November 2004 Archives

If you are looking into implementing e-learning solutions, you may want to read this article by Jane Knight first.

If you prefer a reader which can be installed to manage your RSS feeds, try RssReader which is free.

Do take note that if you are installing the reader in moe's computers, you may need to engage your school TA to assist in the installation of MS .NET Framework 1.1.

Found this tool while reading this post by Scott Leslie.

This online tool can serve as an alternative to bloglines.com. However, take note of the following:

1. One email address (required for registration can only subscribe to 30 feeds).

2. Your account will be removed if there is no visitor for 14 days.

Considering our usual class size of 40, this tool has its limitation.
I have created one rollup. Take a look to get the feel of it.

[Rollup is closing down :( /* updated 12th Dec 2004*/]

Yet another piece of info from Will R.'s post.

It's about Laura J. Gurak, a scholar in rhetoric and Internet research from the University of Minnesota, speaking on the Internet as a communication technology and its implications on writing for this current generation of college students. Read more on what the expert has to say.

You may locate blog templates (aka blog skins) from these sites:

http://blogtemplates.noipo.org/
http://www.blogskins.com

A fine example for a teacher using his blog to summarise views posted by some students in class about their lessons in class for all to view.

See how Rick West did it in his blog :)

(Check out Will R.'s post for more examples on edublogs)

A simple yet effective example of how assignment can be posted in a teacher's blog :)

Read this off Will R.'s post. How exciting!

Instead of waiting for a chance to meet an renowned author (which may never come) f2f just to ask 1 or 2 question, or in the case of answering one to one through email, the author is able to answer queries for all to see simply by posting the questions and answering them thru a blog and its commenting feature!

Take a look at the blog and I am sure you will also be attracted by the 144 comments to a post just like I do. Cant help being more and more excited after reading comments after comments :)

ST Interactive has introduced RSS Feeds for its news! Just to list a few:

Latest News

Prime News

Singapore

Asia

Forum

Just wondering when is Zaobao.com going to follow suit ? *hmm*

RSS feeds are used more and more widely. How about using it for education? Check it out in Will Richardson's post, as well as the comments that follow.

In his post, Craig Nansen has kindly extracted for us some of the more interesting comments by experts with regards to the use of blog in education.

Some of the questions addressed are:
"What advantage do blogs have over more traditional forms of information gathering?"

"What guidelines will be put into place to make sure blogs are rich in content and are worth reading?"

"How do you feel the field of education may be changing because of blogging?"

I have just sent out an email to invite fellow teachers to join us in the above workshop. Looking forward to the get-together on the 1st Dec to explore the possibilities of blogs :)

Venue/Time: Beatty Sec/0900hr

Thanks voyager for citing us in your voyeurism :)

I am actually most interested in his links to his students' blogs.
Take a look at them, my guess is they are a class of trainee teachers and voyager is their mentor/tutor who has asked them to blog their feedback to their peer's micro-teaching. Great example of edublog for peer evaluation and knowlege sharing/construction.

Here are a few blogs I pick at random to browse through:
e-man's e-blog
KelvinYew Entries
My Geog Blog

If you have used mindmaps, perhaps you have used them for all the 3 purposes that Nick Duffill has described in his posting?

Mrs McCuller has set this assignment for her class. Scroll down to check out the comments posted to see the interaction generated from just one posting!

The nominations are open. The existence of these (inaugural) awards indicate the widespread use of blogs for academic purposes in 2004. Check out more details here.

Finally back from Krabi, Thailand yesterday night. 13 of us SMC members (P, VP, HODs) went abroad 4 days and much work have been covered while in the resort. Still many ends to tie up though :)

As part of the report following the release of the Chinese Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee (CLCPRC)'s Recommendations, we are once again mentioned in ST's Prime News.

　不久前，在一个社区服务团体的晚宴上巧遇他，他告诉我今年底就退休了。我的立即反应就是：多可惜呀！我们的圈子里又少了一个真正的教育家。

　　在今日环球化世界，在经济与教育挂帅的时代，在行行业业竞争剧烈的社会，在教育趋向企业化的岛国，真正的教育家越来越少了。有些时候，教育的目的变成制造品牌。为了成为品牌，就得有促销策略，包括网罗优质学生，争取奖项，搞创意活动，抢先行动，大肆宣传，甚至放出秘招等等。在每个存优汰劣过程中，大家都施尽法宝去争取优秀生，我不禁要问：其他平庸的呢，谁来教导？

Netguide Web Awards has announced the best personal blog.

Just an idea, should we also run some form of competition to jazz things up for our students ^_^

Too busy to maintain a blog? Take a look at Principal's Quest. If a Principal can take time out of her busy schedule to blog, maybe we don't have much excuse not to. The underlying question perhaps is simply, whether or not we believe blogging is worth our time for it.
Mrs. Hooper is using her blog as a character building page. Through it, she shares her views on character traits. Another avenue for top leadership to communicate your ideology with staff and students.

