Module 8 - RSS Feed

I think my son beat me to this one! Each evening he 'checks out' @ 100 RSS feeds he has on his Google Reader - cartoons, pictures, cool stuff, comics, etc. For him, its a means by which he keeps up to date with what's on the net and be ahead of the rest - conversation starter! He is addicted to tivia, and there is plenty of that on the internet.

In my role at SCCVC, its important to keep abreast of the latest technologies, uses in education, government trends funding & usage, and readily accessible online resources. Creating RSS feeds to sites which advocate these areas is a clever way to aggregate the information. It's only when I remember or get a request from another staff member, that I will go back to these sites. The clever way, is to let RSS do the work for you.

Module 7 - Delicious

Having just had my school laptop stolen, complete with @100 bookmarks, I can certainly see the benefit of devising a Delicious account! Using the bookmark option in any browser, users are able to organise, plan and prepare for work and study in the future. Delicious allows those mobile internet users to have their favourite sites accessible from where ever. As teachers working between school and home, a cloud based bookmarking system is ideal. As too for students who may have access to computers in labs, libraries and study centres at school, can easily record those important websites for later use at home.

Here at SCCVC, all students have their own laptop, and they can readily bookmark internet sites for work purposes. Clearly, if laptops are broken, forgotten to be bought to school or run out of battery, access to these weblinks are not possible.

There is a real purpose for Delicious, but I am not sure that it would benefit the students at SCCVC.

Module 6 - Bubbl.us & Glogster

Today's Web 2.0 group concentrated on Modules 6 & 7. In reality, I feel that the Bubblus software was rather fiddly to use and feel that there are other software package (MS WORD) which would be a more suitable fit for mind mapping. Here at SCCVC we also have LAMS in myPLS which also has a Mind Map activity which teachers have used effectively in their classes. Students are becoming more confident in using the huge array of Learning Activities in LAMS.

Glogster on the other hand, appears to have more appealing usage. The ease at which you can use the software - without huge amount of instruction - is very appealing for teachers. There is real potential for students to create a very interactive poster using text, images, sound and video. As every SCCVC student has a laptop, they are also able to create images and video easily.

Every subject would be able to use Glogster as an assessment / class tool.

Check out my simple poster at Glogster.

Module 5 - Podcasts

Our students are very familiar with the use of iTunes (to update their iPod) and YouTube (latest funny video). As teachers we should be trying to incorporate both educationally based podcasts and videos into the planning of our programs.

Especially in vocationally based subjects (as is the case at SCCVC), videos really lend themselves to demonstrate to students some of the practically based aspects of the course. Equally, teachers and students have easy access to cameras with video capability or videos. This enables them to be creaters of knowledge and upload to YouTube or TeacherTube. This is handy for teachers to record lessons, experiments or pracs, for students who are away from class.

Module 4 - Flickr

Clearly, Flickr is a great source of copyright free images which you can use in the creation of class resources - online or paper based. Using Creative Commons images and vidoes allows the user to create resources without any concerns over copyright infringements.

Utilising Flickr would also help students accessing images over the internet. Especially when dealing with high quality images and email, users are resticted to the ISP / mail server restriction on attachment sizes. Uploading images to Flickr, even if access is restricted to specific users, allows 100MB file storage capability, which is probably ample for teachers and students.

Check out a very old photo of my daughter at Flickr