School 2.0 in SA

It is that time of the year again and I am sure nails are being bitten, hair are standing on end (in the case of parents and teachers), candles are being burnt on both ends and nerve endings are fragile.

But don’t worry- focus and fly!!!!

Here is the exam timetable so that we can keep track of who is having nervous breakdowns!!!

2009 NCS Exam Timetable

CONCLUSION OF THE 2009 NSC EXAMINATION: 4 DECEMBER 2009

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:

• www.sasolbursaries.com
• www.absa.co.za
• www.hcifoundation.co.za
• www.funzalushaka.doe.gov.za (for teacher training)

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)

Goodbye Jeanne

I only heard this morning that one of the valuable members of my personal learning network has passed away. Jeanne was an inspiration to me and I first got to know her as part of the group of conference hosts for the e/merge conference. She was always cheerful and lived her life in such a positive way that I was quite taken aback when I found out in the beginning of this year, that she has been struggling with a debilitating disease, an antibiotic resistant strain of bone infection, since 2001.
One of the great learning tools that she was co-responsible for creating is “Facilitating Online” an online open source course manual , which can be used and downloaded from here: http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2009/05/22/facilitating-online-curriculum/ She does indeed leave behind a learning legacy which will be of great value to us all!

She joined my online blogging workshop and started a blog called Choosing an Enabled Life to share with us her journey of recovery. She also started a fundraising and advocacy blog, http://pagetherapytosouthafrica.blogspot.com/ to raise awareness and funds for her recovery and to lobby the government to bring Phage Therapy to South Africa. She created a Facebook group to assist her in her efforts. I was so proud of her embracing all the social media tools to help her fight the good fight and make sure that she does not have to go through all this alone! It is ironic that I am starting another blogging and twitter course this week and will be dedicating it to her.
But sitting here now reading through her blog posts I realised that I could have done so much more. I bookmarked her posts to get back to later and I never did. I feel like social media did in fact fail her here. This is  therefore a reminder to value my learning network more and to make sure that I make those blog comments, and pass on those positive vibes and messages of advocacy while I can.
I am asking everybody to celebrate her life by making a contribution towards her cause and to help her family cope with the heavy burden of her hospitalisation costs.
The trust fund for making a contribution is:
TRUST FUND: LOUW DU PLESSIS (lawyers managing the fund)
Payment reference: J SMUTS
Branch: SOMERSET WEST
Bank: FIRST NATIONAL BANK
Account number:53680945972
Branch code: 200-512
NB: Your reference: Please add your name, telephone number or email address. If its an overseas payment please add Swift Code F I R N Z A J J
Dear Jeanne, thank you for the learning moments we have shared and for touching my life in such a positive way!

I received a tweet from one of my twitter contacts (loisath) which told me that I have been tagged in her “7 things about me” meme. So the first thing I did was to go and see what it is all about by reading her blogpost about the topic. Basically you have to write a blogpost describing 7 things about yourself that people do not need to know about you. You then tag 7 others to do the same and then let them know. This results in everybody basically spreading the idea virally and it gets promulgated almost in the same way as a chain e-mail letter.

I then looked up what a MEME is (not the sound that sheep make apparently) and found a very good blogpost explaining it in a friendly non-scientific way from Gary LaPointe. According to him it is “lists of questions that you saw somewhere else and you decided to answer the questions. Then someone else sees them and does them and so on and so on”.  In essence it is:

• An idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve.
• A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation.
• A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); “memes are the cultural counterpart of genes”.

So what is the point?

So let’s get back to the the question that formed the basis of this meme: “7 things about yourself that people do not need to know about you”. Why would anybody need to know this about me? Isn’t it an invasion of privacy and poses a security risk? Will it be a “cultural unit” as posed in the definitions stated above? Hardly. In a way it does resemble the sheep-like action of sheep following one another in a thoughtless manner. So what would encourage me to immitate this meme and behave like a sheep?

Firstly, I have always liked sheep- they are wooly and cuddly and cute. Secondly, my rule of thumb is to do something if it at all encourage learning and collaboration. So the question for me is did I learn something? The answer of cause is, yes. I learnt a new word (meme) and what it means in different scenarios and I learned about the person that asked me to partake in the meme. From her answer, I at first thought that she was local (from South Africa- especially the bit about her aiding and abetting the theft of a microwave) which made me very excited to encounter another blogging local teacher! But, alas she was not, which made me realise that we indeed live in a global village and have so much in common (especially the cannot-spell-admisssion)! So from a collaborative point of view, she has strengthened her networking with me with her invitation ( I will now keep an eye out for her as I feel I know here just that little bit better). Thirdly by asking people to extend this meme, you can get some exposure for your blog (good old marketing tactic)!

