The new thumbtribe generation has embraced an innovative way to slay their age old enemy- maths, using their cellphones and the much debated and severely fouled, Mxit!

Mxit has been getting a lot of bad press ever since it became the craze of the teen (and pre-teen) generation with parents and teachers alike, calling for Mxit to be regulated. In the midst of “slut-lists‘ and paedophile phobic verbal attacks on the popular cellular chat-client, Dr Maths is emerging as a ray of hope!

There is no doubt that Mxit is incredibly popular. This free service has grown by word of mouth to over 2000 learners country wide! So Laurie’s Butgereit of the Meraka Institute’s brainwave to use our learner’s favourite tool for teaching and learning, was indeed not only a stroke of genius, but an incredibly brave move in the face of adversity. I, for one, was initially sceptical about whether the learners will allow us to use their favourite tools for something like (…uhmmm) learning maths, but the popularity of this maths helpdesk speaks for itself.

To test the service and to catch up with the latest Mxit-maths “craze” I dialled in on this here lazy Sunday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to found the friendly maths tutors on hand, ever so professional, helpful and oh so knowledgeable. I have it on authority that they are well trained not to just provide answers, but to guide the learners through the meaning making process. The fact that there is also a delay between responses also makes it possible for learners to “give knowledge a try” and most of the time, they get to the answers themselves with just a little nudge from the tutors. The tutors can assist with maths and maths literacy problems and even help out with a bit of science hassles along the way as well. Truely remarkable!

So how does it all work?

First off, you need to install Mxit on your cellphone and/or computer. For more instructions on how to do this….

• Give your cellphone to a member of the thumbtribe (the closest teenager around you) and tell them to set you up (Quickest and easiest method)
• Or you can follow the instructions from the Mxit website
• Add Dr maths as one of your contacts 27799923960 thru 27799923969
• When they come online, you will hear a little sound and there will be a green dot next to their name
• Then go ahead and ask away!
• The Dr Maths team is online after school hours i.e. Mondays to Thursdays 2pm-10pm and Sundays between 11am and 8pm. They are even considering extending the service to Saturdays as well. How amazing!

They also have introduced a maths game which can be played when the team is not online when there are no tutors on. The learners can then compete in different categories, like addition, subtraction, factorials and others, to see who can get then highest score. The champion and the previous champion are notified to defend their title. Positive peer pressure at work!

So bravo to Laurie and her Dr Maths on Mxit team! Let us learn from their enthusiasm for creating authentic learning environments using the oh so dreaded Mxit on cellphones!

A few more articles regarding DR Maths on Mxit:

• Maths is cool when you MXit - South Africa - The Good News
• Using MXit to learn
• Learning and Support using MXit
• MATH ON MXIT: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE (Laurie’s Amesa Paper on her brainchild- a must read!!!)

I am busycreating learning objects for my subject advisor training and one of the tools that we will be playing with is Bubbl.us. I chose it as it is really easy to use and you actually do not even need to register in order to create your mindmap!

The context that we will be mind-mapping is the National Curriculum statements (NCS) so that we can also check if we all have the same understanding of how this official structure “fit together”. Please test drive it for me and tell me if there is anything about the “how to” of bubbl.us that is unclear or cumbersome!!

I have been playing with a few new tools. “Wordl is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.  Here is a Wordle cloud that I have made from my del.icio.us tags:

Another tag cloud generator is Tagcrowd, where you can also choose the colours scheme for your cloud presentation:

And last but not least, Tagcloud creator is tagcloud-generator, where you can also choose which tags to keep and which to loose: http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/index.html

Of the three, I thought that Worldle generated the most effective, visualy stimulating cloud! Which brings me to the question, why would we want to create tag clouds? The answer for me lies in more than just visual appeal. Pasting a piece of text into any one of these tag cloud generators provides us with a quick visual summary of the important (most used, most of the time) keywords and concepts contained in the text. It gives us a quick overview of what has been highlighted within the text and it can sometimes be quite a suprising way to see if the idea that you wanted to get accross where the one that are being visualised.  A very ahndy tool indeed!

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!

A mindmapping tool is a great way to quickly and easily brainstorm an idea or project. It is also a good tool to use for teaching and learning.

