Screen Jelly – record your screen from your browser.

This would be very handy for our students to quickly and easily record themselves and share their work. Can see great potential for learning languages online.

Learning Languages Taster Classes

As part of the VLN Primary initiative i am working on, i run ‘Taster Classes’ to showcase to schools who want to know more about our project. I also run this class with students who are enrolled with us before they begin their language classes to prepare them for learning online. We cover such things as learning to use our online learning tools – the Adobe Connect classroom, our audio connection, and Moodle site. We also learn about effective ways of communicating with each other online and talk about the benefits of learning languages also.

I had a great session with the students from Auroa School today to prepare them to join their Spanish & German classes. If you are interested in you and your students attending a Taster Class, and interested in joining the VLN Primary initiative contact me :-)

 

Hawera High School Online with the VLN

Hawera High School had their first VC class today. Here two students chat with their Physics teacher from Te Kura.  We are using Polycom PVX software and a logitech camera and the quality is pretty good. We do also have a polycom microphone and speaker set but this has been causing feedback with the speakers on the camera so still need to work out how to resolve this. You shouldn’t need to have expensive equipment to be able to hook into online classes. The challenge to come will be for teachers who are used to the functionality of zooming in on whiteboards, using document cameras or sharing their laptop through VC – desktop VC doesn’t provide the same ability because of the limitations of the camera. Surely then the answer looking forward to having access to high speed connections will be using webcams in Adobe Connect to provide a more interactive learning experience for both student and teacher.

TaraNet Students Rate their Online Learning

 

Half or our students think that learning online is just as good as face to face. While the other nearly half think that it is better than Correspondence. A big tick for the VLN :-)

Interesting to note too that one of the biggest challenges our students face with their online learning is the quality of their school internet connection – roll on UFB (ultra fast broadband)!

Truly Remarkable – NZPF Conference Queenstown

I have spent the day at conference today to share the message of the Virtual Learning Network (VLN) Primary/Intermediate initiative. Unfortunately when it came time to give my elevator speech my technology failed and i couldn’t get my presentation to run – aaagghhh! Anyway below is the presentation. Schools who are interested in finding out more and participating in this initiative should contact me. We are really keen to involve new schools who are wanting to collaborate with other schools to extend learning opportunities for their students through online learning. We have room for new enrolments next term in our German & our Te Reo classes, possibly a new Spanish class starting up also. Keen also to hear from any teachers, language teachers even more so, who want to learn to be online teachers and offer a class to other schools.

Truly remarkable nzpf_vln_presentation

View more presentations from first last.