I’ve mentioned the photography club before haven’t I? Well - I help run the photography club at school. I call it a photography club because we go around taking photos. Which is fun. But I don’t manage to teach the children much about taking good pictures. We tend to just cover the basics.
Anyway. I overheard one of the members of the club chatting away to his group while they were transferring the pictures from the camera to the PC. The boy was using his own camera and he said “Oh - I forgot about that picture. I took it with my phone and then transferred it to my camera so I could bring it in.” Just a passing comment. He thought nothing of it.
How many teaching staff would have been able to say that? It kind of goes a bit of the way to demonstrate how different things are now. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying all the staff at a school should be able to do that. I’m not suggesting we run loads of staff meetings on bluetooth and the latest mobile handset. But it is important that we think about these things. I need a better idea of what the children in my class are capable of and what they actually enjoy doing.
On Thursday this week I think I am doing a staff meeting. As I am the ICT Co-ordinator I will be doing the staff meeting on ICT. They wouldn’t let me talk about anything else. As part of the meeting I am thinking about looking at different web 2.0 things to see if the staff at school can come up with any reasons to use them! I am confident discussing blogs, and podcasts etc. So I thought this evening I would spend a bit of time looking into Wikis.
I’ve set a few freebies up to see if I can make any use of them. Some of them claim to be ad free but you have to prove you are a school before they take the adverts off (fair enough!) Wikis are something I am not too familiar with. I know what they are and I use them often enough but I have never written one or been part of one. It will be interesting to see if we can find a reason to use them at school.
The places I have looked so far have been Wikispaces, PBWiki and Wetpaint. Wikispaces is probably better than wetpaint - it’s cleaner and easier to use (so far!) but the ads are really obvious and I don’t know if there is a free way of getting rid of them. Wetpaint is ok though - a bit messy on the layout front but that’s probably to do with the style I have chosen and the fact I haven’t turned the ads off yet. I’ve not played with PBWiki enough yet but it looks ok - clear layout and no ads but you have to pay for most features.
In my quest to find a reason to use blogging / wikis / etc for educational reasons I have stumbled across Common Craft. They make a video animation series called “… in Plain English”. They describe how to do things in, you guessed it, plain English. They are pretty handy. Not so much for my quest to use this all to teach the kids in my class but a useful place to send people who are new to this kind of thing. The following one is an example - it’s about blogs. And it’s in plain English!
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