I put this presentation on strategic planning together for an inter-cluster meeting. I loaded it up to Slideshare for a meeting I had today and thought other people might find it useful. | View | Upload your own Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I just wanted to give a big ‘ups’ to the teachers that I have worked with over this year who have now started to do their own blogs. Today I worked with the staff of one school (in groups of three) to get new edublogs up and running for their classes. Everyone was so enthusiastic and really enjoyed the tools at their finger tips when making their blogs. I must say that I am getting more and more impressed with Edublogs - particularly the Pages function which basically means that you have the benefits of a wiki and blog combined. I do find a couple of things mildly frustrating such as that when I send an image up to the editor when posting and try to resize by dragging the corners, it does not stay resized when I publish. I know that I can go and change the dimensions in the insert/ edit image area but it would be handy to resize without using this. The other very small thing that I think could be improved is having a widget named Html rather than having to know that you use a Text widget. It might also be handy to have something written in the template thumbnails to let you know which you can customise the image of and which ones you can’t. However, these are very minor things and they don’t interfere with me being able to use the blog. The page feature more than makes up for any small irritations and I plan to add some to this blog in the very near future. It would be great if some of you out there could go and leave comments for my fledgling teacher bloggers. Nothing is more motivating than knowing that someone is out there and values what you do. Below is the link to a page in our cluster wiki with all the blogs linked to: http://teacherportal.wikispaces.com/Blogs  I have also spent time working on Teacher Portal to make it easier to navigate and to simplify the interface. I am quite happy with it now. While some of the content is specific to our cluster, I think this could be a useful resource for other people as well and it would be great if anyone wants to add some of their own content into it. Let me know if you think it could be improved and what you’d like to see added Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

There has been a real surge of interest in Second Life through Twitter recently. I have had an account for about a year now but only occasionally go in. I can see that there is a real potential in Second Life for education but I have not really found enough of interest to keep me going back in that regularly. Still, the other day I decided to hop on and ended up teleporting to an island on Second Life that is a Spanish speaking area. As I am learning Spanish, I thought I would head in there and see if I could try and talk to people in Spanish. I bumped into a nice guy called Angel (in real life - I can’t quite remember his SL name) who was based in Spain. We chatted for a while and he was very patient with my exceptionally broken Spanish! It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that we realised that we were both ICT advisors and were able to share ideas around that topic. I took a snap shot of us having a talk. For anyone trying to learn another language, I think Second Life has HUGE potential. I certainly found it very motivating Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

In my last week in my job as ICT advisor, I had some time free and so offered to do anything in classes that teachers wanted. Stu put his hand up and asked if I could spend a session with his class while he worked with podcasters as part of his action research project. I was quite keen to get into a classroom again and, of course, I couldn’t help but try an ICT tool that I have been mucking around with for awhile - VoiceThread. It turned out that the session time was during maths and I could get the laptop pod so I decided to put together a problem solving VoiceThread and give it a go. Generally, it went really well but there were some issues as well so I would adjust the activity if doing it again. Here is a summary of my thinking after the session: What went well The problems were aimed at the right level and I think it was definitely worth the effort of popping them into Comic Life to ‘jazz them up’ before exporting them as images and uploading to VoiceThread. I had previously set up 10 identities called ‘Group One’ etc on my account and this meant I could have the children working in groups of three using one of the identities. I was able to be logged on to 10 different laptops on my one account and we could even all add to the same VoiceThread slide at the same time using the different identities (I was trying to stretch VoiceThread to the max and it coped well). I had embedded the same VoiceThread on 10 different pages of a wiki so that everyone could work off their own copy in their groups. This worked extremely well. The children were extremely motivated to use VoiceThread and many even asked if they would be able to set up their own accounts at home. Some children persevered with working out problems for almost a full half hour and showed higher level thinking skills. What could be improved The children were told they needed to work out the answers to problems before being able to record but many were so keen to get onto VoiceThread they rushed the problem solving just so they could record. This meant that many of the answers were not well thought out. Next time, I think I would have a paper version of the problems and the children would have to show me they had worked to figure out an answer before being able to get a laptop to record their strategies. Some children recorded silly comments just to listen to them back and have a laugh. Even though they deleted them, this wasted time. By having the paper version as I said above, I think this would go some way to resolving this issue. I would also lay down some ground rules at the start and point out that anyone not following these rules would be working all the problems out on paper and not using the laptops at all. There was too much background noise in the recordings. I might try to control the noise levels more or have the recording area somewhere a little quieter. I didn’t know how to make the doodle tool stay solid so it kept fading out making it hard for the kids to show all their working in time. I know now that you click on the big white circle in the middle of the Doodle tool circles so this would make things much easier next time! I couldn’t seem to upload any images for identities or otherwise when I was at the school. I think this is something to do with the school firewall so it is a good thing I got it all set up the night before. I did try bringing a picture across from my Flickr account and this worked fine so I would advise teachers to have all their images banked there for the kids to use as a workaround. I did really enjoy working with the kids and still think it was a very worthwhile activity. Anyone can use this VoiceThread and add their own working out strategies so feel free to do so! Many of the problems still have not been solved correctly. Stu has also blogged about the session in his class blog which you can also go and read. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that the Time4Innovation online conference is happening at the moment with a focus on ICT leadership, building learning communities, and implementation of ICT in education. I am the keynote for the second session on building learning communities and would love feedback from the blogosphere Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Well, people might be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth with me putting very little out into the cyberverse recently. Basically, I started working for CORE education full time at the beginning of June and I had to hit the ground running with Milestones from clusters to read and respond to. I have now finished working my way through those and am now doing some work on building up resources in the ICT PD Online area. There is a section in ICT PD Online to collect and organise cluster and school internet spaces and links. If you are a New Zealand school or cluster and have any that you would like me to add in, either leave me a comment with the address or send an email to me at suzievesper@gmail.com. If you want to give me any feedback on how the section of links could be better organised or what you think is missing, I’d also like to hear from you. As part of my work on ICT PD Online, I have been brushing off my GIMP skills considerably and trying my hand at some aspects of design. I needed some textures to add to some of my images and I have found some really useful sites that gave some to me for free that I thought I would share with you. These are: ImageAfter Texture King CG Textures (where I got these lovely bones from). Another thing to report on is my recent visit to schools in Auckland with my old cluster. This was an excellent trip and I got heaps out of it! There is a page on Teacher Portal where I have uploaded my notes and the schools that went are all supposed to add to (hmm…..haven’t seen evidence of this just yet!). Thanks to Lenva for showing me http://glogster.com and http://www.circavie.com/ which I plan to have a good play with when I have a spare minute. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

