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

Flickifying Art History @ Waitara

I spent some time with Ceri our VC Art History teacher at Waitara High School today. I had a mission before i went that i just had to hook her into using Flickr with her eLearning class. Mission accomplished i think - will have to go back in a couple of weeks and see how they are going. Ceri was very enthusiastic about how she could use this - the ability to collect favourites, annote areas of images, describe & discuss them with her students. A virtual tour through Italy possibly as i showed her how to geotag photos with the Arena Chapel in Padua - she's going away now to find out the address so she can pin it down to the exact street location :-) Though Ceri would not have done this on her own as the flickr sign up process via Yahoo ID was a mission in itself for your average teacher. So my being there really got her through the hard part - the rest will be fun :-)

Media Team Prepares 4 the Jubilee

Today we got the whole Media Team together to prepare for SPS Jubilee coming up on Queen's Birthday weekend. It was great to have kids working together tuakana/teina - we should make more opportunities to do this in our schools. They have begun preparing Decade presentations using our flickr photos. Though i can't work out why for some photos we can't download our own pictures & just end up with an empty image - spaceball.gif - this is really annoying. We have all the photos on our own server but its easier to find them from flickr. They also learnt how to optimise their images, upload them to flickr and to make a blog entry too. Over Jubilee Weekend we plan to be uploading pics, audio & short video clips as we go so those who can't be with us can be part of the celebrations - it would be great to get some comments from ex-pupils on the Jubilee Blogspot.

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 :-)

Jubilee Junkie

Every spare minute of my time (and lots of minutes that aren't spare) have been spent in preparing for our school jubilee. It's been really interesting to be given lots of old school photos from people in our community, scanning them & loading them to our Jubilee flickr site. Memories have been shared on our Jubilee blogspot. All of these will become our "Digital Time Capsule" (Thanks Kelvin :-) - the 21st Century version of burying old newspapers to be dug up 50 years later. Our Time Capsule will be easily accessible for anyone with an internet connection for a long time to come. I have begun to pull together a Jubilee Media team of students from Stratford Primary School & Stratford High School to document the events of Jubilee weekend, taking lots of pictures, short video & audio to be shared in our Time Capsule. This team will also prepare the multimedia presentations that will be on display, along with presentations from SPS classes, throughout the Jubilee. Presentations no longer need to be PowerPoints. With Flash Slideshow Maker you can easily put together presentations and display as a flash movie. Here's an example. Another tool i found was Flash Flipping Book which i used to display a very old handwritten book which really needed to be displayed in it's original book format. (Not sure if this one runs all the way through properly as it is hosted on the School Zone network & it wouldn't upload some supporting files)

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 ;-)

Lets Hit the Beach......

It was too nice a day to be at school today & apart from Tania and I continually pleading to take all the kids to the beach we instead sat down in different parts of the school and Skyped each other. So Marco School is ready to roll with Skype & waiting for Pitt Island to have their internet connection fixed so we can continue the conversation from a few weeks ago. Come on ICONZ get it fixed! Did you know if you are a school with the ICONZ internet satellite service and wanting to webconference you can contact ICONZ (with 24 hours notice) and have your bandwidth boosted for the day. That was news to me, even having worked with these schools for the last 4 years! If there are any schools who would like to make a skype connection with Marco please contact me or Jen to organise something.
Today I also helped Jen set up a flickr account for Marco School and set up juploader to make it really easy for her to resize and upload their photos in one hit. Next time i go back i will show her some of the cool tools you can use with your flickr account. Marco School is here on flickr.
Another thing i have been trying to do & just this minute worked it out, is accessing their school server remotely. All i need to do is put in their Static IP address, system administrator user name & password and i'm in. What i'd like to know how to do now is to manage the desktops off the server remotely so i can do some PD at a distance. Any advice on remote control of desktops in the smartnet server environment would be appreciated :-)
We achieved lots @ Marco today but still it was a better day to be @ the beach....

