This site is INCREDIBLE!!!
I have only just begun to have a look around but there are a heap of streamed videos all about different aspects of reading and literacy.
Phonemic awareness and phonics
Reading and the brain
etc, etc. etc ….

All teachers should take the time to have a look around in here!

This blog entry has an interesting list of the so called “top movers and shakers” in the world of podcasting.

David Warlick is coming to NZ in February next year and we are organising a full day seminar with him on the 24th in Dunedin

It is interesting to note that two of the top primary educational podcasters in this country - Jane Nicholls and Dorothy Burt - were announced as recipients of 2007 eFellowships this week. Podcasting is getting an increasingly high profile in education in this country!!

Both very deserving recepients, and having worked with Jane at Pine Hill School for a number of years I know first hand what a stunning teacher she is! Well done Jane

It was a fantastic day with lots of connections and re-connections being made.
The Media Team has been doing a fabulous job of recording the thinking adn learning taking place for the delegates and modelling the ways school-aged children are using Web2.0 tools in their lives in and beyond the classroom.
Students from 8 to 18 years old are involved and have produced some very cool products.
check them out!

Well it has been a long day …
The build is almost complete and registrations have begun. I have spent the day in all of the wee jobs that have to happen at this stage. Printing and setting up the Media Team have been big focuses.
It was good to have the kids from the Media Team in as well and go through the conference with them. And a good meeting with the teachers involved as well.
Tomorrow it all begins in ernest.

It has been good this afternoon to connect with Julia Aitkin, Joan Dalton and David Anderson, and Tony Ryan again.

Time now to look through the conference bag and see what is in there … reminds me of a blog post I read ages ago about how in North America they call all the free stuff you get at conferences “schwag”. You can even subscribe to a site that will send it to you on a monthly basis - for a fee of course.

mmmmm …….

I have had a very busy couple of weeks - mostly not getting the time to do more than check bloglines, tag things to delicious, make notes of blog ideas, and move on ….

I have had the distinct privilege of attending the very first 5 day course with Joan Dalton and David Anderson from the PLOT programme. Wow what a week. I have learned SOOOOO much and have a lot of things flying around in my mind to get done and ponder on. With my new position at Outram School next year I have lots of things to think about, not the least of which is the PD day coming up looking at the new curriculum in NZ. That was the thing driving what I went into last week at the PLOT course thinking about and now I have an overwhelming number of things flying around in the old brain that could be utilised to make the day even better ….. A bit more thinking and planning required….
Many thanks to Joan, David and ALL the participants for a fabulous week. For those I introduced to blogs, bloglines, wikis and Del.icio.us - I hope you find them the great tools I do for organising your thinking and linking with the thinking of others that I do!
Lets all “be the best we can be” ….
ULearn starts tomorrow so things are continuing to be frantic. Challenging but lots of fun
I intend to be blogging as much as possible during the conference itself so watch this space …..
Now - I need to get some sleep ….

It is only a week until the ULearn conference and there still seem a zillion wee things to finish off. The ULearn blog summarises a lot of the information about the media team and the Web2 nature of this conference.
There are a lot of web-presences for the conference to allow people who are not able to be there to access the learning taking place. Check out the blog, wiki, podcasts, daily newspaper, etc. The keynotes will also be streamed throughout the venu and available later on-line. The other very cool thing is that most of the media content for the conference will be produced by KIDS! Proving that the ‘wee bodies’ we have in our classrooms every day are great at creating and managing this sophisticated sort of content.
Gone are the days of the watch-it-and-gone conference experience.
I am looking forward to it!

Iain Bonney from the Hill Cluster just sent me this. It is from the creators of Cosmic Blobs - which is not free - and this Beta release IS free.
Looking at the website it has some cool features and abilities. It is also for both Mac and PC.
I think I’ll show Phillip (my 10yr old) when he gets home and get him to suss it out for me. He is an absolute Alice freak at the moment and loves this sort of thing.

It appears there is a new version of Skype out for OSX ….

and it supports VIDEO!

Skype is great. Most of the people who use it like it. But if you???re a Mac user, you???ve always been a little behind in the game. Fortunately, the good people at Skype are fixing that. Today they???ve released the beta version of Skype 2 for OS X, with video.

Now you can screw over the phone company without having to boot into that pesky Windows XP, and the software is as easy to use as ever. The video features allow you to talk face-to-face with your friends within the Skype application or full-screen, for that GI Joe Videophone thing we all imagined in the ???80s.

Skype calls are still free to other Skype customers, but you???ll have to pay to call landlines or mobiles, though it???s still less than most long-distance, so it???s still a great way to go.

from the CrunchGear blog

I have written before about my take on what Marc Prensky adn others are saying about the compelling nature of gaming and how we need to build this into our classroom pedagogy.
The creating passionate users blog has a good post today on this issue. It is well worth a read.

I like this: “The secret is to be more provocative and interesting than anything else in their environment.” Isn’t this what we want our classroom programmes to be like?

The post finishes with a good list of things that create the interest and engagement:
* Be Different–Break Patterns and Expectations
* Be Daring
* Change Things Regularly
* Inspire Curiosity
* Pose a Challenge
* Be Controversial and Committed
* Be Fun
* Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive
* Help them have Hi-Res Experiences
…. and finishes with the challenge to add to this list.

More from the Teaching Hacks blog as they suggest ways for the teaching community to get coordinated with its resource sharing:

Thanks to Alan Levine for suggesting the idea of a common tag in order to share our specific resources with each other and move to a little more 2.0 action, and John Blake for pointing out a few other places where we can share media. I am really interested in seeing which services educators are moving towards.

I have been using a shared tag for resources to be added to the ???Geocaching for Educators??? section of the wiki. (Glenn E. Malone has added so many great resources there)

A shared tag is a great idea, since everyone can benefit from the feeds. So I have added a shared tag and feeds to the various sections of the wiki for automatic updates of each section according to the newly tagged content.

I think del.icio.us will be a good place to start to aggregate the tags. Later on, we could move to technorati and other services, and then merge all the different feeds together. Any suggestions for other services? The only requirement would be that any shared tag would have an RSS feed.

Please pass on the following:

1. If you are an educator and using a social bookmarking web site please tag your web space with ???edsocialbookmark???.
http://del.icio.us/tag/edsocialbookmark
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/edsocialbookmark

2. If you are an educator and using a wiki please tag your wiki with ???educwikis???
http://del.icio.us/tag/educwiki
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/educwiki

3. If you are an educator and using a blog please tag your blog with ???educblog???
http://del.icio.us/tag/educblog
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/educblog

4. If you are an educator and using a photo sharing web site please tag your photo sharing web space with ???edphotoshare???
http://del.icio.us/tag/edphotoshare
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/edphotoshare

5. If you are an educator and using a video sharing web site please tag your video sharing web space with ???edvideoshare???
http://del.icio.us/tag/edvideoshare
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/edvideoshare

Update:
6. If you are an educator producing a podcast please tag your podcast with edpodcast???
http://del.icio.us/tag/edpodcast
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/edpodcast