Conference Presentations/PD sessions

Knowlegebank online session on Thursday July 23rd 2009 in conjunction with Jenny Ashby for Knowledge Bank.

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SuperclubsPLUS ROCKS!

SuperclubsPLUS site

Students from grades 4 to 6 have all been busy registering for this great social networking site in the last week. It is wonderful to walk into the room and see excitement, students teaching students, the sharing of what they have learnt and how they did it. Students love to customize their pages, and the first few lessons were spent adding colours, images, text and polls.

Already, after four days, one student had their account suspended as someone else had used their username and password to send emails. All teachers were notified, including the principal. So, here was a teachable moment, that students do not share their passwords. Students were spoken to.

The Department of Education and Early Childhood Education is sponsoring all Victorian students in years 3 and 4, and students involved in the netbook program, to join superclubsPLUS, online software developed by IntuitiveMedia. It is a safe educational site with a teacher on duty at all opening times. Students learn how to learn, study and behave appropriately online from an early age, in a safe educational environment. 

Students can upload media, publish articles, build personalised web pages, run their own clubs, complete projects, join discussion forums, chat with friends, achieve their ICT ‘Star Awards’, and participate in ‘Hot Seats’. One of the first awards to aim for is the cyber safety award.  On Thursday, April 30th, a female Qantas airline pilot will be online and availabe to talk to the students. Teachers can also achieve “Star Awards”. There is a teacher howto  section.

Here are the steps for registration. If you are in another state or country, goto superclubsPLUS and follow instructions. A fee is payable annually for each student enrolled.

If in Victoria, goto the Education Channel page  and follow instructions. An email will be sent out with several attachments – a proforma letter for permission to join, to be sent home to parents and a spreadsheet, for data entryt of student and teacher names. This requires birth dates of students as well.  Once parental permission has been given the spreadsheet is emailed back to SuperclubsPLUS and a phone call is made to the school, to ensure that it is indeed a school and that those students exist.

Usernames and passwords are then received and students  can commence. 

• Students logon.
• Give students 10 minutes to explore and see what they can discover about the site.  
• Who’s On shows the teachers, students who are on and the staff member on duty.
• Staff and Student who are new to the site, should check out “who’s on”  after changing the “my stuff” page. You can see who is online, click on their links and see their pages to get ideas of what can be achieved.
• Goto “My Stuff”  to  change their password and add an avatar.
• Goto “My Tools” where students can customize their own page.
• “How to Link” helps develop confidence in using the site.

This video demonstrates the excitement and interest that superclubsPLUS can generate.

Talk-It-Tuesdays

It all started with an idea of Jess McCulloch and was fully supported by me, that we apply for professional leave to research “Laying the eplanks in a web2.0 school”. That idea has taken us on a rather incredulous journey, whereby our staff after taking ‘baby steps’ are embracing the use of web2.0 tools wholeheartedly. One of the reasons for this success was our “Walk In Walk Out Wednesdays”, where staff can come into the computer lab for an hour after school and seek advice for any computer related issues. Staff from neighbouring schools have also taken up this option. However, they ‘Drive In Drive Out’!

Now look where those planks have led us………………… “Talk It Tuesdays” with Knowledge Bank, hosted by Tamara Carpenter.

Talk-It Tuesdays are informal online gatherings for educators interested in using social media, or Web 2.0 tools, in their work. These collaborative sessions take place every second Tuesday and will focus on:

• Sharing stories of what we are experimenting with and learning about
• Teaching each other about what we’re finding useful and exciting
• Listening to each other’s experiences
• Connecting people, tools and ideas
• Helping each other sort out problems and get started

Everyone is welcome, the format will be open, respectful and flexible, and there is no prerequisite knowledge for attending. You can drop-in for part or all of the session. You are equally welcome if you are the greatest Web 2.0 Whizz ever, or just trying to find out ‘What it’s all about.’ The sessions will be loosely facilitated by Anne Mirtschin, Jess McCulloch and Tamara Carpenter.

The first session is Tuesday 14 October at 3.30pm

Register your interest at Knowledge Bank.

It is hoped that Jess can make it today all the way from Nanjing, China (riding her eplank, of course!)

Knowledge bank online conference – Day 2

July 23rd, 2008

Day 2 was another great day. Participants showed a lot of virtual participation – the chat room as usual ran hot and people came from Canada, USA, Pakistan, England and other countries. This shows the power of web2.0, when a Victorian based conference in Australia can attract such a broad audience and gives an indication of where education with students could lead. Virtual classrooms or flat classroom floors are coming closer to reality and reinforces the notion by Steve Hargadon that web2.0 is the future of education.

Steve Hargadon had put out a notification email to all classroom20 members and many joined in at various times of the day. Twitter notifications also drew some particpants and the live blog drew some participants. The first session involved Jason Callaghan Manager of KnowledgeBank: Next Generation, and focused on investigating how to “create a cyber safe space and single portal of teaching and learning content to showcase new and emerging technologies supported by Department policy and process”.

He discussed some interesting developments and websites, including youtube for the very young a site developed by a father with youngsters. The dept are looking at developing something safe like this for students. (Personally, I think this is sorely needed as students love making digital stories and wish to embed them in their blogs or wikis but although our www.abc.net.au  allows the young to house their videos there, they cannot grab any code for embedding.)

