This is my list, help me decide. Each has its merits, the Edna space is shared by many Twitter colleagues, feeding me their comments.  However, there are a few hurdles to jump before I can actually view and edit my blog. Not a problem at home on a super fast connection but at school it is a right royal pain.

There is the Wetpaint space, blocked at school so any links or interesting material I want to refer to during the day are not accessible so that wipes that one from the list straight away.

Then there is Edublogs.  Now I have made a rod for myself because I have two spaces, I’m not even sure which one this entry will end up on so I need to make a decision.  I have my widget fascination catered for, many Twitter colleagues are also involved or using this space and it is viewable at school.  Suppose that answers my question then and makes it hypothetical!

Still feel free to comment on which is your preferred blog-o-sphere, perhaps this will assist @aleaness (an educator from PA, USA) and I to rise to the blogging challenge again and stick to it.

My other spaces

Wetpaint http://mrsbanjer.wetpaint.com/

Edna  http://me.edu.au/b/fbanjer/

Wordpress  http://mrsbanjer.edublogs.org/

Postscript: Hunting for my blogs using Google I found myself listed in this slideshow  http://bit.ly/2gGoUi as someone to link with when developing a PLN (personal learning network).  One of the slides has a Wordpress icon, perhaps I can link one of these spaces into that one! Another interest of mine, mashing up what I use to develop a more compact viewing arrangement.  As some recent participants in a presentation I gave recently worried, there is so much to look through, it is all becoming a monstrous juggle through numerous web pages. Perhaps that is the theme for my next entry!

These videos provide an insight into some of the research done by The New London Group, which includes educators and academics (including Cope & Kalantzis and Luke & Freebody) who examined literacy and how society is changing the modes of communication to include virtual and ubiquitous technologies (anywhere, anytime).

Teaching and learning is changing, slowly. We have to manage the balance as leaders, not pushing so hard as to cause conflict and resistance but enough to transfer a notion of agency, encouraging others to share the power of digital literacy and use of multi modal texts.

The children will learn to use all of this despite us. They are familiar with the latest gadgets and online trends and many have access to them at home. Bringing them into the classroom goes a step towards bridging the divide between education and entertainment and provides opportunity for the experience to those who do not have that access. These are the 21st Century learners you spoke of in your previous post. Every one is unique and some will not engage with these tools, but they should have the opportunity to explore and be exposed to what is possible.

http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/riesland.htm ”

This final assignment may provide some relevant material to include in my belief statement as there is emphasis placed on the impact of social discourse, how learners are influenced by the environment, norms and values of their peers and significant people (such as their teachers). This ning is an ongoing project that was developed in the first half of this course, it is a resource bank to support teachers understanding new literacies and provide a theoretical base. http://explorelit.ning.com/page/reading-material

http://learningischange.com/

I am in the third group of Ben Wilkoff’s descriptors, the teacher who is passionate and sees purpose in change.

I started my online learning journey almost three years ago when I was so frustrated with colleagues responses to my stories of ICT success.I signed up with USQ to do the MEd (Technology) course to arm myself with empirical evidence to support what I was becoming increasingly commited to and haven’t looked back since. I have networked globally, interstate and intra EQ. I have acquired skills, because that is imperative. How do you know what to share with the children and colleagues unless you have at least a basic working knowledge? The tools and online applications that are freely available offer WYSIWYG interfaces but there is still an initial learning curve for each one.

I want to fly with this, and I do in Second Life and other virtual worlds which present a unique environment that even our very young students are living and playing in out of school hours. I enjoy the power of developing web sites with Kompozer and sharing that as a tool of communication and collaboration – my year 3s are more open to the basic programming than the teachers! I communicate with astronauts and famous people via social network tools and look in on photos from movie sets and bands that were unavailable before the advent of Twitter and Twitpic. Since the internet became available to the general public the choice of freeware and open source applications I have witnessed develop has become phenomenal and I want to be in a position to share that. I believe that we should be sharing this in school now to skill the students in ethical as well as technical use.

They are there now, we need to catch up.

Bruce Dixon – In addition to his roles as Director of Ideas Lab and Fellow of Education Impact, Bruce Dixon is the founder and president of the Anywhere Anytime Learning Foundation. Bruce has close to 30 years experience working with schools and technology. He consults to schools, School Districts, Education Departments, Ministries of Education as well as technology companies such as Microsoft, HP-Compaq, Apple, Bertelsmann and Toshiba on 1:1 teaching and technology in education.

