cut a long story short, there were two of us in the room who were tweeting – a very elite backchannel, and we did enjoy a bit of sharing and networking. But there was none of the sharing of ideas, thoughts and resources from a wide range people that I have grown accustomed to. There was also nothing to challenge what was being said or provide a different point of view to that of the one person standing before us. Even the digital resources that we were told we could access once we got home were provided to us on a piece of paper. There was no interactivity, I wanted web 2.0 and I was in a read only world. By mid morning our presenter, who had been telling us of the importance of including IT all morning, actually provided a hashtag for us to use but by then my phone had gone flat making Twitter inaccessible and I was back to taking notes by myself on the iPad, all the while wondering “Where’s my backchannel?”

Stepping into my digital footprint

This was the slide that did it…

slide from George Couros’ opening keynote: CEGSA2012

This slide was about a third of the way through the opening keynote presentation of CEGSA2012. I had spent the previous few months hearing my friend and conference organiser Tina Photakis talk about how fantastic George Couros, our opening keynote was going to be and had wondered how Twitter and other  web 2.0 “toys” could possibly change my professional life very much.

I love dabbling in technology – I already had a twitter account and followed some interesting famous people. I had a facebook account and had mucked around with a class blog at one stage too. In short I felt comfortable in this online world and it was a fun place to be. I was looking forward to hearing what this George Couros had to say but didn’t know if it would change what I was doing all that much.

From the start of the keynote my perceptions were challenged about why I was using this technology and what I was getting from the online world and giving back to it. This slide in particular made me challenge my thinking about my online presence and how it could be not only a source of entertainment but also tool for professional growth and development.

This slide inspired me to take charge of my digital footprint. Up until now it had been scattered – a dabble here, a play there – crazy dance-steps all over the digital floor with  nothing really being used to greater potential. My first move was to gather together all that I had been toying with and decide which were the main tools I wanted to focus on. I decided, for now, upon the 5 big ones: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and a WordPress blog. I have since added Pinterest too as the visual nature of it appeals to my photographic senses!

I then had to learn some new tools. From my work with the CEGSA blog I was familiar enough with the basics of WordPress and the others were fine too except for Twitter. People seemed to be able to do so much more with it and watching George negotiate his way through columns in TweetDeck made me see that there was a lot more too it than just reading other people’s 140 characters! So along came a TweetDeck account and now 12 (and occasionally more) columns later I have a much greater regard for this as a wonderful tool and how I can use it to learn and share with others.

So here I am, after a few months of getting myself organised and deciding how I wanted to approach my footprint, I have now arrived at the start of my digital journey. My digital presence goes by the name of JAKnipe – JAK of all trades ( I still like dabbling in lots of things and always will). The information that is readily found about me is information I have put there and there are no eggs or cartoon avatars in sight!