Options for the afternoon

This afternoon I'm keen for us to have the chance to take things that we've found worthwhile for our own classes (or our own lives) and have a go at setting them up for ourselves!

Here's some examples of activities to choose from:

• Setting up your own email group. We'll create a group and add own email addresses so that we can test it out and have it ready to use in class. Or you could even create a group for your year in highschool, or another group of people that you email regularly.
  
• Setting up a blog for class - including linking student blogs to your class blog, and customising the template a bit. If you haven't used a blog much before, then I'd recommend that you first focus on blogging yourself. You could start by writing a post about your experience today!
• Setting up a Basecamp project for you class. Again, I'd recommend creating a one for a home project of your own first so you can have some fun with it first... why not plan that next holiday, or just get your home maintenence todos done!
• Setting up your own Wikispace. Start creating your first wiki-resource for use in class next week. This'll be an activity that even your students can update and improve!
• Setting up your own Bloglines account. Keep up with your students' blogs with ease as well as professional journals from your own area of expertise.

If you're already familiar with the above, or don't find them that interesting, then here's a few more options:

• Create a Google Calendar for your class that you can share with your students. While you're there, why not create a calendar for your own private life that you can share with just your own family members?!
• Setup a del.icio.us account and start adding all your bookmarks so that you can access them from everywhere.
  
• Finding a Librivox recording for use in your next literature class (or just for your own listening pleasure). Why not even volunteer to record a few chapters of a book that you love?!
• Experience Ubuntu Linux on your own computer!
  

I'm hoping that there'll be a few sub-groups who are keen to work on the same activity, so that we can work together and help each other as we go.

Once you've decide on your first activity, make sure you add it to our BaseCamp Todo list so that I can see who's doing what (OK, so it's really just to practise your BaseCamp skills).

Cert IV Web - a case study

Now that we've had a chance to get a feel for a few different tools like email groups, Basecamp, Wikis and Bloglines, we'll take half-an-hour or so to look at a case study of these tools being used in a course.

I'm very aware that not all these tools will be appropriate for all courses, but hopefully an overview of the Cert IV Web Design course at Blue Mountains college will help see how these tools can be used together to provide a flexible approach for study.

Blogging in our classes

Up until this point, we haven't even mentioned using Blogs to communicate with our class.

I'm a bit opinionated on this one: I reckon blogs are a great tool for learning, but it's no use trying to force people to blog themselves. The best thing we can do is model how we use them to learn... and we can only do this if we blog ourselves for our own personal benefit. It does take time... but it can be time well spent (see Gisela's Travels for an example of one learner who learned how to blog while on holidays!)

If you haven't had a chance to create a blog todate, you might want to get started this afternoon with Getting Started with Blogging in Education. But I'm hoping there will be a few active bloggers in our group so we can see a bit about Bloglines and how easy it is to add our students blogs to our class blog! (See the Current Participants list on the right-hand side of this page).

If we've still a bit of time, we can also take a look at a few other handy tools such as del.icio.us, GoogleCalendar, Librivox, Flickr or even Ubuntu Linux.

Creating an Activity with a Wiki

Believe it or not, wikis have been around longer than blogs, but never got much limelight until the rise of Wikipedia, which has become so popular that it's hard (but possible) to have not heard of Wikipedia in 2006.

Wikipedia currently has over 1,200,000 articles in the English version which seems unbelievable (this is nearly 10-times the number of articles in the 2004 version of Encyclopedia Britannica)?! How could the people at Wikipedia possibly write so many articles? If you're waiting for something to do, visit Wikipedia now and see if you can find an article in your area of expertise... we'll talk a bit more about this great resource when we get together!

After chatting briefly about wikis in general, we're going to have some collaborative fun with a wiki of our own! You might have noticed the strange hat and timer in the classroom...

Scenario
You are a communications teacher at a small country college, who's starting to enjoy some of the new tools on the net - but you're definitely not confident with them! You are planning on attending a "Learning with Blogs" seminar in a few weeks, which should be great!

One bright sunny morning, as you're reflecting on the how well you've got your lessons planned for this semester, your boss walks in and says:

Look, you know that blogging seminar that you were planning on going to in a few weeks? Well, the facilitator has pulled out. We've got people from over 200km away coming for the workshop... so, I, ..er, said to the director that you'd be able to run the workshop instead...

After coming to terms with your anxiety, you decide that you'll give it a shot. Thankfully there's a large number of these workshops happening across the state and all the facilitators have agreed to chip in and collaborate on an Activity plan for the workshop. Since you've got a spare 5 or 10 minutes now before your first class for the day, you decide to take a look at current state of the Learning with Blogs activity plan on the wiki and improve it a bit.

