Educational Origami

… was a little quiet on the blogging front as I prepared for 2 fairly significant events.

The first event was the opening of the new block at school by John Key. My part in this was running a video conference with my Year 13 class. We were lucky enough to have a colleague to conference with who works in Google in San Francisco. The VC was a collaborative presentation on collaboration. 2 of my students collaborated with our colleague to prepare a joint presentation. The medium we used was the google suite of tools including:

• Google documents
• Google scholar
• Google alerts
• Google sites
• Google calendar
• Gmail and gtalk

We all enjoyed the presentation and I was impressed by range of tools available and free. Two tools that did impress me a lot were:

1. Google alerts – this is a cool – its like an RSS feed on steroids. Select your subject area or keywords, select your alert range (what you want want the site to look at – news sites, blogs journal etc) and set you report frequency. Each time an article is published within your reporting criteria google alerts lets you know.
2. gTalk -free video conferencing built into your gmail account

In the also very cool category is google scholar -  a search engine that only looks in academic or scholarly sites.

The kids did very well and considering the whole collaboration period was 48 hours from concept to delivery it was very good indeed.

The second event was the learning styles and learning tools workshop I ran at Tahatai Coast school. Man, those guys were good. Its Saturday morning, a voluntary event and 22 out of a staff of 35 turn up. Great turn out and these guys worked right through. Its great working with motivated people who contribute and want to be involved. There personal contributions, experiences and suggestions made it a great workshop. We covered some favourites of mine – Sensory learning and Multiple Intelligences and then linked these to learning tools.

They also understood that while we were talking about tools, the tools are just the medium the kids work in to achieve the educational/learning outcomes. They are a mechanism of engagement. Good day and lots of fun.

We also made a wiki which the staffa re going to use as a repository for learning activities.

So all in all a busy week.

Next week is also busy as I have sessions to present on robotics, Web 2.0, Open source software and digital kids.  Yehaa