inspiringteaching.com

This year I am only posting once per month. However, if you have not visited previously you will find a wealth of resources in my previous posts.

Moodle item of the month

I will focus on Assessment for the next few months. Last month I looked at HotPotatoes and suggested ways of using this as both a formative and summative assessment tool. This month I wish to explore the idea of using the workshop module in Moodle. A colleague in the Dublin Moodle Users Group showed us this module a few weeks ago and it is a module that I had tried to work with in the past. It was not working for me but hats off to Ennovation (our Moodle partner) they were able to tell me that the assignment uploading feature was not enable on student roles (one to watch for if this module is not “behaving”). If you are working in my school however, the module is now working and availalbe for use. It is a tricky module to learn and as usual there are a wealth of resources on YouTube to help you. Essentially, however, you upload a rubric. Student assess their own and each others work (I like to give them 2 to assess). It is a great way to get students to connect in with a mark scheme and to focus them on what is called for in summative assessments. I have also found that it raises standards as students work harder (knowing their peers will see it) and they also learn from the experience of seeing each others work.

EduApp of the month

A great application which was recommended by Susan our Home Ec/Geography/SEN teacher is Tarsia. This is a free download and is intuitive to use. I enjoyed using it myself and creating a series of questions which students match to answers to form a shape. It is ideal for formative assessment, a refresher activity in the starter of a lesson or even as a group work exercise in the lesson or the plenary. Check it out!!

Website of the month

Have you found TED yet? If you have not found this great site them you need to visit it now www.ted.com – for ideas worth spreading.

I-pad/I-phone item of the month

I have not used this app myself (as I tend to do much of this work in Moodle) however some of my colleagues are raving about TeacherPal – it allows you to track attendance, behaviour and grades. Worth a try as it is free!

PLN corner

A great person to follow on twitter is missnoor28 – lots of great websites and tips on how to use technology in education.

Moodle item of the month

I did lots of great training on Moodle this week with new staff in my school. We were looking at using Moodle based tools for quizzes. We looked at Hotpotatoes (both the cloze test and multiple choice quiz). I’m sure you know this, but it is worth reminding ourselves that students can easily create a hotpotoato quiz. This is a great revision tool for students – but teachers can then upload the best ones to become a class wide revision tool for the school.

Application of the month

We have been doing a lot of work around finding good solutions for recording oral work. Ideas including using
* voicethread
* ipod touch/iphone and the memo recorder
* using audacity and uploading the sound file to moodle for marking
While they are all good to use I am looking forward to exploring the third option as it seems like a very simple way of saving sound  files for reflection and marking.

App of the month

I have recently used my kindle app extensively – not only can I download books to my ipad and pick them up where I leave off on the my iphone – I have also found that with academic books I can highlight key sentences and words and then log into my amazon/kindle account and get a page of all my highlights. This is great when preparing literature reviews. I can also see the most popular highlights by other people……also useful for the busy researcher/teacher.

Website of the week

Check out http://edublogawards.com/ – here you will find all the winners of 2011 and no doubt some other interesting sites. No Irish winners this year but I have a feeling that our excellent SEN, Art and Maths blog are likely future contents. Find the links to these at www.belvederecollege.ie

Moodle item of the week
Continuing my exploration of the Administration panel in Moodle 1.9x, I turn today to the “files” area. If you are uploading several files at once (be they in a compressed folder or individual files) it is worth turning to the files area of the administration panel rather than uploading through the “link to file or folder” in the add resources section of each block. The files area allows you to set up folders (which is well worth doing from the beginning). It also allows you to delete old and obsolete files and to rename files. A word of caution if you rename a file or move it to another folder make sure you reflect those changes on your moodle course – pointing to an area which no longer holds your files makes no sense!

Edu-Application of the week

I have blogged previously about how I am running a course on using IT to enhance learning and teaching. Last week we did a session on cooperative learning using photostory as the IT tool. Those who are familiar with photostory will testify that it has a very easy to use interface – allows for easy transfer of visuals and voice-overs (great for the visual and auditory learner) and the active participation in creating the photostory should serve the kinasthetic learner well. It is not available for mac. The teacher-students on my course really enjoyed using it and it is well worth considering as a tool to harness a presentation of a group.

