Playing in the Sandpit – outcomes of Tech TalkTuesday webinar!

Collage created with fotor

As this was an unconference style workshop session, there is always an element of uncertainty as to how things will pan out. However, it was a great session, with educators from Australia, UK and USA playing and sharing together. You can listen to the recording by clicking on this link.

Here is what it looked like:-

1. Peggy George (@peggygeorge) shared the app she has created for Classroom2.0LIVE using cleverlize - the app creating program that we learnt about in last week’s session.
2. An application share revealed the sites that Carole McCulloch had shared as a comment on this webinar posting on the Australia Series blog:- Tools that are collated on the SA eLearning site and Marlene Manto’s blog where the most recent post shared some great sites for MS Powerpoint.
3. Jo Frei shared some great images from her blog Sprite’s site and Gifted Resources blog
4. I shared fotor – a collage making online tool, that is free and requires no registration – always a bonus when working with students. Participants were quickly shown the basics and then given 3 mins to create their own collage. A quick demo was given on saving and sharing options. Participants copied their collages onto the whiteboard in Blackboard Collaborate and shared their results – a wonderful diversity of experiences and interests.
5. Marc Grossman @UKGrossman from UK demonstrated the new look Scratch 2.0
6. Peggy discussed her attendance at the virtual 4T Conference over the last few days and shared her livebinder for March Classroom2.0 featuring a presenter on Scratch and Stretchinstructor.
7. Finally people shared some of the collage making tools that they liked using – photoscape, pizap and shape collage, jigsaw maker

Tech Talk Tuesdays: Playing in the Sandpit

When: Tuesday, May 21st 4-5pm, Melbourne Australia time (gmt+10) See timeanddate for your day and timezone.

About this session: This is an ‘unconference’ style webinar where participants are encouraged to bring along some of the latest tools or apps that they are using or ‘playing’ with. Those who join us will have the chance to play with the tools, share what they have learnt and discuss how it could be used in the classroom or learning. Alternatively, come along with questions about some tools that you would like to use.To kickstart the session, I will share  fotor, a great online image editing tool and some of my favourite apps for twitter use.

Please join us by clicking on this link.  If you cannot join us, what tools or apps are you trialling or playing with? Please leave a comment below.

Talking to Native Speaker

Endang and students asking questions of native speaker

Endang Palupi is an amazing Indonesian educator in Western Java and despite poor infrastructure and working in a developing country. As Endang is well connected, she then connects students she works with to classes and educators across the world. She is studying for a doctorate and her thesis is based Talking with a Native Speaker. Using skype and facebook groups, Endang looks for people who may be available to work with Indonesian students who are learning English and speak it as their second or third language.

One question they consistently ask is “what  is your age?”. I respond truthfully and can see that they understand that as there is some element of surprise, as I could be their grandmother!!! “What is your hobby?” is the second most common question. My response is gardening and arranging flowers but I am never sure whether they fully understand that response. Usually I key that response into the txt chat area to help understanding.  On the weekend,  I took a photograph of some of my flower arrangements so that I can quickly share my screen in skype or ghangouts and show them my hobby as well as tell them.

Images will become increasingly important as we become more globally connected. How do you ensure understanding when working with people from other countries? What tips would you give?

Sharing my hobby in an image

A Glimpse into “A Day in the Life of a Connected Educator”

It started as a normal, fairly mundane school day………

Well connected teachers will  find there are many ways to learn, share and teach, teachable moments arise constantly and interruptions to normal routines may become the norm. Yesterday was one such day, when normal classes were planned and a relaxing night at home anticipated, but….

World Museum Scratch Day Saturday, May 18th

Year 8 students are participating in  the Squares, Circles and Triangles project for the World Museum Project to celebrate World Scratch day. Students take photos of shapes in the real world and add them as a sprite to Scratch, highlighting the shape first and then sharing the whole picture. See an online animated sample.

Circles-Storage tanks for firewood

However, this project is quite challenging and as I am not confident with the programming elements, we had to impulsively skype my wonderful online colleague – Lorraine Leo from Boston, USA to help us in our dilemmas. My laptop webcam shared the screens of students with Lorraine so that she could see what the student was doing, speak to them and help them solve their problems. The lesson time was not long enough. So a sample student project was emailed to Lorraine for further investigation in consultation with Yoshiro Miyata, the creator from Japan.

Lorraine from USA (in laptop) virtually teaches Amy how to solve her problem with Scratch

Brendah from Sth Africa shared her lesson on learning cell references in MS Excel with grade her 2s with the HLW Skypers Group in the chat area of skype. Joe McNulty of Pennsylvania USA, joined our conversation. Within 6 hours he had shared a google document containing more mystery picture challenges that his year 7/8 students had created for Brendah’s young students. It was on impulse that I decided to use these tasks with my year 3/4 ICT class after lunch. Students were highly engaged colouring in reference cells to reveal the mystery pic. They discovered a house, faces, a flag, a rainbow etc if they followed instructions carefully.

A rainbow in progress

Images of Brendah’s and my students working on the tasks were emailed to Joe who then shared them with his students, resulting in them being even more motivated in creating further tasks. Joe has now put some of these up on his google site.

Home at last!

Enjoying the last remnants of my evening meal, I noticed a message in my HLW Skypers Group popup seeking people to ‘jump’ in and join a hangout with Reinhard  Marx and a class from Germany. The students were about to share their learning about “German Islands and the drinking water situation”.

