Archive for October, 2009

Oct 30 2009

My poem: Last Friday

Published by maggiev under Uncategorized

I read through Tom Barrett’s little newsletter that he compiles for his fellow teachers and was intrigued by the little tool that he introduced them to, called Write Rhymes. It helps to compile rhymes (duh) and is a very creative way to get your learners to write a poem. So I tried my hand at it and this is what I came up with……

Good morning last Friday
How did you get here?
I thought you were still far away
You sneaked up on me, that’s clear!

I still had so many things to do-
A whole month seemed so vast
But you in wisdom turned the clock
And now I am left aghast

So take me back to Monday first
So that I can try again
To pick up pieces of my life
That I lost – God knows when!

Very rudimentary and the list of rhyming words did not always inspire me, but it made me think. So this little tool get’s the thumbs up form me. Why don’t you give it a try and let me know (or post below) some rhymes???

2 responses so far

Oct 28 2009

South African bursaries for matrics

Published by maggiev under General, Local is lekker!

The year 2009 is fast approaching its end and most young people are
pondering on what to do in 2010. For those who are thinking of tertiary education I suggest that you have a look at bursaries offered on the following sites:

There are also opportunities for new graduates. All major banks offer
graduate development programmes. For the Training Outside Public
Practice (TOPP) offered by Liberty Life you may contact
vikashi.chetty@liberty.co.za . The revenue service is looking to take in 200 BCom graduates in 2010. For more on this you may contact graduates@sars.gov.za

If you know of any other opportunities for our matrics leaving school at the end of this year, please add it as a comment.

Good luck- the future awaits!!

(Thanx @ceanlia for sending me this)

No responses yet

Oct 25 2009

School 2.0 Bookmarks (weekly)

Published by maggiev under School 2.0, Weekly bookmarks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Oct 21 2009

Twitter guide and my favourites

Due to the incredible popularity of twitter globally, more guides are being written every day. I have had to update my teacher twitter learning object twice, due to the twitter interface changing. I also have not began to scratch the surface as far as handy twitter applications are concerned, but then I discovered this comprehensive guide to twitter from Makeuseof which always gives a down to earth perspective and look at tools and gadgets.

My current twitter tools that I am using are:

Hootsuite:

As I have various alter ego’s (@maggiev @schoollibrary @hogsback @mathslitteacher- The last 3 are collaborative), this web based tool is really very handy. You do not have to install a programme on your computer as it sits in your browser. You can keep track of all your personas and create separate streams which helps if you are following a great deal of interesting people. You can create a stream group by adding followers or hashtags. For instance, you can create a stream to follow the learners in your class. Another advantage is that you can keep track of your tweet stats with detailed graphs and stats (always very interesting from a maths point of view)

My Diigo auto- bookmarkmarklet to twitter

Where twitter is the mouth  of my online learning, Diigo is the heart and as it has an auto twitter tickbox, I can automatically post my bookmarks to twitter on the fly by just ticking the box. All you have to do is to install the diigo toolbar and click on bookmark. The rest is seamless. Very handy.

Twibes (www.twibes.com)

Is a grouping tool and comes in quite handy when you have meetings or workshops. Previously I swamped my poor following with workshop/meeting tweets. I am sure not all my social media and edtech followers are interested in mathematical literacy and the hassles we are having with assessment, so twibes makes it possible to create an interest group around a specific hashtag and use it as a seperate backchannel.

Backing up tweets (http://printyourtwitter.com/)

Tweets are only visible for a period of time and it is therefore very important to back it up/print it. I do this once a month and also back up my favourite tweople’s tweets! This makes for some great bedtime reading!

But let me introduce you to this great guide for a few more (very comprehensive) step by step pointers……..

The Complete Guide to Twitter

One response so far

Oct 18 2009

School 2.0 Bookmarks (weekly)

Published by maggiev under School 2.0, Weekly bookmarks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

No responses yet

Oct 12 2009

The spoilt under 30 crowd

Published by maggiev under Funny/cartoons

Last years matrics has never not known cellphones, TV, ipods, and all the mathingie-jigs of our 21st century world. So when Lanie send me this I had a really good chuckle!

If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning…. Uphill…barefoot… BOTH ways Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it! But now that… I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today…

You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3′ s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished and the tape would come undone. Cause – that’s how we rolled, dig?

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it! And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen…. forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel! NO REMOTES!!! There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!

And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoilt. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!

2 responses so far

Oct 11 2009

School 2.0 Bookmarks (weekly)

Published by maggiev under School 2.0

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

No responses yet

Oct 07 2009

Create your own custom search engine

Published by maggiev under How to (Tutorials), My posts

When we ask learners do research on the internet, they are sometimes faced with inappropriate search results. This is any firewall administrator’s nightmare as well as a valid concern for most teachers and librarians. A search can also bring up millions of results, some of which are either commercial in nature or irrelevant. By creating a custom search engine we can make sure that learners only search within pre- approved search sites.

To create such a search engine is actually remarkably easy, the hard part is to collect relevant sites to populate your search engine with. I have decided to START with a kid safe search engine and built on it! Here is my search engine and a learning object that I have created to assist you to get going with your own one as well. I would be grateful if you can play with the learning object and let me know if there are any mistakes (grammar/spelling, broken links etc).

Come on try it out! Search for something!

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Create your own search engine

2 responses so far

Oct 04 2009

School 2.0 Bookmarks (weekly)

Published by maggiev under School 2.0, Weekly bookmarks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

2 responses so far