I-App of the week
We are currently encouraging departments in our school to blog. We are hoping that a set of dynamic and oft updated subject blogs will emerge over the coming weeks. School blogging at this level is also an indicator of “ICT Culture” in the NCTE framework.  An easy way to keep blogs updated is by using the wordpress app.

Website of the week

There has been alot of talk about using i-pads in the classroom recently. This led me to the Apple (Ireland) – Education site http://www.apple.com/ie/education/why-apple/ there are lots of useful tutorials and articles to at least get you to a level of understanding!

PLN Corner

If you are keen to expand your twitter network with some interesting followers then I highly recommend that you tune in to

#edchat.ie on Monday nights. The discussion is run by @fredboss and is a rich source of inspiration on many educational topics.

Moodle item of the week

Continuing my meandering about administration settings, I would like to talk about groups today. I am sure that there are many applications for groups but I use them when more than one class are using a course. On the administration panel of Moodle you will find the group button. In here you can create a group and add students to the group. One trick I picked up along the way was to assign an enrollment key to a group (Hint make the first 2 letters of the enrollment key the same as the overall enrollment key – this way when the enrollment “hint” comes up it is not confusing as the hint takes the “overall” enrollment not just the course level enrollment!). If a student is logging in for the first time and using a group enrollment key they assign themselves to their group. This means that you do not need to worry about assigning them to groups later. Groups are very useful when it comes to marking  and checking grades. When you create activities you will need to ensure that group settings are enabled.

Edu-Item of the week

The Irish Department in my school are currently trialing Voicethread. The idea behind this application is that you can upload pictures/movies and students can leave voice messages in response to the photo or your written or oral message. We are very much in the infancy of its use (and I will come back to it again) but so far here are my observations

1.     it is very easy to set up – costs (as of publishing this post) $350 for 350 accounts

2.     the most difficult part to figure out was how to make a group (as a teacher) and how to share the voicethread with students (there are excellent tutorials on this in the voicethread site)

3.     students find it very easy to use and require little or no training in how to use it

4.     it can be integrated into Moodle 2 (though I need to spend time with this)

5.     there is an app (see the next item)

6.     this has broader applications than languages – discussions around any topic could be easily facilitated using this application

Ipad/ipod item of the week

Voicethread have just produced an app for iphone/ipad. I do not have the ipad 2 but using voicethread with the iphone makes great sense to me. I did a trail with it over the weekend and found the sound quality to be excellent. It will not suffice from a teacher end as some of the features of the desktop application are not present but from a student perspective it is the way to go.  Open the app – login with  your account – find the voicethread – leave your comment – work done (very 21^st century way of doing homework!)

Website of the week

This week its a website about websites…….Nigel Lane (twitter is @NL_84) has set up a tmblr (a collection of blog posts) aobut Irish teacher blogs – you can find it at http://irishteachers.tumblr.com/

PLN corner

One effective way to build your PLN is to find a subject association. The CESI google group (which is also an organization which has f2f meetings) is a great one for Ed Tech peeps!

Good to be back! Apologies for not posting for sometime. We were on summer holidays in Ireland and while I did spend a sizable chunk of it, at work – I refuse to bore you with the details of hardware procurement and installation! During this academic year I am going to add a new heading which I will call the PLN corner. I am staring a course with teachers on using ICT for learning and teaching and as a kick off I am doing a session on developing your own Personal Learning Network – more on that later.

Moodle item of the week

For the next few weeks I am going to blog about administration settings teachers will come across in their work. As we start a new term I think one of the most requested items is “How to change the name of my course” and how to enroll new students. Most teachers will do this once a year.

Changing the name of the course is simple – when you are a teacher on a course you have an administration panel on one of the side blocks. Go to the Settings button and in the window that comes up you can change the name and short name of your course.

Adding students – there are options around this and you may find one suits better than the other. I personally prefer to go to Setting and under the Availability section to set an enrollment key. This way I can ask students to enroll themselves. I just need to give them the key. I urge you to make sure that all group and course enrollment keys begin with the came letters as the “hint” can be confusing otherwise. The other option is to go to the Administration panel and then into “Assign Roles” – then choose students and select each student adding them manually.

