Week 4 – Learning and teaching tools 1 (18/5 – 24/5)

Continuing the journey ……… I have played with the blog and added some widgets ( foreign language class seems to be going well 😉

I am trying to determine the difference between Categories and Tags – I thought I know how tags work as they relate to social bookmarking – Delicious etc. … but here in the blogworld, I am not so sure.

FUSE is an amazing collection of sites – sorted to our needs – could spend a long time getting lost there !

I used Flickr last year to help facilitate a fun project we ran with a country school.  We based it on the NSW Through my Window project.   It was a great project involving sharing written descriptions of scenes at our schools, children deciphering the written word and drawing pictures based on the descriptions and then comparing the sketches to the real thing (photos).    Flickr makes sharing photos fairly simple.

Stumbled upon another Elluminate session – Jenny Luca’s ideas on Cloud computing.  I didn’t realise that I knew what that was – should have realised that Google Docs is ‘Cloud Computing’ – the idea of working on files that are ‘on-line’ in the clouds is excellent.  They become accessible from anywhere but better still they can be share with others.  True collaboration is enabled by this technology .  Not sure how this can transfer to primary students but would definitely work for teachers who plan together.   I have used Google forms to create a survey and it was easy and fun but never shared or collaborated with others in this way.

Wallwisher is a cute tool to encourage collaboration or brainstorm. I did this one earlier this year with Year 3/4 class to get their opinions on our newly finished school renovations.

Year 3/4 Wallwisher Feb 2010