Murrumbeena Primary School worked on the Magic Garden Project and Level 6 students produced Digital Artwork as a part of the program. Check out their Magic Garden Blog to view more art and animations.

I created this symbolic shield at Scion crest generator after blog-surfing and stumbling onto Tom Woodward and Jim Coe’s site, Bionic teaching. Last year, the year 9’s drew their own symbolic crests using symbols from books and the internet. You could try to create your own at Scion - although you should be over 18 to download the images (I’m not sure why yet? - the site is owned by Toyota, and may have unsavoury undertones?) My shield represents my passion for sustainability - biodiversity, energy, water and waste. You could even use the image as your avatar.

I have discovered a vibrant, safe online learning environment for school children called Superclubsplus. This supervised utility is huge in the UK and Europe and is now gaining recognition in Australia. Currently it is free for schools to sign up their students for two years. The aim of Superclubsplus is “to enable children to communicate safely, work together creatively, learn from each other, have a voice…and a purposeful audience..” It allows students to create web pages, articles, join clubs, participate in forums, discuss current issues, create projects for school, earn rewards an the list goes on. This is all done in an environment that is consistently mediated by highly trained and dedicated staff. It is well worth while visiting Superclubsplus and taking the tour to see how it all works. Please check it out, comment and let us know what you think, or if your school is already registered tell us how it’s going.

SIGN UP FOR THE CONFERENCE NOW!

The Knowledge Bank online conference this year is focused on Web 2.0 in education: what it is, how it’s being used today and its potential to radically change education.

Topic: Learning in a changing world - Web 2.0 and beyond
When: Six sessions held over July 22 and 23 2008
Where:  Online in Elluminate
Sign Up:  The conference is free but you need to Sign Up.

Highlights
Web 2.0 is not new - many of us have used social networking sites like YouTube, TeacherTube and FaceBook. We know about Wikipedia, Skype and podcasting. We read, even write, and comment on blogs. But what might happen to education as Web 2.0 becomes mainstream?

• Introducing Web 2.0. Who are you? Where have I met you before?
• How can reading and writing a blog change your way of learning?
• How does a direct connection with an expert shift your relationship to knowledge?
• Who are the content experts?
• What skills should we be teaching to young people, and what can we learn from them?

FULL PROGRAM DETAILS WILL BE AVAILABLE SHORTLY.

This two-day conference includes six sessions and a great line-up of speakers to talk about theory and practice.  We challenge you to actively contribute to this debate - read, ask questions, comment on the conference blog and add to our own body of knowledge on the issue.

“I believe that the Web 2.0 will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. We cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens.”
Keynote speaker Steve Hargadon in Web 2.0 is the future of the education.

The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. There may be some location and activity shots relevant to your work. For example, there are some interesting land clearing shots, histroical buildings, farming and agricultural images. Also with all these images there is a Creative Commons licence. This license means that you can republish this material for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give attribution back to the Powerhouse Museum as the creator and that you do not modify the work in any way.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/2469701212/>
This is a great resource and easily accessible for students and teachers.

 At the end of term 2, we experienced an amazing session. It was Friday 13th, in the school library with a combined year 9/10 info class and the grade 3/4s (as  it was too wet to play sport outside). Our principal had just left on a plane for the US, but we beat her there as we had an appointment at 10 am with a school from New England in the USA, at 8pm Thursday 12th.

Skype allowed us to videoconference with exceptional clarity. The audio did not falter on our end and the video was quite clear and had few time delays. A web cam and desktop mic were our means of communication. After 8 weeks or so of connections via shared blog posts and live blogging, our finale was this videoconference of ’show and tell’. A live bird, a New Guinea eclectus parrot, and three baby birds started the show off, followed by vegemite, a meat pie with sauce, a footy, Essendon footy jumper, a netball, webkinz, toy koala, banksia flowers etc. Collaborationnation showed us their dunkin’donuts/drink, baseball cap, basketball top, district flag, Disneyworld souveneir. They explained the origins of their national anthem and sang it to us with gusto. The girls demonstrated cheer leading and jazz ballet steps and chanted mugzy to taste test vegemite from a teaspoon to prove it was a food. We responded with a demonstration of netball and the singing of our national anthem. The responses from students has been resoundingly positive  and they wish to continue on with this style of learning and both countries’ students have begged their teachers for more. However, the US students finish their school year next week and we change semesters. It is certainly to be hoped that we can continue to collaborate next semester with a new group. Read these student posts to see what students feel about our current schooling and the online collaboration in comparison:- Flurogreen, Tawney, Leecie, Lauren, Mugzy The fabulous part about all this collaboration, is that it triggers further research from the initiative of students. Paul Bogush has forwarded on this finding on our infamous vegemite from his students after yesterday’s videoconference. We had promised to send them a tube of vegemite, but now we will have to abstain. However, I have been since informed it was a hoax!!!!

