WOW 2,000

While I see Adrian Bruce tweeting about almost hitting the 15,000 mark (check out his site - awesome!) I am quietly having my own celebrations!

Today I hit 2,000 visitors on my blog! WOW! That’s really scary but very exciting!!

Thank you to all you who read my blog and take part in the conversations and questions. You have up-skilled me, listened to me rant, helped me solve problems and challenged me by making me think past what I can alone - so thank you for being part of this community!

P.S. Head along to Educating The Dragon, an amazing blogger who encouraged me to get into blogging!

Embedding Enhanced Garageband Podcasts

WOOHOO!

It’s taken a few days of experimenting and playing around and ALMOST getting it right to consult the wonderful twitterverse and be sent this link from dswaters - Music Is Not For Insects for embedding enhanced garageband podcasts into edublogs.

I was so close! My final attempt was changing the file extension to .mp4 but as I learnt above it should be changed to .m4v in order to upload to edublogs.

So in a quick nutshell…

Save your garageband to disk (to your desktop) as an aac file.

Once it’s on the desktop change the file extension by clicking on the name twice slowly - change it from .mp4 to .m4v

Go to edublogs editor and write your post in edublogs - go to the upload section, select your video, click upload then click send to editor.

It will come up looking like a link while you are editing:

But once you click publish it will turn into this (Press the play once):

Trial Enhanced Podcast

Thanks to Allanah, Dswaters, Room 13 2007 and the wonderful twitterverse for helping with this one!

Inspiration

This week I have had the most amazing week.  I have been out of the class working alongside students and teachers to develop and embed different elements of ICT into their programs.  This weeks major focus has been on blogs. I worked alongside a fantastic teacher and 3 students for them to write their first blog posts.  I actually only really taught 2 of them.  Because then that one went on to teach another one how to write and publish a blog post, with me filling in tiny gaps along the way.

The coolest part of this was seeing the reaction from one student when, less than 5 minutes after he posted his work, he had a response.  Thanks so much to my twitter network!  This is the power of opening your classroom up to the world… and the benefits are huge!  Check out their blog here… 25eps

I have just run a session with teachers looking at lookybook.com and also Knowledge-Net. Tomorrow I am working with more classes blogging, using bubbleshare and also iPhoto.  I am absolutely loving working alongside different students and teachers in my 1 day a week and seeing the enthusiasm grow.  It’s really amazing to be sharing some of the knowledge I have gained from my PLN and sharing it on with others.

So thank you for your inspiration cause you are part of this!

Oobleck

Now, i’m not much of a science brain but this is one ridiculously fun lesson that kids love.

Today we made Oobleck. For those of you that don’t know about oobleck it is about time that you did, because it is the most amazingly crazy stuff. It is a non-Newtonian fluid that acts like a liquid and solid at the same time, see this video.

It is an easy recipe that is made purely from cornstarch or cornflour and water… see here for instructions.

Oobleck is explained at Science and Kids as:

“Oobleck is more commonly known among science teachers as the name for a substance made of cornstarch and water that peculiar ability to act like a liquid and solid at room temperature. Scientifically speaking, oobleck is a type of polymer. This means that it is made of very long chains of repeating molecules (monomers). Oobleck is also a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that its ability to flow changes when different amounts of pressure are applied to it. More simply, if you squeeze oobleck, will become brittle and crumble. If you just let it sit in your hand, it will drip and run like thin white school glue. Sound interesting? Try making some and explore it for yourself!”

To start the lesson off I used the first half of this video from You Tube by Kid Science.

It’s great because it’s hosted by a 4? year old who explains it all very articulately (honestly!) My kids really enjoyed being taught by this kid! We then broke off into groups and made our own ooblecks! This was great fun and kids being kids loved getting in there with their fingers and trying out this amazing stuff.

