Wednesday 20 May 2009

Creating Class Blogs

Today was my first experience at sharing some of my web 2.0 knowledge with other educators. I presented a professional development workshop for the teachers at my school on creating class blogs. Only a small fraction of them actually turned up, but the ones who did were enthusiastic about using this new tool for learning.

I eventually used my own personal wiki to create a site that would guide my own teaching but also guide the teachers if they needed to go back and review what we covered. It will also serve to help those teachers who were not able to attend. One of the teachers said she found it easy to create her class blog from the instructions.

I cannot take all the credit, I borrowed heavily from two of my favourite New Zealand teachers and part of my PLN, Jacqui Sharp and Allanah. Thank you both, I used links to your blogs so I did not have to reinvent the wheel.
http://jacquisharp.blogspot.com
http://www.bling4yrblog.blogspot.com

My class blog wiki guide:
http://shaunwood.wikispaces.com/About+Blogs

I have encouraged these teachers to get their feet wet and post a few blogs, as well as introducing it to their classes. Our next step will be to comment on each others blogs to encourage participation and show the kids that they have a wider audience. I also plan to run a few short workshops to help the teachers start adding all the fun extras once they have gained some confidence.






Saturday 2 May 2009

Graphs and charts made easy

A big thanks to Kevin Jarret I discovered Chartle.net a flash based site for creating graphs and charts.

You can create pie, bar, line and a few other fun charts with just a few clicks. It is easier than using Excel or other spreadsheet programmes.

I especially like that no sign in is required which means it is easy for K12 students to get in and create awesome graphs.

Another great feature is it alows you to create further graphs based on one already created. For example I created this temperature graph sample for my class as they are tracking and graphing temperature. They will be able to use this model as the basis for creating their own graphs, thus scaffolding them in their introduction to Chartle.com.

The only issues I found was using the embedding code. You need to be able to embed it in both the HEAD and BODY html which is not always an option when you are working with blogs and wikis. I found the easiest method was to create a screen capture on the chart and insert it as a picture.