Sunday 30 January 2011

The e-Learning Classroom

A few months ago @janedanielson sent me a link to Ewan McIntosh's presentation on 'Spaces in the Classroom'.

The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.

Ewan's thoughts resonated with my own, this was the way I used to teach when I was still in the classroom.I called them areas and I became very creative in the way I used furniture and the space in the classroom and outside. When speaking with new teachers I always advise them to become best friends with the school caretaker because that is the person who will help you to find the equipment you need.
Towards the end of the year I was approached by 3 teachers from one school who said they were putting a proposal to their principal to set up an e-Learning cluster of 3 classrooms of different levels. At the same time another school approached me and said that they wanted to set up a 'Digital' classroom with 1-1 access. I have since put them on the e-Learning pathway. This is when I had the idea of these schools working together using a wiki as the lynch pin. Over the last four months several other teachers have discovered the project and asked to be involved. At last count there are 13 teachers from eight schools involved.
The expectations for these teachers is to be part of the e-Learning wiki, develop a community of sharing through participating in the discussions and publishing their successes and failures on their classroom page.
This blog's intention is to document the journey we make together.

Thursday 13 January 2011

Photobucket

Photobucket  is an online storage site for your photos, it is a one stop place where you can edit and create slideshows.
Upload photos to Photobucket.
Media: Upload your photos, create albums, view as slideshow, get embed code to add to blogs or wikis
Themes: Change the theme of your Media page
Organise: organise your photos into albums
Edit photos: Fotoflexer is integrated into Photobucket so that you can edit photos.
Tags: add tags to photos
Photo Products: for a price turn your photos into cups, calendars, books etc
Tools: Create interesting slideshows using filters and themes