January 2005 Archives

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This has always been a concern by teachers, whether in students' work or preparation of teaching resources.

Found this article in Techlearning. It's a good reading for updating oneself on copyright and fair use, especially in the education setting.

Found a sample of a rubric for EL which we may adapt for assessing the postings by our students. Score of 0-5 were assigned to the following domains:

1. Regularity
- of posts, how often, the frequency

2. Extra exposure to language
- use of language beyond classroom, through self-reading

3. Reflection
- of things heard/learnt in/outside classroom

4. Organisation and Vocabulary
- of thoughts, of words used (esp new ones)

5. Accuracy
- grammar, typo

[source: Edubloggers Link Feed]

Found this page, like what the owner says, it's a "Complete Waste of Time", so unless you are checking out what are some of the games our students may be playing when they logon, else dun look here :P

You have been warned.

During the sharing on last week, one issue that was raised: "If we were to allow students to create their blogs in blogger.com, how can we manage the blogs, which include who are the people viewing, the things put up etc?"

The key word here is _manage_, but control could be the meaning from within.

In time to come, I am quite sure that many, if not all, vendors will build in a blog function in their LMS/CMS. This would allow us the control we desired. But is this as desirable as it seems, especially if we place our students in the center, and think from their perspectives?

Personally, I believe that this is a great drawback on blog itself, as a platform per se. Youngsters worldwide are readily embracing blogs because of one key thing in blog -- the sense of ownership.

Hosting blogs in a controlled environment such as a LMS/CMS is giving up much of these ownership. The people who are allowed to view my blogs may be restricted, the things that I am going to blog is likely to be restricted, the look and feel of my blog is going to be restricted etc etc.

Blogs on free platform will free our students from these. It will return this sense of ownership to them coz they are virtually in control of everything.

To control or not to control, each has its (dis)advantages, so its something we may want to park at the back of our mind during our planning stage.

There is this reflection posted by Will Richardson expressing his thoughts about blogs not just be outside CMS but "should be outside school altogether". Check it out.

Many of our students are hooked to different types of games (pc, ps2, xbox, mmorpg etc) and it has been deemed by many teachers that these games are a waste of time. Well, interestingly, this article points out that 3 of the world's top researchers believed it to be otherwise.

As a computer gamer myself for the past 17+ years, I have learnt much from games. Besides facts which are obtainable by reading books, the training of reflexes (physical and mental) is perhaps something unacheivable by reading alone. The use of games can definitely complement the use of books in teaching and learning. One should not look at it as though books and games are mutually exclusive. Now that we are also going to explore games in our R&D work, wow, it's going to be very exciting indeed.

[source: slashdot]

Thanks to Seng Chee for allowing me to share at his class in NIE this afternoon. Was warmly greeted by the HOD ITs who were attending their DDM course. Quite a number of these fellow teachers have heard of blogs and one of the teachers had allowed his students to use blog for their weekly journals.

A few concerns were raised during the sharing, which included copyright, vulgarity issues. Really glad these were brought up as I am sure these are common concerns by many of us. Thanks to the active questioning, as well as contribution of ideas by the wonderful audience, have managed to prevent a boring workshop :)

Weiying was with me and she had helped me advertised on the upcoming Edublog Workshop to be held at Nan Chiau High School on 2nd Feb, 1430hr. Almost forgotten about this. Truly hope some of the teachers belonging to the HODs' schools can make it to the workshop too.

For those who may be interested, the ppt slides used during the workshop can be found here. A step-by-step HOWTO to account creation in blogger.com is available here too.

Another round of blogvangelism completed, cheers!

Found this great initiative via Weblogg-ed while clearing feeds in bloglines this morning.

The 6-week course is organised by Aaron Campbell, Barbara Dieu and Graham Stanley, with numeorus other facilitators including Anne Davis, James Farmer, Will Richardson etc.

Tried applying to join the course, not sure if it is too late, but thought it would be a great learning experience seeing how the course is going to run, with experts and participants all over the globe.

In the meantime, waiting patiently for the acceptance reply ... :)

This site provides free elearning modules entitled:

1. After-School Programs - From Vision to Reality
2. Assessment, Evaluation, and Curriculum Redesign
3. Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning
4. Cooperative and Collaborative Learning
5. Inquiry-based Learning
6. Interdisciplinary Learning in Your Classroom
7. Making Family and Community Connections
8. Tapping into Multiple Intelligences
9. WebQuests
10. Why the Net? An Interactive Tool for the Classroom

You must have either heard of or played the game "Scissors Paper Stone". Well, to spice up the game and to reduce the probability of a tie, here's a new variation, with new addition of Spock and Lizard.

Have fun!

This few days we have been talking about looking at Open Source Software (OSS) for possible applications in schools, to support teaching and learning. Chanced open this site(KnowNet), home to 2 OSS, namely Plone and Zope.

For future reference purpose:

Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications.

Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities.

Some lecturers in NUS have used blogs for their courses, as well as to keep track of their research students.

Blogs are especially useful for popular courses taken up by a large number of undergraduates. Instead of setting up tutorials for all students, they conduct some of the tutorials online, by adding their comments to a discussion set out in a blog. Marks will be awarded based on their responses at the end of the courses.

Looks like the students are embracing blogs quite well, as seen from the responses. Read the article for the full report in STI.

And thanks Agnes for pointing me to the article :)

Chanced upon this website while browsing the orange-covered "Engaging IT" CD produced by ETD in 2004, well, and it happens that this morning during meeting that the big word GAME was brought up.

I/We belong to a generation (may not hold true for everyone of the same age group though) of gamers where we have witnessed computer games giving off only beeps thru the good old PC speakers, to the 3D Live surround sound games today. Looking back, some of the facts that we gathered are from the games we have played. Hmm ... let me recall the optimum height to fly a F-16 for maximum fuel efficiency ...

Need more time to explore this website in evaluating its educational value, but the games are surely engaging :P

Funbrain.com, check it out here.

Some figures extracted from this report by Pew Internet & American Life Project enlightened us to the extend of blog awareness in America:

Of the sample size of 1324 pple,
- 38% of people know what a blog is
- 27% of people read blogs (representing 32 million, 58% increase since Feb 04)
- 12% have posted to blogs
- 7% of people own blogs (8 million)
- 5% of people use RSS

Wonder what's the figures like if a similar survey were done in Singapore, especially if targetted at students. This figure can prove useful for our use of edublogs in teaching and learning.

[Source: Weblogg-ed]

Well, if you have some time to spare and want to take a look at some of the most well-liked blogs in the blogosphere, check it out at this URL.

Organisations as well as educational instituitions all the world have been banning the use of IM, for some reasons which includes security, waste of time, a form of distraction etc.

This post by James F in his blog has reminded us of the global community we are in as well as the world in which our students are growing up.

Quoting findings from a paper "Instant Messaging � Collaborative Tool or Educator�s nightmare!" by Robert Farmer, it is no surprise to me that under "students' normal usage outside of class activities", the frequency in use of forums is less than half that of IMs. It's now 2005 and I believe the trend is there to stay, if not increase.

While IM is relatively new to the educational environment, it is raising many questions and concerns. Clearly students have embraced this technology, while faculty have not.

As a user very much hooked on to IM myself, perhaps it is timely that we (re)look in-depth on the benefits of IM *hmm*

Bid farewell to my school for the past 3.5 years and reported to work at MOEHQ today. Will be working as an R&D officer in the Educational Technology Division. A series of orientation programme has been arranged for us to familiarise with the system/environment. There will be tons of learning to catch up and hopefully I will be able to adjust myself to my work asap.

Stay healthy and positive, cheers!