Wondering about Wikis

Does anyone have any advice for wikis.  I have a teacher that wants to start one with a group of students but is concerned about security.  She is uncomfortable with the idea that students can write to the wiki without any approval process before the editing is publicly visible.  I would prefer to have our teachers use one that has no advertising and very simple, uncluttered interface.  Some of the ones I have looked at, even the "education" ones are quite busy and might be quite distracting to look at.

RSS Reader

Have finally set up my RSS feed reader and things are working quite well.  I was able to get a feed to most of the blogs set up by members of our committee.  There were a few that my reader did not work with.  Not sure what the issue is.  It may have something to do with the blog site being used.  Both blogs that did not work with my reader are blogmeister blogs ( Jim & Kim).

Another media converter

Just a quick note to share another resource with everyone.  Although I have found Zamzar to be quite functional there were times when it did not seem to work.  I am not sure what the issues were but ended up trying others and have found one that seems to work as well or better than Zamzar.  You can find it at the following link:

Media-convert

I have also made a link to this service in the resource section of our group resource page.

United Streaming Followup

I am almost through my first assignment created with the assignment builder tool available from Discovery Learning/United Streaming.  So far things have gone quite well.  Students have been fairly successful at working through the materials at their own pace.  The supplementary materials in the Teachers Resource book and the Black Line masters have proved to be quite helpful.  The lab activity was fun for the kids and it was easy to incorporate some math and computer skills into the assignment.  Students have yet to write the quiz so I will have to wait to see the results.

Although I have used united streaming extensively in the past it has been primarily to download videos to the entire class via the LCD projector or a DVD player connected to a TV.  For this assignment I purposely designed it to have students view the videos independently to guage its effectiveness.  It is clear that if multiple students are viewing the material in the classroom at the same time independently they MUST have headphones of some kind.  I was certainly distracting to hear all the other soundtracks playing in the background as I was trying to watch the video on my screen.

This was also the first time I had used video segments instead of showing the whole video.  I certainly see this as beneficial although next time I would probably show the entire video the the class as a whole first and then have them use the segments on their own as a followup.

All in all I am quite excited about my next assignment.  I am interested in the experience of others and am willing to show you the process I went through.

United Streaming

I have been spending some time 'playing' with the United Streaming/Discovery Learning service and continue to be impressed by what it has to offer.  I have discovered that it is certainly more than a video streaming service.  I recently completed my first assignment complete with video segments, weblink assignments, and online quizzes.  My plan is to use this assignment as the core component of the Understanding the Nervous System part of grade 6 science.  My plan is to have the more advance students in class work independently through the assignment while I work with a small group of at risk students.

Anyone interested in viewing the assignment can do so at the following link on my class page:

Nervous System Web Assignment

Of course you are welcome use the assignment if you are interested.  I have set it up so that it can be shared within our division.

Terry

At McKitrick School we have decided to make November Parents Month with regard to after school activities.  A number of opportunities are available for Parents including Cooking, Health and Beauty Tips, North Star Hockey games, Crafts, and Computers.  Parents are invited to attend and child care will be provided for their children.

On the computer nights parents started by learning a little about the system in place at our school.  They also had an opportunity to discover the world of the internet and how to use Internet Explorer.  We finished off the evening by discussing internet safety as it relates to their children.  At our second session we got into the use of email.  All parents in attendance created their own email account with live.ca and managed to send and receive a few messages.  Many of the parents were able to send messages to their children, which created quite a bit of excitement.  The third session will focus on digital photography and photo sharing.  Parents will have an opportunity to take and upload digital photographs and upload these to accounts they create on flickr.  Time permitting we will also look at some basic photo editing.  The topic of the final session is yet to be considered although we are considering digital citizenship and using the computer for school work.

So far our experience with parents in all activities has been quite successful.  I am hopeful that we can continue to offer computer access to our parents after the formal sessions are complete.  We also hope to donate some used computers to those parents who participated and other families in our school that do not currently have a computer at home.

First look at Zamzar

I am still having some difficulty keeping track of and organizing passwords and usernames. I suppose it will come with time. I am concerned that this would certainly be an issue with students as well.

Tried using the Zamzar file conversion site today and found that it worked quite well in my initial and very limited experience. Will have to do some more testing to see if it is as good as it seems at first. I am not sure I see any learning application in the classroom at this point but it certainly could be useful for teachers and students as a utility.