One of the tools that we had lots so fun with has been bubbl.us. It has a funky bubbly look and it is easy to add mind-bubbles, change colours, drag bubbles to where you want and link them up to show relationships. But in the back of my mind I have always felt that I would like to have a more professional looking tool and one where I can have sub-points in my mind-web.

So I decided to try Mindmeister. It defintely has a far more professional look and you can make 6 mindmaps for free.  For the rest is does all the normal things. You double click to create a subnode, drag and drop ideas on the parent node and it is quite easy to figure out how to use it. You also have the added advantage of using Skype straight from your mindmap, which is a great perk as far as collaboration is concerned

The one disadvantage, which is quite a big issue for me, is the fact that you cannot link up nodes. My mindmaps are always interlinked and I feel hierachal mindmapping does not suit my learning style at all. I do not think in a linear way at all and linking up thoughts to other ideas help me to clarify how I would like to structure my thought process. Now Mindmeister does not allow, as far as I can see, for this.

So, it looks more professional, have really fantastic features like notes, the ability to add tags and urls to your mindmap, but comes short on the inter-linkability issue. As this is an important one for me, I will have to think about if I will use it…

See Demo girl’s video tutorial on how to use Mindmeister

• For a quick excellent screencast of how to use mindmeister (from demogirl) click here

Voicethreads is a nifty little platform that is being used more and more where ever I participate in online seminars and conferences. This means that it definitely is a tool to explore for the classroom as well. It is basically an image based slideshow, but the real magic lies in that you can post unlimited voice inserts (comments) with each picture. Not only that, everybody else can as well! And if they do not have a microphone to leave a message, they can even leave a typed message.

The way that it has been used in seminars is mostly as an intro for everybody….as a place where we can say halo and get to know one another. But I feel that there will be a myriad of ways for us to use the platform. From story telling in the English class, to students “presenting their work/project/asssigments” with explanations and input from everybody working in their group. Here is an example:

To learn how to put a voicethread in edublogs, this video is most helpful!

Here is an excelent exloration of voicethreads

We will be using Edublogger to create our blog. These instructions will be good for any wordpress powered blog as well. You may also download the powerpoint, which will give you the animations in a more step by step way. Just pause the slideshow to follow the instructions…

Creating a blog (1):  You will learn how to..

• Register with Edublogger, activate your blog and how to change your password.

[slideshare id=163606&doc=setting-up-a-blog-edublogger-1194891617968098-5&w=425]
Download Slideshow

Creating a blog (2):  You will learn how to…

• Change the theme (”Look & Feel”) of your blog
• Set up general settings (your blog title and tagline, timesettings, which page your blog should open on, comment notifications)
• Do your first post
  • Post settings
  • Inserting a picture

[slideshare id=183077&doc=setting-up-a-blog-part-2-1196203979355978-2&w=425]
Download Powerpoint

Creating a blog (3):  You will learn how to…

• create a banner (header) for your new blog!

| View | Upload your own

Download slideshow

This site caught my interest as I was helping one of my workshop attendees to create her blog for her artworks. I wanted to find a good photo slideshow creator to showcase her pastels.

Site: www.slideroll.com
Registration: Very effortless
Cost: Free and Pro (Of cause I am the freebie queen!)

What can you do:
Create slideshows using pictures from your computer/Facebook/Flickr or any Url for that matter. Add music to your sideshow and embed/share it.

Creating your slideshow:

I found it to be very intuitive and I could choose music to go with my slideshow (I used beth’s bird pictures from Flickr). Their music clip was a bit short for my slideshow and it automatically repeated.

See: http://slideroll.com/?s=jsunqbb6

The biggest problem was, that for the life of me, I could not get it to embed into either Wordpress (where we created her blog) or Ning. I have not tried Blogger or Facebook yet.

So I downloaded the video creator that can be found on the Slideroll site and in now time at all, I converted the slideshare to video!! I could also choose new music off my computer to accompany the slideshow. Very cool indeed. I then saved the video onto my harddrive.

Now this opens up lots of possibilities for me…

• I can now upload it to YouTube/Facebook/where-ever
• I can cut it to a DVD to give to Beth as a present
• I don’t have to be online to watch the video

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!