Read a couple of posts a while back that made me consider how we handle the set of skills that our students are slowly acquiring while using our Eportal system.
In the Three-rs of-education Dana Watts asks:
Do we need to have an entry level test to access students’ needs when they enter our school? Is there a need for a skills course to pass during the first year? Or will students pick up these skills on their own?
Scot Meech, on the other hand, in Universal Document Creation Techniques wonders:
Are there universal techniques that everyone should know about document creation? What are they if there are? Who is responsible for teaching the basic fundamental techniques?
Both posts reminded me of conversations I have had over the years. I often wondered, keeping in mind the transitory nature of our student population, how you could ensure that all students would be exposed to the same tech skills?
In Abu Dhabi an idea was to create a virtual, video based, course that contained the basic tech skill set I thought our students should have. Such a course would have the added benefit of being a PD resource for teachers as well. Unfortunately, I never got around to completing the course mostly due to a change in High School administration.
With our move to a 1-2-1 program and the removal of some ICT courses I think it might be time to look at this again. Create a blog that could become our skills course much along the same lines as what I have just begun with the Tips and Hints blog. Check out the work @rappino and I did last year with our description of online writing skills and from this create an online writing checklist like my blogging checklist. Add content, by having students in my tech classes create “how to” screencasts. Hopefully, this content could help their peers drive their own learning and make teachers aware of the skills the students were acquiring.
Who is currently responsible for making sure these skills are taught? Same old thing I have been seeing for the last 20 years; tech teachers through an ICT course. This needs to change. Responsibilities need to change. If we want this become part of what each SSIS student does on a daily basis everyone needs to be responsible, administration, teachers and students.
We started blogging at SSIS last year in September using Edublogs. Although I really like edublogs and the support I was given the issues we had with blogging due to our lack of bandwidth made the experience fairly painful.
I was pushing for a local install of wordpressmu and moodle so that bandwidth would not be a major factor in the use of web based tools at SSIS. Fortunately, at the EARCOS 08 admin conference administration found out that
other schools were moving in this direction and decided it would be a good move for our school as well.
At that point I was using Netvibes and Greader to collect the students RSS feeds as I wanted to use a Netvibes page to collect and showcase student writing. You can see the edublog feeds above. I did not really like the widget view that you had with Netvibes so in the end I used a shared Greader feed to display student work.
I see there have been some changes with Netvibes. You are now allowed to view the feeds in what I feel is a better way: a reader view. In this view you can to see your feed in, a list, an expanded view (with the whole blog post), or a mosaic mode (looks like it pulls a graphic from the blog post) with individual feeds and categories shown along the left hand side.
As you can see above they have also added a few other items to their feeds. Still think the current system we have in our wordpressmu blogs of collecting RSS feeds into a teacher blog is the best way of displaying students work but these Netvibes changes are quite nice.
Graphics were captured using Snagit for Mac beta version. Works quite well so far!
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Have been using Wordle for the past year and a bit but had not been on the site in a while. Noticed in a Diigo group you could create clouds from RSS feeds.
Here is mine.
One page of my RSS feed as a wordle cloud.
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