paul reid • blog

I’m having a look today at the Victorian Education Knowledge Bank 2006 Online Conference - October 11-13: Stories from Teaching in the Digital Age. They are using software call Elluminate (which is Java based) to allow attendees to take part online via audio chat, text chat etc - similar to a Skype conference. But it has a lot more features built in and works on Mac and PC. Of particular interest are live desktop sharing, video chat, ‘the ability to put ones had up’, and see a fellow participants profile. I am going to be dramatic now and say this is a groundbreaking leap for professional learning in Australian education. Anyone interested can join up. I’m particularly interested in the use of these tools to provide engaging geographically disparate professional learning. Register here and listen to the introductory welcome here. The Knowledge Bank 2006 Online Conference…

….. explores how education networks are creating and sharing knowledge. The conference features a great line up from school presenters to e-learning experts and covers topics ranging from online competencies to digital literacy, blogging and podcasting.

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   Social Software, Web Apps, Web conferencing

MynoteIT is yet another web2.0 online tool for students that allows them to organize their class schedule, class notes, and group their work. It does so quite cleverly in such a way that it can be easily shared and referred to in a few mouse clicks. Potentially it could be used by students of any level. As more eLearning services come out as part of the now famed web 2.0 (”Are we there yet Dad?”) such as Nuvvo and Chalksite, it seems with mynoteIT they are getting more specialised.

Postbubble has a favourable review here as does Lifehack here. If you are interested, it is worth downloading this .wmv screencast from Screeniac.

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   , ICTs, Social Software, Web Apps

I’ve been taking a look at web application based eLearning services. Nuvvo and Chalksite certainly forge new ground with educators in mind. For educators wanting to run courses online for students to access at home and at school, these simple to use web apps may be an incredibly handy tool to have in the toolkit. While they certainly don’t have the scope of Moodle, Blackboard or WebCT, in time they promise to offer similar functionality. As these web 2.0 apps mature, the simplicity of their implementation is surely going to prove popular with educators. I run an Instiki wiki to host my student’s collaborative writing from my NB4Ts laptop. The ability to view, mark and add notes to the student’s good work from this portable base is a very convenient tool. On the flipside, the set-up of this was laborious and distracted from my planning and DOTT time. This is the exact kind of situation where these new online eLearning services such as Nuvvo and Chalksite start to come into play……

Nuvvo claims to be the first free on-demand eLearning service. Nuvvo uses Web 2.0 innovations to facilitate easy course creation, search, and syndication. Individualvice), which allows a person to display teachers to sign up and begin offering courses in minutes. Courses can be private or public, free or pay. Nuvvo has integrated with Skype (peer to peer voice ser his/her Skype status on the site. This means that university students using Nuvvo for example will have access to talk live with their teacher if he/she is a Skype user. Nuvvo says:

Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Everyone knows a little bit about something, and this free, AJAX-enhanced eLearning web service is designed to bring out the teacher in all of us. Sign up and build a course in minutes; advertise your course on our eLearning Market to get the word out. Get teaching with Nuvvo, Web 2.0’s answer to eLearning.

Also, there are capabilities in Nuvvo to enable rich media, such as audio and video. It is free to create a course and Nuvvo makes money from ads and by taking 8% of any course fees set by the educator. it looks like they have lots of activity there with courses both free and for a fee, from programming language tutorials to customer service training to foreign language to self-development.

Chalksite offers simple design built on the Ruby on Rails framework and allows educators to post messages, assignments and manage grading. Chalksite allows teachers to create their own weblog and about me pages to help communicate and display biography information which is a great implementation of a blog. The open and intuitive design sets Chalksite apart from Blackboard, Moodle and Elgg. Chalksite says:

It’s the quickest, simplest route to expanding your classroom onto the internet. Teachers, students and parents have a central point to access grading, assignments and messaging. Chalksite is a total web package designed just for teachers, giving you a personal website and tools you actually need without requiring an IT degree to use them.

Chalksite was designed for teachers and tested by teachers at every stage of its development. It’s specifically created to be the easiest path to online learning for real teachers and students — people who don’t have the time to decode complicated software packages or hard-to-follow instruction manuals.

While looking at the Chalksite website I noted it is similar to 37 Signal’s (designers of Basecamp) website and design sensitivities. While I couldn’t find any direct reference to the fabulous web 2.0 company 37 Signals it appears Chalksite have been directly inspired by their CSS and layout.

The thing I like most about web 2.0 apps is their gentle learning curve. Chalksite seems to be a great “stand alone” classroom enhancing product that takes less than 4 minutes to learn. The current free pricing is restricted to 5 students. With the paid pricing starting from US$4.95/month for 50 students. Chalksite does allow unlimited assignments to students/classes with image/file uploading/sharing, a complete web-based gradebook that allows students to view grades, messaging to individual students or entire classes, and a personal website.

I get the feeling that for online courses to succeed, students must be able to become engaged interactively in the learning process through discussion board comments, and plentiful guided course document and assignment postings. The more interactive the site, the more the student will return to the site. For eLearning services such as these to succeed, interactivity and collaborative features will be the most requested features together with an intuitive interface (GUI).

Paul

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   ICTs, PLE, Web 2.0, Web Apps

Many of you may know this website already, but in case not I wanted to share the Australian Rainforest Maths website by Jenny Eather. It has some of the best online interactive activities I have seen for kindy through to upper primary. Each year level includes the seven mathematics outcomes. One of the strategies promoted in the First Steps Mathematics course is giving students a variety of different learning opportunities to match each aspect. In particular using online activities to provide instantaneous feedback to the child as to whether they have the key understanding or not - if not the child can quickly try another strategy. This is one of the most under-rated bonuses of using interactive activities. It frees up the teacher to provide more guided feedback to students in need of specific assistance. The activities are easily aligned with the key understandings and could also be used as supplemental diagnostic tasks.

The website states that it contains:

“Over 800 interactive mathematics activities for Kindergarten to Year 6 covering the math strands of Number, Number Systems, Operations & Calculations, Strategies & Processes, Patterns & Algebra, Measurement, Space & Geometry, Chance & Probability, Data Analysis and Money.”

Paul

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   , ICTs, Resources, Web Apps