Claire's Blog

As I sit here, I breathe a sigh of relief, as I am now on HOLIDAY!!!!

Thanks to everyone for their interesting presentations, it was great to hear that we all share the same frustrations, problems and vision of the future for all our schools. I leave this class, with the largest bank of ICT tools that I have ever had, a greater insight into technology and an insight into where ICT and education is heading.

Thank you to Craig and all my classmates for making this the best ICT course I have ever taken and I wish you all the very best in the future.

Have a great holiday, safe travels and I hope our paths cross again in the future.

Today we covered class management and learning management tools. At DCS our main learning platform is Studywiz and is not very user friendly, efficient or reliable. Learning and class management tools are very useful and are a useful tool for communication, plus storing data in one place. However, it is evident from today’s class discussions that all the problems faced by Studywiz seem to be the same faced by Moodle and within other schools. At DCS, teachers prefer to use Wikispaces for their class web pages as it is a little more reliable than Studywiz but it is also mobile and allows them to take their work with them. It begs the big question, whether a virtual learning platform is worth a school investing in, now that there are so many other cloud based computing programmes?

Great presentations yesterday and some useful web tools presented.  The Maths tools Geogebra and Khan Academy will be really helpful for the Maths department at school.  Thanks to Bill for sharing them.

Learnt some great things on Photoshop and Excel toady.  Two software programmes I am absolutely useless in using and yet have to use on a daily basis.  I now know how to create formulas on spreadsheets (which means I don’t have to slink to someone in the IT or Maths department to help me) and now know how I can make myself look slimmer in photoshop.  Ok, it does now mean I will be able to send my photographs via email in decent size and I may finally be able to use photoshop to create my pages for the Yearbook – goodbye Comic Life, Hello professional looking photoshop pages.  I am so going to wow my best friend at school who  is in charge of the Yearbook and regularly giggles at my appallingly bad yearbook pages.  Bring it on

I’m breathing a sigh of relief as my Web 2.0 presentation is now over. Was a little worried as all three tools I had never used before but surprised myself by how much I had learnt in a short time. Sadly, my blog seemed to be missing a couple of things but technology, like humans, is not always reliable. I would also like to thank all those of you who presented today as I discovered an exciting new range of tools.

Being introduced to such a multitude of possible Web 2.0 tools, has really made me reflect today on how as an administrator, it is so important to ensure that a vertically and horizontally articulated curriculum is implemented with the school, especially for ICT. The plethora of tools that I have been introduced too over the past few days has sent my head spinning and my mind boggles with a multitude of questions. Some of which are: How would the introduction of so many tools affect a student? Is it better to structure the number of tools and the age level to which the students are exposed to or does it matter how many and how often they are exposed to new tools? These questions I am going to ponder over the course of the next few days.

With so many Web tools available, it is essential to share my knowledge and experiences with staff at my school and also provide the opportunity for other teachers to share their digital resources and knowledge. Working with the ICT Integrator next year, I plan to set up a blog or wiki for teachers and students at the school as a library to aid them when looking for tools for learning and teaching. Thanks to all of you on the course, I already have an extensive list of new tools for the staff at Dulwich College Shanghai.

For all you busy people, today I discovered a way to keep track of new initiatives being posted on useful blogs and websites via RSS feed.  RSS allows you to gain a summary of any changes or new postings on a webpage, Wiki or Blog.

For all Apple Mac users, I strongly suggest signing up for Mac Mail.  I have had this software on my computer for years and have just ignored it, as I thought, why do I need another email account, I have 5 already.  However, Mac Mail allows me to maintain all my current email identities but will collate all emails from each account, store them so they can be read and searched for offline and allows you to set up an RSS feed.  Hopefully, it will make your life easier as you won’t need to log into all your email accounts.  How many other really useful tools do I have on my Apple Macbook that I have no clue about?

Another application to download is Instapaper.  For all you busy people, Instapaper enables webpages to be easily captured in seconds and can be saved to be read offline later not only on your computer but your iPad and iPhone.

The frustrations of adpating documents that are only in PDF format is now here.  Go to Zamzar and your document can be transformed into a word document that you can edit.  You can also convert lots of files and download videos by pasting in the URL.

I am hoping these tools above will help me to keep abreast of new initiatives, developments and news.

Today I discovered a range of useful tools that can be used by administrators.  Three that I felt would be extremely useful were:

GoogleDocs: A powerful tool for creating, sharing and accessing documents online.  Google Docs allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys and much more.  Any school should seriously consider implementing Google Docs to support collaborative planning and curriculum documentation.  Unfortunately, the frustrating element is that access to Google is limited in China and this restricts the use of these tools within my school.  However, I am glad to add it to my toolbox for when I move on.

