Not Currently Active

This blog site is not currently active, but all pages are still present and I believe the links and resources are all current.

The blog "moving to catch the digital train" is active and may be found by going to http://movingtocacththedigitaltrain.blogspot.com/.

The earlier incarnation of this blog which was actively updated until 2007 may be found at School Tech Ideas, http://schooltechideas.blogspot.com/.

Resources for Interactive Whiteboards and Computers

The following website, classtools, has a variety of programs that can used for instruction with a whiteboard or with individual computers.

Online Survey Results

Now that you have completed the survey you may see the results by following this link or by clicking on the image below. When the full survey appears to may enlarge it by clicking on the image that appears in your web browser.

Resources for PDF files

There are several programs that I have come across for working with PDF files and these include the free PDF to Word document converter and there is the text extractor or mining tool. The second program works some of the time and if you find another that works all the time please let me know. If you are looking for more resources go to the website Lifehacker and enter "PDF to text" in the search box at the top of the page and a list of programs and resources will be presented to you courtesy of the folks at Lifehacker.

ICT Presentation September 2008

Link to presentation.

Creating webspaces for your courses

The first thing you should do is to consider what type of website or resources you would like to provide for the students in your course. If you need to provide regular updates then a mailing to their school email might work and if you wish to post assignments and presentations then you should consider creating a space for your course in Moodle.

Options and Ideas

Public folder on the school network. You may have the system administrator create a public folder for your class on the school network and then you can use it in a variety of ways: you may have it read only so that students may only copy files that you have put in the folder, you may let students place files in the folder so that they will be available for group work or the pooling of data.

Create a mailing list. Create a mailing list for your students using their school email accounts and then you can write one email with instructions and links to materials that each student in the school can access.

Course blog. You may create a blog, with comments turned off, for the posting of homework, the posting of links of resources, and to post interesting content. Examples of class blogs include: IB HL History Year One, Grade 12 English, and Global Geography. You may also create a wiki to provide another webspace or as a place to store content for your blog. Good blog providers would be blogger, wordpress, and edublogs.

Using a wiki. More to come.

Create a course space on the school Moodle site. Moodle is a course management system that you can use to create webpages for your course, place content and lessons, post materials, create online quizzes, in short anything that you might need to support your course. The address is kesmoodle.ca and Derek Parker can issue you a user name and a password. There are several staff members who have set up Moodle spaces and each would be happy to help you set up your space.

Here is a link to an earlier post regarding Moodle.

Problems and Possibilities with New Technologies

I stumbled across this BBC podcast only after I forgot to turn off the proceeding podcast for history, and realized that it dealt with a conversation from the morning in our staffroom. It is called "Cheating in Internet Age", 7 min., and the simple message is "if life [or technology] gives you lemons, make lemonade." Great lesson ideas regarding book reports and other common assignments or tasks that are plagiarized from the web.

This podcast, also from the BBC, reviews "Technology and Teaching" and reviews some of the current trends as well as uses for technology for teachers.

The final clip is from a school board in California (found while searching for a lost link to a similar podcast).

Here is a link to a cell phones and teaching post by W. Freyer on his blog. There is also a debate regarding cell phones in schools in the December/January 2001-8 issue of ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology.