Myebook - Redon Brittany

Myebook - Redon Brittany

Books are everywhere

I wandered through the suggested ebook links and found a few things that caught my eye.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

https://www.eff.org/pages/blue-ribbon-campaign

http://fiction.eserver.org/novels/

I'm not much of a writer and most of what I write is work related I like writing but you seriously have to take time to do it and I don't have alot. Notwithstanding my paucity, I did upload a couple of docs to Scribd and I'm thinking about having a go at the Scravel writing when we go to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in Sept-Oct.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98776324
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98777110

I liked this photobook I found on myebook

and decided to have ago at doing one of my own using photos from a trip to France last year. It's  not that hard to do and there are all sorts of bells and whistles to add if you have time. It takes forever for the book to publish but I guess that's because I used images that were high up in the pixellation scale or maybe I'm just talking absolute rubbish but I do know the camera was set on a fairly high level because point and click is about my level of photographic expertise. I digress......the sites I looked at were pretty easy to navigate. One thing that is common to just about everything is Facebook: ubiquitous, omnipresent and exigent. I might have to set up an account.......raises issues for teachers.

Here's the book

OR try

http://www.eanswer.co.uk/index.php?option=ebook&id=135244

<a href="http://www.eanswer.co.uk/index.php?option=ebook&id=135244" target="blank"><img src="http://www.eanswer.co.uk//assets/frontend_file/embed_image/ebook_id/135244.png" border="0" alt="Myebook - Redon Brittany - click here to open my ebook" /></a>

Teachers Guide on The Use of Graphic Organizers in The Classroom

Teachers Guide on The Use of Graphic Organizers in The Classroom

Condense the sense

Waiting for an invite from strawberry but have created a news paper and embedded it on a new page in this blog. At this stage I'll just have a weekly paper and I can probably stop buying The Australian on saturdays- it is a woeful, prejudiced and opinionated rag! Actually,  there was one article I found interesting about collaborative consumerism which reported the work of Rachel Botsman. Its all about how social media is allowing people to share resources like homes, offices, cars rather than just owning everything outright- bit of a new take on our relationship to the means and forces of production. I think I'm going have a look on twitter too.

I did not find TopicMarks comfortable to use and it was frustrating trying tp think of links etc to put in but I did find newsorganiser http://www.newsorganizer.com/ useful and i put its rss feed into wibbitz

Also I came across the peeplo search engine http://au.peeplo.com/ wich searches through blogs and domains too and it has a widget to enable sharing social media.

Progress

My students are beginning to use prezi.com:

Chinese Assignment on Prezi

Chinese Assignment on Prezi

Search Engines.....

Kngine proved to be a bit of a dud as they must have moved it from an online thing to a mobile app thing so all I could get was the advert for downloading the app to the iphone which in my case is a work one and I need some code that I don't have because basically these downloads cost heaps apparently. I liked the little video and tweeted it. Anyway, I have never been able to download an app; what's on the phone is what i have. So maybe I need a personal mobile....? Anyway I continued with my search terms "learning Chinese pedagogy". First I checked out Twurdy and saved to Diigo and also used bit.ly. Through Twurdy, here is an article I found from another search engine, for free articles, www.articlebase.com . I wasn't keen on Blekko as it tended to throw up commercial textbooks, software or institutions but I did like this media article: Found this general article about
growth of Chinese

:

View Chinese as a foreign language and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.
The Dewey Digger and the Wolfram Alpha weren't super helpful for the topic I was focusing on although i did find an interesting article on ERIC through D/digger: Found this from a Podobook on podcastco from Big Shed audio documentaries. it has nothing to do with Chinese but it caught my attention!

I'm not certain which engines are best: I think it depends on purpose but Twurdy and Blekko are probably better for more specific inquiries unless your looking for journals/articles/books which might be more suited to ERIC and other such archives.

Had a look for some other engines and came across http://www.mamma.com/  and located this opinion piece about learning Chinese and yes there is a reference to pedagogy.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10295 

Following on the Cow theme

Photo tools

Here's one from Zoom.it

And also one I did on Be Funky

Novitiation: China- Jinan Foreign Language School

Novitiation: China- Jinan Foreign Language School:  Visited Jinan last December and signed a sister school agreement. The school was very hospitable and really happening place with lots of very engaged teachers and students. Next stage is to get an exchange going. Picasa has helped me share some photos.

China- Jinan Foreign Language School

 

Sourcing audio-visual material

What riches! A wealth of material but mostly to do with English, Maths, Sciences, Social Sciences. There are incidentally organised materials for languages but a lot is sourced from commercial producers or generated by individuals. I looked at Chinese language material and it was not inspiring but I guess its how you adapt and use it. One thing that would be useful is explanations about how [a] language works e.g. the metalcognition around how to learn it so that students have a resource that say shows them how to structure a sentence. One thing I find really curious in a lot of Chinese didactic video for listening and speaking is the constant emphasis on Chinese script which is actually to do with reading and writing so its not actually helpful- people don't speak in Chinese characters!!
I found this little clip quite interesting from a language point of view though the interview style is a bit static but it is not too long:

 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wnvrZpcOosU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I also enjoyed this TEd talk on English and the opportunities to flip the lesson:

This also got me thinking about the fact that the resources deal a lot with the English language: it all assumes that English is all there is so this Patricia Ryan talk was pretty interesting, especially when I think about the 58 non-English speaking background International students we have let alone all the other local NESB students and what they bring to education:
http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ryan_ideas_in_all_languages_not_just_english.html

I like the tools that these sites provide for developing ideas and contributing to a community of teachers. In order to do this more it will involve rethinking my work: there is going to be more time in selection and preparation and less emphasis on classwroom delivery. This is where the Flipped Teaching mode is attractive. I think students do benefit from active facilitation through an activity in contrast to active pre-instruction followed by "independent" assignments whether in groups or otherwise. There are big questions here about how teachers work is structured.

