Thursday, June 16, 2011

Things to Learn - Vid

Here's a great vid - by Matt Edgar. Some very cool messages. Now I'm wondering how we can use this as a model for our class to communicate something they've learned...

things to learn from Matt Edgar on Vimeo.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Sharing with no one...

This term's focus has been to get our efolios up and running. I've decided to use the edublogs platform this year which is a shift away from my favoured use of blogger. Here are three reasons I want to give edublogs a trial;

1. A clean, attractive interface for readers and users

2. The option to add a password to individual posts (great for assessment details, sensitive information and privacy focused students and family)

3. Nicely worked comments that can show up as threads under a post. Excellent for students answering questions in their comments.

Empty hall

It's the last possibility that I'm most excited about. Yesterday we talked about one of the reasons for having a blog at school - the possibility to share with an audience. I used the analogy of giving a speech to an empty assembly hall and they seemed to understand that vividly.

The image on the right shows how the comments
can quickly become a conversation that is both powerful and engaging - that's the potential, anyway. You can see how to activate this feature here.

Our major 'workon' this week has been to create better comments. We've used this poster I made to help scaffold our comments and there has been an improvement in them. Feel free to download the poster using the download button, bottom right.






'Threaded comments' image source above - writeoutloud.edublogs.org