For those unfamiliar with the term, a learning style is a way in which an individual approaches learning. Many people understand material much better when it is presented in one format, for example a lab experiment, than when it is presented in another, like an audio presentation. Determining how you best learn and using materials that cater to this style can be a great way to make school and the entire process of acquiring new information easier and much more intuitive. Here are some great tools that you can use to cater to your individual learning style, no matter what that is.

Read this article 

Second Life is a virtual world. You download the software to your lap top and then you can enter this world. When you do, your avatar represents you. An avatar is a digital representation of yourself. When you select this avatar you have to give it a name. I named my avatar Mazarine Rhode. I have just spent an hour or so changing Mazarine’s look from this:

to this:

Of course she looks nothing like me (I have blonde hair and wear red glasses!) but that’s part of the fun of it. You can change all sorts of details of your avatar - the size and shape of any body part, how far or narrow set the eyes are, skin colour, freckles, height, weight etc. I must prefer Mazarine’s new look! I hadn’t spent much time playing around with appearance until now. Now I’m ready to party!

A few weeks ago I went into Second Life with a few other teachers from the OZ/NZ Educators network. It was a session for newbies like me. We spent the time on the island of Jokaydia. I took a quick video so you can see a very little bit of what Second Life looks like - in an art gallery! I recorded this with SMART Recorder and the quality isn’t great, but it will give you a bit of an idea if you are interested!

I never thought I’d be really interested in this sort of thing. I’m not into computer games at all, and so I didn’t think I’d like it. But, it’s great fun, and there is heaps of potential for education and business! People are making real money in Second Life doing all sorts of things. Lots of conferences on all themes are held in Second Life. Just search ’second life conferences’ in Google and there will be a whole bunch listed.

I am hoping to spend some more time in SL and start thinking about using virtual worlds for language learning. I’m a member of the Second Classroom Ning, a social network for educators interested in students using virtual worlds. I’ll keep you updated…

Technorati Tags: secondlife,virtualworlds,avatar,jokaydia

What a difference a few months of working with the web 2.0 tools can make to students and teachers alike. Prior to being introduced to these amazing tools of trade by our two dynamos Anne and Jess, project presentations were somewhat tedious to say the least.

At the start of the term, when I proposed the idea of a “project” and brainstormed methods of presenting them, the preferred option for students were posters or books! I was horrified.
That’s when I made the decision to hop onto the blogging wave which was swamping our school. The students all had their own blogs, and they had in place some of the tools that became pivotal to our progress. Once my home internet was reconnected and I could access the technology from home again, it was all go, go, go.

The students helped design our presentation rubric, where we explicitly pin pointed the things that made a presentation a “good one”. Then we brainstormed a number of ways in which we could use these tools of technology, to help us enhance our projects. The results have been amazing.
The students have used:
• Powerpoint – and then slideshare to embed their presentations in their own blogs
• Smartboards and wireless mouse (does anybody else have their tongue out the side of their mouths, or feel like they have had a stroke while using this? )
• Photostory
• Podcasts
• Video interviews and role play
• Voicethread interviews
• Quizzes using “mystudiyo”
• Voting – using “polldaddy “ and “zoho”
• And of course, the faithful old wordfind and crossword puzzles
Below is a quiz created by one of our students, who did a brilliant presentation on Albert Einstein. Tzigane created this quiz using polldaddy and it was a huge success. It was the finale of her presentation. She chose the same number of children as she had questions and as each child got the answer correct, she issued them with a lollypop.