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 has many uses in the classroom as a tool for creating documents and for collaboration. One of the newer features that Google have introduced is the ability to create web based forms that can collect data directly into a spreadsheet.

The idea behind Google forms is simple. In the Google Docs main page you select ‘New’ and then ‘Form’ from the menu, which takes you to the form editor. There you can enter a title and opening information for your form and begin to create your questions. Google gives you the choice of six types of question and you can mix them as you want in any form.

You continue to add questions until you have finished your form. At that point you save the form. You can embed the form in a website to be completed or you can use the link at the bottom of the form creator to share the webpage of the form. You might want to use a URL shortener to make the address easier.

Here is the address of my completed form

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pqWdwkQ2SenCigz8XGDgUOA

(and the shortened version is http://memurl.com/mefede)

Here is the same form embeded in the page

You can find out more about Google Docs and Google forms at the website docs.google.com

Have you ever been frustrated when a student tells come to a lesson and tells you that they have forgotten what the homework was that you set? Wouldn’t it be good if all your students could access a record of what you set for homework from home or the library even if they have lost their homework diary or were absent when it was set?

The solution is to publish your homework tasks on the Internet so that they are always accessible. I’m not talking about lots of detail or the homework itself being online, just a note similar to what you would expect a pupil to write in their diary, but maybe more accurate. Now not every teacher has, wants or could manage a full website or blog to post homework on, but every teacher should be able to use email.

With the online tool Posterous email is the only thing you need to be able to use to create a mini website with a record of the homework tasks you set.

As it says on their website you don’t need to sign up, all you do is email post@posterous.com and an account will be set up for you and they will email you straight back with details. The email you send will be converted into a post with the subject being the title and the body being the text. If you attach a word document or similar to the email it will be attached to the post and if you attach a picture it will be added.

You can then just send an email with each homework task and it will be posted, creating a mini website that your students can look at.

Have a look at the demo site I set up at classroomtechdemo.posterous.com

and have a go at starting your own by emailing post@posterous.com

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.

Almost all online tools and web applications not to mention blogs require you to register an account or at least give an email address before you can use them fully. This causes a problem when you want to use one of these services with pupils and they either don’t have their own email addresses or you don’t want them to use their own addresses for whatever reason.

Google Mail provides one option to work around this. If you don’t know anything about Google Mail, it is one of a number of web applications that are provided by Google and are free to use. Google Mail is an email account and webmail program (a bit like hotmail or yahoo mail). Google Mail has several advantages including a large amount of storage space (several gigabytes) and advanced search and filtering capabilities, making it easy to find messages. It is free and straightforward to sign up for a Google Mail account and you can sign up for as many different accounts as you want.

Google Mail is useful in overcoming the requirement for lots of email accounts because once you have signed up for an email address, for example mrtdolan@googlemail.com, you then get more than just the user name ‘mrtdolan’. You can add a ‘+’ to the username and then anything after it and it will be delivered to the same account. So email sent to mrtdolan@googlemail.com, mrtdolan+one@googlemail.com and mrtdolan+two@googlemail.com would all end up in the same place. Although Google Mail treats these as the same account, anywhere else they would be considered different addresses and so could be used separately to sign up for a service multiple times.

For example, say you were setting up a class blog and you wanted each student to have their own login so you could keep track of who wrote what. You could set up a new google account (e.g. mrtdolan08yr10@googlemail.com) and then use varations on that address to sign all your pupils up to the blog, e.g. mrtdolan08yr10+bob@googlemail.com, mrtdolan08yr10+jane@googlemail.com, etc.

Obviously there are always issues to consider when using online tools with students where they have to register for accounts, but by following careful procedures, only using first names, not requiring them to use their own email and having clear rules and guidelines it is possible to make the most of some of the great tools out there.

You can find out more about Google Mail and sign up for an account at mail.google.co.uk

I was excited when I first came across Mnemograph (I’m glad I am typing and not pronouncing that) and had a play with the demo. Mnemograph is a web based application that allows you to create visual and interactive timelines.

You add events and enter basic details like dates and locations and then more detailed information and links. The events are then organised into a timeline that you can zoom in and out of and explore. The main timeline view is nicely organised with more information available when you hover over or click on an event. You can create text labels for events or use pictures. It is possible to show two timelines simultaneously above and below the date line. The demo shows this well with a history of the Wright Brothers split into two timelines, one with text labels and the other with pictures.

Mnemograph is currently in beta (still being developed) and doesn’t have a complete feature set yet, but it is already a useful tool. The application is designed to allow easy collaboration on creating timelines and they can be shared easily too. The best way to get a feel for the application is to have a play with the demo and then sign up and try creating your own timeline on the Mnemograph website.

It’s worth looking at the instructions that explain more about the tool and how to use it. They also reveal the origin of the name Mnemograph.

As they say:

Why is it called Mnemograph?
Like many good technology companies, the origin of our name is Greek. Mnemosyne was the personification of memory in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of Gaia and Uranus and, after a nine night stand with Zeus, the mother of the Muses. To be honest, we aren’t terribly happy with the name. It doesn’t seem exactly main stream and is hard to type and pronounce. So, if you have any decent ideas, let us know!

The growth of online video fueled by video sharing websites like YouTube has created a great resource of millions of videos ready and waiting to be tapped into to support our teaching and our pupils learning. Obviously there is a lot of rubbish that needs to be waded through, but there are some gems as well.

Because of the possibility of misuse of these sort of sites and the unsuitable nature of some of the videos, most of these sites are blocked by school networks. That means that it is impossible to show a video streamed directly from the site in the classroom and another approach is needed.

As long as there are no copyright issues, videos can be downloaded from YouTube (and other video sharing sites) using one of a number of free websites. These websites will take the address of the video (that you get from the YouTube page) and will download the video and allow you to save it on your computer for playing back later.

Some of the sites download it in the format (type of video) that YouTube uses, which has the file extension .flv . If you get a file like this you will need a special video playing software such as VLC media player or Wimpy desktop FLV player, both of which are free. Other websites will convert the file for you into a format that can be played on windows media player (e.g. .avi, .mpg or .wmv).

Here is a list of some of the websites that you can use to save videos from YouTube and other sites:

Sites that will download as .flv files

• videodl.org – multiple sites supported
• youtubecatcher.com – YouTube only
• keepvid.com – multiple sites supported

Sites that will download and convert videos into nice formats

• catchvideo.net – YouTube only
• vixy.net – Multiple sites supported
• vconversion.com – YouTube only
• zamzar.com – Multiple sites supported

I haven’t tested all of these sites, but have listed several to help you find one you like.

**UPDATE**

I have found another web site called Youconvertit.com that allows you to convert and download videos as well as convert files of all kinds into other formats.

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…)