Edu Item of the week

I have been experimenting with some “new toys” recently and posted on the CESI list about the new “connect” software which now forms part of the “Livescribe” experience. It is a year now since I saw Adrienne Webb demo the “Livescribe pen” in Dingle and while I was impressed with it at the time I felt the fact that you could not save the pencasts to your VLE/Blog without sharing them on the livescribe site was limiting. Obviously I wasn’t alone. You can now create your pencast , save it to your computer and upload it to your Moodle etc. Very clever and very useful.

Ipad/Ipod item of the week

This one comes courtesy of my friend Pat Duffy. I spent a bit of my summer creating an ICT handbook for our staff and wanted to demo it at the start of the year. I didn’t want to use PowerPoint or create it as a PDF. Pat suggested that I use the epub format to demo it and by using Pages and a format I found at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4168 I was able to create a book which I could bookmark, turn the pages of and use the table of contents to guide me through the explanation. It looked good but has also inspired several teachers to begin to use the ipad for course notes etc.

Website of the week

http://sites.google.com/site/richardbyrnepdsite/home This site by Richard Byrne was a real find. Some really nice stuff on copyright free images, (more on) ebooks and the whole google experience in education – check it out.

PLN corner

Twitter is an essential tool in your PLN and for the next few weeks I will blog about people I follow! To start this I have checked out my “favourite tweets” and one person I regularly “favour” is @joedale – Joe is an “Independent languages and technology consultant passionate about teaching, learning, blogging and podcasting”.

P.S. – check out my entire favorites list by finding me on twitter I am @clareire

Its been a while since I blogged! In my defence I have been up to my eyes with TY exams (we run IC3 through the Irish partner Prodigy!) and I’ve been in early and staying late in an attempt to facilitate the students [along with hundreds of teachers at this time of year, I'm sure]. So apologies…….

Moodle item of the week
Focus on community hubs: As summer approches I am excited at the prospect of having time to really delve more fully into what Moodle 2 offers. One of the most exctiting features is the community hub. You can read more about it here . I had occassion to mention it during the recent edchatie twitter discussion. The ease with which courses can be shared and the promise of clusters of school sharing practice in a true community is very exciting and one to watch!

Application of the week
I was fortunate enough to attend the inventorium this week and while there I met with someone from a new company called UVoice – I’ve been trying to find a product that will allow “practice orals” to be done on the Internet for sometime and no one solution is perfect! I will be playing with this in the next while and will report back! http://demo.uvoicenow.com/

Ipad-App of the week
The App I use most on my iPad is Total Recall – this free app allows you to easily create simple mindmaps/spidergrams and is simply the very best way to make quick notes at seminars and conferences. I am amazed by the number of maps I have stored on it since January and how useful they are in terms of refreshing content months after an event – so much better than reams of notes and so much easier to create as you go!

Website of the week
I have finally found linkedin and while I might be disastrously behind the posse I think it’s one to watch! In terms of educational application it might be better from a sharing practice perspective but time will tell!

Moodle item of the week

Sometimes it is really worth looking back over “old tricks” in Moodle. It has been a while since I used Hot Potatoes and this week I used it in 3 different ways. A couple of Irish classes were working on cloze tests, I had some third years looking at how to make multiple choice quizzes and I made a cross word for a class who need to learn 40+ definitions to do with computing and the internet. In all cases I uploaded the finished version to Moodle so that scores, attempts and other key stats could be saved! Hotpotaotes is very initiative to use and I highly recommend getting the students to create the learning objects in Hotpotaotes and then the teacher uploading the best to Moodle.

Key applications

I Can Animate – see my tutorial at  http://goo.gl/xP81P the possibilities are endless but in my current school the Irish Department are using it to animate Irish Fables.

I-pad Application

A superb list of applications can be found on the Computer Education Society of Irelands website http://goo.gl/C1CLg   If you have not come across these they are well worth taking a look at.

Website of the week

I have mentioned Tom Barrett’s interesting ways series before. This week he has set up a new one on how to use Moodle – if you are a keen moodler please contribute to this very valuable resource http://goo.gl/ODFna  this is an ideal start point for those who are new to moodle also.

Moodle Item of the week

Focus on Groups: I have been very grateful for the input of Tim Hunt, for comments to my blog. A few weeks ago I blogged about groups and how the grade-book does not allow you to turn groups on. More recently, I have begun to use the attendance module and again you cannot turn groups on at course level. Tim pointed out that you can turn groups on in the administration settings of a course.  Under administration, settings, turn group mode to “separate groups” and force to “yes”. When these settings are turned on you can can then see your grade book and attendance registers in groups!