Mobile Flickr

A request from Brent:
"rachel... you're not sending those pics straight from your phone to your Flickr account are you, like remotely? I'd love to be able to do that... so if you've figured that one out (from NZ) please post :-)"

Yes you can get your pics straight from your phone into Flickr. Moblogging isn't very streamlined here yet - unless someone knows how let me know.
You can get your pic to appear straight to Flickr but any comments or description you pxt with it doesn't appear & you get a link back to the Xtra photo album page. I don't know if this is the case with Vodaphone. I have tried sending pics straight to the blog thru both Telecom & Vodaphone & all you get is a redirection message & no pic. So it is a two step process if i want to blog the photo i sent to flickr then i have to go into flickr & send it from there with all the comments, tags etc i want to write. The potential for moblogging with our kids - field trips, school camps etc would be so awesome if only it worked a little better. No need for internet or computers - just a cell phone & of course depending where u are cell phone coverage...
Some links on how to do it on my Flickr wiki - let me know if you learn anything new :-)

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.

Flickr Blog

You have received a Telecom Photo/Video Message
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Blogging straight from Flickr.
This image uploaded from my phone to flickr.
Sign outside O'Donaghues Stratford after shots were fired in Malones the bar next door the night before. This is hugely not like Stratford - not really the Wild West here...

Bubblr

Having a little play with Bubblr as i get together a Flickr workshop for L@S next week.

Connected Spaces

It's amazing how quickly an idea grows in the blogosphere - is that what they mean by 'viral' If it is i guess i've caught it too. Ewan in his lunch time boredom suggested that other edubloggers flickr a pic of their office space (its sad to be on your computer @ lunchtime... tho i am guilty too) & me, who have got a million other things to do but is easily distracted went over for a look & to join in. A full 360 degree view of my 'official workplace office (which i don't even know yet if it still is my office) can be seen here. Made with Panorama Composer.

Stratford Primary School Jubilee 2007

Have been a little distracted from the blog of late with a few other things going on right now. One of them has been taking over as Secretary of the SPS Jubilee Committee. Mug me? No I wanted to do it! Having been here since i walked through the door at 5 years old - with a few extended breaks in-between of course :-)
So I have taken over updating the Jubilee page and created an online form for registration - which wasn' t too much of a learning curve as SchoolZone has a few templates for forms (so if you are a SchoolZone school you will find the templates in the SINA web tools section - download them and change the details - upload it to your site & voila it works - i don't know how...). I also set up a Flickr page and uploaded all the schools archived photos going back to the year dot. Not forgetting the other important thing that Secretary's are supposed to do - keep the minutes! I thought that i would set up a Wiki to share all our organising documents and so others can access & work on the files (may be important later on when Lynn gets flooded with registrations and needs an extra hand) Well maybe - if there's a need.

Almost as Good as Being There?

It's really hard quite often to get alongside teachers in the classroom to work on ICT rich activities with them & with their kids, and even when you get the opportunity it can often be a 'one-off' & nothing else happens till you return weeks later... So how to make it as easy as possible?? Here's another idea - work with the kids - then you get someone in the classroom who has an idea what to do (even if they are only 5 or 6 years old ;-) and also these kids have the drive, the enthusiasm and the expectation. Then bring the teachers on board - develop the curriculum planning, create very detailed instructions - printed & digital and make sure that the gear they need in the classroom works. Well I couldn't do anymore - it's all delivered on a plate. It will be interesting to go back to these classes in a week or two and see if the work i did with the kids has carried on into the classroom (or what will the excuse be this time?)

So this week at SPS i will have worked with kids from every class in the school - phew what a hectic schedule. A different focus for each syndicate - KidPix Chocolate Cakes in the Junior School, Flickr Colour Stories in the Middle Syndicate, Web Pages with Jen's kids, & soon Inspiration as a Research planning tool with the Senior kids. Detailed planning, printable 'How To' instructions with lots of screen shots and I spent a good part of today playing with CamStudio creating little 'How To' videos (Almost as good as me being there) - Phew...

But even with all of this i know i am working backwards - i need time to plan with teachers to do something they want to do, that fits in with their kids learning - where they are - and then I'd feel really happy about all this stuff I've been doing with the kids the last few days.
Though now i can see where the feeling to want to 'shoot the wounded' comes from! ;-)