Adventures in Teaching and Learning

Here’s my Web 2.0 page with my favourite applications highlighted, courtesy of Awesome Highlighter, which I found out about via Tim Rylands blog, which I found about via Ewan McIntosh’s links, which I receive now that I’ve signed up to receive a regular update of Ewan’s blog. Ah, this is why I love blogging! Isn’t sharing great?!

Thanks to jdobres who pointed me in this direction … NC pages for ICT in RE … although I’ve just seen the note that says that website will no longer work after 30 May 2008! So we better all head over to the new QCA pages …

Wetpaint Wikis in Plain English

Here’s another example specifically for Wetpaint. Wetpaint wikis are really easy to use.

Wikis in Plain English

Also thought that this gives a clear introduction to wikis! Saves me doing that …!

Blogs in Plain English

I hope this link works … Judy posted this video on the TTP Cohort 1 blog. Great explanation!

Its time has come … Last week, while complaining about how long I was taking to produce a booklet on Hinduism for my Year 8s, one of my D&T colleagues pointed me in the direction of Chalkface. This website has links to a variety of resources in many different subjects, some free, some that you can pay for. I’ve downloaded some free RE ones to try out next half term if necessary, as cover lessons – they look as if they could be quite useful.

Then this morning, Ian, who runs the Chalkface blog, left a comment on one of my older posts about Yacapaca, so I have been scouting around on there in more detail. As Ian points out in his comment, Yacapaca can be used to produce assessments that can be auto-marked by the computer. I have just spent some time playing around testing myself on the RE tests, and have fortunately done quite well on most of them! (I just pressed the wrong button once, honestly!) I was also impressed by the “pupil perception” questionnaires that students can complete. Obviously, if you already have a VLE, like we do, you might wonder why you should use another VLE-type website. Well, my VLE doesn’t have any pre-set up RE questions on it, as far as I can see. So here is a place where you can share your tests and assessments with other teachers, and see how your students are getting on, and it’s all free. Let me know how you get on!

An advert for teaching in Saipan; I laughed listening to the song, and decided to share it with you!

Also, I saw the “Extremes” TDA advert tonight on TV. A teacher uses a mobile as a link to a lesson on human rights, then uses images (gleaned from Google or Flickr, perhaps) to engage the students in discussion – what’s going on? How might they feel? etc. A good example of using Web 2.0 to support learning …

Just trying that out to see if it works …

I see that Edublogs has changed the layout … just four days after we had our school inset into setting up a blog and I uploaded a slideshare presentation featuring screenshots of what the edublogs layout looks like! And now it’s changed!! I’ll need to have a look around and see what’s changed. Now, how do I publish this?!