For my non-science brain it was so fantastic having these resources on tap to ensure my kids were getting the correct explanations for the concepts they were learning. It’s also great giving them the chance to hear explanations given in different ways, as different kids understandings of how it worked, clicked more with different video’s/explanations. And what I liked even more is that most of these video’s were MADE by the kids!

**warning** art shirts, newspaper and clothes nearby are a must!!

As the session progressed we talked about liquids and what we knew about them, then solids. The kids then had a go at trying to make the oobleck into a solid, making it run like a liquid and turning it back into cornstarch. All in all an extremely messy lesson but SO much fun.

Am going to continue the lesson tomorrow with the rest of the Kid Science video and also this one that show people running across a pool of Oobleck… really is amazing stuff!

More ideas with Oobleck…

Literacy: Link it to the Dr. Seuss story Bartholomew and the Oobleck, here’s a video of the story
Visual Art: Colour the oobleck with food colouring (warning: dyed hands!) and create awesome dribbly/spotty art that dries in layers!
Written Language: This is a great literacy experience activity as it is very rich is oral language and descriptive words. Get the kids sharing words as they play - write them down. Ask the kids to recount the experiment or their personal feelings in writing. Get creative and get the kids to come up with a new story that involves the oobleck!

Rememble Part 2

I have posted about this site before but I really enjoy this!

This is a great site where you can post all your ‘remembles’ or memories. Your posts can take the form of comments, photos, videos and what’s even cooler is you can put your flickr photos or your tweets from Twitter!

It’s such a great way of keeping track of all those things you want to remember… so far I have events such as birthdays, gigs, festivals, family events and more all remembled in my ‘memble line’.

The site is so user friendly and easy to use that it would be easy for a range of ages to use. At the moment i’m only using it for personal use but would really like to trial it in the class. You have 3 options for viewing your membles from a long membleline to a more in-depth memble line through to a one memble at a time view (see more in my last post).

A new(ish) feature is to be able to add your latest membles to your blog (but I can’t get it to work at the moment!). You can add friends and your friends can leave comments and information about each of your membles.

I am slightly addicted to this site… let me know if you give it a go and how you found it! I would love to have some more memble mates!

Social Networking Survey

In my search for mashups I stumbled across this website Mashup Events which is described as

“…mashup* Event is a formal gathering of like minded professionals who meet to discuss and debate what matters in the digital world. ”

You can read more about them here.

What interested me is the next meeting that is to be held on the 26th November on the topic of Social Networking. As part of this there is a survey you can take here. So out of interest I took the survey and then had a chance to view the results. Which you can access here.

I found this really interesting as I too roam around within these social networks and each day more and more of my friends (including the tech-slow as they see themselves) join these sites.   The results are interesting and easy reading, so go check them out and take part in the survey too.

Rememble

Woah… this is a cool site!

Rememble is a site where you can make memory timelines using video, audio and images.

Basically you post a memble (or memory) using text, video, audio or images… add in your information and then add your memble and wahhlahh… you have a memble timeline. The result is as below!

You can view your membles in 3 layers…

- first one is a long timeline view

- a close up showing names/dates.

- zoom in again for each individual memble that you can navigate on from one to the next.

This could be a really awesome way of timelining your year as a class, as it is really simple to add in events. You can add in labels and add comments - so students could add their memories or comments about an event.
How cool would it be keeping this all year/term and on the final day spending half an hour (or more!) looking back at all the things you did.

At the moment I am just tinkering and have added in images from my flickr account which was very easy to do. (When you add other media and it comes up as different colours to identify it as audio/video or image.) You can also send/add in your twitts from twitter or send things in via email and mobile phone.

Pretty nifty…

My Public and Private Spaces

As part of Ewans keynote for Ulearn07 he spoke of our identities and the spaces we have.

