Adventures in Teaching and Learning

This post will hopefully cover straightforward video sites as well as more interactive audiovisual sites. Once again, I have asked my PLN (Personal Learning Network) of other “educationalists” and “edtech” folk at Twitter to share their favourite sites, which I will hopefully share with you here. I’ll start with a few of my own:

YouTube – Probably one of the most well known Web 2.0 sites. There is a lot of inappropriate content, as there is anywhere, but don’t be put off – there is a vast amount of fantastic content as well. If you are an RE teacher, then from my skattp profile, you can find links to a group for RE teachers and to some other accounts that I find helpful. I am sure there are similar groups for other subjects.

TrueTube – There some excellent (British based) videos on here that would make great debate starters. TrueTube hopes that young people will make more equally provoking videos and share them on the site. I have written about TrueTube before, here.

Teachers’ TV – An excellent resource for CPD; the site also contains videos that can be used in class. There are also groups and forums that you can take part in.

TeacherTube – Videos by and for teachers.

Animoto – Upload photos, choose from a selection of Creative Commons music, and Animoto will produce an audiovisual presentation for you.

Xtranormal – If you can type, you can make movies. An easy way for a teacher to make a starter video, or for a student to produce an ICT-based piece of homework.

VoiceThread – You could add this as a way to introduce a topic, by uploading a picture or video, then recording a commentary while using pens to highlight key points. Or, you could upload students’ work, and other students can then comment on each others’ work, as a form of peer assessment.

GoAnimate – A fairly easy way to produce short animations. These can then be hosted on a video site, such as YouTube or TeacherTube.

Voki – This is an easy way for you, or a student, to animate a message without having to record your face as well as your voice. You normally need a blog to host it on.

Audacity – An excellent tool that can be downloaded for free. Easy to use to record and to transform voices as well. The voice can then be added to vokis or other videos.

There are some good primary examples on this Demo Primary School site, based in Falkirk. Thanks to @mvass for producing it, and to @johnmclear for drawing it to my attention!

I will add more later, as I receive more suggestions!

I have asked my good friends on Twitter what Web 2.0 photo tools they recommend, in preparation for a CPD session I’m giving in a week or two on the use of ICT in RE teaching. Here are their (and my) recommendations:

Flickr – I think the number one choice of most. Worth paying for. Which reminds me, I need to pay for the next year. Anyway, I think it’s well worth it. It’s about the only web tool I don’t even hesitate to think about paying for. It’s about £12 a year. I use it constantly, and have about 5000 photos stored there at the moment. I think. (Supported by tweets such as @creativetallis, @davefoord)

Compfight – Strange name, great way to browse Creative Commons Flickr photos.

Flickrstorm – Another way to browse Creative Commons Flickr photos (thanks to @mtechman).

Photo Sharing Web Tools – A whole list of good Web 2.0 tools for photos. (@mtechman)

Gazopa – A way to search for similar looking photos (and, I think, videos). (@mtechman)

Cool Iris – “The fastest way to browse photos and videos”. (@victoriaellis has been going on about this for ages!)

Big Huge Labs tools – A variety of fun things to do with your photos (@victoriaellis)

ImageChef – Customise photos and clip art (thanks to @dominic_mcg).

Tag Galaxy – Visual way of honing in on just the photo you are looking for by gradually being more specific in the tags used (thanks to @dawnhallybone)

It’s amazing how many more photo and image opportunities, tools, applications etc there are now compared with two years ago. There are still many of the sites that I thought were fantastic when I first found them, but I think as I have become busier, and the amount of time I have to spend online has decreased, I have become more particular with which sites I use. It is good to have a reason to find out what I might be missing out on in the wider world of Web 2.0, and it makes a huge difference that I now have Twitter to help get more precise and focused recommendations. It’s also good to see that Flickr continues to be popular!

If I have missed out your favourite photo tool here, please leave a comment and I will update this at some point!

