small steps

Just playing around with a new presentation tool called sliderocket. Basically a web based powerpoint so not sure how it will add anything but still played around with it!! Would be good for schools or people moving away from microsoft office applications I suppose as a way to present information. Does have an offline player also so can play without the internet of required. It is quite flashy but does seem to take a long time to load. Think I will keep playing around with this one.

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Stumbled across a great blog by Dan Meyer where he shares his classroom experiences as a beginning maths teacher. He is a very clever film maker and poses lots of good questions in his blog and videos. 

The faculty room is a great blog which is is a collaborative effort of a number of prominent bloggers who regularly contribute to questions put forward to them. You get to see a range of opinions on issues affecting education such as ’should homework be banned’ as linked to above.

I would love to see a similar forum in operation at our school level where teachers could debate key issues that are relevant to us. I think this would provide a great opportunity for teachers to learn more abut each others view points and could be a great professional learning tool for both experienced teachers and beginning teachers.

I would also like to see it on a broader scale for PDHPE. Again, a panel of experienced PDHPE educators including policy makers debating key issues affecting the subject area and the opportunity for all PDHPE teachers to get in and contribute to the debate. A great learning opportunity for all involved.

I always thought that as the years went by, teaching would become easier and easier with the demands on my time lessening as I established myself and set up all my programs and plans etc. How wrong could I be.  It seems that the demands on our time are always increasing and I am yet to meet a teacher who thinks that  teaching is becoming easier. It is really an endless job and to do every expected task to its full borders on impossible and always ends up with the need to prioritise which tasks are most critical and do our best with the things that are lower down the order.
Unfortunately I think one of the things that is commonly pushed to the bottom of the list is professional learning and ’sharpening the saw’ so to speak. I can see this is a false economy where in the long run we are going to be a lot worse off and the students in our classrooms will be effected also.

This is somewhere I think technology can be our friend, even though it is an area where a lot of people see it as being another distraction and thing that we do not have time for. I only learnt about tools like RSS and Blogs and the benefits that online networking can provide last year but already feel that the learning I get from these far exceeds anything I received in the 6 years beforehand.

Why? Because I choose what is relevant to me and what I need. Because I can get it to come to me (RSS etc) and I can do it in my own time when I am ready for it. I have access to leading presenters/thinkers all over the world who 10 years ago I would never have had the opportunity to see or hear about. I have just watched a few presentations from the NECC conference which were awesome, and that in the past I would have had to fly half way around the world to hear (which I never could have done). I can watch these in my lounge chair as I please which I find pretty amazing.

I figure that the ‘time’ issue in teaching is only going to become worse and that if we are serious about professional learning and improving our practices than harnessing available technology is critical. As our Principal always says ‘it is about working smarter, not harder’ and technologies available to us now offer this, we just need to know how to utilise these tools.

After watching Chris Lehmann speak at the NECC conference about his schools (Science Leadership Academy) approach to teaching and learning, I have realised I need to ask better questions of my students more regularly.  He talks in his session about asking questions that we don’t know the answer to and allowing students to find their own answers. While I am aware of the importance of asking fertile questions I think I have fallen into the habit of not asking anywhere near enough of them.

I think the ‘googleable’ questions are much easier to ask and allow us to remain in control because we know what the answer should be and can lead our students to them. To ask questions that students are forced to interpret and think about can get ‘messy’ but opens the door for authentic learning and is something I think I need to refocus on.

The verdict: works well and plenty of potential with this one!!!

I finally got around to having a go at setting up interactive whiteboard using a nintendo wii controller and a homemade infrared light. I stumbled across a presentation on TED talks by Johnny Lee who developed a program to enable the wiimote to interact with the light source and projection of the computer screen to effectively create a very cheap interactive whiteboard. When I noticed that fellow PDHPE teacher Ben Jones had done this it got me into gear to have a go.

Not being handy at all I followed these directions to create the infrared pen and managed to get it all up and running. If I could solder it would have halved the time it took me but a good hour or so and I was done!!

Then I just downloaded the program to read the wiimote on the macbook and I was away. I had the kids playing a few games on the wiggles website which they loved and had a little play around myself. I Will play around with this some more in the near future and hopefully get back with some ways I have integrated this into the classroom.

There is loads of information out there on the wiimote intereactive whiteboard and a great starting site is www.wiimoteproject.com. Ben Jones’s video is also a great insight into potential uses.

I have been enjoying my journey on the web 2.0 path, but have really looked forward to finding other teachers using the technologies in meaningful and relevant ways in the PDHPE learning area. I was very excited to come across Ben Jones’s work, who is leading the way in how to implement these technologies for both personal professional development and also in the classroom to enhance student learning. Check out this great video Ben created about using a wii remote to create an intereactive whiteboard at a cost of $55.

I am sure there are lots of other PDHPE Teachers doing great work also but my searching has not uncovered them as yet. I am sure I will come across more and more teachers utilising these tools over the next few years and then I think the real benefits of web 2.0 will come through with a larger range of teachers with common goals using and sharing with one another. Exciting times ahead!!