* secret - mobile phone
* group - bebo
* publishing - fickr, journals, blogs
* performance - second life, warcraft
* participation - mathches, demonstrations, markets, events - conference, online events

I now fit into all of these spaces… I have a mobile phone to text, bebo, facebook, myspace, flickr, this blog, k12online conference, a ning community and now with my recent venture into Second Life - that also.  Along with other spaces i’m trialling or have trialled in the past.

This morning as I looked through my aggregator I read this blog entry from John which interested me.

He talks about an article in The Herald (Scottish I think) that talks about teachers joining up to bebo, myspace etc and accepting students as their friends to create a social network to stop cyberbullying.  i.e. You’ve got to be in it, to know about it.    John then also links onto Mr W’s blog entry which summed up what I was thinking.  I definitely understand keeping kids safe on the net, but when does it become an intrusion of privacy.  Yes, how private can it really be when it’s publicly on the web I hear you say…  This is an interesting read, from The Guardian, which shows the difference in opinion of some parents.  What really interests me is the differences in opinions and experiences that come through.

At our websafety meeting I ran last week, we discussed that we also need to offer to parents to allow them to become more net saavy i.e. getting netsafe in, running units of work with kids/parents.   What knowledge do our parents have to a) not be afraid of the possibilities b) support their students and c) help them keep safe?

On Bebo I have had several requests from students to accept them as friends.  My account on Bebo is a place where I don’t wear my teachers face (as Ewan says) but rather my private face.  I don’t want to accept students as my friends in these places because this is my private world - my late night drinking, my use of words that i’m sure they know even better than I do - but this is my space.
I have had discussions with another teacher about opening up a “Teacher” bebo account for students to add me to - which is something I might experiment with next…

Classroom 2.0 - Clarence Fisher

As I listen to Clarence’s presentation for the second time, more things start to sink in and I think about the journey I have been on in the last few years and the journey I can see people around me on.

Since attending ULearn I have continued to have conversations with others and I am now really focussed on the pedagogy. It’s fascinating for me, as I want to broaden my own knowledge and ideas. For me there has been a big shift in my thinking over the few months and now I know, more than ever that the pedagogy, the why am I doing this, is so central to what I am doing with my students and my class not just “the cool new tools”. (For some I know this sounds so simple - but it is all part of my journey!)

A key element of what Clarence talks about at the start of this presentation is the fact that it’s not about the fancy tools, not saying “oh, well i’m blogging” but about the future that we are preparing our students for and how we are preparing them. The why am I doing this? He talks about the way that we as teachers have to change the way we are teaching, the what we are doing in our classrooms, so that our kids are developing the key skills we want them to have when they are older.

As I look back through my journey and I continue to speak to others, there always seems to be a phase where one goes through using the fancy tools, blogging to say that they are blogging, podcasting because “it’s cool”. It seems to be a part of the journey that alot of people travel through before the pedagogy element is developed. And with so many amazing tools out there it’s hard to not do. So how does one shift from developing the knowledge of the tools available to the more structured pedagogical knowledge behind the tools. I’m not saying that this is a bad phase to go through, I can see that I have been there. But rather how can we shift teachers straight into thinking about the pedagogy and fitting the tools to the learning rather than tools because I can?

I know for me alot of that has been developed through being able to attend events such as ULearn and now the k12online conference and also having people around me to discuss all these elements. So if I have a network around me that can do that, how do we guide the others who can’t attend these conferences or have these opportunites to develop the pedagogical knowledge alongside the amazing tools? Or is the “here’s the cool new tool i’m using in my class” just part of the journey?

** FURTHER: Check out the entry and conversation on Simon’s blog Educating The Dragon

k12online07

Started to watch some of the video presentations for the k12online07 conference.
I started tonight with the Classroom 2.0 presentation by Clarence Fischer, which was quite interesting. Have started a new page with my notes for the different presentations. Need to watch these more than once before I add my thoughts about some of these presentations.

If you aren’t watching them… get onto it!
If you are - what presentations are you watching/most interested in?

http://www.k12onlineconference.com