We can work IT out

This post was written for a PD Session

“Students in Years 5-7 should each have a laptop for use at school.”

What Do You Think?

Do you agree or disagree?

Give some reasons to back this up.

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This post was written for a PD Session

What Comes Next?

Below are 5 different number patterns.

Choose one of them and write a comment that includes:

• Your name (first name only)
• the pattern you choose
• the next three numbers in the pattern

(1) 1, 3, 8, 18, 38, …, …, …,

(2) 301, 289, 277, …, …, …,

(3) 1, 4, 9, 61, 52, …, …, …,

(4) 1, 8, 27, 64, …, …, …,

(5) 1020, 500, 240, …, …, …,

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This post was written for a PD Session

The Case of The ______________________

In the picture below, Detective Sheerluck is in a delicate situation.

Write a story where the picture is the start of chapter 4 – what will happen next?

blank text – intentional

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This post was written for a PD Session

A verb is an action word and there is quite a lot of action in the photo above.

Can you think of at least 6 verbs to describe the action in the football photo?

Click on ‘comment’ and type them in – remember to put your name.

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Image: source

This post was written for a PD Session

Here are a collection of blogs that you might find interesting. Spend 30 minutes browsing through some of them.

Note that most blog posts aren’t too long – educational bloggers understand that teachers are time poor but do want to do professional reading.

If you find one you like, add a comment below, name the blog and say what you like about it.

Teacher / Subject Blogs

Maths With Mr B link ………. Langwitches link ……….Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day link

Hey Jude link ……….Teacher Lab (Science) link ……….Alison Hall’s Blog (Music) link

Tom Barrett link ……….The Whiteboard Blog link ……….Teaching Challenges link

Professional Blogs

Stories From School link ……….Joanne Jacobs link ……….Classroom 2.0 link

GoogleDocs Blog link ……….The Principal’s Page link ……….The Tempered Radical link

Classroom Blogs

Miller’s English 10 Classroom Blog link ……….Technology In Our Classroom link

Mrs Hossack’s First Graders link ……….Mrs Trefz’s Fifth Grade Blog link ……….The Tillis Tribune link

Look What’s Happening in Room 102 link ……….Piazza Mannino, 23 link

2km Leopold Primary School link ……….Grade 2 link ……….Room 5 At Work link ……….6KF link

Long List of Primary Blogs link ……….English Teaching blogs list link ……….Miss T’s Talented Texans link

Student Blogs

Jamie’s Blog link

Emily’s Blog link

Alexei’s Blog link

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Last week via Twitter rmbyrne invited people to be a guest blogger on his blog “Free Technology For Teachers“.

Being the reckless type, I emailed Richard, gave a link to my blog and said that I’d love to be a guest blogger.

Why would I do that?

Well, I admit it, I wanted the exposure that his blog could provide. But, I also wanted a challenge.

Richard replied that I could do a post on Wednesday.

Now, late wednesday evening in Adelaide is early morning wednesday in the USA. Wednesday arrives and at about 8pm I go for my regular run through the parkland around the city. It’s hot, so I waited til dusk to go and the whole time by mind is thinking ‘what shall I write about?’ That afternoon I had run a PD session for the management team about Web2.0. It had gone really well, and I thought, I might write about that.

I have been noticing that since school has been back that my ability to keep up with all my social-networking tools has decreased. These now remind me of what my email inbox used to look like. I considered writing a post about that.

I have been using Edmodo for a few weeks and I considered writing a post about how things were going there. I had also suggested to Richard that I might write about clayanimation. He liked that idea, and I really liked that he liked it. But, I hadn’t really done much recently with these tools and while I had ideas and could talk about it, I wasn’t really up-to-date with software changes.

Fifty minutes later and back at home, I have another look at Richard’s blog to remind myself of the types of posts he normally has. They seemed to be useful, with examples on applications in education. It was then a choice between Edmodo and Animation, and I chose edmodo, only because it was more recent and therefore fresh in my mind.

A quick shower and then I blogged. It was after 11pm when I had finished. It took 2 hours to write my guest post.

Now that it’s over, I can reflect on the process.

I was so excited to be offered a guest blogspot. While it is just one post (wel, one post each from a number of us), I think Richard was very generous to do this. He has built up a following and could easily losse readership, if the posts were not what readers were expecting. As well, it’s a brilliant idea, as it does keep your blog active while you are away and it exposes the regulars to a different voice for a while. It provides opportunity for the guest blogger and the reader.

In the hours leading up to writing my post and while I was writing it, I experienced the typical “why did I say I wanted to do this?” thinking. That voice nagged and nagged until after I was done, and has only just stopped now, that I have read Richard’s post thanking his guest bloggers.

Would I do it again? – you bet!

I’d also like to offer guest spots on this blog. (Not yet, but I can certainly see it happening in the not too distant future.)

Finally, a huge thank you to Richard. You have certainly assisted me in my blogging journey!

As part of the 31 Days to Better Blogging challenge, I needed to leave comments on blogs that I hadn’t commented on before. This is one of my favourite parts of blogging and I like to check back and see if there are any comments about my comment – ie continuing the conversation.

Over the past few weeks Sue Water’s has made numerous comments on my blog and I was curious as to how she knew that there were new comments to comment on.

