Classroomtech.org.uk

As teachers we tend to be hidden away in our own classrooms doing our own thing  a lot of the time. There are loads of great things that go on in lessons that our colleagues never get to hear about.

This is especially true in the effective use of technology in the classroom. Lots of us have tools that we use and we should be looking to share our ideas, things that have work and that haven’t, with each other. Initially this should happen with our closest colleagues in the departments we are based in, then it should extend across the whole school or college.

But even if we are sharing good practice effectively within our institution, unless we are seeking dialogue with our colleagues around the country and even in other parts of the world, then we are missing out on a wealth of knowledge and experience. The aim of this website is to do a little bit of that, to draw peoples attention to some of the tools that are out there and hopefully build some connections with people who are innovating and developing wise ways of using technology to enhance teaching and learning.

There are hundreds if not thousands of teachers around the world who now record some of their ideas on blogs and websites. This is a vast (and slightly daunting) resource that we should be trying to tap into. A good place to start is with some of the best established British teacher bloggers (or edubloggers to use the term that has sprung up to describe them). Another place to look is on the blogging site edublogs.org where you will find loads of teacher authored blogs.

Here are a few places you could look to get started (after looking round this site of course)

• Dougbelshaw.com – A history and e-learning staff tutor in the UK
• edtechroundup.com – conversations about using technology in education
• joedale.typepad.com – Integrating technology into the MFL classroom

Google Docs is an online office suite, like a cut down version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). It runs in your web browser and stores your documents online making them available from any computer. Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate on and share Text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

There are lots of applications for Google Docs in the classroom and I will discuss others in future posts. One application of the word processor part of Google Docs is to create quick and temporary web pages.

Because the word processor enables you to quickly edit documents with instructions and links you can write some instructions or information for a lesson just as you would on a worksheet, except that because you can publish it as a web page it can include links to other websites.

When you have finished your page, you can publish it (go to ‘share’, ‘publish as webpage’) and you will be given a link to your new web page. Here is one I created for this post:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbtbm3h_52c747dtgd

This is now a webpage that you can send the students to in order to guide them through an online task. You can use a URL shortener as detailed in another post to make the address easier to share with the pupils. When I ran the above address through Memurl.com I got memurl.com/duvote which is much easier.

When you have finished using the page with a class you can either leave it published or unpublish it, but save it in Google Docs. That way you can come back to it, ammend it and use it again.

For more information about Google Docs visit the website docs.google.com. I will endevour to write about Google Docs in more detail soon.

One of the best features of web browsers when they first became popular with start of the mass use of the Internet back in the 90s was the ability to save, or bookmark, favourite web sites. Making it easy to find them again. Bookmarks are still a major feature of all browsers and there have been various advances and additions that make them easier to use and more useful. The problem with the bookmarks in your browser, on your computer is that if you go to another computer or even use a different browser on your computer then you don’t have access to them.

Over the past few years services that solve this problem have sprung up on the Internet. They are websites where you can register and then bookmark web sites from any computer and access them from any computer. These services are called social bookmarking services. The name suggests one of their major features, the ability to share your bookmarks with other people (if you want to) and collaborate in building lists of useful web sites.

The biggest and probably best known of these sites is called Delicious.com (formally Del.icio.us). (Read the rest of this entry…)