I have been using Twitter to try to find some new resources that could help my students revise. I’ll need to make a revision post on my school blog later, but let’s concentrate here first!

First of all, I could make – or ask my students to make – a video … perhaps a conversation between two people with different points of view discussing one of the evaluation statements that crop up all the time in their exam papers? But, videos so often seem to take so much time … Well, fear not, because my good friend Victoria on Geogtastic has pointed me in the direction of Xtranormal. Their tagline – if you can type, you can make movies. And it’s true. Check it out. (Although I have had some difficulties recently making movies. Not sure if it’s them or me. Hope it fixes itself soon. It is in Beta, so maybe I ought to drop them a line.)

On the other hand, some of our students really like revision cards, and some enjoy trading cards. So how about they make their own trading revision cards? BigHugeLabs have such a trading card maker. And results can then be shared on Flickr, or elsewhere, or printed out to be used as revision cards.

Finally, for now, a new YouTube type site, where you can make your own school based site. The privacy levels on Fliggo can, I think, be made stronger than those on YouTube – for example, you can moderate comments before they are posted. You can visit my new STM RE Fliggo site here. I presume I can upload any relevant video here, not only my own? Would be a good place to store all the useful and relevant videos I find in such places as TrueTube and GodTube. I think. If that’s allowed. Any advice?

And now, over to you. What one piece of advice would you give a GCSE student that would help them with their revision? Thank you!

Talk in the papers of primary schools learning Twitter rather than history, or some such nonsense! Must read the reports properly … Anyway, there are many ways we can use Twitter in education, and there are many in this presentation. Thanks to tombarrett and others!

I feel that since I have been blogging so little recently, and using Twitter so much, I should share some of the interesting links that I have discovered, and some of the interesting twitterers that I follow. (If I mention you, and you wish me to remove you, please let me know via the comment box – or DM me on Twitter!)

Twitterholic – According to their website, Twitterholic “robots scan the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet. A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit in our database.” You can look up your own stats to see what your ranking is; however, it is also useful to see who the most popular Twitterers are (Barack Obama followed by Stephen Fry, as of Friday 13 February 2009). Jonathan Ross joined only 75 days ago, and he is already at number 12.

Mr Tweet is my next recommendation. When you follow him, he will suggest people that you might like to follow, including people who are particularly relevant to you, based on what you twitter about. I found loads of interesting technological educators … which brings me to my next site.

TwitterSheep is like Wordle for Twitter. If you enter your username, TwitterSheep will look at the bios of your followers and come up with a word cloud. You can see mine (well, my most recent one) on TwitPic here. Alternatively you can search among your own tweets to see what you tweet about. Mine was too big to take a screenshot …

TwitPic could do with some more explaining. Well, not much explaining. You can upload photos or send them from your mobile, and these will be added as a link to your twitter feed.

I’ve just uploaded TweetDeck to my computer. So it’s maybe not the best time to give any sort of opinion! But it gets good write ups elsewhere, and Phillip Schofield uses it. Along with loads of other people. You can see everyone’s tweets, but you can also make groups; I can therefore follow my personal friends, helpful educational twitterers, people who tweet about Malawi and celebrities, as well as getting my BBC updates etc.

Twitter_Tips is an interesting general twitterer to follow: this application (?) posts links to interesting general Twitter news.

I’ve mentioned Terry Freedman a number of times now on my blog. I often get links to interesting articles via him. I recently came across Alvin Trusty (via his excellent blog post on how to create a great powerpoint). Another twitterer worth following is Tom Barrett, particularly for links to such excellent presentations such us Nineteen (and counting) Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom.

Hmmm. There are so many more. I am following just over 100 people, many of them top class “edtech” folk, who obviously live interesting lives and also provide me with links to fascinating posts and news about new technology in education. I had hoped to add some links to a few of the interesting recent news and posts about Twitter that I have read in the last couple of days, but it is Saturday the Fourteenth now, rather than Friday the Thirteenth, and I have to get some sleep! I hope there has been something of interest to you in this post. Which will be twittered on my Twitter feed at some point in the near future …

ADDED LATER:
50 ideas on using Twitter in education – thanks to Carol Cooper-Taylor, whose blog I found via Twitter_Tips.