I have posted previously about youtube videos and how I am a big fan of it as a resource. I noticed recently that a really good video has been taken off and this is one of the downfalls of this service – that the videos can be removed by those who originally post them. A way around this is to download the videos and keep them in case they are removed. Downloading can also be helpful if you plan to use the videos in class and the internet is down or unavailable. I have played around with lots of ways to download youtube videos so thought I would put a few of the easiest ways I have found.

2. Unplug - this one is a firefox add on and presents itself as a little fish that is on your toolbar. When you are on the page with the video you want you simply click on the fish and it shows you all the files on the page that can be downloaded. Only problem with this way (and most other ways I have come across) is that it will only download it as an .flv file which is not as versatile as .mp4 format. You need to have a program to run the .flv files. Which makes the process a little cluncky. SWF & FLV PLayer is the one I use to play these files.

3. Video Downloader - another firefox add on that will download the videos in .flv format. The link provided has a good explanation of how this one works but is essentially very similar to Unplug.

4. Video Download x – is a web-based downloader which means you do not have to download any software etc. I have found that the quality of the downloads is not quite as good as the other methods but still useful if the others are not workable for any reason.There are a lot more applications out there that do the same job. Let me know if you find any that should be on the list!!

As our school pushes forward with a 1:1 laptop program in 2008, i am rushing to get my head around the place of ICT in the area of PDHPE. The laptop program has huge potential for us to engage students in quality learning experiences that are relevant and meaningful to our students. It offers the opportunity to differentiate learning for students in ways that were previously unavailable and engage students who struggle to motivate themselves with traditional teaching strategies. It will enable us to continue to utilise the practices and strategies that have proven successful for us while providing scope for a whole a new range learning experiences that have only recently become available to us.

If all we do is use the laptops to do what we have previously done then we are doing a great disservice to what the laptops are capable of. For example, if we all we get students to do is type their answers rather than write them then we achieve nothing besides improving their typing skills at the expense of their writing skills. Quality teaching practise is vital in the success of this program.

PDHPE is a unique subject area in the sense that our focus on encouraging students to lead healthy active lifestyles requires interaction in the classroom and some may argue laptops may inhibit the environment required to learn a lot of the knowledge and skills required.

The obesity epidemic has largely been atributed to poor nutrition and a decrease in physical activity and part of this decrease in physical activity could be related to an increase in time students spend watching popular media and the use of computer related technologies. It is ironic that we shall be encouraging the use of this technology to develop their health literacy, possibly at the expense students enagaging in other activities that improve their social and physical health. This needs consideration, however i believe that the we can have the ‘best of both worlds’. Through quality education we can encourage a more active and healthy lifestyle while using the technology in a positive way to help educate students.

I am a big fan of the google applications and one that I am playing around with the moment is google forms. It is aligned with google spreadsheets (similar to excel) and basically allows you to create forms or surveys that can be completed online and the results are automatically entered into a spreadsheet. The surveys are very user friendly to create and they give you a variety of question styles that you can ask including multiple choice, check box, paragragh & drop down list. At the moment we are completing a physical activity and nutrition survey of our 7-10 students and also a survey of their thoughts and opinion of our pdhpe lessons.

When you are surveying 700+ students it is a huge time saver on data entry and gives us some great feedback. For those who prefer using excel you can copy and paste the data straight into excel which is a great function also.

I read an interesting blog post the other day that talked about some of the ramifications of our online presence – making kids googlable. It talks amongst other things about about employers searching online for information on potential employees and the need to make our students aware of this and to also build an online presence that may advantage them. There is scope to address this in our Year 10 Careers unit and I think students would gain a lot from focusing their attention on the issue and thinking through how this could affect them. Some thinking to do here on how best to address this but something I can see as being very worthwhile.

This is another cool mind mapping tool (mindomo, inspiration etc) that is probably the most simple of all to use. If you are after a program that takes next to no instruction time to use then this one is well worth considering!!! bubbl.us

I often have students check up on the meaning of words in class or for homework if we are unable to define the meaning in class. Next time this situation pops up I am going to show them this neat little tool which is basically a dictionary and thesaurus that presents information in a very visual form.The creators description of this tool: Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.  Great little tool for visual learners.

 Getting across complex ideas in a simple manner is a something good teachers always seem to be able to do and I just happened to stumble on some really good videos on youtube that do that with a few web 2.0 tools. The videos are made by lee lefever and the ones I found particularly useful were on blogs, RSS & social bookmarking (del.icio.us).  I think the videos will be beneficial when introducing students to these as they do a good job of explaining the uses and benefits of each tool over traditional ways of doing things.  (The RSS and Social bookmarking vidoes can be found in the sidebar after clicking on the above link- I have also included them in posts below).

 del.icio.us/bmcallis
This is a great site which has great potential for sharing information and resources and is designed to encourage networking and collaboration. It is basically an online bookmarking site where you can save all the internet links you have found useful and it allows you to apply ‘tags’ to help organise all the different links you find.The part I like best is that you are able to search for and view other people’s links and share links with them. You are able to add people to your network which gives you quick and easy access to their bookmarks by placing them in your sidebar.Over time, if you link up with a group of teachers from your subject area you can share resources in a really simple and effective way. I have stumbled on lots of great sits through checking what people in my network are looking at. Would be great to see lots more PDHPE teachers using this!!!