How? What?

David Wann

Posted by email from Brian’s posterous

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I hate writing. Why the hell would I blog? Trust me, I’ve got a syndrome, with the fringe benefits of learning problems. It takes days to write a simple little post. So why blog? It’s freaky! As hard as it is, with blogging I’m enjoying the writing process.

It’s a bit late, but this is supposed to be an introduction. I’m not promising anything but I hope to cover a series of topics. People’s comments are generating incentives for more posts. Both Chad & Jabiz comments, are spurring new thinking about recruiting. I’ll write a piece sharing my opinions on international schools review, Skype, and blogging. In it, I’ll ponder questions around the Recruiting 2.0 concept.

Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Board is an impressive demonstration of cheap education technology. We’ll be experimenting with it. Hopefully it works but if it’s doesn’t, you’ll learn about the failures.

We’re also throwing twitter at everything in our school and seeing where it sticks. This will be a long term project, in the mean time our updates will be tweeted.

Still need to do my reflection piece from last week’s workshop, I’ve got plenty of material, just need to compile and post it.

The task will be keeping an up-to-date blog. Over time, I’m sure I’ll learn short cuts, maybe I’ll skip this writing process and move right to podcasting. Soon enough we’ll discover the results. Until then all the best.

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Ever since attending Alan November’s conference in Boston, I’ve been struggling with his vision. Are International Schools capable of accomplishing his bold blogging goals?

Last week Andrew Torris’s posted a question asking “Can a school leaders be “real” bloggers??” Could they? I wondered, and I emailed his post to our Senior Leadership Team. Very quickly I heard back, they wanted to know: why and what void does blogging fill? Instead of sweating over an answer, I thought let’s use the power of commenting and posted these questions to Andrew’s blog.

Less then a day later Andrew posted a response “Why is it important for school leaders to blog?” Our SLT had their answers and this time we hooked one. Wow! it worked, he really wanted to do this. Pondering wasn’t an option, we kept it simple emailing two free blogging choices wordpress.com or edublogs.org

Two days ago I receive this email from our Deputy Head Master announcing his blog. I’m puzzled, it’s done? and he didn’t need our help? We’re the IT department, we need a reason to exist. Actually I’m happy for him, there is hope this blogging thing could work.

So in a long winded way this is a good week, a few days ago YIS’s first administrator posted this “Two Why’s (but not very wise)“. As some already know I’ve tweeted his post and many have commented. Thank you very much, as we all know it’s this commenting cycle that really makes blogging work.

Alan November’s vision speaks of having everyone blogging students, teachers administrator & even parents. It’s a bold vision and I wonder can schools achieve such a goal. Those questions remain unanswered, but at least we are taking our first baby steps.

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How is technology improving student learning? It’s an excellent question asked by my twitter colleague Andrew. It turns out there are more questions, than answers from this query.

Sadly, it seems it isn’t a question that comes up until after a school has made large investments in technology. Not to say no one is asking these questions, it’s just a minority view point. In a metaphor technology is like paper and pencils. Do we ask “How are pencils and paper improving learning?” and if you are. What are your answers?

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Before I posted a reflection from Saturdays workshop, first I’d like to show this Animoto video. In it, is the adventure of traveling from YIS to ASIJ, switching between buses & trains and a few pictures from some of the sessions. On reflection I wish I had uStreamed the workshop, but there is always next year.

I have no clue what the words to the song are. I’m just hoping it fits in, if not, it might be one of those items lost in translation.

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This Post is for the Weekend Workshop happening at ASIJ on April 26, 2008

We will be exposed to several different websites, each with a unique purpose, all are platform independent, working on both Macs and Windows computers. We’ll look at a school which has Electronic Portfolio system in place. Preview some different services and also look at some neat new organizational tools

Once the preview is completed, each will pick a favorite, explore and try it out. We end the session discussing discoveries or disappointments.

Sharing & Beyond

Twitter is a mirco blogging platform. It’s one of the main tools used in researching this workshop. It’s a great tool for continueing our learning on this topic.  Create an account and following many of the educators listed on my twitter account. My link is this http://www.twitter.com/brianlockwood

…and twhirl is a free application for keeping your tweets up to date.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ddO9idmax0o" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

E-Portfolio Example

Shanghai American School uses Wordpress MU for student blogs, a few weeks ago students presented their E-portfolios to their parents.

Framework

edublogs or Wordpress

Video, Collaboration & Graphics

Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/dvjRzaUYoLw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/kL_vSVqXjKw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

VoiceThread

Here’s an example of a thread used in a Kindergarten Classroom

and here’s a demo example of how to use it. School’s have free and protected access to all of VoiceThread’s feature sets.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=409" width="700" height="550" wmode="transparent" /]

Scrapblog

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Neat tools but…. why would I use them?

Evernote and my shared notes and some other shared notes from one of our History teachers

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GetDropBox is not in beta, we’re limited to watching this informational video.[kml_flashembed movie="http://s3.amazonaws.com/scast/beta/flvplayer.swf" width="500" height="393" wmode="transparent" /]

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