A directory of Learning Professionals (and others) on Twitter – digital breadcrumbs meant I went from Carol’s blog to Jane Hart’s blog, to her Twitter page, to her other blog, to here! I also found Twitlet through her. Many thanks, Jane!

Some of you may wish to join and add to the Twitter for Teachers wiki.

I’ve just found Clif’s Notes … on Twitter in Education. There are plenty of links there that you could follow to find out more. Clif’s Notes linked to Tom Barrett’s post on using Twitter in the classroom, in a Maths lesson on probability. Nice one!

Terry Freedman often has very interesting articles on his blog, and as an active Twitter user, these are well advertised to other Twits with too much time on their hands. Like me. At the moment. (Snow Day 2!) Anyway, the topic of Social Networking: the Pros and Cons with emphasis on safety is one that has been covered in a variety of other places, so if that was all it was, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned the article here, even though it is quite interesting in itself. But what caught my eye was Terry’s admission that he belongs to 63 social networks! Which made me wonder … how many do I belong to?

So here goes. I may include some links, although others are more private, some I am dormant in, and others I may have been thrown out of by now for never having used them! I am sure there will be some I have forgotten.

Facebook
Twitter
Ning
Dipity
Friends Reunited
LinkedUp
Plurk
Classroom 2.0
Haringey Transformation Teachers’ Programme
Diigo
Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
Slideshare
Flickr

So that’s 14 so far. Sorry, post took much longer than planned: I ended up browsing around Friends Reunited! So that’s one of the main problems of Social Networking! I was supposed to be marking!

I have been experimenting with Twitpic – this has included sending a photo from my phone, a first for me – not great quality, but then again, some of Jonathan Ross‘ are obviously snaps rather than professional, and they are fun and interesting. Although I suspect his phone is of a somewhat higher quality than mine!

It just has to be done … a post about the snow in London! However, I will try to add a few thoughts on Twitter as well, and its role in helping people what is going on with the weather. In terms of transport, as opposed to looking out the window and seeing that it’s still snowing.

As soon as I got “the call” at 7am, just before I left the house, but was already warmly wrapped up (”the call” being, of course, snow day: school’s closed!”), I decided to head out anyway but with my camera rather than my rucksack. The sky was still a bit brown-grey, just beginning to clear, the air was crisp, and the snow was (still is, in most cases, at the moment) clean, crisp, fluffy, white, light and airy. I wandered around the local area, and took quite a few photos, before heading back to my back yard, making a couple of snow angels, and building a snow-face (the snow was a bit too soft and fluffy to impact together to make a full sized snow person!). I then decided that, since I was still awake, to upload my photos before going back to catch up with my sleep (now at 81% uploaded, been going since about 9am and it’s now 2pm …) and see what was happening in the world of Twitter.

A lot. Also, a lot of people were twittering using “#uksnow” (this made me discover that I’ve no hash sign on my computer, which is a bit weird); there are sites dedicated to looking at these “hashtags” and how they are used on Twitter. Exploring these links helped me find a number of interesting pages: Broadstuff reflects on how Twitter has helped people find out what the transport arrangements have been like around the UK; there’s a great map mashup showing how much snow is falling in different parts of the UK; I’ve started using TwitPic because so many others have been showing off their snow photos, and Channel4News were wanting people to upload pics (and to get their 3000 follower – it could be you!).

Anyway, it’s all been fun, and later I’ll see about posting some of my favourite Flicker snow pics here!

Emmm … not long left of January! It’s not that nothing has happened this month, more that I have been too busy to blog! However, it’s good to be back!