Doodle: A very effective and easy tool to use that supports scheduling.  As an administrator it is so frustrating having to send bulk emails and reply all when organising meetings.  Doodle will help take away the pain of scheduling, as it aids in meeting scheduling by enabling you to create an easy survey that you can send out to everyone and then by them simply filling in the survey, it will transmit the information and place it is an easy to read table format, allowing you to easily determine the optimum meeting time.  I can’t wait to use Doodle next term, as it might mean less emails in all our inboxes.

OpenOffice: An alternative to Microsoft office and is free.  Based online, it provides a great and much cheaper alternative than installing Microsoft on each computer, plus it is online and can allow access to all your documents from anywhere in the world.  The downside is, if your school does not have a reliable Internet connection, then this could be a real hinderance.  I am going to give it a go back in Shanghai and keep my fingers crossed that it will work.

I am still amazed and in awe of the power of digital storytelling.  There is a range of software programmes that can be used by students to create digital stories but one that struck me as really easy to use was Storybird.  Digital storytelling will transform education in the future and am excited to share and utilise this software with my staff and students in August.

However, although my knowledge of the Cloud and the software available for educational purposes increases, my greatest weakness continues to raise it’s ugly head, my inability to effectively search and navigate the Internet.  I spend way too much time surfing the web looking for appropriate and useful websites and software programmes.  This is an area I need to become more tech savvy, narrowing my searches so that I can effectively and easily find websites relating to my needs.  Anyone have any idea of how I can get better at this?  Is it about knowing how to use search engines effectively?  If you have any tips, videos or ideas that can help me improve, send them my way.

Of the numerous IT courses I have been on, this class has to be the first that I am going to leave, with not only having gained greater knowledge and understanding but a huge amount of practical tools, ideas and software, that I not only can use but share with the staff at my school. So often IT seminars or conferences for educators are designed more for the techies in school and teachers often leave wondering about the practicalities and with questions on how can this transform their teaching and the learning experience for their students. My advice to all educators out there…..take this class.

Today I found out some answers to the many questions I have had over the past few days:
Creating safe environments for blogging: it is possible to limit access to any blog that you set up by adding a username and password.
Finding free software: there are a number of sites that allow you to discover and then explore the free software for educational purposes (links on my software page).

I have also learnt that blogging is more than simply posting your daily thoughts and sharing information. You can embed video and even set up video chats to your blogs. I have no idea what else I am going to discover about blogging over the course of the week but I am eager to learn more.

Although we explored hardware and how to compare and purchase for personal or educational use, I think I am going to leave this area for the IT Directors in my school. At least I have more of an idea about what they are talking about when comparing different hardware, I still feel my knowledge is limited. However, I am keen to pass on my discovery of the Chromobook which could be a wonderful alternative to laptops within a school. The one problem my school faces is its location. Being located in China greatly hinders access to new technology and software. The constant debate in school is whether the school purchases a VPN or whether we abide by the laws of the country, which states that VPN’s are illegal. On one hand, access to the internet and free educational software seriously enhances the learning environment for our students but then on the other hand is the ethical issue and the expectation to model appropriate ethical behaviour. As an educator, how do you make the right decision? What is the right decision?

Just a reminder to you all out there, that when anything is posted on the internet, even if you delete it, it will remain and can be retrieved.  You will always leave a digital footprint.  We must ensure that everyone in our community is aware of this.  A great website to demonstrate the digital footprint: Webarchive.  Take a look and explore, you will be shocked and it will raise your awareness so that you stop and think before you post.

Today we worked on developing our blogging skills on WordPress.  Blogging is certainly a neat tool for communication and collaboration and there are many ways that it could effectively improve communication within school amongst the parent, teacher and student community.  As most of our students blog daily and their skills are way more advanced in this area than mine, I wonder why in some schools, we are not advancing with them and using blogging as a tool for collaborative learning.  I guess that fear still remains for some of us that if our students are blogging in class, will they be focused on the class blog or will the temptation to instant message their friends be greater?  How do you control and keep the students on task or do you?

One of the fears that I have about blogging, is how do you ensure that the students post comments that are appropriate and constructive in nature?  How do you monitor their posts and blogs and ensure that this tool is using in a productive and collaborative way?  The internet is so open, that as educators, one of our roles is to ensure that our students are safe and secure within their learning environments and this is as much true on the internet as it is within the physical environment of our classrooms.  This truly highlights how important it is for schools to ensure that internet safety, appropriate communication and digital citizenship are areas that we need to highlight not only in our PSHCE classrooms but also within our individual classrooms on a daily basis.

This class seems to constantly raise more questions and hopefully, I will have more answers as the course progresses!