A perfect example of how a teacher may utilise a blog for communication with students, parents and even ex-students can be found at Mr Wright's Class.
In it he has everything from spelling words to pictures of field trips to appeal for parents help. By keeping an account of assignments, events etc, parents are kept informed of the happenings in class. This is a great way for communication. Go take a look.

To stay informed whenever a site updates its information, subscribe to its RSS feeds using Bloglines.com.

If you need some help on bloglines.com, a quick guide of bloglines.com has been created by Alex Halavais.

Will Richardson in his article Getting Started with RSS urged all to take up this great teaching tool.

RSS, short for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is seen being used more and more widely. Besides searching a site for an orange XML button for its feed, another more convenient way is to switch to the newly released Firefox browser (assuming you are using Internet Explorer). Whenever you surf to a site providing RSS feed, Firefox will indicate to you with an orange RSS tag at the right-hand bottom corner of the window.

Another online tool that allows you to instantly cut-n-paste any information from anywhere (www, working documnets etc). As pointed out by Will Richardson in his article, it is a great collaborative tool!

Some features:
1. Anytime, anywhere, anyone (who knows the name or url)
2. Hassle free: No username, no password to remember!
2. Notes can be saved and retrieved in future.
3. Get notified of new notes posted thru RSS feeds

Take a look at my sample note or create your own now! :)

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has published the above report which highlights six technologies with the underlying research suggesting these technologies will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

Take a dip at current and future development here.

象头神，何方神圣？

　　话说，一天，印度女神Parvati沐浴前，把身上的尘埃搓成一个守卫，让他门外伺候。

　　男主人Shiva回家，竟然被这个不识好歹的 “陌生人” 挡驾。盛怒之下，利剑一挥，守卫人头落地。

　　Parvati知道后，不停啼哭。Shiva为了安抚太太，答应派手下到外头巡视，不管是谁，第一颗向北睡觉的头颅，将被取下，作为补偿。

　　怎知，手下在外看到的第一个对象竟然是头大象。 “一言既出，驷马难追”，说过的话，怎能反悔……

　　从此，守卫有了象头。

知多一点

　　屠妖节也称为灯节。当天，兴都教徒会穿新衣戴新帽，发糖果给晚辈，点油灯，到寺庙上香祷告，添香油钱。灯节，象征光明战胜黑暗，良善战胜罪恶，智能战胜无知。庆典一连持续好几天，一如中国的春节。

原载《早报－副刊》，2004年11月11日（今天是屠妖节）

　　在娱乐普遍匮乏而物质生活高度贫瘠的童稚时代里，放风筝是家里一桩了不得的大事。

　　风筝是爸爸自己糊的，设计成各种可爱的形状，印象最深的，是一只大蝴蝶，色调斑斓得非常前卫，俏丽而又活泼，想到它在洁白的云絮里翩翩飞舞的样子，兴奋便像是孵在心里的一株豆芽，愈抽愈长。

　　爸爸总在雨季不能出门的闲暇里糊风筝，屋外风声呼呼、雨声淅沥；屋内呢，笑语朗朗、笑脸盈盈；说是家徒四壁，然而，每一串笑声，都是口里吐出的珍珠，简陋的家，满满都是珠光宝气。

　　做好的风筝，束之高阁，大家满心欢喜地等待老天放晴。生活里有了美丽的期盼，每一个日子，都好似髹上了亮亮的釉彩。

　　终于，风筝季节来了。

Another interesting article that summarizes blogs and its advantages so well.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2003/02/blogs.html
Particularly like this part:
Golub, who is also associate professor of English education at the University of South Florida, teaches future educators three central principles about encouraging student authorship: "Students will write when they have something to say, when they have an audience, and when they get feedback."

Read the "The Challenge of Assessment" section if you need ideas on assessment.

Our project 'Online Student Reading Portfolio Using Blogs' is featured in the Straits Times Publication - Digital Life. Access it online here.

Tested and discovered that the Search in blogger.com does not very well support CL input. Hence, the building of a teacher's repository isn't advisable as things will become 'lost' in no time.

Further tested the movabletype Search. It performs without problem when searching content in CL.

很可爱的照片吧！这是从文杰老师那儿得来的。我们都是是爱猫之人！哈哈！

This is a proprietary system developed by Audree Thurman for building of an ePortfolio. Looking at the types of pages available, this will definitely gives teachers/students more choices for organising their stuff, other than just blogs.

About online/virtual learning enviroments, like wat James Farmer said, it will take 1-2 weeks (or months!?)to digest these resources.

A good starting point for many blogging resources.

Look under "software and tools" for use when rolling out.

Anne Davis took a look at the possiblities from these few perspectives:

1. creating a reflective, journal type blog to ...
2. starting a class blog to ...
3. encourging students to blog thru comments given to ...
4. having your students create their own weblogs to ...
5. asking your class to create a shared weblog to ...

See the full possibilities here :)

A heavy going article/paper .... by James Farmer

Voice - not which that comes out thru the mouth, but that in writing.