My main exciting event this year so far was the birth of my nephew, Leo, on 14 January. I have been back up once to Scotland to visit him – thanks Megabus for providing a cheap and cheerful way to travel north suddenly! – and I look forward the next visit. His mum (my sister) is also a teacher, but I’ve not managed to get her blogging yet. Shame; that could be an interesting comparison. Life as a music teacher in Tayside as opposed to an RE teacher in London. Anyway. She has other things on her mind now, and I’m guessing not too much time on her hands!

I have just come across an interesting post using Wordle, to add to my previous explorations in that area. Miles Berry and Terry Freedman recently completed some research into how children use technology at home, and the Wordles make very interesting viewing. A really nice way to summarise research findings as well. Wish I’d known about them when I was writing up my Masters! (Now, there’s an interesting challenge … what would my literature review or findings look like as a Wordle? A task for another day, perhaps!) I found these posts through a link from htjoshua (Jocelyn Chappell) on Twitter …

Other than that, I would like to say a huge THANK YOU to RE Today which has given me some great ideas for lessons recently. First of all, the last edition of the magazine came with a free CD ROM on the Jewish Way of Life, which has proved invaluable in teaching my Year 7s about Shabbat and being a young Jewish person as part of our reading of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in our Integrated Curriculum course. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it to all RE teachers! There is so much information on the CD ROM and the pupils found it engaging; they also enjoyed some of the interactive tasks, and it provided an excellent stimulus for questions. I learnt loads too, and will definitely be using it lots in the future!

Secondly, there was a very interesting article about a lesson on Transubstantiation and the Eucharist, which suggested videos to watch and a song to teach the students, set to the tune of My Girl by the Temptations. I therefore had a couple of fun lessons with my Year 10s this week, who enjoyed watching the Prince of Egypt and (I think!) watching me singing about transubstantiation, -ation, -ation while dancing in an embarrassing way. At least one pupil said “Thanks for the lesson, Miss!”, which was nice as well!

Lovely to have used new technologies in such straightforward and helpful ways this week.

Just a short one since it’s getting late and I have a lot to do in the morning. I have spent some time today reading a variety of blog posts on improving blogs and getting more comments. For example, Problogger had a challenge in September: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. Every day there were tips posted, and I am making my way through them, although I have not followed all the advice yet! I did do Day 8: Comment on a Blog you’ve never commented on before, and have just being following the advice given on Day 11: Dig into your Blog’s statistics. I realised I have Google Analytics installed, so had a nosey around to see what I could discover. Well, I learnt that there had been 119 visits where the person only visited once and did not return, compared to 34 visitors who apparently have visited over 201 times … could this be me, with a roaming ISP address or something? These figures don’t seem to tally with other figures I have … 56.41% of my visits are from returning visitors (welcome back, over half of you reading this!), with the remainder (obviously) being the first time visitors mentioned above (welcome, to those of you just popping by today – please do call again soon!). The average time a visitor spends on the site is 4:16 minutes, which I suppose is long enough to read a couple of posts! My bounce rate is 55.31%, which I presume is the number of people who call by accident and immediately hit the return key. As to content, other than the home page, the most commonly read posts and pages were:

1) What’s the difference between blogging and writing? (33 pageviews) (6:59 mins average on page)
2) About Me (25) (2:07)
3) The Jive Talker or How to Get a British Passport (14) (1:55)
4) A List of the Software I’ve Used (14) (0:45)
5) Trying to use ICT in the Classroom (11) (3:48)

As for referring sites, I’m delighted to announce that the top source for referrals to my blog goes to … (drum roll) … Ben Annett, so thanks for that, Ben! Twitter is also up there, and I got 5 visits via Terry Freedman’s comments site, which is also why the post on blogging and writing is so high up. I presume.

