Teaching Under the Microscope

Another session with Rangiroa at Opunake today. His VC class has really highlighted to me the demands we place on our eteachers as they 'teach under the microscope'. Everyday class dynamics such as mixed abilities, student & whanau expectations, even behavioural management are all amplified in an elearning environment. Teachers have to be quick to adapt to new technologies, extend and adapt their learning resources & teaching strategies, and be on the ball with communication with a widely dispersed group of people. It is not an easy feat to balance with the face to face demands of a busy school life. I guess what would make this challenge worthwhile is that we can make a difference for our students who would not otherwise have this learning opportunity and that along the way we are developing as teaching professionals to the benefit of all our students.

It was good to see Mark having a go at developing a Protopage site to showcase student work in the technology faculty. Check it out.

When Web 1.0 Meets Web 2.0

Another thing thats been taking a huugggeeee amount of my time is the redevelopment of our website. It is still a traditional Web 1.0 site in it's purpose, design, structure & hosting but throughout the site elements of Web 2.0 have been utilized. These definitely make it more dynamic & I think interesting. It also opens up the potential for greater interaction with the school community and beyond through these cool little tools - depending on how they are managed by the school... Examples are the photogallery (a flickr site), www.librarything.com integrated into our Information Centre page, and the Sitemeter, Geovisitor & Measle Maps you can see on our front page. I won't make any links here to those things - please go and visit our site and explore them for yourself :-) Another cool thing coming up on the site will be the links into the classroom sites made on protopage. I was totally blown away when i checked back into Room 1's site - a great benchmark for our other classrooms - check it out.
These are just a few tools that we can use to Connect, Communicate, Create & Collaborate through our school website. If you want to read more about Web 2.0 Harnessing the Potential for schools please read my article (any feedback welcome :-)

Pitt Protopage

The kids at Pitt Island School have been playing with Protopage to make their own webpages today. By the time i had made this little movie tutorial they had worked out how to use it - Easy Peasy. They are just starting out but check into their website to see what they are up to :-)

Take Back your School Website!

Kids at St Joseph's are starting to take over their own class web pages. We have been exploring Protopage & here is an example from Room 8. OK, so still a little to learn about categories, tabs & widgets but they are getting there... Very cool tool & easy to use. They also started their class flickr accounts so it would be really good to work out how to get some of those cool flickr toys like bubblr into their protopage. Hhmmmm lots more play-time needed ;-)