ejourney with technokids

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Listen to Sandy Phillips from the education channel at the Victorian Education Department tell us how global teacher/student came about. Note that:- globalteacher/student is an especially designed and adapted campus through edublogs. Learn about the role that SLAV and Heather Blakey have also played in this area.

nb I really like using gcast as it embeds well and allows me to select the podcast to be played.

Year 9/10 IT students, you need to:-

• Complete two posts, one answering my two questions for the joint Collaboration Nation blogs, the other choosing 4 questions that the New Brunswick, Canada students posed, and answering them. Do not forget to copy your first post and add as a comment on my blog.
• Make sure you read the replies to my quesions from the students from Conncecticut, USA
• Create a voki, grab the code and insert into a new text widget on the sidebar
• Write a new post “My avatar” Describe what an avatar is to a beginning computer user. Explain why you chose this style of avatar, why you built it as you did and what software you used to build it. Would you prefer your personal photo or your avatar as your ID? Why?
• Read Mr Keith’s poem on his avatar. Make a comment on his post.

The majority  of our students have set up their own blog space. A little risque as some of you might ask! After all some are only in years 4,5 and 6 and the even riskier end is year 9 and 10 teenagers. Well, so far so good.

Some have tried to put images on their posts, to give their stamp of personality but this has led me to talk to them about public perception, cultural impact and plagarism. Most students have immediately complied and removed possible offensive material.

Cyber safety is constantly being addressed and talked about. Most have created their own avatars and are in the process of adding them to their blogs and their comments.

Much of the time it is student directed learning as they work out what they might need and the image they wish to project. eg Many started creating a personalized header image, using the panoramic option in irfanview.

Some have added posts for Chinese (mandarin Chinese is our LOTE). The principal and various members of staff have commented on the posts, and comments from overseas are starting to come in. (A clustr map widget exists in edublogs now.)

A meeting was held with grades 4-6 parents and part of that time was spent outlining our goals with student use of web2.0, including blogging. (See the slideshare below for the content). One parent commented from the floor that her 11 year old boy no longer wanted to play game……the staff who were present held their breath for the next comment……(as there had been rumblings as to the need for any technology at their age)……. but the next comment delighted us all…………..he only wants to blog now!!!!
Many students are now adding their own posts and journal entries, adding samples of their photography. Students with learning disabilities are also taking to it with ease and some of these students have actually entered the most detail and posts into their blogs.
Some are using it as journal entries about their daily acitivites with others adding any school work that they are proud of producing.

Below is the presentation given to parents, using pedagogy to justify the use of web2.0 and predominantly blogging.

Last week, despite personal mental and physical exhaustion coping with first week back at school, one crashed computer lab and intermittent internet access, my students on Friday, set up their own blog space. We decided to enrol with global students, as our experience with edublogs did not work last year. (possibly our school’s tight security.) Following are the steps we took.

Pre-Learning activities

1. Viewed some online blog sites, including our own backyard site (where I would grab their writing and images and post them online myself) and discussed content and appearance.
2. One group was given the responsibility of commenting back on a youthradio blog that we will be involved with this year. I quickly checked content and spelling to ensure comments were suitable and discussed etiquette and the need for saying where they were from. (but no personal details!!)

Going online

1. Each student applied for a blog, checked their emails, activated the response, got their username and password) and then logged on.
2. Each student had to set a minimum of 5 goals for the year, three had to be school related and two could be personal. (a very interesting excersice and will summarize the results at some stage as it was a rather eye-opening one)
3. We kept the post simple except for some basic formatting and will look at presentation more fully next week (although the geeks were off and running and found that option early on.)
4. Students then created a cartoon to illustrate some portion of their blog. Most are still working on this and it does add interest to the post. They created the cartoon, made a screen dump and resized the image and saved it through MS Paint. Then uploaded it into their blog.
5. I am in the process of linking all their blogs to this blog and will ensure that I have administrative rights over their blogs.

As our students as a whole call themselves technokids, each year level has techno in front of it. Scroll down this blog and some year 9s and 10s (technoteens)  have completed their first post. (eg Tarzy, Dhugsy) Even our challenging group of ex-year 9 boys were focused on the task and enjoyed the challenge.

Evaluation

• All students, from the least to the most literate, completed 5 goals (only a few struggled to find 5)
• Would have liked a little more depth to some of their goals and had to push them to explain some of their sporting goals.
• They enjoyed making cartoons and enhancing the presentation
• The geeks were off and running - discovering all sorts of areas of wordpress that took me months to find
• The comments we made on youth radio ended up in Kevin’s spam box. They were quickly retrieved. Hint:  email your host informing them that comments have been made.

Post lesson acitivity: will endeavour to reply to student posts with comments plus try and get form teachers to do so as well.