Tim’s Blog

I found an article wirtten in Learning and Leading with Teachnology that is written by a student himself. It was an evaluation on his change in his academic progress after recieving a Microsoft iPaq Pocket PC. He writes that after he was given this Pc his academic progress went up and then he conducted a test on several other studetns with the results agreeing that those with Microsoft iPaq Pocket PCs improved their academic progress.

This is all well and good and I’m sure his progress has improved and he has conducted a nice investigation. BUT is this just an advertisement for Microsoft under the heading of a reflective piece by a student. I guess it is also providing advocacy for the use of technology in the classroom, which is what this publication is all about.

An intersting article, whichever way you look at it!

I came across this article in a “Mulitmeadia and Internet @ Schools” magazine and was interested in reading it as it is hard to ignore the spread of online social software that young people are being caught up in. Site such as Facebook and MySpace are becoming ever so popular with not only teenagers and young adults but with primary school students as well. From what I have noticed primary school children are more interested in MySpace than Facebook mainly becasue mySpace has more multimedia applications.

This article gives a nice run down as to what social software is and what the main programs are and what a teacher’s concerns are with them using this software. Teachers are worried that children can be exposed to very explicit content on these pages and alot of the images are not suitable for young children. Also the fact that facebook has a feature where you can create groups and invite other students to join certain groups and events whilst excluding others. Groups can end up being created for the purpse of being hurtful and abusive to other students.

The school that Barrett writes about had to end up removing access ro social networking sites form thier school servers. It seems that this will be the way all schools go in the future to prevent online bullying and other hurtful instances happening.

I had not really heard of the term Portal in an educational context before so it was interesting ot read this article and I found out that educational portals put otgether links to sites and resources educators would be interested in viewing. Portals are designed to eliminate the hours of searching that might be invested if standard search engines were used.

Educational portals feature lessons, units, printable resources, creative ideas and more. Some portals are free while others are subscription services but they offer additional resources.

Chamberlain states that for educational portals to be a success they need to contain 7 essential components: Vision, Commitment, technical expertise, coordination, feedback, forward motion and instructional focus.

I am glad I read this article as I had never really come across this technology/resource before and am keen to find out if this resource is avalibale in NSW, Australia.

I found this article in a “Learning and Leading with Technology” magazine and looks at how a school can keep functioning if your school was closed down for weeks at a time. This is unlikely to happen in Australia but it could happen and it is also likely to happen overseas.

The focus of this article was of a situation Hong Kong International School faced in 2003 when they had to close down to prevent the threat of SARS spreading. The school worked together to obtain web-based resources, design and upload Wep pages and also explored other new technologies to create a virtual school. They realised they had a commitment to the community and needed to maintain a teaching program which would be done virtually.

Grad level design team were set up (in Australia these would be Stage design teams) becasue the school acknolwedged that the job would be too hard and too big for individual teachers to design specific classes on their own. The design teams worked around a philosophy they called the three Cs: communication, community and content (interactive). Their main tools in support of the three Cs were Web sites, Webquests, wikis, e-mail, phone and fax. They made sure that they kept the delivery of lessons as simple as possible because most of theur parents and students would enter the virtual school with basic technology skills abd in some cases limited access to computers.

Like I said this is an unlikely situation to happen in Australia but if it ever did happen it is good to know that a virtual school could be designed and implemented.