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Microsoft Innovative Teachers Awards

Have you been using ICT in innovative ways to inspire your students? If so the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Award is your chance to receive rewards and to be recognised for your contribution to teaching and learning.

Enter now!

Hot New Titles!!

We rarely buy Teacher Reference, but I feel that the TR collection is in desperate need of updating! These two titles should inspire you to start incorporating Web 2.0 into your classrooms. Borrow one of these today.

"Classroom Blogging" by David F. Warlick is a teacher's guide to Web 2.0 tools taht are shaping a new information landscape. Weblogs are about reading and writing. Literacy is about reading and writing. Blogging equals literacy. How rarely does an aspect of how we live and work plug so perfectly into how we teach and learn? Reading this book will give teachers important clues not only in how to become a blogger and to make their students bloggers, but also how this new avenue of expression is revolutionizing the information environment that we live in.

"Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful tools for classrooms" by Will Richardson is an easy-to-read guide to Web 2.0 tools. This book will move teachers to think differently about technology's potential for strengthening students' critical thinking, writing, reflection, and interactive learning. The book demystifies words like "blog," "wiki," and "aggregator", making classroom technology an easily accessible component of classroom research, writing, and learning.

This guide demonstrates how Web tools can generate exciting new learning formats, and explains how to apply these tools in the classroom to engage all students in a new world of synchronous information feeds and interactive learning. With detailed, simple explanations, definitions and how-to's, critical information on Internet safety, and helpful links, this exciting book opens an immense toolbox, with specific teaching applications for:

• Web logs, the most widely adopted tool of the read/write Web
• Wikis, a collaborative Webspace for sharing published content
• Rich Site Summary (RSS), feeding specific content into the classroom
• Aggregators, collecting content generated via the RSS feed
• Social bookmarking, archiving specific Web addresses
• Online photo galleries

Blogging

If you haven't already seen it, this video from the Commoncraft Show explains how blogging emerged and how blogging now fits into our daily life of friends, family, work and news. Blogging is a form of communication that has permeated many aspects of our lives and changed the way we communicate.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

What is MIT OpenCourseWare?
MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

• OCW is not an MIT education.
• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

This resource could provide you with a fantastic source of information for those students who need extending and for yourselves as teachers and learners. There is course material in the areas of engineering, sciences, humanities, the arts, health and more.

17 Tips for a Creative, Life-Long Learning Journey

Download this wonderful little interactive book , 17 Tips for a Creative, Life-Long Journey, from Fablevision for a refreshing, simple guide to teaching and learning.

Fablevision is a company that produces CD-ROMs, websites, books and films that inspire and teach. They are advocates of the wonderful classroom and their mission is to help all learners discover their potential. Check out their other free educational resources - all aiming to inspire and encourage.

Visuwords Online Graphical Dictionary

We all know that a lot of our students are visual learners. Check out Visuwords, a free resource for all web users. It is a dictionary and thesaurus and great for students, teachers and writers. Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Share this resource with students. They'll love it!

Skype

Interested in free calls or video calls? Try using Skype - free software from the web that allows you to make Skype-to-Skype calls or video calls. All you need to do is download the software and have a headset or built-in microphone for calls or a webcam for video calls. This could be a great option for cross-campus classes, video conferences or simply keeping in touch with family and friends who live a distance from you.

Learning to Change, Changing to Learn

How times have changed! What can we do to equip our students to cope in a technology-based world? A lot of our students could end up in jobs that don't exist yet.

The Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international not-for-profit consortium of over 260 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the United States, across Canada, and in Europe, Asia and Australia. Among the membership are an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges and universities in the world, as well as a growing list of innovative museums, research centers, foundations, and forward-thinking companies.

As the centerpiece of NMC's Emerging Technologies Initiative, the Horizon Project charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report. Download the 2008 Horizon Report and read about emerging technologies and critical challenges that are facing education and learning organisations in the near future.

Our Poor Printer

I know that sometimes you have problems with the staffroom printer, and that you need to send print jobs to the library. Please remember that all the students in LT1 and the library also print to the library printer. It may be wise to not send confidential items to our printer as it is readily accessible to students and we cannot monitor the printer all the time (nor do I see that as our job). Also, if you need multiple copies USE THE PHOTOCOPIER. It is much cheaper and does not tie-up the printer for others.

Watch the World

Have you heard of Second Life? It's is a 3-D virtual world created by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of residents from around the globe. It has been used by some Australian schools and educational organisations to teach students and host online conferences. To get an idea of the creativity and wonders involved, see "Watch the World" to see the possibilities.

Making URLs Tiny

Do you hate giving students shockingly long URLs to websites? By entering a URL in the text field on TinyURL, the website will create a short URL that is simple to give to students, will not break in emails and never expires.

Who on our staff blogs?

I attended a fantastic seminar on Friday on Blogs, Wikis and other Web Tools. The keynote speaker was inspirational. Check out his book - 'Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms' by Will Richardson. He spoke eloquently about the failure of schools around the world to teach students how to really use Web 2.0. Most of our students are teaching themselves and each other. Couldn't we, as educators, do a better job if we could get a handle on the web and all it's uses? How many of you have your own blogs? Who doesn't even know what a blog is? How many of you utilise blogs in your classes? I have seen the perfect opportunity this year for students to use blogs - some of you require students to journal their learning. A blog could be a great solution - you'd be teaching them to utilise Web 2.0, teaching them new skills (and yourself) and it's far cooler than typing it up on Word and printing it out! Blogger is an easy tool to use - I now have three blogs up and running and am having a great time. Even the technophobes amongst you could manage it. Have a go - your students will love being able to blog for class.

The Wonders of picnik

My thirteen year-old daughter showed me how to funk up my photos on a great website called picnik. I could never get my head around Photo Shop - far too complicated - and this web site is really easy to use, plus you don't need software. It's all on the web. All you need is a picture and away you go. Have a look at the results.