Happy Birthday Bardwired - 10 Years Old Today!

Wow what a milestone, I am feeling old today as my baby hits double digits!

I was introduced to blogging by Richard & his students at Matau School & thought this would be a great way to keep schools in touch with what was going on around the Bardwired ICTPD cluster. Sure beats stuffy reports to Principals' once a month. It has been quite a journey over that time, with many highlights and in the last couple of years quiet patches too. My first post was a very factual account, in fact a list, of what i did at work that day...i think it only got better after that.

To start with it was text only, you had to have some working knowledge of  html to make anything else happen. Pictures weren't easy and it was four months before any images appeared on my pages.

Flickr arrived early in 2005 and that was the beginning of my love for Flickr. That was also the time i began to use hyperlinks but it was still awhile until hyperlinks became part of my deliberate writing style. My writing here waned when blogging became a professional requirement for my two other roles with the VLN Primary & VPLD; Twitter & Facebook also took over my attention. As with any pride & joy there are special milestones & highlights - here are a few of mine.

Here are some of my babies milestones:

First podcasts May 2006 - Prensky@School Marc Prensky's keynote from Learning@School
First video May 2006 on Vimeo - Kidz & Kitez @ Makahu,
First flash animation - Christmas 2006
First friends -  Tom & Graham - when i learnt that blogging is about conversations and learning together
First blog post from my phone - moblogging February 2007
First Youtube video embeds TUANZ 2007
First embedded slideshow - Around te Maunga May 2007
First avatar - Meez May 2007
First Panorama - Panoramic Pitt August 2007
First slap on the wrist for this post May 2009

Highlights:

Where Are We Going??????? - 2005 thoughts about Google
Connecting with others - Edubloggers Offices Photostream
Starting nzedublogs with Jedd
Life changing highlight - getting to know my darling Rick
Time 4 Online Conference
Dead Cats & Laptops - most interesting/gross picture
Helping Bruce update his blog
Connecting with others - 8 random facts meme (great to be reminded of those connections :-)
VLN Primary kicks off at Matapu School
The Future of Education (i just like this post)
Being 'published'
eLearning eBooks (i liked this one too)
N4L consultation  early conversations

Google Books

Check out Google Books. I knew it existed but I had never taken the time to explore it until the day i really needed it. I have been fixing up an article that i have written for the DEANZ Journal of Distance Learning when i came across a reference with no page number ….. and i don’t have the book anymore. A Google search brought me directly to the book – most of which i could read online – complete with page numbers – phew! I have now started my library in Google Books.

 

NIE Quiz Practise

St Joseph's students are practicing for the Newspapers in Education (NIE) Quiz this week. These links are made for them to sharpen up their current events knowledge & see if they have been reading the paper & watching the news on TV :-)

National News

International News

Sports

Entertainment

We will also be looking at and discussing cartoons and finding where in the world our headline news is coming from.

More practice quizzes can be found on the NIE site.

Maps and Memories

My childhood, seen by Google Maps
Originally uploaded by mathowie.

As i prepare my flickr workshop for Learning at School next week i am discovering new cool things. I've been trying to find examples of annotations on flickr pics and turned up this one. There are notes all over the google maps picture that talk about places in the neighbourhood & things that happened when Mat was growing up. "This is where i got hit by a car when i was chasing the icecream truck..."
I am thinking about our Stratford Primary School jubilee coming up soon - it would be great to get a flickr group going of students & old students who could annote maps of the school & the town together - what a story they would make!

Another interesting find is Bloglines now has a feature called Image Wall that pulls in all the photos they have in their system (not just flickr). Definately not for kids as in their words "Curious, funny, challenging, good, bad, and ugly - it's all there." I viewed for a short while & it was very interesting but some of the pics that appeared were more than a bit dodgey (pornagraphic in fact).

I won't blog anymore of this you can see my presentation notes in progress at the Bard Wired wiki site.

Burning it Up @ St Joseph's

Carol & I created a little production line today with the kids in Room 5 burning & labeling CDs with their 2006 School Memories to take home. When sending disks home I try to cover all bases by setting up disks so they autorun to a startpage that has links to the work the kids are sharing & to extra installation files (of every age & description) so that whatever operating system they are using at home they will be able to open the files on the disk. Over the years when kids have taken things home so many of them come back saying they can’t play it on their computer so hopefully by setting up the disks like this we will overcome most of these problems (though I bet not all…)

Room 8 have been investigating the history of St Joseph’s and a small group (including my Sophie) have been making models of the school (old & new) using Google Sketch-Up. We exported these to a 2D graphics file so they could be included in the class presentation. There are so many cool tools around I wish I had more time to play with them and really explore their potential.

St Joseph's Old School

St Joseph's New School

Smart Kids @ Eltham

Smart Boards for Smart kids - let them tell you themselves. It was good to see kids hands on today - a learning tool as opposed to a teaching tool. Here they are constructing sentences on the bbc.co.uk site.
Lots of work going into preparing for the end of year school production - an international theme. Kids are creating presentations of images related to different countries. I helped out a bit with that & have been working at capturing moving images through Google Earth and Cam Studio (software that captures in a movie what is happening on your screen). The movies display on the big screen and will zoom into different places on Google Earth & link the various countries scenes of the production. (Well that's the idea anyway :-)
Here's an example:



Where in the world is Eltham? on Vimeo

Sharon continues to make and use WebQuests - with or without internet access. Without - she calls them PageQuests. Her feedback is that kids who have been through these quests have a greater understanding and recall of their learning long after the event. Hhhmmm active engagement probably key here. You can download these WebQuests from Interact.

St Joseph's World Tour

Room 8 students went on a World Tour in Google Earth to view the countries they had been studying in their Carmen Sandiago unit. They were all very excited: "When are we leaving? When are we coming home?!" Very cool - here's a shot from Google Earth of our place :-)
Students in Michael's Room 9 class are busy constructing their Year Book - compiling video & images (their pics enhanced in interesting ways...) into a shared Movie Maker project. Look forward to viewing their final product - a work in progress so far. Other teachers explored online resources (including TKI digistore learning objects) that support their reading & maths programmes. They have created short cuts in folders on the classroom desktop with appropriate resources. Their challenge is to integrate these activities into their classroom programme so that all students have opportunites to use them & feedback to me in my next school visit on how it's all going. A big learning curve for everybody these last couple of days.