eLearning4schools.net

We have all been there. Coming from a corporate background I can especially! The longest powerpoint I sat through had 347 slides!!!! Loosing the will to live just does not describe how I really felt with enough passion….but it was bad! However, now in my classroom occasionally I forgot all that I was taught and other teachers certainly have not been told in the first place.

So below is some handy tips…aimed at a corpoarte audience but still quite relevant.

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This was taken from edublog the short article give 10 useful ways to use a blog.

Edublogs hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, students, researchers, professors, librarians, administrators and anyone and everyone else involved in education.

Edublogs are completely free, without any advertising, and come with 100MB of free upload space

“There are many ways you can use a blog in your teaching, here are ten to get you started:

1. Post materials and resources

The web is a fantastic tool when it comes to distributing resources - all you have to do on your Edublog is upload, or copy and paste, your materials to your blog and they’ll be instantly accessible by your student from school and from home. What’s more, you can easily manage who gets to access them through password and plugin safety measures.

2. Host online discussions

If you’ve ever struggled to create an online discussion space - you’re going to love what edublogs will do for you. Students can simply respond to blog posts and discuss topics you’ve set them through comments of through our simple forum functionality - commentators can also sign up to receive emails when their comments are replied to and you can easily manage and edit all responses through your blog’s administrative panel. (more…)

I found this video sometime ago.  It goes through lots of snippits where ICT has been used in the classroom.  I have used it during whole school and deaprtment insets to get the ball rolling.

Today at eLearning4schools.net we created a blog carnival. Go to BlogCarnival.com for more details. Search for the eLearning carnival.

“To understand what a blog carnival is, consider some examples. Here is the first edition of Carnival of the Vanities (one of the earliest blog carnivals). Carnivals can be very descriptive like this one, or very concise, like this one. Find the style the fits your topic and time schedule.

We think blog carnivals are a great way for bloggers to recognize each other’s efforts, organize blog posts around important topics, and improve the overall level of conversation in the blogosphere. Carnivals come in edited “editions”, just like magazines or journals. The fact that carnivals are edited (and usually annotated) collections of links lets them serve as “magazines” within the blogosphere, and carnival hosts can earn their readership by providing high quality collections.

Since blog carnivals include lots of posts on specific topics, they also serve as a place to connect with those who are expert (or at least highly opinionated!) and those who are interested in that field.

Blog Carnival simplifies carnivals for two kinds of people:

People who read and contribute to blog carnivals, and
People who organize and publish blog carnivals. ”

To judge whether VLEs have a role within the new education landscape to enhance teaching and learning it is necessary to examine the available research evidence.  Research literature is only beginning to emerge relating to the benefits of VLEs on teaching and learning in schools in the UK, as the market for VLEs is still developing.  But by drawing on the more extensive evidence from further and higher education, where the use of VLEs is more advanced, it is possible to identify potential benefits for schools.The aim of this section is to summarise both my own observations and research of others (providing references for further reading) in order to highlight potential applicability in the school sector.

General Benefits

• Users could find it easier to use the ICT found within the various components of a VLE as it offers an integrated environment rather than discrete offerings (Dorner et al, 2000).
• The different options to communicate are increased allowing users to choose those appropriate methods for different tasks (e.g. through email, discussion groups and chat rooms).
• The VLE provides a consistent look and feel across the whole school.

Benefits for students

• Access to learning wherever and whenever required (Jacobsen and Kremer, 2000).  This will improve flexibility in learning and allow students to develop independent learning skills which will prove invaluable in the new knowledge economy.

(more…)

Since the growth and recognition that virtual collaborative environments can be developed using ICT, developers have produced many products to exploit this potential.  This variety of products and different intended uses has created confusion regarding VLEs as many terms around this subject have often been used interchangeably (Becta, 2003).During my research I have come across this confusion first hand and feel it important in this section to confirm what we mean by a VLE.  As with ‘real’ learning environments (e.g. classrooms, laboratories etc.) a VLE is designed to support and enhance student learning.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has a number of working groups one of which looks at the area of VLEs, and in July 2000 recommended the term (more…)

An interesting video that shows how students are far different from the way we were!  We really need to think about our teaching and the environment we offer our students to learn they fundamentally operate differently.  It is this that we need to grapple with when we look at implementing eLearning as part of a blended approach to education.

ICT provides a profound potential to make the taught curriculum significantly more relevant, purposeful, creative and flexible and more widely accessible, supporting all learners at all stages throughout their lives and in ways that best suit their own particular learning style.Within our schools and educational establishments, ICT also presents a genuine opportunity to support all teachers in their planning, teaching and learning.  The government also see the potential of ICT use beyond teachers and learners but include parents, support staff and governors.  The government also highlights that ICT should also be used as a means of enabling learning to take place more easily beyond the bounds of the formal (more…)

Blogging has great potential as a means of communication but also as a creative outlet for students as well as another avenue for reflection. 

One of the eLearning4schools.net put a great blog together a year or so ago to help teachers and students in his school to create and use blogs.  We think it is a great starting point for you to take a look at.  bloggingguide.wordpress.com

Seeing as our whole reason for being here at eLearning4schools.net is eLearning we thought we would try to outline what we feel eLearning is all about!

First of all “what we think it is all about” is a very important statement as their are so many varying points of view.   

This question normally elicits a variety of responses depending on the experience and background of the person involved.  So, here are some definitions of e-learning on the Web found by Google. 

We could write a long academic article covering all the different view points however we are all about cutting through the waffle and delivering useful information, guides and tips to you to make your job easier and save you lots of time to boot!

We believe eLearning simply means encompassing technology in the learning process whether it is in the delivery, activity, assessment or management of learning.  The important point to raise is that eLearning is about Learning supported by technology.

eLearning can include Learning supported by:

• Hardware that assists in the production and delivery of digital resources such as video, audio and animation
• Use Mobile technologies such as mobiles, MP3 players, MP4 players and PDAs
• Software that helps produce content such as MS Powerpoint, Audacity, Photoshop, Gimp to name just a few
• Online tools and technologies to help create, deliver and present resources such as blogging, conferencing, searching, and social networking and sharing sites
• Help to manage learning and assessment from marking to analysis of data e.g. Sims
• Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) that can help combine a number of the above technologies 

ELearning, therefore, could be achieved by using robots, programmable toys and interactive games; interactive whiteboards, the internet and digital photography; and by web-cast master classes, distance learning or on-line formative assessment. I feel the support for learning through real life experiences, for example communicating with real people in real time through video conferences, watching real experiments and videoing real-life experience are other significant contributions of e-learning. Its scope is infinite only restricted by our imagination and creativity.

ELearning not only encompasses hardware technology but also a multitude of opportunities presented by web technologies and services such as blogging, social networking sites and live streaming and broadcast services.  There are also opportunities to make more use of commercial and open source software as well as mobile technologies.  For a pictorial overview for my definition of eLearning please click here eLearning Overview