Rich’s OET Blog

Here is my assignment 2… finally!

http://oetassignment2.blogspot.com/

/rich

Here is a link to my plan for assignment 2 – happy reading!

Tim mentioned the We Feel Fine project on his blog which reminded me of the TED talk which first let me in on it.

Thanks Tim!

Thanks Ted for the extension on the description of assignment 2! 

I have now added a bunch of online resources that I use in my teaching that I think are pretty cool.  They are listed at the top of this page, or under the “Pages” section on the right of this blog, or just click here!

Would have loved to include Thinkature as one of them, but I have real problems accessing the workspaces from school… which is a shame, because when I do get in it seems great – a lot more flexible than a basic mind-mapping function like bubbl.us (which I have listed).  It could be a network issue at school, but either way it is not something that I have been able to test out with students.

And I realised on Wednesday that the change to daylight savings time on the east coast of Australia is going to mean that our Wednesday chats are going to clash with one of my lessons, until Sweden moves off daylight savings to (horrible) winter time – which I think is at the end of October sometime.  So I might not be around for the next couple unfortunately.

Just had another look at Andrew’s Camstudio tutorial and appreciated again how easy it was to follow, but more so the inspiration it gives to the benefits of learning objects that the learner has control over when and how often it is used/viewed.  One of the great benefits of the digital age is the ease in saving and reusing good tasks that we design for students.  For those of you that were in elluminate on Wednesday when I did my little run through of Course Manager (an inhouse scheduling program) and Sharepoint (Microsoft) you hopefully understood the benefits that these 2 products provide. 

1. Course Manager: an easy way to save your couse/subject planning in digital form, and for the students to access a web view version so they can view homework, what was covered in class, and provide links to websites and documents uploaded to sharepoint.
2. Sharepoint is a Microsoft product designed for companies to facilitate sharing of information – it was not designed for use in schools, and I notice that (every day!).  But it does allow uploading of files that are then easy to link to and so can be easy for students to access/download.

With these 2 programs it has been possible for me to feel like we have created a few courses that we have been able to refine each year and that we now have a very solid package to teach each semester/year.  It feels like I need to spend much less time reinventing the wheel and can focus on refining everything and improving.

One of the interesting (I think) observations to make is that Course Manager was developed in response to a wish for a tool to meet specific requirements and is therefore amazingly welcomed and loved by all the teachers at our school.  Sharepoint was designed for to be a something for everyone, and not really everyone, more designed for the corporate world it has not been so universally welcomed – even by the more tech happy and savvy teachers.  There’s a lesson there for all of us!

Here is a link to my tutorial on podcasting.

I would greatly appreciate any comments on this blog, thanks!

Cheers!

Richard.

Hmmm… trying to think a project for the second assignment – spent some of Sunday sitting in Paolo’s café trying to form my idea.  The caffeine helped!  I have previously had the idea of creating a web based course for one of my social science courses here in Sweden… I had little sketches of what I wanted but it was going to take a fair bit of time, flash, html, possibly learning xml and java, to be able to do what I “saw” in my mind.  Over the weekend I think I’ve come around to trying to “recreate” one of my other courses in an online environment using free (and easy to use) online tools (some of them “Web 2.0″).  There is so much out there that we as teachers can use that don’t require learning a whole lot of code, programming or installing software.

The course is “Samhällskunskap C” (Civics C) is the official translation.  The Swedish system relies very much on teachers designing their own courses within a set of “Goals”.  Grading is also done by the teacher according to a set of “Criteria”.  The Civics A course is compulsory for all students of and “program” at senior secondary college.  A “program” varies from the academic Natural Science to the vocational Childcare, there are 16 (I think) national programs for schools and students to choose between.  The Civics B and C courses are then extensions on the A course, although B is not a prerequisite for C.  Unforturnately the Goals and Grading Criteria for Civics C are not translated into English, but the Civics B course is.  If this seems quite open and vague to you the Civics C course is even more so… in effect I can do what I want!

Our school has chosen to base the Civics C course around participation in a Model United Nations (which I managed to get some municipal funding for and as a result need to maintain a blog so that the local taxpayers know where there money is going!).  The MUN is in Nairobi and as a result the Civics C course is focused on Africa, particluarly on development issues; as well as their preparations for participation in the MUN.  This year I have 12 taking the course, all of whom have chosen to take it (and all vetted by me!).  As an advanced course I put much of the learning back on them.  There is homework preparation, often different for different students, and then we have round table discussions during the lessons.  There is a large degree of responsibility that they are given and last year (the first) the students responded very well.

So, finally, onto my idea for the project – I would like to see if it is possible to recreate this course in an online form, using freely available tools, whilst maintaining the interactive nature of the course.  Some of the tools I thought of using are:

VoiceThread

Slideshare

As well as some simple form of podcasting for any guests that may visit (I had some amazing ones last year that I have on film that I may try to use too).

I suppose I wrote this as much for myself to have my ideas on paper screen, but feel free to comment, of course.

(In response to this entry on the OET group blog)

Ok, I’ll take the bait! I do not think that a wiki is a good place for reflections. I feel that the shared authorship and ability to edit entries does not lend itself to the type of personal comments and discussion that would usually be understood to be part of “reflections”. I think that wikis work very well for a body of accumulated knowledge but not for ongoing discussion. I would prefer to see this type of discussion either on a discussion board using threads (as in a LMS) or on a blog/blogs of some form. For this course my personal preference would be some mix of the group and personal edublogs. Maybe the group blog for discussion general topics and the personal once for individual/personal reflections?. Adding an RSS feed can aid in keeping abrest of new posts, as there is on the group edublog for all our personal edublogs. As for creating an online presence I think blogs are much more conducive to that.

As I mentioned in the elluminate chat this week I would be happy to produce a tutorial on how to put together a podcast.  It will be a recording of a lesson/lecture on democracy that I will be giving in a week and a half.  It is the first time I will record one of my lessons so I would like to give it a try, and then I can share it all with you!  I can explain more when I put it together.

Guess it will be done in about 3-4 weeks.

Some of you might have already seen this… I often use as pre-work for a discussion on why SOSE and Media studies are important, why we need to be able to be able to ask the question “why” and develop abilities of critical thinking.  Enjoy!

Hi!

As a late starter to this course I’ve a bit to catch up on, but I’m getting there slowly.  Added a bit to my ‘About’ page if you’re interested.  Am madly trying to get this looking respectable before our chat in 35… 34… minutes.

My own blogging experience is meagre… I like the idea of keeping it updated when I started 18 months ago, but it has become sporadic.  I started it as an alternative to the group emails I used to send out every 6 months or so to keep friends updated – I live in Sweden so I miss the daily/weekly contact with friends in Melbourne.  The link is over on the right hand side of this blog.

I do think it is a medium that can be very useful in some situations, and I will be starting up one at work with a project I’m involved in.  We have received funding from the local municipality (approx AUD 20,000!) and they want us to publicise how their money is being spent, which does seem like a very reasonable request!  When that gets going I’ll add a link for anyone that is interested.  The plan at the moment is to give all the students involved in the project login details so that it is a group blog.

As for wikis… I tried out using one in one of my social studies units last year, worked ok and I’ll probably try it again this year but with better instructions and structure from the start!  Can write more about that later if anyone is interested.

That’s enough for now…