Status5 May 26, 2007
Posted by Steve in ClassBlog, Elearning, Technotrivia, Web2.0.trackback
The Honours Programme is rolling along and is developing into something quite special. It would not surprise me that we are doing a “First” in NSW incorporating social networking software and student activities who signed up for the Honours Programme. (See Honours page on this site).
The Honours Programme co-ordinator was already doing a superb job with the students. My input advocating the use of groups found at yahoo and the option to create a blog has added another dimension to the programme.
Within the Honours Programme are a few genuine gifted and talented people. In the ordinary school structure, they usually are marginalised by their peers. According to studies, these type of people need some way to publicise their thoughts and ideas.
As the Honours Programme advances into the school year, the group has developed their own synergy and energetically help each other out. The genuinely gifted and talent people have created their own blogs which have been read by their peers and given positive, reinforcing feedback. These people are no longer ‘marginalised’. Wow. Great Pastoral stuff.
My Year 8 Technology group finished their animated gif tasks. The better students were able to upload their gifs to their blogs. The less able students created the animated gifs and were marked in their storage directory. I expected to see a couple of students zoom off with their blogs but it does not seem to have happened. Sigh.
It was made known to me over the week that students share the only computer at home and that they have allocated times as to when they can use it. Would you believe that is the first time I ever considered such a thing? that students have limited time on a single computer at home.
The Year 8 Technology students are onto their next task. Basically, they are to create a radio type commercial using Audacity and they are required to mix tracks. Needless to say, they are having a great time experimenting. The finished products are expected to be uploaded to their blog site as a mp3 file.
I am involved in assigning sessions at the Computing Studies Teacher Association (NSW) inservices which take place once a school term. Four workshops run at any one time and participants choose which workshop they wish to do (numbers permitting).
The committee lives all over the place. I started something new in May 2007. I uploaded the session assignment sheets and the agenda document to docs.google.com.
This way Committee members get to look at the documents as they evolve from one inservice to the next. They may make changes or comments as to how the evening should be guided. Hopefully, this will allow the Committee members be more involved in the assigning of sessions, hence, collaboration. Of course, strict deadlines over-rides everything else!
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Have fun!
Chris