21st Century Educator

Episode 11 The second Student blog project… Step into my classroom for a moment: Please send comments to edtech@brettmoller.com

Right click to download the podcast

Well I have started the final term here for 2005. I have started writing an assessment piece for my students (year 7 which is 12 -13yrs old) that involves them maintaining a blog for a number of weeks. I have placed the rough assessment sheet online for you all to look at and comment on. I am particularly after feedback on what my assessment criteria should be. I would love to get feedback and thoughts from as many different people as possible? It is getting late and I am a tad brain dead…. Need some ideas here!!!!!!! View the rough assessment.

After some help from different sources to get my head around the whole CMS idea I decided to start throwing some ideas around and give some food for thought….
1) How do we make effective use of CMS’s in schools without them just becoming another task for teachers to worry about adding to thier work load?
When I started at my current school we introduced a school intranet that was sold to staff as the next “big thing” that was going to make our lives easier. While some of it sounded exciting to many staff the program never really took off as well as it could have due to the lack of input taken by teaching staff. To solve this we employed someone whose job was to focus on the intranet development. Once again it didn’t work as well as many would of wished for due to the lack of content provided by the educators. Will CMS be different? or How can it be different?

2) How do we draw students to using the CMS?
Once again a probelm we had with the intranet project was getting students excited about it. We went with a basic (fast loading) interface. Unfortunatly, that didn’t get studnets interested in using the service. This was a typical example of us as staff not thinking about the students and what they would be looking for in their learning aides. I would have to say that the school CMS’s I have seen recently are very plain and would not attract student use. The final problem we had with the intranet that I see as a possible problem with CMS’s was the way we didn’t have the system updated often enough.

Be interested in your thoughts? Stay tuned for some exciting upcoming news too!!!!!!

An amazing article from a blog I just found by Dave Pollard. He was talking about the phsycology of why people don’t share information and knowledge. Some incredible insight considering my thoughts from yesterday. Certainly worth a read. I realise his writing comes more from a buissness perspective but I believe it certainly is applicable to education.

I am interested to read Dave Warlicks blog and comments on the social cell that is the blogasphere. I found David’s observations interesting but then when I clicked on the comments from his readers I was provoked to start thinking about the use of CMS’s such as Moodle and the correlation between that and profesional blogs. Also being inspired by a lunch conversation I just had with Dr Robert Herschell who is the Dean of the education faculty at Christian Heritage College in Brisbane. He and the staff are looking at the value of CMS’s such as Moodle and trying to decide if they will head in that direction. Further in our conversation he discussed a recent trip to Japan where he spent time with some Japenese educators who were blown away with his sessions on questioning. Obviously, they were amazed at what he had shared and wanted to learn more.

I am now thinking that CMS’s create a closed society of educators who don’t share and collaborate with one another. Blogging on the other hand creates an open network of collaboration that shares knowledge and understanding among peers. At the end of the day the benificaries sharing and collaborating are students and the education process as a whole. If experience is not shared and learnt then we just continue going around in circles. What draws me to blogging and podcasting is the fact that it is an open network of freely obtainable information that is ultimatly improving my teaching. I want to always be an educator that shares what I know and even what I am learning as I am learning it. My students learn from sharing what they have just learnt. I think we can all take a closser look at how we share information and skills so to benifit education. I would even appreciate having a chance to see what universities are teaching undergrad student teachers in many areas. I would also love to share in the review of student work at a teritary level. I am sure there is plenty that even the most experienced educator could learn. Especially when it comes to the area of educational technologies.

Let’s face it, none of us are going to make millions out of education so the idea of intelectual property being worth something is long gone!! That comment may be a tad niave but I am still just 26 years old!!!

NAME CHANGE - Please send comments to edtech@brettmoller.com

Right click to download

Episode 10 show notes: Please send comments to edtech@brettmoller.com

Right click to download the show notes for episode 10

Long time no chat so here we go…. Episode 10 with show notes: Please send comments to edtech@brettmoller.com

Right click to download the podcast

I have been away for the past week and got home to a number of emails from listeners/readers and iTunes telling me that the feed isn’t working….. Not sure what it is but I just log back into wordpress then resync the feed and it is all good again!!!

I will look into this over the week.

I have been interested to read David Warlick’s latest blog on the use of blogging as research safe material for teachers and students. I started my website for this exact purpose. I wanted a place that I could start to collect ideas and thoughts for my interests and formal studies in the area of Educational Technology. We learn so much from others experiences. I appreciate the chance to engage in the learning process with much more expereinced educators who have been around education longer than I have been on the planet!!

How much more effective could our students learning be if we simply allowed them to engage in similar learning. It is working for me and I can see this working for students!! Imagine a class participating in blogs with those who have had real life experience in an area of study…. My class are studying our country’s system of government this term. How incredible would it be if we could have our local member of parliament blogging about his experiences each week. Discussing the processes that he is going through each day during sittings of parliament!! He/She would engage the students in a realtime and real life learning process that I am sure would contain the learning of content that is required by our curriculum. hmmm just some thoughts for next time we teach this unit of work….

Comments thoughts?!?!?!

Cheers,

Brett