Feedback was sought on the gaps between gaps and work needed to populate web2.0 policy in the classrooms. Need for safety of students was emphasised throughout. Tasteach’s students were listening to the session and spoke on how they love blogging. It was great to hear the student voice.

Second session for the day was presented by Chris Bigum on “Why has the web now got a number? – or coming to terms with the read/write web, knowledge production in schools and learning to deal with technologies that develop exponentially.” His links and discussion can be found on the knowledge bank confence wiki.

The third session was a great practical one. We heard from teachers and educators who are using various web2.0 tools. Tamara Carpenter spoke of her use of blogging (and isnt it great when people like Tamara blog and can share with others in her workplace the great benefits it can reap). Jenny Ashby spoke about podcasting with her students with some great tips, advice and ideas. The 3 p’s for podasting were plan, produce and publish. She then went onto discuss the 10 steps to podcasting success. You can see Jenny’s school site.

Clare Rafferty from Ringwood Secondary College and one of her students spoke about cyber safety in the classroom. This was another great segment and wonderful to hear from the students. They outlined safe use and features of myspace and facebook. Practical suggestions for stopping cyberbullying were put forward and the big message was “once you have it out there, you can never get it back and you lose control over it”.

Finally Chris Sutton who runs a virtual office spoke on a subject dear to my heart on thinking about virtual schools. She uses elluminate (eLearnAustralia) and kept reminding us to think outside the square and our normal classroom walls. Online software allows us to get speaker online and we no longer need to bring them into our school. Virtual classrooms and schools are a very real possibility.

Concluding remarks – Congratulations to the organisers, presenters and participants on a fantastic conference. May there be many more of them!

The conference website and wiki

Knowledge Bank Conference Day 1

What a great day of online sessions we had today with the highlight being the keynote speaker’s session by Steve Hargadon of classroom2.0 fame. Steve who lives in the USA was amazingly clear considering the distance between majority of us.

They journeyed from USA, England, Hong Kong, various states of Australia but predominantly Victoria to attend the sessions. The journey was virtual though and it was great to have the mix we had with the chat room going flat out most of the time with some wonderful ideas, resources and advice shared amongst the participants. The sessions were often at capacity, an average 110 participants. One of our USA participants had to get up at 4am to be present. What an effort!!

Steve identified ten trends in the educational use of Web 2.0 and discussed seven steps for educators to make a difference. Tools are changing how we learn and making schools think about what they do.
Why, why now and why such an impact? The Internet is becoming a platform for unparralled creativity and we are creating the content for the web. The principles of web2.0 are

• Contributing,
• Collaborating,
• Creating

Trends

1. Ability to create content
2. Tidal Wave of Information
3. Culture of openness
4. Culture of participation
5. The age of the collaborator
6. An explosion of innovation
7. The World Is Getting Flatter and Faster
8. The Long Tail
9. Social Learning Moved Toward Centre Stage
10. Social Networking

What to do as educators?

• Learn about web2.0
• Lurk
• Participate
• Digest This Thought: The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.
• Teach Content Production
• Make education a new discussion
• Help build the new playbook

Read Steve’s post for the full picture and read the comments that were made on the post. Read the live blog or check out the conference wiki for more details or the live recording of the session.

Jess and I started the day with a 15 minute presentation with “How we championed web2.0 at our school”. Of the stakeholders in an educational institution, we feel the teachers are the most important to encourage and discussed how we got them on board, with a little bit about our personal journeys in web2.0.We were followed by interesting presentations by Daniel Gooding on ”how I use Virtual Classrooms for teaching in LOTE” (check out their great resources and wikis) and Heather Robinson on “how we used a Virtual Classroom to bring a fossil back to life”.

The final session for the day was run by Mark Landy and 5 panelists. Again the chatroom was extremely busy and global educationalists took part in the live blog which was great. Another post will be written covering some of the chat and the panel discussion.

Looking forward to day 2 of the conference, tomorrow our time in Melbourne, Victoria (gmt+10)

Knowledge Bank Online Conference

“I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and that even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens. I’m going to identify ten trends in this regard that I think have particular importance for education and learning, and then discuss seven steps I think educators can take to make a difference during this time.” Steve Hargadon

The Victorian Education Dept’s Kowledgebank is running an online conference on Tue 23rd and Wed 24th July. I am running the live blogs which will complement  the conference sessions. The liveblogs will be active 15 mins before the beginning of each session and can be found by clicking on the appropriate links on the conference wiki. This means that I can blog about what is happening in the elluminate conference room and others can join me with questions or share links and resources.

Jess and I are kickstarting the conference with a 15 minute presentation on “How we championed web2.0 at our school.”

To summarise the sessions

Day 1:
9am – Session 1 – Introducing Web 2.0. 

10.30am – Session 2 – Keynote - Steve Hargadon. 

12pm – Session 3 – Panel discussion on Keynote.

Day 2:
10am – Session 1 – Knowledge Bank: Next Gen.

12pm – Session 2 – Keynote 2 – Chris Bigum.

2pm – Session 3 – 5 ways to get started.

Personally, I am really looking forward to the session with Steve Hargadon as classroom20 has played a critical and essential role on my uptake of web2.0 and I love his quote:-