School 2.0 in SA

I am only getting to make a summary of what transpired at our blogging workshop now as I have been “virtual-less” due to a burglary at our house (while we were sleeping) But, I am back online now, which already make me feel  better! So provided that my AAADD (Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder) have not erased too much of what I remember from the workshop…here goes… 

We decided to have the workshop on a school day as an experiment to see if principals will support informal professional development for their teachers. It was sad to see only a few (but enthusiastic) souls at the workshop and all of them were from private schools, even though we were hoping to see some governmental teachers there as well. Don’t know if they couldn’t manage to “get off” or if the marking and end of year preparations just got in the way? 

It would be just our luck that the internet was particularly slow on the day, which allowed lots of time for Face to face discussions. We started off by looking in general what a blog is and discussed the advantages of blogging. It can act as a way to improve writing skills and as learners can take ownership of their blog it can teach them critical thinking skills as well as responsibility. As it can potentially reach a wide audience, it can motivate them to become more involved. It can also be used for class projects where it can act as a central organisational space to bring together tools and resources for the learners to use and explore. A blog can also be used as a personal journal which could lead to reflection. We talked about how great it would be to learn from what other teachers are doing in their classrooms and Wilna and Sandra shared with us how they are trying to use it as a reflective tool and mechanism to keep track of what they are doing in their classrooms. As it does not require any special web programming skills, it is relatively easy to use and provides for great interactivity as you can add videos (www.youtube.com), mindmaps (www.bubbl.us , pictures(www.flickr.com, www.picasa.com ), slideshows (www.slideshare.net) , games and more to your blog.   

This took as on a pathway to go and look at a few web 2 tools land as always (isn’t learning great) we got slightly sidetracked to look at various pressing Web 2.0 issues, like…

• Our learners are crazy about Facebook…how can blogs be incorporated into Facebook
• The privacy issue…and we generally decided that we need to educate our learners about privacy issues in their use of all Web 2.0 tools.
• Issues inhibiting us from using web 2.0 tools (teachers (lack of) ICT skills, internet access, computer theft, curriculum pressure, technical support, lack of management support, we feel inadequate compared to our learners who know much more about Web 2.0 use, the burden of staying up to date with new technologies, lack of time to investigate and get to know new technologies)

We then got stuck into creating our edublogs and ran into the usual problems of not being able to remember user names and passwords and not being able to access e-mail in order to activate our blogs. But eventually we all got there (give or take) and managed to create our blogs and add some pictures. We also looked at how to add interactive widgets to our blogs using (http://www.widgetbox.com). 

We want to thank IT schools (http://www.itschools.co.za/) for sponsoring a great lunch and Brescia House for hosting the workshop! The photos of the workshop can be found here… http://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiev/sets/72157603336650771/