Your Task
When the hat is passed to you,

1. go to the Learning with Blogs wiki page and have a brief read.
   
2. Find something that you can add to or improve (or delete!)
3. Click on Edit This Page and improve it!
   

Once you've finished, call me over and we'll have a look at our BaseCamp todo list, find someone who hasn't yet edited the wiki page and assign the task to them! And if you get stuck, don't hesitate to ask a person near you for help!

Getting things done

Most of us have had some involvement with Project Management, and specifically, tracking all the tasks that we have on our plate. In fact, for a lot of us, Project Management is a part of our course that is often, unfortunately, taught in theory with a Project-based assignment.

Why not treat your whole course as one big project? And collaborate with your students (who are all part of the team) towards the goal of learning and demonstrating their skills! We can demonstrate the benefit of time management and project management through participation in our courses...

You may have heard of Getting Things Done (GTD). GTD is a time management method that:

rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks.

(quote from Wikipedia entry on Getting Things Done). Basically, ToDo lists.

I have enough trouble trying to remember all the things that I've got on my plate for work, let alone all the things my students are currently working on, which is why I've grown to love Basecamp. Basecamp allows my students and me to develop and manage our work collaboratively. (Plus it's a professional Project Management tool that's worthwhile learning anyway).

We're going to try it out now by adding our tasks for today to our own ToDo lists! I'll give you a quick tour and then we'll all login to our GettingPractical project on Basecamp and add the following items (and assign them to yourself):

• Introduce myself on email group (even though you can tick this one off straight away!)
• Comment on Michael's blog post about Basecamp,
• Take some time to find out a bit about the person next to you,

If you're anything like me, you've probably got a few things on your mind for when you get home too. Add two or three items of your own that you need to do after todays workshop (e.g. pick up some milk, pick up kids etc, bearing in mind that everyone else in our project can view them!) Have a go at re-ordering your tasks.

Can you imagine how you might be able to use Basecamp to help get something done? (Perhaps planning a renovation, or a trip? Or a project in class?) If you finish updating your todo list, early, comment here and describe how you might be able to use Basecamp.

What's the plan for the day?

Over the past few years, there's been an explosion of free tools on the net, with many that have great applications for us in education! There are too many to choose from, and it's hard for us to know which ones might be useful to us as educators - and worth the significant investment of time.

I'm hoping that through the activities today we'll be ready to use one or two useful tools in our day-to-day lives. In outline, our day will be as follows:

Get our hands dirty (10:30-11:30)
We'll start the day by getting our hands dirty with a number of tools. Not an in-depth review of the different tools, we'll just have a taste of a number of tools as if we were students in a class where they were used. Hopefully this'll also include some practical ideas about how to introduce students to these tools.

We'll be having some fun with:

• Email groups
• ToDo lists for you and your students
  
• Editing a Wiki page
• Using Bloglines with blogs
  
• Depending how keen we are, we might also have a play with Google Calendar, del.icio.us and a few other tools.
  

A real-life example of these tools in action (11:30-12:15)
We'll take a tour of a current course where these tools are being used by students, seeing what works well and discussing some of the dangers to watch out for.

Getting started with one or two tools
After lunch we'll be getting our hands dirty again, but this time, planning and creating our own tools for use in our own classes and lives.

The first thing we'll do is setup our Practical Tools email group to see how easy it is to communicate with our classes (or friends!).

Getting practical with Web 2 Tools

Welcome to Getting practical with Web 2 Tools!

Hopefully you're here because you read the description of this workshop on the NSWLearnscope August 3 Workshops:

After integrating Blogs, Wikis and other social tools for a course delivery over the past 2 years, I've made tons of mistakes and discovered a few real gems! Come along, learn from my mistakes and get practical as we go about integrating a few useful Web 2.0 tools into our current practise. We'll see some concrete examples of Web 2.0 tools being used in a current course delivery, as well as have plenty of time to work together to integrate one or two chosen tools into our own practise.

In a moment we'll take an overview of the day, but to get us started with a discussion (and perhaps to wait for stragglers!), here's a question:

Can you identify any pros/cons of learning and using tools that benefit us in our work as educators as well as in our own personal lives?

Take a few minutes to read Learning Tools for Life (Hint: if you click with the right-mouse-button on the link, you can open it up in a new window). If the discussion there interests you, leave a comment with your own thoughts!