Alan+November

In one of the web backgrounds Alan showed, I spotted a link to his site where some interesting articles lie. Here is one that I checked out and found potentially useful. Here are my notes: //Russell// = EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES = QUOTE: I hope that some of the ideas I present are good enough to criticise. QUOTE: Desperate people make the best students. QUOTE: We need to teach the kids to tear apart the web.

· Being globally connected allows you to build community: harness the talents of a lot of people · People now have to deal with overwhelming amounts of information · We must aim for learners who are self-directed: organise own learning, design own assessment, don’t need someone to tell them what to do because they are independent. BUT: //**Our classrooms often prepare students to be dependent learners.

Does the teacher own the learning in our school? How can you tell? Easy: ask “Who works the hardest?” Let’s turn the existing around and make every teacher the learner and every learner the teacher.
 * WHO SHOULD OWN THE LEARNING**** ? **

//WEB TIP: Can type “site:nn” where nn represents a two letter country code: allows you to filter the search content for responses from a particular country.// //A list of country codes can be found here: []// // I // was interested in learning more about how to tidy up a search and I came across some notes presented by Alan in China in 2007: [] I think you’ll find it useful. Need to understand the grammar and syntax of the web. e.g. search Martin Luther King: 20000000 results. The second result: www.stormfront .org: Who is “stormfront”? It turns out it is a white supremicist site. Hmmmm.... [|www.easywhois.com/] allows you to see this. [|www.archive.org] : type a URL in the search bar in the “WayBackMachine” and it will give a history of that website’s presence on the web. [] ||
 * I checked out Alan November’s web site. It’s interesting, and I think I might use some of the articles (//see top menu// // à articles // ) to stimulate some discussion. Here is the link to the article page, and I will put a sample pdf up onto our wiki so that you can check whether the stuff may be of interest to you too.

[|www.allaboutexplorers.com] : look up Sir Francis Drake: complete and utter rubbish. //Ain’t that what the internet is about though? Contribution. Anyone can put stuff up. Who will ever have time to check the veracity of what purports to be legitimate content? We need to urge our kids to be vigilant, critical users.//

[|www.mathtrain.tv] : tutor has students who design tutorials that help other students learn. Student did homework that took 7 minutes. However, when challenged to prepare an activity for other kids, she was happy to spend 2 hours doing this. She built much more in the way of depth, sequence and layers into her work.

[|www.jingproject.com] : screencasting software (Win/Mac) //Russell:// There is a link on this page to this freeware. I have had a look around and I like what I see. I think I’m going to get my Year 9’s to tinker with this and see what they can do.

Tom just had a play with jing - this has heaps of potential applications for sharing info quickly - I like!

Another useful key: **host**.nasa.gov This allows you to search how many pages are hosted on the NASA site. This one found 4,000,000. But, within this, you can put in a number of key words and it will filter the site for the key words. Easy. However, I found it seemed only to work with dot.coms.

Should we be asking children to do the work teachers used to do? Maybe? Probably? Why not? The possibilities are endless.

CHILDREN can find the work of other children all over the world. This has proven to be a highly motivating factor for children. They will often want to improve on what others have done. In fact this is a very good reason not to push children beyond their own capabilities in an attempt to make the teacher or school look better. This disenfranchises the child for a start, but also places a performance barrier that is difficult/impossible to overcome. Let kids stimulate and challenge other kids by posting their own work, not the work of a helpful teacher.

Every child is capable of finding such work and thinking about how they might improve on what they find.


 * Scripting chart**: title, people responsible, written, recorded, mixed, produced. Kids produced weekly summaries of the learning they have done for the week. Teacher provides the initial structure, but other things spawn off this BECAUSE there is an **AUTHENTIC AUDIENCE** for the week.

[|www.studentnewsaction.net] : This is a student news action network. Here is a link to one of the articles in it. Definitely written by students. Possibly useful.

[] isenet.ning.com – teacher contribution site? //Russell:// I haven’t really had time to sort this one out for you: maybe a wiki topic to work through. However, the quick look I did have was cool. I found this video: [] (... opportunities of adversity.) I think there is potential for this in English, Social Studies, Health… Perhaps other aspects of the site are equally as good. Oh, isenet stands for “Independent School Educators Network”, but I think if you focus only on the last two words, you’ll enjoy what’s there. // Wiki topic: Useful to do a search sometime on what tools are available to really prune down a Google search. // The following three websites were also found on Alan November’s background images. He didn’t refer to them, but I jotted them down because I didn’t know of them. Always worth a look, eh? Who wants to nosey in and give us a heads-up on them? [|www.polleverywhere.com] [|www.yolink.com] [|www.richerpicture.com] Teach critical thinking on the web. Teach kids to pull apart the web experience. Build community: have kids come with solutions for teaching. Release the boundaries and unleash this army of children to manage their own learning.

[|www.wolframalpha.com] Can provide a whole lot of information about (even) maths equations. Let’s have kids use this to explain the maths: the explanations within this becomes the homework. Here’s the rub: In the US, if you show this to the maths department, some say, “How do we block this on our filter?” Others say, “Wow, I have been waiting for this all my life.” What does this tell us about these educators?

The web is capable of providing instant feedback to kids: kids can work with other kids around the world to solve real problems.

Russell.