When I started thinking about 7 things that people will not know about me….I realised that I am definitely not shy (as opposed to private), leaving very little that people do not know about me. So here goes:

The Rules

Each player starts with seven random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. You need to choose seven people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged and to read your blog!

7 things that you did not know about me… (definitely harder than it looks)

1. I get on with bees (found this out recently as the bees seems to be refusing to leave my washing room ceiling and it does not really bother me anymore)
2. I cannot seem to get plants to grow (so that is why I try to get communities to grow instead)- jip, no green fingers.
3. I hate cooked spinach (much to green), but can eat it in a salad.
4. I love reading forensic crime stories even from before CSI etc, made it fashionable
5. I love maths (everybody knows that) but struggle with doing calculations in my head and goes blank if older people ask me to calculate 1+1 (comes from when my primary school teacher hit me with a stick everytime she asked me a maths question- reminder to self-must go for therapy….;-) This resulted in me wanting to become a maths teacher as a way of learning to cope and making sure that others do not have to live with the same fear.
6. I cannot bake. Cook yes, bake no.
7. I am scared of heights (comes from when I did a bungi jump way back….another sheep-like activity that I regret I ever partook in…)

So how do you choose 7 people? Okay, as I have been trying to get local teachers to blog, I think it will be useful to give everybody a common topic to get us started for the year. Also this can be a good way of extending your network to include people who do not know you.

So here is my tagees, with reasons why I chose them:

• Tateach (will be nice to get to know someone in Tasmania better!)
• Ronan7 (a local teacher and fellow web 2.0 enthusiast
• Melaniedebruyn (another local teacher and fellow web 2.0 enthusiast
• carbru (part of my blogging learning circle and a sweetie pie)
• moondancer (My sister and an avid blogger- would like to see if there is something I do not know about her…
• Ariellah (I hope she is not angry with me any more….)
• janenicholls (a random click from my tweeple network)

(I just love this new meme word and am definitely going to pronounce it mêêêê- mêêêêê (like the sound a sheep makes)

I think all teachers can relate to this dramatic presentation! I have decided to use it as a ice-breaker for my next teachers’ training workshop. There are quite a few “teaching styles” that can be explored as “how to-not to do it”….

What I enjoy most about this presentation is the passion- which is the most important thing that maketh a teacher!

I am visual learner and quite enjoyed the creation of a visual image of my blog, which I found at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph and after investigating this interesting site (http://www.learning-styles-online.com) I have decided that I do not nearly enough use “learning styles” as a lens for material development and teaching!

I investigated this after reading this class blog post. (Sometimes I wish that I can remember to record the learning pathways I am taken on…..)

Note to self: Make a list of visual learning aids for teachers to use…..

• Flickr (a place to upload and share images that can then be embedded using all the lovely slideshows and widgets)
• Voicethreads (Making conversations/discussions meaningful with images and sound)
• …..feel free to add you own visual tools in the comments

I am still at the conference in PE and had one of those WOW moments this morning at one of the presentations. It was also one of those really humbling experiences.

Yesterday one of the teachers from rural KZN came to my collegue, and told her that she was doing a presentation on “How I teach”. Her words were “How do I get this into the computer“. She also wanted to have a PowerPoint presentation to accompany her paper, but has never ever even touched a computer.

So last night my colleague sat up till midnight making a PowerPoint for her. I was quite dubious that it would work as we did not have time to teach her how to use the equipment and the programme, even if we could get it “into the computer“. I was tasked to assist her with the presentation. Quite frankly I hoped that she would look at it and decide not to use the slides as I had only 10 minutes to explain it and go through it with her. But she was adament. She had to have her things “Up there“. I asked her if she wanted me to stay with her in the front and help her and she assured me that she was okay. I hovered around the front row ready to “save the day”.

The room was packed with about 100 delegates. She started off by reading her presentation from her paper and completely forgot about the laptop presentation. Then she remembered and frantically pressed too many buttons, which happened to catch the presentation up to where she was. Then  she relaxed and swapped over to the PowerPoint’s pace. It was poetry in motion. It calmed her down and she followed and talked to the slides. Like the professional she was!

Then came question time. One of the delegates asked her to go back to one of her slides as he wanted to ask her something about it. My heart froze. I almost jumped accross the desk to help her, but I froze in my seat as she calmly hit the back button till she got to the correct slide.

Not only did she gave a great presentation, she used the technology like a pro. Considering that it was the very first time that she has ever touched a computer, I suddenly was filled with hope for the future. I watched as new bounderies were crossed and I now know that I am not wrong when I say that the digital devide can be crossed- we just have to allow people to be brave!

Now here is a wake up call for us! We think we are so progressive (web 2.0 tools and all) but essentially we are still doing what was done WAY BACK WHEN…..

I got this video from Gary Stager’s blog “Willfully Ignoring the Lessons of the Past” where he gives a good insite into “change education”

MMMMmmm another ed-blogger to follow…

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….