Facebook

1st post for a while. Just joined up Facebook! Was inspired to by an ex-student (from many years ago) who invited me as a friend. He got me off my behind to have a look at it. Have been meaning two for a few weeks as I've noticed mention of it in the regular media. Seems a very myspacey type of social networking. what I cannot believe is the founders knocked back the billion dollars they were offered for it. I can see Facebook being vogue for a short while then superceded by the "next" innovation. By then the founders might have missed the boat!!

Hooray assignment finished!!

Hooray my 2nd assignment for FLE finished. I'll let it sit for a couple of days then re-read and edit before submitting it. I don't know about others but I actually completed in a more formal way as I found the structure easier. I hope that sits ok. It was good covering a variety of readings in relation to social software to support the learning task that Liang and I had created. Now that I've put in the hard yards from Friday evening to now I'm going to enjoy the public holiday tomorrow with my beautiful family!!

Mashups

Read an interesting article found in Cathy Chen's blog titled Mashups: The next major new software development model? As I replied to Cathy, I think it was interesting that the author stated that rather than the business organisations being at the leading edge of developing Web2.0 that 'the much larger community of the Web as a major source of innovation and leading edge behavior that subsequently moves across' This has repurcussions for us as educators as well- Are our students at the leading edge and we, the teachers, are just catching up?? Perhaps not so much for the primary students that I teach, but this certainly might be the case for those teaching middle and upper secondary students. Also interestingly there seems to be two different types of mashups- those that are being developed by the general community that's on-line (wikis etc) and also now a growing body of tools from commercial software vendors that also try to bring the apparent advantages of mashups to the business world, both on the Web and in our intranets. Will the 2 come together or will the general community prefer to go their merry ways without the cost of the extra tools created by vendors?

CamStudio in use!

Camstudio is very useful and practical to use in a teaching environment. In yesterdays class I created a demo on how to use the address book for our email environment. When I played it for the gr 4 children they were very attentive and listened well w/o being distracted by me using the mouse or keyboard. I then had it looping for the rest of the lesson for them to follow. After the lesson I have shrunk it to email size and posted it to the grades' myclasses page (an LMS environment). As a result the children can access the demos from home and show their parents what they are learning in Info Tech lessons. I have uploaded the compressed movies for those who'd like to view them. Let me know what you think!

All this new software.....

It has been great using all this new software and doing a number of varied activities. It's been great learning about blogs, creating my own and reading/commenting others. I've loved some of the new software I've been introduced to that I would not otherwise have used or known about in any detail. The latest two I've had a look at and used are Audacity and CamStudio. I used Audacity to record Where the Wild Things Are for the FLE assignemnt I'm doing with Liang Soon. I was really pleased how it sounded prior to passing it onto Liang Soon. This was nothing compared to improvements Liang Soon made still using the Audacity program (try it @ http://fletls.podomatic.com/). I showed it to teachers at school and they were impressed with the possibilities for literarcy. As an ICT teacher of primary children CamStudio is great(thanx Ted). Quite often after demonstrating something to students they need to be shown again once they get down to work. By using CamStudio prior to the lesson the demo can be pre-recorded and after a 'live demo' this can be played (looping) on the large instructional screen (plasma, i/active white board, data projector)for reinforcement/assistance. The recorded demo can also be placed on in the on-line learning environment (myclasses in my case) for children to go back to later and/or to share with their parents so they too can see what we are doing in class. If you want to try CamStudio try this link for version 2.0 (later versions require a licence code that is difficult to obtain)ftp://ftp.freenet.de/pub/filepilot/windows/multimedia/video/camstudio20.exe .

Social Bookmarking- valuable?

I must say that I'm not convinced by the phenomenon of Social Bookmarking.
"But you can access your bookmarks from any computer!" I hear you exclaim. Yeah, but if you have a personally customisable, web-based software that allows teachers and students to share school related content which includes bookmarks then social bookmarking is superfluous.
"Ah what about the tagging?" You reply. Well, there are no strict or widely accepted conventions and more to the point those people / organisations that would use the web for material gain or inappropriate activities have begun to use some of the most common tags. I would prefer to use my own web-based software for collaborating, communicating, organising, document storage, and information management. It is available anytime, anywhere, making home to school activities and school communications easier without the risk of students being exposed to inappropriate content.

Ning

Ning
http://ning.com/
...an easy way to create your own social network by allowing you to create the profile questions, upload all types of media, and more; use a private social network to create an interest inventory for the students in your class!

Heaps of Private networks to choose from (or create your own). An interesting one that had relevance to me as a teacher was the classroom2.0 room @ http://classroom20.ning.com/ as it says "the social networking site devoted to those interested in the practical application of computer technology (especially Web 2.0) in the classroom and in their own professional development. "

Have a look, tell me what you think.
Andrew