As the Digital Chalkie team were completing the second in their series on blogging (sorry to have been unable to participate) some of my colleagues at QUT have just released a book on the topic…

Here’s the official blurb on the book:

Uses of Blogs brings together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields to offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. Blogging is rapidly developing into a mainstream activity for Internet users, but beyond the popular headlines, there has been very little serious research done on their actual application in specific, everyday contexts. One reason for this is that the variety of styles of blogging—news blogs and political commentary blogs, marketing blogs, corporate dark blogs, fictional blogs, educational blogs, to name just a few—make it difficult to generalize and to imagine how blogs might be used in particular environments. This pathbreaking new book demonstrates the application of blogs and blogging in the full range of industrial and social contexts. 

Go on, you know you want one

Digital Chalkie will be continuing the discussion about classroom blogging this Sunday, the 30th of July, at 5pm West Australian time (9am GMT).

Join us as we discuss some further teaching aspects of blogging with Jo Mcleay of The Open Classroom. We will then delve further into the “techie” issues of setting up classroom blogs with an overview of some blogging options; some specifics about setting up WordPress on a local server; some outside hosting options; and effective ways to set up your blogs.

We welcome anyone who has experience with installing various blogging tools to join us and share your knowledge and insights with the teaching community.

Please note that we will be keeping the formal part of the show to an hour in length as strictly as possible, there will however be opportunity for further discussion in a post-show session from 6pm onwards for those who are interested in sharing further discussion and addressing specific issues (an unedited post-show podcast will also be made available).

A detailed explanation of how to join the live webcast will be posted in the next day or so.

Hope you can join us.

Brad Hicks and Paul Reid

ECAWA is proposing to offer a half-day of training sessions for South-West teachers, in Bunbury.

PROPOSED DATES
2nd, 9th or 23rd of September

PROPOSED SESSIONS

• Game Maker
• Flash
• Movie Maker
• Logo programming
• Clay Animation
• Photostory 3
• Digital photography
• Audacity (sound editing)
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Other sessions you would like…

It is proposed to have a number of concurrent sessions, about an hour in length, which participants can rotate through. We would intend to run the sessions for about 3-4 hours so that only half the day is taken. A fee will be charged to cover catering and travel expenses of presenters from Perth, it is also intended that the fee will include membership for non-members.

If you would like to participate, please email Brad Hicks at contact@web2learn.net , by no later than Friday 4th August, indicating which date might be best for you and which sessions you would like to have run. Please feel free to request a session and we will see if we can accommodate the request. We would also welcome anyone interested in presenting a session, if you wish to do so please also make contact via the above email address.

Once the level of demand has been guaged, we will email final details to teachers who have expressed an interest.

This is part of an initiative to support rural and remote teachers by ECAWA, we encourage you to participate.

Recently, Brad Hicks, Paul Reid, Kelly Anderson, Doug Symington and Reg Whitely gathered online at various corners of the internet to discuss the topic of “Classroom Blogging” in a live webcast. A big thank you to Brad Hicks for his webcasting expertise and for hosting the show. Also to the engaging interviewees and chatroom participants.

Digital Chalkie Webcast #1 Part a: Classroom Blogging (MP3 – 9.9MB – 42min 58sec)

Right click to download the audio file from here.

Show notes:

Part a: Classroom Blogging

00:00 - Introductory explanation of Digital Chalkie website and its aims. Brad http://www.web2learn.net/ interviewing Paul about Digital Chalkie.

04:50 - Brad talks about the webcast and gives instructions about how people can contribute to the live webcasts.

09:20 - Paul Reid’s take on collaborative writing and the functional literacy opportunities provided by an Instiki Wiki: http://www.instiki.org/show/HomePage

14:35 - What blogging is and how it can benefit students? Kelly Anderson talks about her recent experiences with blogging in the classroom and how it could be their reading and viewing journal. Kelly uses edublogs.org - http://www.edublogs.org/ based on Wordpress - http://www.wordpress.com

16:05 - How were the blogs set-up and what tasks were set? Kelly talks about the naming conventions for student blogs that we used with Kelly’s class to avoid identification of students

23:15 - What is commenting and how does it work?
Links to other blogs: Jo McLeay’s http://theopenclassroom.blogspot.com/ Clarence Fisher http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=2734 Room 208 http://bobsprankle.com/blog/

26:03 - Doug Symington from http://www.samlab.com joins in to discuss blogs and share some of his experiences from the blogosphere. Doug is a regular on http://www.edtechtalk.org and hails from Vancouver, Canada.

29:45 Brad mentions http://www.worldbridges.com - a global network of homegrown webcasting.

31:15 What happens to blogs at the end of the schools year. Kelly mentions http://www.blogbinders.com can print and bind blogs.

32:31 Doug talks about the importance on helping students become responsible web citizens. Kelly talks about liability, and privacy.

Digital Chalkie Webcast #1 Part b: Classroom Blogging (MP3 – 9.7MB – 42min 43sec)

Right click to download the audio file from here.

Show notes:

0:00 Brad fields a question via eChalk from Terri van Zetten http://missterri.wordpress.com/ regarding bullying in the classroom via blogging. Doug, and Kelly discuss this.

02:45 Paul asks how Kelly and Brad have set up their accounts to protect students from potential bullying behaviour. They explain the administrator settings http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities and setting up Bloglines as an aggregator for reading/keeping up with student blog posts. http://www.bloglines.com

17:15 Doug talks about using Flickr http://www.flckr.com and Blogger http://www.blogger.com to introduce people to blogging and web 2.0.

28.40 Reg Whitely joins in talks about setting up Wordpress with some of his Year 7 students. http://beachlands.wordpress.com/ (NB: unfortunately the live stream starts dropping out at this point).

For Digital Chalkie’s live show Brad Hicks and I chose to use the word webcast because the audio is released live (streamed) onto the web. The streaming audio comes through like a radio station to iTunes or Real Audio as the user chooses -unlike this podcast, which is released as an MP3 or in an RSS enclosure after the webcast has occurred. In time we will post an enhanced podcast with links and pictures etc that users will be able to subscribe to within iTunes (for example) and which will be archived on the Digital Chalkie podcast page.

Another ‘live’ feature of the webcast that accompanies the streaming audio file is that listeners can join the text-based chatroom. We use Skype to record all conversation within the ‘SkypeCast room’. We will release a podcast of the event which will be an edited version accompanied by a transcript of the webcast.

We welcome the participation of other Digital Chalkies to the follow-up Classroom Blogging Webcast 2 next Sunday. If you have any questions on the topic of blogging please send them to webcast@digitalchalkie.com and we will raise them during the show. Please provide us with some feedback, discuss the topic and the new Digital Chalkie webcast in the comments below.

Join us live for Part 2 of Classroom Blogging with the live webcast from 17.00hrs GMT+8 on Sunday July 30.

The Head of my Science has asked me to come up with some recomendations as to what we should ask for in the way of IT equipment for the science department. In particular, she wants some amunition about what other schools have so we can justify it.

What should I be asking for in order to bring us up to par with most schools?

As I don’t even have a computer or network access in my classroom, I’m sure some fellow science teachers can provide examples of better equipped science departments.

We will be getting access to a room with 14 computers to share between the various science classes. How does this rate against the standard?

How many classes have data projectors set up?
Does anyone use Smart Boards or similar?

What schools have laptops provided to teachers?

Any assistance welcome.