Mrs A's Blog

My Rambling Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

Who the *Tweet* Cares?

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Over the course of the last year I have offered many PD sessions on the basics of social networking.  My usual focus is on Twitter as this is the social network which I am most inspired by in my teaching practice.  These PD sessions run from one-to-one sessions to small groups (3 or 4) to class sized groups and beyond.  I know I am no expert when it comes to social networking.  And I always start my sessions with…

Hi…

My Name is @mrsangell and I’m a PLN Junkie…

Who the *Tweet* cares what I have to say?

1019 people on Twitter

690 friends on Facebook

and numerous more on Nings, LinkedIn and Yahoo Groups…

Twitter Bird

Image by Fanie! via Flickr

This hooks the really large groups and really small groups…  I find it interesting that the take up rate with twitter from people who have never used it before is 100% in the one-to-one sessions then diminishes for the small group and class sized groups and in then increases to around 80% in the really large groups.  After an explanation of the WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHY and HOW of PLN’s we usually set up a twitter account (I’ve found most staffhave the other accounts already) and run through the basics, recommendations anddiscuss how to manage the PLN, and uses in the Classroom and for Professional Learning.  I realise that this is a lot to take in when first looking at PLN’s but I feel it is necessary to get people started.

I would love to know how you teach people about Social Networks and what they can do for your teaching.

 

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Categories: Collaboration, Tools.

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Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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Scream - Day 29, Year 2

Image by purplemattfish via Flickr

There is no other way to explain it.  Our school year starts on Monday that is two days away.  As I sit here in the dark writing, its midnight on Friday night and I can’t sleep.  I can’t sleep because I have never, ever, EVER felt so unprepared for Day One in my teaching life.  I have been teaching for seven years and with the exception of last year (where I was on maternity leave for the first six weeks of Term One) I have never not had Term One planned to at least to Week Five.  This year I am rushed.  I am rushed because everyone is rushed.  I am stressed because everyone around me seems to be stressing.

This year I’m doing my ELF role AND taking on an academic class and not just any academic class its a Year 12 IB Economics.  Our PD days like every other year have been planned down to the minute.  Usually this hasn’t phased me because I am planned and calm but this year I’m pushing my luck.  This year preperation week seems to have just disappeared.

Day 1 – your general intro to the year and this is the direction we want to take includes a bit on our new e-learning environment and time management (this is funny!!)

Day 2 – Habits of Mind – something we so desperately needed – was a brilliant session and I learned a whole heap of things to take into the classroom

Day 3 – Public Holiday (yes a breather) – spent… you guessed it… working!!!

Day 4 – Understanding by Design and Differentiation – again a great session and I have a good tool kit to go into the classroom with

Day 5 – Department Planning, E-Learning Environments, and various meetings depending on what you teach. – today

This was the hardest day of all.  As one of the E-Learning Facilitators I spent the day going from planning session to planning session assisting staff with their E-Learning Environments.  This was great however as the day wore on and more and more things went wrong and patience was tested.  It got harder.  So now I need to write my to-do list and try and get some sleep so that tomorrow (well today now!!) I can try and plan at least my first lesson and hope that I find the time to complete the tasks on my ELF to-do list (132), my classroom teacher to-do list (62) and my parent to-do list (44).

And this just about sums it up….

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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Categories: Rant.

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We Still Block Content in Schools?

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I’ve been spending my summer break catching up on my favourite PodCast Classroom Geeks and even though the episodes I was listening to were from way back in 2009 it was interesting to note that there were discussions occurring about blocked content in schools.  When I was next close to my twitter feed I noticed a number of articles come through about websites which should be white-listed on school content filters.  I have to ask what exactly is content blocking teaching kids?

Granted the educational institution I work for also filters content (though the restrictions are not too bad we do have access to facebook, twitter, and YouTube). I do want to know what are we teaching kids if we don’t let them access the big bad world.  I have three children and at home we do not filter the Internet.  Instead we teach our children what to do instead and trust that they know how to handle it.  Ms 10 certainly does a number of times she has come to us about questionable content her friends have sent her or she has stumbled across and we have the appropriate conversation and alert who we feel needs to be alerted.  I don’t think we need to shelther her from it.  Perhaps educational institutions need to take the cotton wool off their eyes and have a good look at their content policies.  I guess the problem is there is always someone who objects and makes waves. And schools need to protect themselves from this.  I guess this goes back to my earlier post Time to Pop the Bubble Wrap We need to teach the kids cyber safety.

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We can do Multiple Videos…. Can’t We?

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A colleague of mine (@jmintouch33) commented that she had seen online a site which offered a list of videos which as you clicked on them they played in the ONE Video Player.  She went on to say how fantastic it would be if we could do that in our Sharepoint Environment.   Some of you may remember an earlier post where I lamented on being told “Anything I could do on the web I can do in Sharepoint“.  So again I started my search for the answer.  To cut a long story short I found the answer thanks to endusersharepoint.com it is a lot simpler than I thought it would be…

What you need to do is…

  • Create a Document library.
  • Save your Media Files to this directory.
  • Add a content editor web part and add the following code to the Source Editor Section:

<SELECT  id=cancion onchange=document.all.music.filename=document.all.cancion.value;  size=1 name=Music> <br>
<OPTION  selected>Please Select the Video you Wish to View</OPTION><br>

<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>
<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>
<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>
<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>
<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>
<OPTION  value=”URL of Video”> Name </OPTION><br>

</SELECT><br>
<BR> <br>
<OBJECT  id=music height=505 width=640  classid=clsid:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95> <br>
<PARAM  NAME=”AutoStart” VALUE=”true”> <br>
</OBJECT>

  • You will need to change the URL for each individual Video and add a Name
  • You may need to change the height and width depending on the files you are showing.

And this is the Final Result.

I guess it’s true anything you can do on the web you can do in Sharepoint.

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Categories: Help Guides.

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McDonalds and Culture in the Same Sentence?

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Our Year 6’s are about to study a unit on Culture and among discussions during planning the conversation moved towards what definition or concept of culture were the students going to look at.  Being an inquiry based unit the decision was to go with what ever definition the student decided to go with would then lend the student to creating their own assessment piece.  One of the more interesting or open definitions of Culture is

Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. –http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html

This led to an intersting conversation which ultimately ended with the idea that McDonalds in itself is a culture.  I decided to investigate this further during my Spring Break.  So here is my interpretation of “The Culture of McDonalds”. Would love to see or hear yours!

Please feel free to use this as stimulus in your classroom.

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Categories: Resources.

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