Exciting News

Jo Donalsdson has created a blog. Please visit her blog at this site and pass on your congratulations.

Week 8 Online Applications and Tools

I am writing this post using Zoho Writer and they tell me I can publish straight to my blog. I believe them - but I don't as yet know how to do it. Well here goes!

Yes! It worked and was really simple. There appears to be a couple advantages of using an online word processor. You can access your documents wherever you have internet access and it allows collaboration between authors. If you have a group of kids working on a project they can each have access to the document and add, change and delete.

Anyway, I'm back to play with my new toy - I'll let you know how it goes.

Well I'm having fun! I have created a short document and shared with Dave Klan. He gets sent an email with a link to the document and, when he signs up to Zoho, he will be able to work on the document. Come on Dave, have a go!

(WEEK 7) Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that educators use them

"A Wiki is a quick-to-build, easy-to-edit website on which all information can be edited, changed, or rewritten by the users or members of the site. It is an incredibly useful tool for collaborative writing, pooling knowledge or exchanging ideas, especially on a subject that changes or needs updating frequently." http://plcmccore.blogspot.com/2006/04/wiki-wiki-wiki.html

Wikis look useful for Year 6&7 - not sure how or if I would use them for younger students. Definitely worth further investigation.

This link takes you to a video showing how a Year 2/3 class in New Zealand is using Web 2.0 tools.

This video looks at a Year 4/5 class and how it uses Web 2.0 tools.

Use this link to see how Wikis are used in some Australian classrooms.

Week 6:Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati

Went to Del.icio.us, a social networking favourites site. It looks quite a useful research tool for teachers but I did not open an account because it requires the downloading of a toolbar. It gives you an option other than a straight search engine and the use of tags allows you to narrow your search. I don't think I'll be using it.

The information about Creative Commons and Copyright, while interesting, is more relevant to Teacher/Librarians.

I found this week's tutorial not as useful as previous - but I am looking forward to next week and an introduction to Wikis.

Week 5: Play Week

We are asked to play with some online picture tools. I used Big Huge Labs to create this movie poster. It was easy and I can see how you could use it in class.

We were also asked to go to Rollyo to create a custom search engine. You create a search engine for the sites you nominate. I can see this being useful for say Year 4 and above, but I created one for Year 2 and it is here.

Select Search Engine...DinosaursSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders

The tutorial suggested Bloglines but I went for the Google Reader. I added a few education type feeds as well as some personal interests.

The whole thing is pretty simple to use and I will report back as to how useful/interesting the feeds are.

Getting Started - Weeks 1,2 and 3.

I want to use this blog to share what I am learning on the Classroom Learning 2.0 tutorial. As you can see I have created a blog and an avatar from Week 2 activities.

From Week 3 activities I have created a Flickr account and started mucking around with some of the Web tools available from Big Huge Labs.

Above is a trading card I made.