Adrian Greig works at the Learning Innovation Centre at the Sunshine Coast and is a mentor for those who provide PD, such as myself – an inspiring leader and innovative presenter.

http://mediasite.eq.edu.au/EQ/Viewer/Viewers/Viewer320TL.aspx?mode=Default&peid=aa75f044-c462-41f8-85d5-0849548e2f61&pid=7c9f08a8-eddd-4228-9163-7608d657e655&playerType=Port25
Bruce Dixon, keynote address The Compelling Case
Microsoft Innovative Schools Asia Pacific Forum 2009 – Forum Presentations

1 hour 6 mins.
Collaboration – across countries every single day and communicating
Better equip our learners to be better collaborators  across cultures, across countries.
Competitive and comparative nature of education around the world, globalisation.
Accountability to ensure optimum learning experiences.
Wider boundaries, virtual space / environment – quality and convenience of experience
Don’t simply repeat what been doing in the past.  Not going to solve problems of the world in the same ways. Leshard.

Have to be innovative and create unique solutions, have to create creative collaborators.
Makes assumption that widely spread, diverse collaborative networks. Challenged by access to chat, FB, MySp. Google banned. Interesting challenges.
Relevance – children can get to Google as soon as they leave school, adjusting to them. Access whatever they like, at school don’t let them this presents a challenge of relevance.
Talking about MIT sharing podcasts, powerpoint slideshows, discussions we are doing this already on Twitter, not allowed to use at school.
Intel says we are in the Collaborative Age.
Publishing, creating, constructing.
Web2.0 opportunities create, collaborate, construct and publish – audience anywhere.
Allowed to think very differently. Opened up medium audio, images, video. Young people who couldn’t express through text on a page have a medium, video and an audience beyond school.  Karl Fishch. “Shift Happens” The reach of a staffroom PD.  Slow in responding, opportunities presented.
People in room invited because creative thinkers, will start sharing (we already are.)
Gardner predicted tool for businesses. Most organisations use today.  Web2.0 doesn’t have an end point, more than blogs, wikis and podcasts.  Exciting.
What is possible?  Barrack Obama – largely able to raise funds by not going out to large organisations. He built on John Dean’s work previously and coopt with Facebook. Search “Explain”. Mixed technology with nature of political fundraising. Society voted in a democratic leader.

Mohammed Unis – professor in Bangladesh.  Recognised need for offering micro loans, what we’d see as very small amounts.  $25 and $50 at a time.  98% paid back. Helped them move out of state of dire poverty.
Micro philanthropy – couple of young people connecting anyone to lend money.  Kiva  – micro loans
Dan Buckley “What does this technology make possible?
How can we innovate using social technologies for process of assessment.
Content masters are textbook publishers.
Content of facts not what education is around.  Not just formal but also informal outside school.  Justin Caverton and Symour Papert  Challenge of this environment is to look at previous world and what can we do with it, our job to give children the skills to do that. Success in the future is doing well what you were not taught to do.  Our challenge is to equip students to do that.
Challenging traditional approaches about communication and literacy. Implications in every school, think creatively what this makes possible?
(About 26 minutes in – Shaun gone for a piss when everyone is talking.)

How is a blog assessable?  Response, genre, writing, exciting possibility.
Standardising assessment – how can we be accountable? – balance between what is taught in school and assessment results.  Teachers are trying to minutely manage assessment (e.g. Naplan)
Relieved not in US.  Barry McGore 1:1 in 1994 – National Curriculum, also leading project looking at 21st Century Assessment Funded by MS, Intel & Cisco. Pulling together best across the world. Real hope in this space.  Potential for rethinking what assessment might be.

Lessen the gap between real world and education institution.  Instead of banning everyday stuff, incorporate in learning process.  “Grow and Transfer”.  Gap is the big challenge, young people are continuosly connected. Have to readdress.  Biggest strength – always open to new ideas from other people, biggest weakness is not always done well.

Every teacher in profession seeks to do best for children in their care. Need to have confidence in what innovations they do with them.  Hopefully strategies will be presented for those challenges.
Confidence in those processes and look to improve and innovate in the future.

