SRN allows you to poll students on DER laptops and the following video gives you a bosic overview http://www.jeffstanger.net/Science%20Teaching/srn.swf

For more detailed info on SRN see http://studentresponsenetwork.com/

Educational research has shown that formative assessment (assessment for learning) is the most effective strategy you can use to improve the performance of your students. The basic idea here is that formative assessment gives students feedback on their knowledge and understanding. It is no wonder that education systemsall over the world have been adding formative assessment to their educational models in the last 10 years. Technologies like SRN can be effective and engaging ways to use formative assessment to help your students. There are several pedagogies that have been developed to do this in the classroom and you can explore two of these in one of my previous posts at http://www.jeffstanger.net/blog/?p=19

Assignments in Sharepoint

Sharepoint is the content management system that SGGHS uses to build an internet and intranet. You can use the functions of Sharepoint to set and collect assignments electronically. Use the following link to view a video that guides you through the basics of how to use Sharepoint to set and collect assignments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00hBQfnDLXc

Ideas for using DER laptops

If you would like to explore some more general ideas for how you can use DER laptops in the classroom see http://www.jeffstanger.net/Science Teaching/Ideas to Try Using DER Laptops.pdf which is a document I put together a few years ago.

Cheers,

Jeff

A video podcast or vodcast is an online delivery of video on demand via an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. An RSS feed is essentially a text document that is placed online which contains the details of files for download. The RSS feed contains information in a specific format so software can keep you up to date with what is available. In my case the software is apple’s itunes software and this allows content to be automatically downloaded and transferred to an ipod or iphone if desired.

As an example I have created an RSS feed at http://www.jeffstanger.net/Vodcast/jeffstangeredublogvodcast.xml to act as a vodcast for my EduBlog. This file is a text file that can be opened and edited in notepad. To view this text file go to the web address http://www.jeffstanger.net/Vodcast/jeffstangeredublogvodcast.xml and select view source in the menu of your browser. You can save the file as jeffstangeredublogvodcast.xml and you may find it easier to edit it in Adobe Dreamweaver as it is set out better and colour coded. An overview of what you would have to change in this text file is given in this document vodcasting.pdf. To see how the RSS / XML file delivers online content to itunes go to the page http://www.jeffstanger.net/vodcast.html and follow the instructions.

Students can use the webcam on their laptops to record videos of experiments or video assignments and these can be distributed to the class. The steps to record a video from the webcam and save it in the correct format for itunes are shown below:

1. Open Adobe Premiere
2. select instant movie
3. name your new project
4. click OK
5. go to the menu and select file
6. go down to Get Media from and select Webcam
7. click Capture to start recording
8. click pause to stop recording
9. close the capture window
10. There are lots of fancy things you can do with it then but if you’re happy with it move to the next step
11. From the File menu select Export and then Movie
12. Select settings button and the best settings are: General = Quicktime and Video = MPEG-4 Video D1/DVPAL
13. Then change the video and audio quality to make the file as small as practical
14. Click Save

Videos can also be produced in Adobe Captivate to demonstrate the use of software etc. See http://www.jeffstanger.net/vodcast.html for examples.

For more info on vodcasting you can google  how to podcast or vodcast and you’ll find pages like this http://www.devshed.com/c/a/XML/How-to-Set-Up-Podcasting-and-Vodcasting/ or http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#testing

Hope this is useful to someone and if there is somthing else I should explain please let me know by going to my contacts page and emailing me.

Cheers,

Jeff

See http://www.wordle.net/

An Update:

Or for a pdf guide to this software go to http://www.open-of-course.org/courses/file.php/10/Freemind.pdf

Some of the basic shortcuts shown in the video are:

alt + arrow key = zoom in and out
insert = adds a new node
enter = creates a new node or completes one
cntrl + up or down arrow = moves nodes around
f2 = to edit existing nodes without typing over the text

You can get this software here http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

You can also use free minmaps online and share or edit them with others. A great example is mindmeister https://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show/56340311

He spoke on this idea and the use of clickers in peer instruction on ABC radio (see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2009/2766093.htm). See more about my use of clickers and peer instruction at http://www.jeffstanger.net/blog/?p=19

I think this guy is hitting the nail on the head with these ideas. Science education as a Science should be our mantra as educators.

Cheers,

Jeff

Peer instruction (PI) and Technology -Enhanced Formative Assesment (TEFA)

The information describing these two techniques is outlined in one of my previous blog posts here.

Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs) for Motion and Newton’s Laws

This has been shown to be a very effective way to teach Newton’s laws and many other physics concepts. An Abstract of the paper where I first read about this technique is available here. Activities using this technique have been published in a book and here is the information for this book.

There are a lot of videos of these activities available from http://csmt.research.tufts.edu/ildvideos/ and associated worksheets can be found on the website http://ild.tccs.tufts.edu/. I have developed a html page that links to these videos and has explanations to clarify the activities for students at http://www.jeffstanger.net/Science%20Teaching/SGHSilds.htm. Save this html file into the same folder as the videos and you can open each video through the links in this file.

These activities still need a lot of work and they are not all suitable for you average student. I intend to film a selection of these to make them more accessible to high school students and remake the worksheets. Stay tuned.

Collaborative Electronic Workspaces

My use of wikis in science is outlined in a previous blog post at http://www.jeffstanger.net/blog/?p=9. If you watch the video I made for this post you will hear me describe what I did.

I hope this has been helpful and if there are any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

A good compilation of information for clickers can be found at http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/clickers.htm

The title of my talk was “Introducing TurningPoint SRS for Assessment of teaching and learning across connected classrooms”. The presentation was transmitted as an online meeting to another interactive whiteboard (IWB) potentially in another location using free online meeting software from http://www.mikogo.com/en/.

For more details about TurningPoint products including software and clickers visit http://www.keepad.com

Cheers, Jeff

The next challenge for you is to give me some feedback. Just like any teacher I would like some feedback on the posts below. Blogs are about people communicating and the way you communicate to me on my blog is the post comments about my posts. Each post has a link at the top saying “add comment”. Click this and leave me a comment, idea or link to something you found on the topic I was discussing. This is the really cool thing about web 2.0, the two way communication.

Cheers, Jeff

Social Networking

Google provides all DET email in NSW and they have just purchased Facebook. They are now developing a version of Facebook for students to use in school. This will be a great way for students and teachers to communicate. For an introduction to social networking watch this video. Here’s a video that introduces some of the applications in facebook for education.

Social Bookmarking (e.g. Del.icio.us)

Delicious is an online bookmarking service where you can tag and catagorize your favuourite websites and share them with your friends. You can find delicious here and here is an article on its use in education.

Video Sharing Websites

Google has also purchased YouTube. DET teachers have just had YouTube made available to them and it will be available to our students soon.

More Resources

Listen to a podcast here discussing web 2.0 in education.

Check out some links here pointing you to web 2.0 resources for education.

Here is another long list of applications using web 2.0 in education.

There are many more examples of web 2.0 applicati0ns just waiting for educational applications. You may recognise some in the image below?

http://grizzlymedia.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/web-20.jpg

So it looks like they can be good communication tools for teachers to use and an interesting medium for students to use in presenting information? Maybe you could post information and instructions for your lessons and students are required to post comments as part of the lesson?

What do you think? Any comments?

Search the web and find some info that informas teachers about using blogs in education. Can you post the information as a comment on this blog?