Welcome to my blog

Hello Sandrine, Tom and Matt. Welcome to my Digital Learning Blog. This blog is a way for me to reflect on my own learning, explore and engage with web 2.0 technology and hopefully exchange learning.

zoho

Zoho is an excellent way to create and save all of your documents online. It means that you can work anywhere there is a internet connection and you don't need to worry about loosing your usb stick.

teaching resources

I think most teachers know about these resources but just in case you dont try out these:

Slideshare

Scribd

They are useful if you are looking for resources on specific texts. Just type in title and run a search and you should get some pretty good results, Try Romeo and Juliet or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

film techniques

Here is a link to a great website which explains the grammar of film and TV.
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/gramtv.html

reflection on blogging in the classroom

Whatever you don don't let the students use their personal emails. They make up ridiculus names like: sandy_sexybaby487_robins@hotmail.com or Paul_badarsed_MOFO_the_DJ_blasterman_58932@hotmail.com. And if that's not bad enough they write it down wrong and you end up with an error message or it has never worked and they never check that particular email.

The best way is to get a list of their sensible school emails and set the blogs up yourself so that you know that they work.

I will be doing it the second way now after trying the first way.

Visual wordmap dictionary

Here is an incredible tool that can be used in the classroom. It's called Visuwords and its a sort of graphical dictionary come definition map. All you do is punch in the word and search and it will come up with a map of all the definitions, parts of speech and their relationships. The map is colour coded so it's easy for visual learners to see how the same word can have different meanings depending on its context within the sentence.

web.2 identity

Our VCE English context is Identy and Belonging. I am putting together a folio of images so that students can get a visual representation of the context and to bounce some ideas around about Identity and Belonging as well as for visual writing prompts. I thought these two images are relevant to our students who are usually pretty web.2 savy.

wordle tutorial

This is the easiest way to create a wordmap great for analysing themes, characters, setting, ideas in any novel or word-based text. Try it with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Just cut and past the text in. Here is an example from Chapter One.
title="Wordle: Chapter One Nineteen Eighty-Four"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/912962/Chapter_One_Nineteen_Eighty-Four"
alt="Wordle: Chapter One Nineteen Eighty-Four"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">© 2009 Jonathan Feinberg Terms of Use subscribe

What you do is copy the text in the box then press 'go' and then save it to a public gallery and then you can either print it out or if you want to but it on a blog or website just embed the html code.

Marie-Josee-Mill showed us a couple of things tonight which i would like to demonstrate on my blog.Some more interesting free programs that can be used as teaching tools.

http://www.jingproject.com/

Jing allows you to capture screenshots and record your desktop and your voice as a video. It is perfect for creating tutorial videos.

http://animoto.com/

Animoto is a great application that allows you to make photo presentations similar to PhotoStory3. However, this is a web-based application

http://www.voki.com/

Voki allows the user to create speaking avatars. This could be useful in creating tutorials also. In fact you could conceivably create a tutorial with all three of these applications.

Also revisited Google docs. I have used Google doc before but would like to use it in the future as a way of creating dynamic collaborative online documents both with other staff and students.

image chef

pay attention

let there be light

Oh and the other nifty thing that Euan showed us was the laptop light for those times when you are in darkness and need to see the keyboard. It's the Fn + PgUp keys which are the bottom left and the top right keys.

first post

Tonight we went through some of the different search engines available. Sue Tapp showed us the following site which will prove useful in student research.

http://www.search-cube.com/
A fantastic visual experience for visual learners and a good way to create presentations.

http://www.searchme.com/
Give a visual guide of the pages that you are searching for. Great for sifting through all those junk pages masqurading as useful.

http://www.silobreaker.com/
A very good engine which looks very project based. Lots of maps, graphs, videos, and text based articles.

We also viewed a video on Teacher Tube about how students are digital learners and how teachers should try to be utilise technology in the classroom.