What will happen as a result of access to the technology?
Technology allows us to be pedagogically innovative.  Biggest barrier – failed to show broad number of teachers what is possible.  Simply increases capacity to innovate. We were innovative before technology. It can significantly increase our pedagogical capacity.

Allows us to go to other places we couldn’t go before. To date automating processes, haven’t been ambitious or bold enough.
How to address this – how should we be valuing these new pedagogies and ideas?
Give tangible examples – e.g. maths and achieving deeper understanding.

Unlocking personalisation.  Across learner diversity but also across systems and processes.  Learning mediums, styles. Have to think about cultural impact of all this.
Papert – goal is to define ways chln can use the medium that not able to do before. Complexity not able to achieve before.

Ubiquitous access, universal access.

$2bn for 9-12s. 1:1  OLPC Eeepc  Uruguay 1:1 PC  Years 1-6.  Portugal, PM young people not a lot of job opps. Knowledge economy.  Need knowledge workers.  Medium – own person computer.  Addressing needs of students today.  State of Maine – took initiative Year 7 & 8 laptop in attempt to improve their potential.

Giving ideas, thoughts, trends. Lot happening, lot of innovation going on.  Some just about technology.  Kevin Rudd $1.2bn.

Here are some ideas, aspects, to present a whole view, one tiny of aspect is provision of technology.  What is role of technology?  Pedagogically inert or non aligned.
Technology to transform is what we are seeking.  Michael Fullen makes “more powerful it becomes, the more indespensible good teachers are.”

Challenges: better leverage technology in school. Assessment, thinking of environment.

School – change in recent times.  In many countries saying schools not meeting needs.  Korea leading over US over 20 year period.  OECD stats.
Routine manual space. Need to rethink skills provided to young people.
No need to provide skills that can be automated and outsourced.
Synthesise, explain, versatile thinkers. Generalist/specialists past. Challenge for schools.
Reimagine what might be possible.

What level of change might take place over 4-5 year period?  Fundamental change or incremental improvement in school?  No right answer, take moment for reflection.
Responses: Need to re-educate parents and society as a whole.
15 years this has been discussed. Incremental change. Fundamental change in minority of schools.

3 lenses
Different world for children
Technology changes
Schools challenges there and nature of change

Innovation rethink, imagine changes
Have to think:
What is innovative?
A whole process dealt with fragmented, incoherent way. Queensland has purpose to go forward.
Cultural thing, have to say to ourselves “What is it about culture of school that allows us to move forward. Can’t just be one or two people.”
Student voice – have to be aware of measures of accountability.
Innovation is about improving. It is about increasing pedagogical capacity.
Looking at individual child.  How can we truly personalise learning. Styles and how technology
Lumiar school in Brazil – designed set of competencies Mosaic allowed to measure and assess competencies as a result of innovation in that school. Challenged a lot of trad boundaries.
Start to get something that is scaleable, something that is sustainable and scaleable.

Instead of thinking about assessment done by teachers, rethink how we assess, review concept of peer assessment, add more rigour, teacher in moderating or mediating role. Do through technology.
What are opportunities this makes possible? Careful, has to be thought through, Charles Sturdy dip at start as you innovate goes to peak, everything in place, have to rethink next phase when at the top of curve for transformation of schools. Ongoing. Have to reimagine what is possible.
Papert – imagine if we could develop ways children could use technology to do things that were not possible before. Possibility is in front of us.

Adrian Greig  50 mins.
Transformational learning – admin typically in early days, innovation or vision = technology. But it does not mean vision.  How do you know before you look at the learning.
Hamilton SS and Stanthorpe SS photos.
None designed to house technology.  Have to look at retro fitting.  Technology changes rapidly.

Devices can do both work and play.
Wii for therapy, work and play.

Halo Disc  500GB  450,000 photos!
Challenge for the technology – storage of the data.

Siftables
Sense and interact between each other.  Music, flow charts, people, coloured square, storyboard, maths, computer in a matchbox. In next 12 months.

Sixth Sense – TED talks.

RSS
http://johndwilson.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/gotoweb20-is-a-very-cool-directory-of-apps/

http://photosynth.net/

http://www.popfly.com/

Cloud computing, all information is online not on machines.  Software is not running locally.  Software is a service.  Storage.  Genuine collaboration on files.  Will hit education in next three years.

