Many of us are familiar with Wikipedia, but how many are aware of the full scope of projects emerging under the banner of Wikimedia Foundation. One especially interesting project is Wikibooks - a free collaborative publishing site for textbooks. Imagine how popular you’ll be if you can reduce the cost of textbooks in your school .. well maybe not with the sales reps from the suppliers.

“Instructables“ seems to be a useful site for all manner of D&T project - what seems interesting is the unpacking of the “design and making” process that such a site requires. The site also serves as a great repertoire expansion for teachers and students looking for hands-on projects - it all about MAKING STUFF - and as such addresses many of the T&E outcomes…. but isn’t limited to that - its focus is on collaboration and ideally innovative teachers will be looking to offer their students opportunities to work in cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary modalities… really working at integrated learning in contexts that are not arbitrarily segregated or limited by faculty/learning area administrative divisions as teachers we sometimes forget that knowledge isn’t compartmentalised simply becasue we mark out KLAs - rather all knowledge and experience is integrated as part of the individual - we deal with the world with the totality of our knowledge and experience not just the bits that fit in our subject area. More resourceful, resilient, solution-focused, independent learners will emerge from a system that embraces that awareness….

Making things is part of being human. Whether you make bikes, kites, food, clothing, protocols for biology research, or hack consumer electronics, a good way to show “How-To” is critical. Instructables is a simple and fast way to share projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff. Instructables leads the way in Open Source development for “Stuff”. from http://www.instructables.com/

We are worrying about reluctant readers and reluctant learners, yet we have so many reluctant teachers when it comes to computing! Kim responded to a comment I made about getting teachers online (excuse the pun) in my post about blogging.

I have no answers there Kim sorry, but I am sure it frustrates many more members of this blog. I have worked on a few principles at my current school;

• If I excite the kids, then they will ask the teachers to do it using ICT, forcing the teachers to learn.
• I will endeavour to enthuse the teachers by showing them examples of what they can do in the classroom using skills they already have.
• Encouraged ATAs (Aboriginal Teaching Assistants) to attend ICT lessons.

And where has that left me? 500 excited kids, a few more teachers and ATAs starting to use ICT more effectively. Yet, teachers come into my room, suprised to see Johnny sitting at my feet being a perfect boy enaged in his work (on the SMARTBoard) and they don’t use the SMARTBoard outside my lesson.

Another important thing I have learned in the last year or so is, mountains can’t be moved without support, if the management is not actively supporting, encouraging and expecting ICT to be used effectively there is only so far that an indivual teacher can go. I am sure that is something you have already worked, but even though I had heard this so many times, I didn’t believe it until I tried and tried…

However, I keep trying, I keep seeing the class teacher after having their class and share what we have done, explain to them that this generation wants to publish not to view, that they want to be part of the web. I encourage the kids to email me, to talk to their teachers about the technology, to use the jargen and share their knowledge.

Many of you may know this website already, but in case not I wanted to share the Australian Rainforest Maths website by Jenny Eather. It has some of the best online interactive activities I have seen for kindy through to upper primary. Each year level includes the seven mathematics outcomes. One of the strategies promoted in the First Steps Mathematics course is giving students a variety of different learning opportunities to match each aspect. In particular using online activities to provide instantaneous feedback to the child as to whether they have the key understanding or not - if not the child can quickly try another strategy. This is one of the most under-rated bonuses of using interactive activities. It frees up the teacher to provide more guided feedback to students in need of specific assistance. The activities are easily aligned with the key understandings and could also be used as supplemental diagnostic tasks.

The website states that it contains:

“Over 800 interactive mathematics activities for Kindergarten to Year 6 covering the math strands of Number, Number Systems, Operations & Calculations, Strategies & Processes, Patterns & Algebra, Measurement, Space & Geometry, Chance & Probability, Data Analysis and Money.”

Paul

Quite a few of you may have been to the BBC Motion Gallery and downloaded a few movies as I did for my Media class. However one day a staff member asked if I knew where there were some clips on Rugby scrums and tackling techniques. I showed him this motion gallery and when we put tackle in the search form and chose the sport category it came up with hundreds of short clips taken from high quality commercial footage. When you choose to preview a particular clip it also has related search choices on the side. He was able to build up a sequence of clips for his students to watch in Keynote. That was just one use and you can literally search for anything and get short clips. Students could use it as a great resource to make their presentations better. I think that it definately is a great visual tool for showing students things in context.
Steve