"Voice is the writer's presence in a piece of writing" as Tom Romano defines it in his article The Power of Voice published in Education Leadership Oct 2004 Vol 62 No.2 Pg 20-23.

"Voice is the key to helping our students develop into writers. We must give them opportunities to hear their own written voices and the written voices of others�their peers, their teachers, and the best authors."

This website hosted the M&M online magazine, featuring a collection of weblogs written by 6th grade students at Brandon Middle School in Virginia.

Want to learn more about blogs and rss? Go thru this webquest created by
Trevor Ettenborough :)

Came upon this site, where you can do your own anaylsis to answer the above question. from the url, I believe that Prof Bernie Dodge has created it for a course which he delivers.

Access the page here.

logged on to net n msn at 12+, chat wif a student. not a typically hardworking student, always late in handing up of work, find chance to 'skip' homework if possible, and never fail to be the last one to turn up for class! typical bad student?

nay, for anything that should happen, there must be reason(s) behind. this is especially true where CL as a subject is concerned in our unique education environment. current reality is that many of our students are simply BORED by CL lessons. 2 major reasons behind this:

一个经常是家庭背景，另一个则是因为学生有"选择"。什么意思？这样看吧，有谁能保证除了华文之外，任何其他科目就没有人不喜欢？ :|
很有意思的问题 huh？放眼未来，华文是"可有可无"的，不就有选择lor。试问有谁敢放弃数学？还是放弃英文？ *LOL*　现在大环境在改变，希望这样的看法也会有改变啦。学生／孩子们真那么有远见？你我都心里有数？放心，这家中的二老才不会承认呢。

说了那么多废话，back to my student, she said i hav long given up on cl. but we came to a common realisation that that is not entirely true. it's the past bad experience that is the cause of all these 'bad' behaviours. things can be changed from today onwards. 其实，一个讨厌华文的人怎么可能成为假期华文讨论小组的组长？天方夜谭！so am glad that things are really changing :)

as the saying goes 有志者事竟成，一定办得到的，加油 loh！all the best to you if you ever get to read 这堆废话!

my lunch's finally here ... *GO GO GO*

This article was published 10mths ago, shows how outdated we are. As mentioned by Will Richardson in his article,

For educators, the potential significance of RSS is huge. Think about how teachers and districts could use this syndication process to communicate with students, parents, newspapers, etc. In the classroom, teachers who have students create their own Weblogs can easily keep tabs on what those students are posting by subscribing to their students' feeds and simply checking their aggregators regularly.

RSS feed's potential is something which we would defintely want to explore for use in education.

spent the whole day today in school library in a workshop. the facilitator for the course was dr ng pak tee ?????. touched on the grow me model. looked at it as an extension of the epms system and learnt quite a number of useful tips from there. some takeaways:

'you have to take up new things and discard old things. schools are the only organisations that takes everything and keeps everything (cf sony)'

'how do we expect to inspire learners if there are no fresh fish among teachers'

'lo
|---> mental model --> ...
|---> shared vision --> ...
|---> team learning --> ...
|---> system thinking --> ...
|---> personal mastery --> coaching --> partnership, peer, team, 360 deg'

'lo is an organisation whose growth is fuelled by learning'

'learn --> change --> reflect --> learn ... ...: when one truly learns, you will change becoz of wat u learnt, and upon changing, u reflected on the process and u learn from the reflection process, and you'll change and ... and the cycle continues'

'learning without practice goes misguided ????'

spent close to 2 hrs with 4 students involved in the project for shots to be taken for StraitsTimes Digital Life (every Tue, previously Computer Times).

詠薇、衍瀚、诗敏和珮绮到最后嘴巴都快合不拢了。听记者Mugilan说报导应该会在下个星期二或后个星期二刊载，就让我们拭目以待吧！

Weblogs of US soldiers, Iraqi citizens reveal viewpoints beyond mainstream media reports from the war front

Read the full article at:
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4780

Conducted an in-house training originally for our own CL teachers, and a few other teachers also joined in the exploration. In attendance we have Mdm Tan HK, Mdm Ho FL, Mdm Zhong Qian, Ms Tan TL, Mr Wen Jie, Ms Loo KW, Ms Susanna Pua, Ms Adel Ong, Mdm Goh LS and Mr Chua KS.

Spent abt 3 hrs covering the various aspects of blogger.com. Shld hav introduced the basics, and further explorations can be carried out individually. Bloglines have also been left for self-exploration :)

this day, alice and i did a sharing of our project 'online student reading portfolio using blogs' at the s7 cluster board meeting@whitley.

这一天的颁奖典礼假教育部四楼礼堂举行。这是我们第一回将我们的“实验”“公诸于世”。很荣幸能够在众多奖项中获选在大会展示。希望借此次的示范能够起到抛砖引玉的作用 :)

Just like any programming book, the first program that you write will usually 'print' the above phrase. So, this mt-blog has finally been configured, up and running!

Hello World! And more entries to come! :)