I stumbled upon this tool via the classroom 2.0 community for a group there called Digiskills. It is a group for….
“Project “Developing Digital Skills @ School” focuses on ICT. Teachers & students learn how to deal with the computer. DigiSkills teachers design, share, compare and enhance teaching methods and materials.”
The grou.ps (yeah…http://grou.ps ) is a tool that allows sharing & communication using tons of features; wiki, photos, links, blogs, calendar are just to name a few. And it is FREE!
The first thing I noticed is that it has a cool chat window, which is open over your screen when you enter the group. This is really handy as it can pull people into a conversation straight away! You can also see who is online and you can switch your chatwindow on or off.
Another interesting feature of this (I don’t know if it is a standard feature) is that you define yourself using tags! What a novel idea! I quite enjoyed describing myself with the use of keywords!
Then when I looked through the blogs…blow me over there was my school 2.0 blog feed already right there! I then remember that I added it as my website address. Very user friendly! It also sported all the links people have been posting to their pages. Instant learning in action!
As community moderator at our mathematical literacy teacher community (www.mathsliteracy.ning.com) I see my main role as facilitator of relationships and communications as well as technical support person within the community. Within this context I have actually learn so much, in unexpected areas. One of my community members posed a question starting off with ” This must be the dumbest question…” and that lead to me having a wondeful new learning experience!
She wanted to draw a system of axes (with grid) to use in her linear programming worksheet where the learners could sketch on the grid. So I immediately jumped to the occation by uploading a ‘How to’:
We tend to want to remedy situations by offering help too fast and she then gently reminded me that she is working in the new WORD 2007. So I went to investigate if I could do it in Word 2007. I have been avoiding getting to know it as it looks so different from Word 2003 and the times that I tried to figure it out, I got quite frustrated. So I forced myself…
What a pleasant surprise! It got oodles of nice features and once you get over your innitial abhorance, I found myself getting around quite effortlessly. My only worry is that I will now have to retrain my teachers to use the new Word from scratch…
So the moral of this story is that we must not be scared to learn new stuff even if the “old stuff” were so familiar and comfortable. If we don’t we, might be missing out on wonderful new features…. I do realise that TIME is a big problem. So I have made a little tutorial to demonstrate how to do a system of axes with gridlines in Word 2007.
We all know what it is like when our child comes to us the day before an
assignment is due and ask us to help them with it (do it for them???) So here is
how it actually SHOULD be done if we really care about giving our child a
learning experience, which I would think…is the actual objective of
assignments…..
A big part of LEARNING for the FUTURE will be not the information so much, but how to
discern what info is relevant
and the HOW of extracting and getting to the relevant information
as well as the skill to summarise the chosen info into a CRITICAL reflection
NO MORE CUT AND PASTE!!!!!!
So it will be cool if we can guide our kids HOW to do this (as the teachers are not necessarily going to do
it)…a tall order but IMPORTANT! This means that we sit with them and learn with them (as opposed to doing it for them…) Asking them all the time what they think look important and ….what does this mean to you…
I was asked by a parent to PLEASE just send them a few website addresses for their child’s assignment on “Discuss productivity and its effects on economic prosperity, growth and global competition”. So it made me think (which is a good thing). How do we help our kids if we really feel strongly about giving them skills to cope in a future world (which for me is the definition of education)?
Here is my guideline. And I am hoping that I can get some help and suggestions here to fine-tune my thoughts… (note to self…will go and post this in my classroom 2.0 community and ask for help)
Help your child to…·
Understand the topic that was given to them. For this Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) works well as an entry understanding place.
Eg: Productivity…what does it mean…how is it defined
I know that the Thutong portal team has been working hard to give us a more school 2.0 kind of interface with blogs, forums and learning spaces. So now we need to give them some feedback on the things that are not working (yet). I always get very irritated with people moaning about free resources but not willing to put in the time to help the developers to create a better experience. So, let us give feedback about the little bugs in the system so that we can have a better repository of resources!!!
I have decided that it is time to take the maths lit teachers into the arena of having REALTIME online meetings. Of cause I went off on a tangent wanting to just throw them into the deep end with some high tech web 2 tools like WizIQ and was then horribly brought down to earth by my ever present friends….bandwidth and dialup.
When I tested my room with a dial-up….well lets say that I had to go back to the drawing board.So I have decided to KISS (keep it simple stupid) and then inserted a little Cbox chat box into my ML NING network. It is very basic but works quite effectively. We will have to see tonight how effectively. The reason why I decided not to use SKYPE or any of the other Chat agents (IM, Google chat…) is that the last time I tried to have an online meeting, we ended up chatting across 3 different platforms with some of us being relay agents. Chaos. So at least nobody will have to install anything and can just jump in. I do think the teachers will probably be a bit confused with such a small chat window and a myriad of conversations that will probably take place. I expect that it will be a first for most of them.
In combination with the chat window, we will do the resources discussions in a forum next to the chat window (rather asynchronously) but it will be a little more organised and the teachers can then upload their resource for discussion as well. So hold thumbs for me! I will report back on how it went…..If you know any maths lit teachers in South Africa, please tell them about the meeting at:http://www.mathsliteracy.ning.com
Time: 19h00- 21h00 (or there about…..) Time goes past so fast if you talk about maths…
I know that the 
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