Educating the Dragon

Miguel Guhlin invited me into a Skype call he was having this afternoon (night- his time) with a guy called Kevin. As I was brought up to date with what the conversation was about, it intrigued me: Kevin is heading up a not-for-profit organisation which seeks to promote the education of young people about the native wildlife of
New Zealand. As the conversation progressed we debated the value of ‘broadcast’ method of presentation against establishing a wiki/ blog inviting interest and collaboration from teachers and students. Although his target audience was year 12/13 I could still see the remarkable possibilities of such a project for my year 3’s. Currently there is a website associated with the project and I hope it will give something of a flavour despite them being somewhat out-of-date as Kevin claimed.

If you have a moment, take a look, but look out for the sound effects, have your volume turned up nice and loud.

Kevin also manages www.cmag.org.nz

Well it’s just hit midnight and I’ve finished a Skype IM with Miguel Guhlin. He managed to ‘talk’ me through converting my .wmv file to a .avi probably with his eyes popping out. Poor guy, sorry to keep you up so late.

Here are the couple of programmes he advised me on:

http://www.ipod-video-converter.org/free-ipod-video-converter.exe

http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter

Little old me, my video being played in
San Antonio…. Kind of gives me goose bumps. (That is if Miguel Guhlin will forgive me for spelling his name wrong on the Blogroll- How embarrassing)

Something else I learnt tonight, how to send a file through Skype. Above the IM messages is a toolbar, the second from the left reads ‘send file’ it’ll let you browse and then once you click away it goes. Easy.

The last thing it got me thinking about was my Skype name. what’s the point of having a name which noone can recognise. Therefore I have changed my Skype name to Dragon09 which some people may recognise, it’s makes a little more sense at least.

Well I’m sorry if I’ve seemed a bit down, or distracted over the past couple of entries. I’ve felt that my head was about to explode. Many of the things that are going on are at several different levels.

• I have to talk to my Principal shortly about a survey I plan to run, school-wide, as a response to my talk to the staff the other week. It is my intension to gauge from this survey how ‘connected’ the Net-Gen kids we have really are. I’m hoping that the results from that will impact directly on the direction technology goes within my school.

• I’ve been looking at the policy for Technology in our school of late and I come to the realisation that even though it is an excellent ‘over-arching’ document, robust enough to sustain the Inspectorate eye, there needs to be some sort of supportive documentation to help the X-Gen implement a curriculum for the 21^st Century learner.

• I have skypetalkandwrite that needs facilitation and development. There are several teachers within my school that appear enthusiastic about Talk & Write to give it a go and will need introductions to other users around NZ. Fortunately Voyagers has kindly volunteered to do some collaborative work next term and my class are excited about that. Chrissy and I will be continuing our mentoring work this year, starting in earnest Term2.

• I have begun www.wikidspace.wikispaces.com with a view to other classes around the country (world?) that are working with Year 2/3/4 children (aged 6 to 8) signing up and contributing. I have dragonsinger already signed up from RaumatiBeach. The site is intended to give younger children an opportunity to learn the value of a wiki, showcase their work and begin to work collaboratively.

• Then there is the development of my PRS project, which is a personal response system developed by Interwrite.

• I have to complete the set up of my classroom HUB or most of this work will need revising.

All in all, I’ve begun to feel a little overwhelmed. But I have to say a big thank you to Chrissy and Jenny for today. You really fired me back up and helped me get things into perspective, I don’t know what I’d do without you. And to Garry too, form Sitech. You really know how look after your people.

Well its confirmed, sort of, I’m making two presentations on the Gold Coast on 30^th/31^st August and the 1^st September.

What I’m proposing to do is a repeat of my presentation about Talk&Write. It’ll probably be more of a ‘a journey so far’. There is much to do in the months ahead. I’m looking forward to my children Skyping with Taradale and Taranaki and hopefully Palmerston North too. No international links thus far. Though If I could link with a school
Bangladesh, the States or anywhere really that’s appearing on my cluster-map. If you are either an educational professional or have a class of your own and would like to participate please just leave a comment and we can hook up and get the ball rolling and get this show on the road and kick start this thing into high gear….. (too many idioms).

Secondly I am presenting on the Interwrite PRS system. Looking at higher order thinking. I must remember that my kids are only 7…. The Personal Response System looks similar to a TV remote. Many a joke about ‘switching boys on’ but there I go with the idioms again. Using this response system enables the class to be much more involved and reduced the ability of some kids to duck away from thinking about let alone responding to a teachers question. If you have experience of using these things I’d love to here your thoughts, good or bad.

I met Peter Kent back last year at the Sitech conference in
Hamilton, way back before I could even blog about it. He was the key note speaker, a Deputy Principal in
Melbourne, Australia. If you want to know what went down at that particular conference you’ll have to check the archives on my friend Chrissy’s blog, December 06 will be the date you have to check.

Anyway, that’s where I met Peter. He took particular interest in my skypetalkandwrite presentation, back when it consisted of a powerpoint, some smoke and mirrors. As a result of that we began a dialogue to start Skyping trans-Tasman. Which incidently is yet to begin. Me and my tangents, get on with it Simon.

The long and short of it is that he very kindly put my name forward to participate in the IWB conference on the Gold Coast. I had a good Skype with the organiser a gentleman by the name of Malcolm Lee. And I’m going. I need to get some more details, and there is still a lot to organise but he invited me to attend, and of course with it being the Gold Coast and all I had to think about it for a very long time!

So, thank you Malcolm, and thank you Peter for the introduction. And those of you who are possibly reading this because of the link on my site, Welcome to the conversation. Please comment and let me know who you are, where your from and I can pretend I’ve known you all my life when we arrive in August. You you blog about talk&write tag it skypetalkandwrite and it’ll get fed to the wikispace www.skypetalkandwrite.wikispace.com

I’m very excited about this trip, not least because it gives me an opportunity to expand my thinking about skypetalkandwrite and how it fits into the curriculum of a digial classroom. Plus how does that then assist a school looking at School 2.0.

The current list of people associated with the wiki is so far quite short, but given the opportunity to expand the children’s experiences beyond
New Zealand I hope will encourage others to give serious consideration to the use of Skype technologies in the classroom setting.