 Application of the week

Focus on Bible: For RE teachers and all interested in Catholic Education there are a variety of iphone/touch/pad apps. Among my personal favourites are Catholic Days, Holy Bible, Rosary and iMissal.

Edu Application of the week

Focus on I-can-animate. We have recently invested in i-can-animate by Kuidlan http://www.kudlian.net/products/icananimate/ . I had seen it at BETT and really liked it but was worried about training myself in how to use it. Last Friday I finally sat down with a first year student and between us we had it up and running in less than 10 minutes. I am looking forward to seeing what students produce! One of the Irish teachers here at the college is working on a project about Irish fables which should be interesting.

Website of the week

Focus on NCCA: http://goo.gl/JiMFU – is a link to the NCCAs website on ICT in primary and secondary schools in Ireland. Even if you are not an Irish teacher it is worth looking at it in terms of curriculum and framework design for ICT in education. Sadly, practical second level ideas are missing!

Moodle item of the week

If you are lucky enough to be in a school where your moodle takes the usernames and passwords from Active Directory (using LDAP) then relish it. My current school does not have this facility as we use a Moodle partner and so setting up usernames and passwords can be tiresome to say the least. It is worth noting that this can be done using a .csv file. This post is not actually about that. It is to share a great idea I had during the week about how to give students other passwords. If you set up weebly sites,  gloster accounts,  have access to on-line resources etc. you will often issue students  with unique passwords and this can turn out to be a pain in terms of getting them to remember yet another password. My idea is simple, requires a bit of leg work but can get you over the hassle of this issue. Start by creating an offline assignment. Then in the comment section copy and paste the required username and password for each student. When the student logs in they can see their own unique password and user ID but others cannot see it. It is also useful for you in terms of having  records of the passwords you have given out.

Application of the week

This one might be helpful for sports teachers. I am currently loving my Get Running App. It was not free but didn’t break the bank either. It talks you through interval walk/running and promises to take you from “couch potato to 5k in 6 weeks”. What I really like about it is that it does not take over your device and so you can use your playlists from itunes etc!

Edu Application

The wonderful Geography department in my school are currently doing an action plan which centres around comparing 2 visualisers. Visualisers are much like the old fashioned projectors and are sometimes called document cameras. The beauty of them is that they can be used to project something like a book or map onto the board but could also be used for demonstrating something like an experiment or a cooking method to the whole class. More expensive ones allow you to record what you are showing as you go and these can be easily imported to moodle. This opens up great possibilities for science experiments, allowing students to review it later. As the years go on you could end up with an entire bank of experiments on file also.  Tom Barrett has done an interesting ways series on how to use them and it can be found at https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_357zsk34mc6&pli=1

Website of the week

Its Seachtain na Gaeilge in Ireland this week. It is hard to choose just one site but one worth visiting  is http://talkirish.com/ – the founder of this site also create an app and won an award for it at the Learning without Frontiers conference this year. Also worth checking out is http://www.snag.ie/

Moodle item of the week

One of the things I have been doing recently is looking at webquest with one of our staff members. I found a really great resource which generates webquests at http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/web_quest/ (thank you to colleagues on the Irish CESI list who sent me a link to that). If you fill this in and then use the html code <> button on a webpage to create the webquest you have a very simple and easy to manage webquest. A few points to consider are

a.     use firefox to add links to each website on the webquest later – rather than using html code which might be tricky for people who do not know html

b.     link the webquest to a survey generated from the feedback or questionnaire module.

Edu-tool of the week

I have recently bought Comic Life for my school and I am sure it will be much easier to use than free versions. I see great potential for languages and any factual based subjects with this application. You can read more here http://plasq.com/education/ about how to use Comic life in education and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_83FgdOlM0 has a range of tutorials to start you off.

App of the week

One of my current favorite apps is called Discover. It presents Wikipedia articles in a more dynamic and interesting way. Check it out for free.

Website of the week

Students and staff often ask where they can find royalty free music and images. I usually teach people how to use the search in Google and Yahoo  for copyright free images. A good site to check out in this regard is http://www.morguefile.com/. A website http://goo.gl/hWmSu is a great collection of free copyright free music!