As Seen @ Faculty Meetings

At most every facutly meeting, our TRT introduces a technology tool or resource for use in our classrooms.   

These are a couple of my favorites:

1. Wordle
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Overview:Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Helpful Links:

• Ways to Use Wordle in your Classroom
• 45 Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom

Wordle Examples:State of the Union Address: President Obama & Famous Artists


2. XtraNormal - If You Can Type, You Can Make Movies!
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• Enhance lessons with a movie
• Have students create their own, suits a variety of learning styles
• Access to the entire library of characters and sets
• One account includes access for students & class admin features

She has dedicated a webpage on our schools site to all presentations. To view click the following link: Technology

Web 1.0 into Web 2.0

During my summer semester, I designed a lesson using Web 1.0 tools using one of the activity structures we were studying.  Mine fell under the information collection and analysis category.   The basic idea of the lesson was for students to make observations of the contrails (clouds formed from water vapor in aircraft exhaust) and submit their findings into a collective global database on the web.  Observations would be organized, displayed and available for students/teachers to use however needed, but one person would have sole control of the data.  For everyone else, it would be a ‘read only’ format which is basically what web 1.0 tools are about.

Designing that project using Web 2.0 would mean that all users would be able to write and edit.  I could see setting up the contrails page as a wiki where contrail observers could post their comments and share ideas about the patterns that appeared in the data.  In the Web 1.0 version, it does not allow for discussion between the groups viewing or submitting data.  This way they could learn from each other and sharing information is more interesting to students especially on an international scale.  It would be a more engaging way for students to participate in the lesson using Web 2.0 tools vs. Web 1.0 tools.   

Helpful links to Podcasts

I was looking for ideas of how to incorporate podcasts into my lessons and I found that there are many sites with podcasts available that are suitable for students from reliable organizations like ABC and NASA.  They could listen to a podcast and summarize what they learned either as an in- class assignment or as homework.

• ABC Podcasts and MP3s Most Radio National programs are available in podcast format
• ABC EdPod Education issues for educators and parents
• CSIRO Podcasts
• NASA Podcasts
• The Education Podcast Network
  EPN is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

I also found these sites that demonstrate how some Australian teachers and their students are using podcasts to enhance teaching and learning. I thought that these sites would be useful to those of you who are going to choose podcasts to incorporate into the lesson we have to design.

• Rod Blitvich's Podcasts Rod's students have produced a range of podcasts based on the Year 11 and 12 Human Biology Course from 2006-2009. Check out his website to see the assignments set and his students' work.
• Chemistry - meagher's classes Richard Meagher's chemistry podcasts contain both audio and video files and are ready to be downloaded to your ipods.
• Orange Grove Primary School
  Paul Fuller's students' podcasts 2006-2009 are available at Podkids Australia