Sue pointed me towards co.mment, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be allowing new users to register.

A quick Google search brought Commentful to my attention.

With commentful, you need to download and install a FireFox Extension so that functionality is added to your browser.

To use commentful, you right-click on a blog page and a pop-up menu appears with the choice of adding the feed to commentful (see post image).

Commentful also places a coloured circle in the display bar at the base of your browser window. It is usually yellow and turns green when it detects that a new comment has been made. I found over a 2 day period that my circle was always yellow. So, by clicking on it, a browser window opened with a list of the blog feeds that I have added. There is an option to click on a “check” button next to each blog in the list, which I did and then I noticed that the circle had turned green. I’m not sure if this happened before I pressed ‘check’ or after the first check.

While it isn’t quite working how I want (I want the button to go green without me going to the feeds page), it is still much more convenient than actually going to every blog. I also suspect that it is checking for comments on the entire blog and not just the post that you commented on, which is also a little disappointing. But, it does open to the actual blog post.

Overall, I would rate it as useful but not perfect.

What do you use to keep track of comments on your blogroll?

Have you found something better than commentful, let me know?

Grapphic: screen capture at Journeys In Education blog using commentful

To start Day 4, I made the changes that were suggested by Sue after she did an audit of my blog. Sue’s recent post on Mobile Technology in TAFE (with links to her The EduBlogger blog) was very helpful in adding the feedburner parts. It was easy to follow and it worked, but I’m not actually sure I could explain the intricacies of why.

For Day 4 the task is to ‘Interlink archived posts’. Given that my blog is quite new, there aren’t that many posts that I can go through to interlink.
I will look, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t.
I will keep in mind that it is good practice to do this on a regular basis.

For Day 5 I needed to update my ‘About Me’ page. I thought that this would have been fine as it was, but lo and behold, when I visited ‘About Me’, it was completely blank!
Now, how did that come to be? I’m sure it wasn’t erased by accident and think it must have been one of those things that I meant to do when I started the blog, thought I had done, but in fact, hadn’t done at all.
So, I now have About Colin on my blog. It’s not that I like talking about myself, but I had to work hard at not putting too much on the page. Here are some tips by Darren Rowse on what to put on your About page.

One of my own aims for today was to read through and comment on some of the other participants blogs. I managed to get through about half a dozen, which I am happy with. I would like to get to read the remainder over the enxt few days.

Photo: source Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license

The task for Day 3 is to Search for and Join a Forum.

One of the ways of sharing the project and developing a PLN during the project is the use of the project wiki. Each participant has their own page on the wiki, where they can reflect on the tasks throughout the project.

I used the wiki page for my day 3 reflection, so if you have read it there, you won’t need to read further here.

I have managed to get Day 3 out of the way, as well today. I have been a member of a number of forums for a while.
My first one was the ACCE Study Tour Ning, Then an NECC08 Ning, and recently I joined the ISTE SIG Independent Schools Ning. And, there are a few more I had forgotten about: Ning in Education, Voicethread for Educators, plus a few private ones that I use for school eg sharing news and photos with parents.
Embarrassing to admit, but I joined Classroom2.0 about a year ago and posted my thoughts on blogging (saying I didn’t get it – I meant it in a nice way ie as a shout for help) and didn’t go back for a long time. When I did, it was another one of those ‘oh, I already am a member here’ things.

The ACCE ning was useful as it was a way for a group to share different experiences while on the same journey. But, generally, I find the forums to be a little messy and hard to keep an eye on. I would suspect that more effort on my behalf is needed. This makes me worry about trying to keep it all going. And, it just may be that blogging, and twitter networks will be more of a focus than forums. I will though, keep and open mind and consider greater effort in the forum/s.

Below is Sue Water’s response to Day 3:

Between everything I do there is too much to do. While forums are good I have to prioritise my time so forums are really low on the list. My main reasons for being on a Ning are like Facebook – another option for people to learn about the work I do and to make connections with me. However for some people Nings are an important part of their learning. So is worth keeping open mind.

Blogging – shown early 2006 thought ridiculous. Early 2007 still ridiculous. April 2007 started blogging – slowly started to understand why important – you know the rest.

Thanks Sue!

I think that for me, the forums aren’t as instant – unlike Twitter, and I haven’t yet learnt a quick and painless way to see new content on the forums. Do nings have rss feeds?

While I will try to be open-minded, I suspect that in the end my social networking preferences will be:

1) Twitter

2) Blogging

3) Delicious

4) Forums

Photo: source Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license

Well, how long did one day (Day 1) take? What a lot of thoughtful comments! I’ve found that it takes time to be a good blogger: following links to blogs, reading through posts, trying to locate email addresses and first names of people, leaving comments on their blogs and following comments on my own. Phew, no wonder I haven’t blogged myself – how do I keep up with this when school is back? I just will, I hope. It’s been busy, and amazing – really enjoying the connections.

Okay, to Day 2.

Today, I need to ask a friend to “Run a First Time Reader Audit on My Blog”. I have left a request on Building a Better Blog ning and I will also twitter a request. I know a kind colleague somewhere will help out (I just hope I don’t run out of friends after 31 days!)

Photo: source Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license