OK - so I decided to take out a bit of time and play with Glogster right now :-)  I have made an online poster of sites that I have made over the last year or so. You can click on a site image to take you to that site. I had a lot of fun with this though the results are not that stunning and I learned a few lessons along the way. 1) The page is a set to A4 portrait size which would seem to make it impossible to play around with some layouts. However, if you embed the page into a wiki and play around with the width and height settings in the embed code, you can change the size of the area you are working on. Instead of shrinking the page while keeping the same dimensions, playing with the embed size settings will actually cut off areas of the page. This is how I got my page to look the way it does in the picture. I heard about this site when visiting Lenva at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. The kids there use Glogster to make the front navigation page of their online portfolios. Some of the children have moved into using Wikispaces for their portfolios and you can see an example of a student called Jess by clicking here. I have embedded my Glogster page into my educational software wiki and you can go and check it out by clicking here (the picture above is just a screenshot) Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Twitter always sends me to interesting places and one of the last sites it sent me to was one called Tutput. On this site, you can sign up for a teacher account and then set up a registration for children to sign up with that will make them part of your online class. Then the children can play games against children all over the world who are logged in at the same time. I pretended to be a kid so that I could test it out and felt bad as I was teamed up against what were probably real kids somewhere else. Still, I soundly lost the first match. Of course, I selected the hardest level of multiplication just to see what this looked like and my first question was 49×27. I was busy trying to work this out in my head rather than on paper and in the meantime my component had solved three questions! I then tried a couple of easier level activities and soundly walloped the poor children I was against (sorry kids but you’re got to learn to toughen up in life!) I think this would be VERY popular in the classroom and each time you win, a summary of the game gets put onto your win wall. There is also a graduation board which shows you which game levels you have completed. As per usual, all of this makes me wish I had a class to try this with! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I was revisiting the wonderful ‘50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story‘ by CogDog while trying to find a way to record video directly into a web 2.0 tool to blog (which I am still looking for if you can help - leave a comment) and was looking at the Cutting Room Floor section at the bottom where he mentioned tools that didn’t work so well for him. I noticed that Smilebox was listed because it didn’t have Mac and PC options. I clicked on the link with idol curiosity and found that it now supports Mac as well so downloaded the free software to have a play with it. I think this is a BRILLIANT tool. It works really well with iPhoto and I imagine the PC version opens up your ‘My Pictures’ folder. There are a large number of templates to play with and each one has a number variations within it. You can simply drag and drop your pictures into the templates and change all the text to suit your purposes. I played with the newspaper template. You can then choose to blog it at the push of a button and it will upload it to your online Smilebox account and gives you the embed code. See my efforts below. Make a Smilebox free ecard Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have been trying to get hold of a SlideRocket beta invite for ages after seeing and reading a lot of hype about it. Finally, one arrived by email a few weeks ago and I’ve been mucking around with it ever since. This is the first online presentation app I have got excited over because it is actually very attractive and full of functionality. The interface is gorgeous and it generally works exceptionally well. If you can get hold of an invite then do so but hopefully they make it available for everyone soon. I have embedded my first effort below. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.