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Music mp3 test upload April 30, 2007

Posted by Joseph Papaleo in General.
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Just working out how to upload an mp3 file.

Click File … Browse

Find the file. Give it a title. Click Upload

drifren2-master.mp3   Link to file

Link to page  drifren2-master.mp3

Link to Nonedrifren2-master.mp3

Classrooms of the Future – Virtual Education April 27, 2007

Posted by Joseph Papaleo in General, classroom.
2 comments

Wow!

Many of us have heard of Second Life. But did you know there were many educational resources available? Check out Jo Kay and Sean FitzGerald’s wiki page on this very topic.
From the Educational Uses of Second Life wiki page, I found this list of links.

There are heaps of resuorces avaialble and I can see it will take me some time to get through. Am I keen to explore it?

Little Tackers and an invitation April 23, 2007

Posted by Joseph Papaleo in Class Activities.
2 comments

I recently created an assignment for our Year 8 students and I passed it onto my colleagues to use. The teachers and students have loved it and they will be presenting their finished work to our Prep to Year 2 students soon.

For the task, the Year 8 students were asked to:

  1. do some research on the Mr. Men and Little Miss series written by Roger Hargreaves and explore the style of the books
  2. write a book for 3 – 7 year old children where they had to create a character
  3. once they finished the book, they had to produce an electronic version of their story for the children
  4. produce a CD with cover art to give to the Prep – Grade 2 students
  5. share their book and computer program with the students.

We are currently in the last phase of the project and the Year 8 students have been very keen on the project. The Prep to Grade 2 teachers seem to be keen to have the Year 8’s do some reading and sharing with the students, so that will be great.

The invitation: Are there other any teachers out there interested in looking at this project to see if a worldwide project can be implemented around”Little Tackers”? Older students can participate by writing, editing, illustrating, producing animations, podcasts, etc while younger students can be the real audience. Let me know if you are interested.

The assignment task is attached here (Little Tackers) for anyone to look at. I’ll be posting an example of one of the stories soon (after getting permission from the student and parent).

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us and Assessment April 12, 2007

Posted by Joseph Papaleo in Assessment, Web2.0.
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This has been out there for some time now, but if you haven’t seen it, you must see a video called: Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us. It was posted by Professor Mike Wesch.

From the video, Mike states that

Web 2.0 is linking people …
…People sharing, trading and collaborating…

We’ll need to rethink a few things …

I believe he forgot one item that we as teachers will need to rethink – Assessment.

  1. Will Web 2.0 technology change the way we assess students?
  2. What are we looking for when a student posts an entry on a class blog? Is it there spwlling or grammar? Is it there style? Or are we assessing their synthesis of a concept that they have covered in class and the fact that they have written about it and covered it in a cognitive manner?
  3. How will we assess a student’s contribution made to a group project using a wiki? Is it that important to assess each student individually? What do teachers normally do when assessing group projects in the “traditional” way? Should it be any different?
  4. Are we going to assess a podcast any differently to a written essay? Are we listening for musical introductions, tones and inflections to keep the listener interested? Or should it just be the content?

These questions interest me as I ponder whether I’ll be assessing student work any differently to a “traditional” piece of work. Of course, dinosaur teachers will use all of these questions to argue why they shouldn’t use Web 2.0 technology in class. And sadly , some of them have not yet discovered the “joys” of PowerPoint as a teaching and learning tool.

Google’s new Toilet ISP April 1, 2007

Posted by Joseph Papaleo in General.
1 comment so far

Google_tispGoogle has finally done it – delivered FREE Broadband connection to every home – if it is connected to a sewerage system. The perennial problem of getting cables from the exchange to your home has been overcome.

So for many families near where I live that have this issue – help is not far away. By dropping a specailly made fiber optic cable down the toilet and flushing, the cable will reach a point that plumbers can connect to nodes giving access to the Internet. tisp_diagram.gif  My father is a plumber and not a computer user, and I can just see him rolling his eyes.

Google says that all three packages include

“a Google Toolbar-based analysis of your dietary habits and genetic predispositions, along with recommendations for healthier living”.

For those wondering how Google can possibly offer yet another free service, Google says that they

“believe that all users deserve free, fast and sanitary online access. To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward”.

So what does this mean for my classes? It means that the fantastic maths program that I’m using (more about that in the near future) will be able to be accessed by all of my students. It potentiually also means that as it is a Google service, then perhaps Google Earth would cost less to download and explore sites around the world.

The only problem at the moment is it is only in the US and Canada at the moment.

PS – Check the date and time carefully.