School 2.0 in SA

Great slideshow about what web 2.0 can do for teachers…

[slideshare id=245978&doc=brave-new-www-1201645277347443-4&w=425]

A great downlowdable slideshow explaining how teachers can use blogs effectively in their classrooms..

[slideshare id=244107&doc=blogsfor-classroom-management-1201537269755031-3&w=425]

Up to now I have just been using YouTube and TeacherTube for videos, but at the open weekend at Knowplace, we were introduced to a few other platforms. How to produce streaming video  is a good tutorial which explain what streaming video is and how to create it.

One of the new platforms was BlipTV. I am still playing with it and decided howe see how easy it is to embed a video from BlipTV here in edublogger.

Okay, that was easy enough.

• Go the video you want to embed at BlipTV and click on the embed icon at the bottom of the video
• It will give you a pop-up window, click on the middle tab at the bottom which says "Embed"
• Copy the script to Notepad
• Copy ONLY the last url before "quality"

• Rememember to note down the width and height
• Click on the "f" flash icon at the top of your post, it will ask you for the flash url (paste)
• Next it will ask you for the width and the height
• Viola!


We have not even begin to unpack the issues that social networking can hold for schools. So I will start collecting snippets of articles dealing with social networking issues…It got the following from Knowplace:

ABOUT FACEBOOK & PRIVACY:

Facebook privacy values were called into question recently following a huge number of user complaints related to the introduction of a controversial new advertising application called Beacon.  Beacon  tracks the online buying habits of Facebook users and spreads trend information amongst their approved friends. Many Facebook members responded with outrage.  Groups emerged out of the protest, the largest of which is ‘Students Against Facebook News Feeds’ (700,000 members) The 23 year old founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently apologized to the members.  To increase your privacy on facebook:

Method 1:

• login to facebook
• profile
• privacy
• external websites
• edit settings
• Select: “don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile”
• Save

Method 2 (If you use Firefox browser)

• Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
• After restarting Firefox select ‘Add-ons’ from the Tools menu.
• Click the ‘Options’ button on the BlockSite extension
• Click the ‘Add’ button
• Enter http://www.facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
• Click ‘OK’
• Click ‘OK’ again and you are good to go.

Both Methods With Visuals: http://www.wikihow.com/Block-Facebook-Beacon 

At our last workshop we discussed how we would do a “classblog”. We did not get round to exploring that in practice, so I would like to create a “ICT-4-Champions” classroomblog where only us (those who leave their names at the bottom) will be able to post and see each others post. eg only invited people can post = gated post.

Where would we like to make use of a gated post…..? Hmmm, …propably for specific projects… 

Anycase, leave your name at the bottom, and remember to fill in your e-mail. Don’t worry, it will not be visible publicly, only to me! I thought that we could tackle the issue of a “how to create a classroom-blog” (as in 4 our learners). If you would want to be part of this, please hop in, I will then create the blog and invite you all into the classroom! I promise to make sure to explain in detail how I did it and my trails and tribulations as I go along!

I haven’t even blinked and we are halfway through the first month of this year already! I trust that everybody are rested and ready for a year of innovation, learning and creative teaching incorporating Web 2.0 tools in our everyday lives. So I better get cracking otherwise I will not reach my goal of getting 200 teachers blogging this year. Jip, I will continue my blogging crusade  as I think that through blogging we can learn about a whole variety of other tools by embedding it into our blogs (Slideshare, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Voicethreads…).

So the first thing I would like to do is to create a “gated blog” where we can all blog in one place (co-authers). At our workshop we discussed  that as a way to create a private learner blogspace for our classes…

I will also start going into all the nitty gritty of, for instance, when to create pages and when to do posts, where do categories and tags fit into a blog…

Social networking is still the flavour of the day and I think it is time that we address some of the issues, pros and cons that are associated with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. We will also look at some other platforms for creating your own social school network, like Ning and Ecto.

So little time…so much to do….

Sometimes we need a few “web 1.0″ skills before we can submerge ourself in Web 2.0!!

Here is a few pointers to help brush up our “WEB 1.0 Skills”, using a few of the great slideshows from www.slideshare.net (which just goes to show that we do not have to re-invent the wheel!

Windows | Word  |
PowerPoint  | Excel

Windows:

| View | Upload your own

Microsoft Word-

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

• Free Microsoft word 2003 tutorials
• Setting up your toolbars in Word 2003
• See also “How to use Autoshapes in Word to create great sketches

Powerpoint:

| View | Upload your own

Please also see: Death by PowerPoint Before you create your powerpoint!!!

 Agenda:

•  What is a blog? Using the www.school2.co.za  blog as an example.
• • What is the blog about?
  • How is the blog used for teaching and learning?
  • What information is available and how is it organised?
  • What interactive elements can be found in the blog?
  • What is the difference between Pages & Posts,
  • Blogrolls, categories and links?
  • Posting to a blog (Scroll down and introduce yourself by leaving a comment at http://maggiev.edublogs.org/2008/01/08/crawford-blogging-workshop/
• Getting started with your own blog.
  • Decide on what your blog is going to be about. (Classblog/Homework/Parent info)
  • Brainstorm with partner (or mindmap at http://bubbl.us/)
  • Go to “Create a blog” /open file in resource folder called “setting-up-a-blog-1.ppt“
  • Open  “setting-up-a-blognew2.ppt” and of course……..!!!!
  • “setting-up-a-blog-part-3.ppt” !!!!
  • Add a widget
• What have you achieved? Go back to your comment at  http://maggiev.edublogs.org/2008/01/08/crawford-blogging-workshop/   and leave a note about the workshop. (or post a new comment)