Haptic technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic  e.g. surgeon remote from operating room.

Microsoft – The Surface.  One of biggest services is based in Sydney.
Children can sit together, have the conversations and work collaboratively.

g-speak Wearing gloves, multiple table surfaces.  Mapping, different angles.  Multiple people.  Video editing.  http://oblong.com/

Remote sensing technologies in classrooms within 5 years. Full colour monitor displays.

Smart goggles – if you lose your keys.

Rosewood State School 1926 – could be the classroom of today, no change in some instances.

Transformational learning – technology does not = vision.

Committed Sardines The Blue Whale – takes 3 mins to do a 180 turn. The school of sardines.  Heavier but can follow each other.  Critical mass 15 – 20%, school will change and follow.

European Commission – critical learning how to learn for jobs of the future.

Technology visual example of change. What roles will we be taking?

A fellow Plurker, an alternative communication space which feeds into Twitter if you so choose, shared a link to the Oprah show when she interviewed Evan Williams and Ashton Kutcher, (and part 2) who beat CNN to 1 million followers.  I’m glad I watched both the YouTube links provided, up until that point I thought Ashton Kutcher was just a silly person with little to say but turns out he has a serious side too.  The most interesting part is in the second video but all worth a laugh.

Mention is also made of Digg.com which I have not accessed, for no reason except that I didn’t believe it had a purpose for me.  AK described it’s purpose – for us as viewers to generate the headlines out of news stories that we believe should top the bill.  So, my first view of that site had this as top story, funniest cat video I’ve seen in a long time!  As a global nation, we need a laugh obviously!

Using Control Panel, click “Add new announcement” (or whatever space you are adding),

Click on the black triangular brackets <> which will take you to the HTML source mode.  (To exit this mode simply click the same brackets again).

You need to enter the following html code, including the brackets:

<img src=”whatever url your pic is at”>

Sometimes it won’t display an image. I use a separate space in the same BlackBoard course where I ’store’ images so that the url for the image is local.

To embed a moving image is the same, here is an example:

http://www.gifanimations.com/GA/animation/MenuSelection/1/12

Finally, to embed a movie is a similar process but there is a lot more code to cut and paste. You just copy “Embed” code on YouTube page and paste into the HTML source code space.

Hope this helps.

When i first got my ipod touch I wanted to save files onto it and use it as portable memory, 8Gb is not insignificant, even I don’t have that many photos to fill it up!  Ran into trouble, it is not designed to function as a storage device.  Off to Twitter and hunting around various forums to discover an application called Discover.  This has allowed me to save Microsoft documents on the ipod, however, PowerPoint appears as a strip of slides not as a slideshow.

At the South Coast eLearning Expo I was talking with one of my PD co-presenters, Shane Roberts, about the equipment we carry around in our EQ backpacks.  They are stuffed to the gunwhales with USB sticks, leads, LAN cables, mobile phones, ipods, screwdrivers etc etc. Shane spoke about sharing TED Talks with his students via his ipod using AV leads.  $59, what a good idea, got myself some.  Took them to school the next day and plugged them in, et voila…. not on your nelly.  Nothing but blue screen and music.  I fiddled around with the plugs in different ports without success, and yes I did press “search source” this time!  (I didn’t the first time I plugged the wii into the data projector, our groundsman Brad worked that one out for me ROFL, he’s a legend.)  I’ve spent today unscrewing the brackets to our plasma tv so I could try here at home, no luck again same result.  Twitter colleagues @shanetechteach, @adambrice and @tmether were kind enough to offer suggestions but again to no avail.

Conclusion: it is pretty but very hard work. How can I share it with more of my students?

School isn’t going to buy any soon and I know the benefit of the children using it is severely hindered by the fact that I only have access to one ipod touch, my own. The QDETA wireless set up at school also means I cannot use it as a wireless device because it is my property.  Catch 22, the children miss out on features such as GPS with Google Maps for maths, sending emails to each other, Literacy, etc.

Animating

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBvS43W8EgU&feature=related

How to key out green screen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxcnEmpPV98&feature=related

How to clone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-iGK_n5h9U&feature=PlayList&p=70FE8D5FB5A8F108&index=0

Things to do with a green screen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb5ZhDW6L_A&feature=related

How to make titles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtUT1FJwrkk&feature=related