So, what should I do with all those statistics? Well, I think I’ll need to spend some time later on following ProBlogger’s advice on How to Keep First Time Readers to Your Blog! However, I think many of his tips are aimed more at people who are professional bloggers and therefore in some way “need” to have more visitors, whereas I am probably more interested in “quality” rather than “quantity”! (Anyone reading this obviously counts as quality!) Although these statistics are interesting, I am more interested in the social aspect of blogging, and the sharing aspect, rather than the numbers. Which brings me round in a circle to the starting point, which is by far the most interesting: commenting.

The blog which lead me to ProBlogger was the Bamboo Project, more specifically the post, Six Reasons People aren’t Commenting on Your Blog. In turn, Michele Martin was inspired by Chris Brogan’s commenting challenge, where instead of writing a post, he encouraged his readers to read and comment on the comments in the comments box. I have to say, it is inspiring reading the comments on other people’s blogs … it would be lovely to have just a few of them (thanks Ben and Zak for your comments today on my animation!), but I understand it is a perennial blogger’s problem. (On the other hand, occasionally on a popular blog there seem to be too many, and I don’t read them all!) (Oh dear, I’ve just started browsing Chris’ site a bit more and found a post featuring 50 Online Applications – just my sort of post!) Right. Sorry for that interruption. (As you can see, this is more stream of consciousness blogging rather than planned and edited writing, Terry, if you’re reading!!) Back to Michele Martin. I found her blog through Diigo, and bookmarked it for future reference. These are her reasons why people don’t comment on blogs, as well as my reflections on my own blog:

1) You sound like a press release. Well, of all the things I sound like, I hope it’s not a press release! Except, perhaps, when I add to Samson’s book reviews.

2) You sound like an infomercial. Hmmm. Perhaps at times I post short posts with links to interesting sites … but I don’t think I sound as if I am trying to get any money out of them, for example!

3) You sound like a know-it-all. Well, I certainly don’t know it all, which is why I post here – I like finding new things then sharing them probably mainly so that I can come back and find them later! However, perhaps I don’t ask enough questions do engage the reader and show that I need your advice, feedback and comments – what do you think?

4) You haven’t shown them how. This one might be true. After all, I started blogging on a course which most of the other participants also had to blog on, and many only put up a few posts and haven’t written anything since. So perhaps my other readers have enough knowledge and understanding of the web to find my site, but the comments button (well, it’s hardly a button) is too small to be obvious. So I’ll need to think about making the commenting easier. Perhaps I could start by posting a link to Tessa’s excellent and clear instructions on how to post a comment? This might also be an appropriate place to point out that I do moderate comments, so please don’t be put off if your comment does not appear immediately. Also, I think – I must check this out! – that you have to enter an email address. Don’t worry, this won’t appear on the blog, although I may send you an email depending on the nature of the enquiry!

5) You haven’t created the right atmosphere. I’d like to apologise if anyone has felt put off commenting because you thought you shouldn’t! I would love to hear from anyone who drops by – whether or not you are involved in education, in ICT, enjoy reading books, have an interest in Malawi, like reflecting on life … Whoever you are, please let me know that you dropped in, perhaps tell me how you found the blog or the post, and add any questions you might have, comments or reflections on what I have written, share examples of how you might have used the applications I talk about, agree or disagree with my views … You are welcome! (Oh dear, I hope I haven’t gone over the top now and sounded all needy!)

6) You just don’t seem that into it. Apparently the blogger needs to sound passionate about their subject. That’s a tough one … do I get that passion and enthusiasm for ICT in eduction, for RE and for life in general across in my posts? I hope so, but I need you, my faithful readers, to let me know if I am succeeding or not!

Michele’s readers have left many comments on her post in relation to these suggestions. I think I may go and leave one of my own now … and hope that some of you might do the same here! I look forward to being overwhelmed with comments!

(Finally … I have also signed up to CoComment which should track my own comments in order to see the conversations I am involved in. You could probably find me there or follow me on Twitter, if you are interested. I quite like Twitter! More on that later, though!)

NOTE: I’ve just realised that I started this post by saying “Just a short one” … I think it may be my longest so far!! Really must go to bed now …