The group skype request from Reinhard

I joined the hangout on my laptop as our desktop computer has been playing up and fully expected to be ejected from it due to my poor bandwidth. Surprisingly I was able to stay in but not able to use my video, nor see the screen sharing from Germany, but….. I could hear and speak to them. In the hangout were Endang from Western Java, Indonesia and Linlin from Taiwan. With me being from Australia, the foreign participants all came from islands – some small, some large and learnt about islands in Germany.

Students from Germany had prepared Powerpoint slides. Reinhard shared his screen with us via the Ghangout. Groups came forward and spoke to the slides and their pictures in clear English. Linlin and I then spoke about the importance of water, issues where we live and how we conserve it.

A small group shares with us

Next, a skype message came from Endang to see whether I could help her Indonesian students speak English to a native speaker. Two students introduced themselves to me, answered my many questions and then asked me questions. The chat in skype helped ensure that we understood each other reasonably well!

An ordinary day turned into a very exciting one in an amazing global classroom! How was your day?

Tech Talk Tuesdays: Where Mobile meets Learning – (Create your own apps with Cleverlize)

Thanks to Chris Smith for converting this session into video format. See below:-

When: Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 from 4-5pm, Melbourne Australia time (gmt+10) See timeanddate for your timezone. 

Here is the link to the recording.

About this session: It is with great pleasure that we have as our guest presenters, Dr Lukas Steinbacher, from Germany and
Binh-An Tran the co-founders of Cleverlize. Cleverlize allows educationalists to create apps for multiple platforms without coding.

With Cleverlize’s App Editor you’ll be able to mobilize your teaching without any

programming skills. It’s never been so easy before to build and publish your own

interactive & mobile learning.

In the webinar we will show you, how easy it is to bring your own learning content on

mobile devices. In detail the webinar live demo contains:

General description of the Cleverlize platform

• How to build your own mobile content in 3 simple steps
• File your content in different templates (Articles, quiz, flashcards, …)
• Design your mobile content
• Publish your interactive content for learners
• Roadmap on next features

Link to the recording.  Read more about cleverlize and register to have your own login.

About Cleverlize (a promotion by the creators)

Cleverlize develops a solution that enables educators to bring their teaching to
mobile devices. The solution therefore is suitable for all educators recognizing that
their students are consuming more and more content on smartphones and tablets.

Go mobile in 3 simple steps – with Cleverlize creating your own mobile micro
learning content is possible without any programming skills. Just file your content
in the Cleverlize App Editor and choose a custom design. Following the creation of
content as well as adjusting the design you can distribute and (if you want) sell it via
a “one-click” solution. Currently we support iOS and HTML5 but soon there will be
more platforms available.

Multiple interaction formats – Cleverlize’s learning content is interactive
and equipped with multi learning features. These can be simple articles, images
or embedded Youtube videos as well as tests with different question formats, e.g.
multiple choice, matching, sorting or cloze. Or just integrate flashcards to your mobile
learning content.

Access from everywhere and at anytime – publish to the Cleverlize
Marketplace app to offer your students access to your learning content 24/7. It
doesn’t matter where they are. With Cleverlize’s marketplace your contents are even
available offline and on multiple devices (e.g. iPhone or iPad).

It’s just the beginning – the Cleverlize App Editor and its publishing
possibilities are just the first step of a next generation learning experience. Further
versions of Cleverlize will contain intelligent analytics features, gamification templates
and integration of social networks.

eT@lking: A Digital Toolbox for Collective Learning

When: Wednesday, May 8th 8-9pm Melbourne Australia time. See timeanddate for your timezone.

About this session: “Our current generation of students have digital tools at their fingertips and amazing opportunities to connect with others across the globe. During this webinar we will demonstrate some of the tools that can be used to engage and encourage students to express their learning with images, quizzes, cartoons, word clouds and concept maps.

Britt Gow, (http://twitter.com/brittgow) an innovative science and maths teacher from a small, rural school in SW Victoria, shares the ways in which she has used digital tools to connect her students with experts in Australia and beyond. Come along and share the ways that you use to motivate and challenge students to extend their learning with digital tools.”

All are welcome. Please join us and join in the conversations. Click on this link to listen to the recording of this session.

Tech Talk Tuesday takes an Excursion to Monet’s Garden

When: Tuesday May 7th, 4-5:15pm, Melbourne Australia time (gmt+10). Please note that we will be taking an excursion to another webinar.

As the National Gallery of Victoria is holding a webinar at the same time as the usual Tech Talk Tuesday sessions, it has been decided to participate in their innovative webinars as part of Tech Talk Tuesday.  It is wonderful to see community institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria conducting webinars for educationalists.  I would like to support them in this venture and encourage people who would normally attend Tech Talk Tuesday to see how exciting these online sessions can be as organised by the NGV.

Monet’s Garden: The Musée Marmottan Monet,Paris is the winter exhibition at the Art Gallery  from May 10th to Sept 8th. This webinar is for primary art and classroom teachers presenting a range of art and cross-curricular learning activities for the classroom. This session includes an introductory talk providing contextual information about the work and life of Claude Monet and an outline of school-based activities designed for a specific year level including

• Ideas for visual art making activities, including materials, media and procedure
• Descriptions and ideas for cross-curricular activities which have been designed to complement/relate to the themes being explored in the art room
• Discussion of relevant resources.

Please join me as a participant for Monet Comes to School for years 5 and 6 and support NGV. There will be something for everyone in this webinar. Here is the link to join this session.

The regular Tech Talk Tuesday will be back next week with a session by Cleverlize on creating exciting apps for learning. Don’t miss this one.