Lauren O’Grady from Caroline Springs School in Melbourne (ICTEV Teacher of the Year) talked about engaging middle years students.
She began by showing us the ‘What is Web 2.0′ video, which is a pretty powerful presentation on the text to hypertext transformation, (web vs us) thought it didn’t really explain the web 1 to 2 thing as well as how own explanation. It was worth explaining as it came up a couple of times in my previous session.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Lauren then talked about what web 2.0 might do for teachers:
- Create new opportunities for learning
- Create and share work
- Collect and remix workb
- Collaborate with others
- Innovate and create easier than ever before
These are better reasons than ‘engagement’, the commonly used one, that I think isn’t good enough. Lauren didn’t emphasise this, but talked about the power and simplicity of these tools.
Other tools that Lauren talked about were:
- Eduspaces
- PbWiki
- del.ico.us (Lauren’s web sites)
- EasyBib (online bibliography)
- Carbonmade (online portolio maker)
- Talkr (converts text only blogs to podcasts)
- How to Podcast
- Writeboard
Lauren’s blog is at global teacher HERE
Twitter/warrick_w
Last.fm/warrickw
Del.icio.us/wozza
Wishlist/Warrick
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I just found this. This is very cool.. I agree there are better reasons than engagement but time is very limited and you are always unsure of who you are pitching to.