Serendipity Webinar Overview – Blogging With Students

Introduction

This session was a sharing of ideas about blogging with students (recording here). As is often the case we used a mix of audio, text and whiteboards so catch the recording for the full flavor!.

The session

We started as usual with deciding a topic and the consensus (by poll as usual) was to talk about blogging with students. We talked briefly about some of the pros and cons of student blogging.
ProsAndCons frmed

Then we moved on to look at how we might manage blogging for students, touching on a range  of issues including: deciding whether to use class or individual student blogs; managing/moderating content; safety for the students; the need for guidelines for students; and the possibilities opened up by joining activities such as Sue Wyatt’s  (@tasteach) Global Blogging Challenge

Conclusion

Blogging with students is a huge topic with so many facets that it was impossible to do more than brush the surface of some aspects in one session, but we certainly enjoyed trying! Most of the areas we touched on would justify a full session to themselves!

Next Week

TechieSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a “Techie How To” – “Imagine Your Image” an interactive session in which we invite you to explore with us a simple to use, free image editor (Photofiltre). Ninety nine times out of a hundred when I or my students need to edit an image we just need to do something simple and don’t need advanced features such as layers. For example we mostly just need cropping, resizing, adding labels or simple image enhancements. So when I construct a simple “how to”, modify an image for my blog or for use in a learning resource I use Photofiltre.

Join us on Thursday July 1st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 2nd at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Webinar Overview – Introducing Scratch

Intro

Check out the recording for this  “Techie How To” session by guest presenter Carl Bogardus (on Twitter as @weemooseus) who showed us how he uses Scratch with students to develop a variety of visual and interactive projects and how this can help students with maths and logic as well as developing basic programming skills.

The session

Carl did an excellent job against all the odds – technical issues with audio and uploading slides meant that he presented the session “off the top of his head”. We started with a look at the Scratch

Scratch

homepage and Carl told us a little about how the site works. He then “played” a project developed by one of his former students to show us the sorts of things that can be done. Next Carl showed us how simply the program blocks can be put together, modified and then instantly tested.  As an illustration of how he uses Scratch to develop maths and logic skills Carl built a very small program to move a sprite by inviting suggestions from the group about how to achieve particular effects and then implementing these so that we could see if we were right! The session finished with questions.

Conclusion

Many thanks to Carl for providing a great introduction to an application that could, in my opinion, be useful for developing engaging learning resources as well as for students themselves to use in developing their own skills

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday June 24th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 25th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Serendipity webinar overview – Web 3.0 where to now?

Introduction

This was one of those small but very active sessions (recording here) where the blend of text, whiteboards and audio was almost seamless with all three being used in the conversation. The best way to checkout this session is to catch the recording.

The session

We started with some discussion on what we understood by the term Web 3.0. This included references to:

  • semantic tagging;
  • small, fast, customisable, virally distributed applications
  • contextual, tailored, predictive searching
  • deductive reasoning “intelligence”

The discussion moved on with most of the focus being on the issues around the tagging, searching and “intelligence” aspects. Particular concerns were expressed about the impacts and influences of this type of search on independence of mind and thought.

ARiskOfWeb3resized

Conclusion

This session was very thought provoking and more thoughts and implications are still striking me some days after the session. I suspect this is very much a theme for further exploration in a Fine Focus discussion in the not too distant future.

Next Week

TechieSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a “Techie How To” – “Introducing  Scratch” from guest presenter Carl Bogardus (@weemooseus). Carl will give us an introduction to using Scratch. An easy to use programming language that you and your students can use to create and share your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.

Join us on Thursday June 17th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 18th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Webinar Overview – Be an “Elluminated” participant

Introduction

Our recorded Edublogs webinar this week provided me with an excuse to play with Elluminate. Occasionally I do a session on some aspect of Elluminate – usually as a result of comments and questions raised in response to using a particular tool in other sessions. This time having had quite a large number of people new to Elluminate joining our webinars in recent weeks it felt like time to take a look at getting the most out of being a participant.

The Session

The plan for the session was to explore a variety of tools and options available to participants in Elluminate sessions. Thus providing some ideas and suggestions to help everyone get the most out of participating in interactive webinars.

The objectives were to look briefly at:

  • establishing an  “identity” in the virtual context
  • arranging the virtual environment to facilitate keeping up with events and capturing/saving content and ideas
  • active participation

Elluminated ParticipantsResize

As always the emphasis was on interaction and activities throughout using polling, whiteboard, text and experimenting with tools and options. Also as usual I tried to fit too much into the time and ended up feeling that I was rushing but the participants seemed nonetheless to find the session useful.

Conclusion

This was, hopefully, an interesting session that seemed to be enjoyed by all. As with most of these sessions this overview is no more than a fleeting glimpse and you will get much more from the recording.

Next week

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday June 10th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 11th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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