Interesting ways to use…. by Tom Barrett

Tom Barrett has been sharing his class ideas and tips about using various tools in GoogleDocs presentations for quite a while and I have been collecting them in my bookmarks. He has now put all of them together in his blog. The presentations are in easy to use in their Google docs format and he invites others to share ideas. They are worth looking at/using and, if you have some tips that have not been mentioned, think about contributing.

The latest one I found was Ten Interesting Ways* to Use Audio in your Classroom. We have been doing some work with audio and I recently listened to a discussion on music in the novel, so I am interested in exploring this area some more.

 The other presentations are listed below but don’t be surprised if the numbers have changed.

•  10 Interesting Ways To Use a Wiki in the Classroom
• 13 Interesting Ways To Use a Visualizer in the Classroom
• 27 Interesting Ways To Use Twitter in the Classroom
• 40 Interesting Ways To Use Wordle in the Classroom
• 40 Interesting Ways To Use Your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom
• 21 Interesting Ways To Use Google Docs in the Classroom
• 24 Interesting Ways To Use Google Earth in the Classroom
• 23 Interesting Ways To Use a Nintendo DS in the Classroom
• 34 Interesting Ways To Use Search Engines in the Classroom
• 42 Interesting Ways To Use Your Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom
• 5 Interesting Ways to Use Prezi in the Classroom
• 17 Interesting Ways to Use Voicethread in the Classroom

Still in the early stages are:

• 4 interesting ways to use Wallwisher in the classroom
• 3 interesting ways to support writing in the classroom
• 5 interesting ways to use an iPod touch in the classroom
• 4 interesting ways to use Nintendo Wii in the classroom
• and so far Zero interesting ways to use Google Wave in the classroom

Catching up, reading my feeds and back in the digital world

After more than a week absent from the on line world I have been trying to catchup and read some of the feeds that have come my way over the school holidays.

Imagining Links - Will Lion from Shirky quote

38 ways of using wordle

Tom Barrett had a post entitled Interesting Ways to use Voicethread, Wordle and the Nintendo DS. I have only touched on Voicethread but I love Wordle. The slide shows he has created offer a lot of great ideas for the classroom  use of these tools. I love the way he invites people to add to the range of ideas about interesting ways to use tools. A truly great way to use technology to add to the education knowledge bank.

17 ways to use Voicethread

Such items show the positives about becoming part of the participatory culture of the Web2.0 world. It allows people to develop skills that connect people together to create something larger than at the individual level. These are the social (digital) skills that we need to be teaching our students, the things they need to know to become digital citizens (and workers) in the future. The combined skills of the group will be an important part of the future. Our students need to develop the social skills that will allow them to  talk and share ideas, safely and with confidence.

Many of the feeds I am reading only serve to reinforce my belief that we are doing our students a great disservice if we do not incorporate the new technologies, and related literacies, into our classroom practices.

TwitterSheep – Twitter meets Wordle

Another little Wordle-type tool. This time the wordle meets twitter in Twittersheep.

 It is as easy as entering your twitter username, submitting and then you see a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your twitter flock. Just some fun!

Images and words: using, manipulating, playing

Whilst I was on-line this morning up popped a couple of emails, One was sent by a teacher and it included the photograph below.

I looked around the web and found a blog, CFRU 93.3fm Election Radio, which posted the photo with the following text

It would seem that the credit crunch is having a really significant impact in the UK.

Even those more fortunate than most are having to make difficult decisions to ensure that their standard of living is maintained.

I don’t know if they created the photo but it certainly brought a laugh to students and teachers alike. I had a great discussion last week with the boys in the reading club/group. We started off talking about some books, then got om to how the media manipulated readers by the language used in their stories and finally discussed the economic crisis and the speeches made by politicians (what do they really mean?)

I was sitting in the library and around me there was a display of newspaper headlines for this year. I had collected these news banners for the morning delivery of papers over this year. So many words in bold print saying…?

These headlines have caused quite a bit of discussion with the students when they have come into the library over the past week.

I then started thinking about what activities you might base on these headlines. They could be the basis of some interesting approaches to language.

Book Week: celebrations and congratulations

Yesterday we finally brought to a close the CBCA book week activities for 2008 with an afternoon tea for the winning (and many of the competing) students. We asked parents of these students to come along. Many parents came along to support their sons, a number of the pastoral care teachers and Heads of House also joined in the celebrations.

The students received certificates, winners and runners-up The certificates were beautifully made up by one of our library technicians. Each one was different from the others and represented the competition the boy did well in.  The competitions involved Wordles, Mosaics, drawing a weird and wacky vehicle, paper planes, library scavenger hunt and a quiz that involved using the State Library of Victoria’s Ergo site.

I thought I would use Slideflickr to create a show of some of the images of the CBCA book week activities. The tool was vey easy to use and I created Flickr slideshows in less than a minute. This was supposed to allow me to put slideshows in my own site. It was generated from my flickr sets. You can attach audio via mp3 url. When I came to embed it into my blog it would not work. I will have to examine it later or maybe use Picasa instead. 

Until I get the slide show happening

Our principal came along and presented the certificates to the boys and congratulated them. Each of the boys also selected a book as a prize and our wonderful technician created book plates for each of the prize books chosen. I felt like Father Christmas, giving away 38 books. The students were great. They had permission to eat and drink in the library and a lot of serious discussion went on about the choices.

In a meeting today we discussed next year’s book week and what we need to keep in mind. The paper folding activities, 2007-origami and 2008-paper planes, were two of the most popular activities, across all the year levels. We are pondering what we can do next year in this line. The drawing, looking at the ideas, not artistic abilities are also always well received so we will have to look towards the 2009 theme for our ideas.