Using these various sites seems to solve the copyright problem as the rights for use are clearly specified so that sort of allays my earlier concern. And I think I'm at the end of the space!!

Presentations

Ok, I started off with looking at Pinterest then got completely distracted and spent quite a while looking for ancient India pictures to pin on a board. That went ok and I repinned someone else's picture and shared one of mine in a tweet.

PREZI and SLIDEROCKET are pretty powerful software and I think I'd use both of them. I found sliderocket more straightforward and easier to manipulate but I was a bit frustrated in not being able to work out how to change layout and fonts for the whole slides. Prezi provided a lot of options for movement and pathways and I found it a bit tricky to set it up. You have to think in 3d while looking at a 2d screen. I would also encourage my students to use these for presenting their own work and collaborating with others. My year 8s have just started a film study and I think these tools will motivate them-------more fun than just writing a straight text.

Rather than starting from scratch, I imported some old presentations and fiddled around with them a bit. I did import an image and youtube into Sliderocket....hope this doesn't breach copyright, which seems pretty complex these days.

http://prezi.com/b9iioh4221hm/scaffolding-how-to-learn-chinese-script/

http://portal.sliderocket.com/BXGEP/Engaging-learners-in-the-classroom

Diigo

Well.........I had some trouble getting beond the first page but eventually managed to save a website into the library- not quite sure how. After thsi i quite enjoyed fiddling around and creating a list and a group. There is an amazing amount of stuff you can look for and tap into if you want. I even tweeted something i liked. I would like to spend a bit more time with this but it might have to wait till next week when things at work settle down. Social media, web 2.0 are fun and there are so many connections but our work lives are so linear at school and so are our work environments: they are more like the C19 the C21. What we need is time and this would mean that the nature of ou.r work would have to be reconceptualised outside the current formula of x.teachers: y.students @ z.contact time. Yes yes I know that the budget controls all but these are just choices. teachers need time and space to really engage new technologies and embed them in practice. I guess incremental change is best: one thing at a time.

Social networking: tweeting

Hmmm...not sure if I'm keen on this yet but let's see what happens over the week. I have picked a range of things/people to follow and tried a few tweets including links using bit.ly.
Its a diffferent idea, just launching what you think into the internet or responding to people you don't know and I'm not quite comfortable with it: mostly i just ring/email or talk to people I know about what i think. I found the idea of tracking and analyzing tweets and bit.ly links as a sort of adjunct to marketing yourself quite remarkable and I can see its usefulness to public figures and companies to gauge penetration and response. Next thing, we'll find that its going to be part of performance appraisal!!
I am waiting for Pinterest to send me the link to register and I'll try to have a play with that.
I have added another gadget and I find that I lack finesse in editing the layout to get things to fit neatly so practice is needed.

Gadgets

Google news was pretty straight forward and I liked being able to adjust sources of content. Google reader irked me a abit because when yopu search you get a lot of stuff you don't want i.e. blogs that actually don't have much to do with what you are after but have one word e.g. 'Byzantine' meant ended up with heaps of uninteresting stuff but I did learn how to unsubscribe as a result!! I created an iGoogle page and added some content such as humour, news and weather. I have started to organise my documents into Google docs and have shared a couple of docs as a test of how it happens. Next week. I'll have a go at adding a picasa or flickr gadget. I couldnt set up a flickr account with the google sign in and i seem to remember a picasa account somewhere but the sign in details are probably history. Its anmazing how the time passes. I got going at about 8am and now its nearly 11! Its personally stimulating but I can wonder if using some gadgets at school will be blocked by the Education Department e.g can't access youtube online.

What I love.

Tried the Google What Do You Love search for British Archaeology and came up with 21 different things! What I love is that there's just so much, I can get it and I am not waiting for something to come on ABC or SBS tv.

In the beginning..........

I have made a rudimentary blog once before but I had forgotten about it. In fact I reckon I've forgotten more than I have learned. I have used wikis too and signed up for some educational ones. With the wiki I used - technolote- it seemed like a collection of blogs on a common theme with an administrator whereas a blog is just a personal thing that others can add comments to.

I have had a go at moodle too but the trouble with these things is time and that the technology works when you want it to! I am hoping that this course means that what I am learning will stick more because I am learning by doing. This should help me to develop skills and ideas about how to use the Web 2.0 tools to actually teach. Its one thing to know about it and another to be able to actively use it. This is going to be especially important as the school moves more completely to an online learner managment system- Daymap.