eLearning4schools.net

I saw this video yesterday and thought I would share it with you it really made me think about how technology should be used more creatively within the curriculum and how schools really need to be focusing on how to develop a clear strategy for eLearning.

This video is a must-see for every parent and teacher. Education guru Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity which is so often being pushed out of the exam led approach to the curriculum in the UK. It certainly made me think about how I could encourage creativity within my classroom.

Today I got back from a 3 day training course near Leeds all about Authentic Leadership. Basically the course gave you bags of time and the tools to explore your own leadership style.

Now I am not usually one for these touchy feely types of course normally prefer a hands on type of course. However, this course together with a recent Nuero Lingusitic Programming diploma that I have completed have really help me focus. Why am I telling you this!??!?

Well the answer is that it became so obvious and clear why eLearning in our schools barely scrathes the surface of what is possible. The reason is the lack of vision from the schools of what they want to achieve with eLearning. Having a clear vision is vital, what is eLearning going to look like? What is it going to deliver? What are the students and teachers going to be doing? How does eLearning help with communication? How does it help bring the world into the classroom? How will impact the school? How will the environment need to change?

I have been in so many schools where they are taking bite size chunks and just skirting around the edges and the reason they are doing this is because they do not know what they are aiming for and what they want the impact to be.

However, I have also been in schools that have the most amazing vision and ambitions but does not seem to get anywhere. So why is this? Well they have a vision but it does not fit with the values and beliefs of the leader and the other stakeholders who need to bring the vision to life. The vision just does not reflect the people or what they believe to be important the result is they have little enthusiasm to achieve the vision. The same thing then tends to happen as with no vision at all, and that is playing around at implementing eLearning with a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

In education the thing the vast majority of us do not have enough of is time to reflect. I found this course gave me some useful tools but above all it gave me time to reflect and really look at what I wanted to achieve and how I could ensure it was achieved.

To finish I would like to encourage all of you who are looking at implementing a small or a large project to take time out to reflect and really think about the vision and what you want to achieve and make this relevant to your own values and beliefs as well as to those of others in the organisation.

It has also made us think at eLearning4schools how we can actually help schools develop their own eLearning vision so keep an eye out for some new services coming soon!

Bring your digital photos to life with Photo Story 3 for Windows. Create a photo slideshow of your life’s most memorable moments. You can capture your memories just the way you want them - with the a single click, you can touch-up, crop or rotate pictures. It’s that easy. Then, add stunning special effects, sountracks and personalize your stories with titles and captions. The file size makes it easy to send your photo stories in an e-mail or take them with you on a Window Mobile based portable device. Start sharing your stories today.

This is a great tool and easy to use. You could use it to allow students to present information in a new way. For example:

- English - develop a modern day interpretation from a scene in Hamlet.
- Geography - produce a show detailing a field trip with findings.
- Science - a show to talk through an experimentation.
- History - a show to give a summary of the causes of an event in history and the consequences.
- Food Technology - details of how food hygiene in the kitchen.
- Economics - theory explained in pictures.
- Religious Education - an overview of a religion that details important facts.

Below are some examples of what can be done with Photo Story. If you search on Google Videos or YouTube you can find lots more examples of what is possible.

Here is a video tutorial that explains how to use Photo Story 3:

Click Here for another Video Tutorial for Photo Story 3. And you can download it free over at Microsoft!

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.