January 2007 Workshops announced

It is my pleasure to announce the first stream of workshops for 2007. Check out the Workshops page for details.
You’ll have to download the Program details in from here until I work out how to publish tables in this blog

I hope to see as many of you as possible and look forward to demonstrating just exactly how to build that house.

Art Musuem Excursion (without the airfare)

Found these nice little sites for Visual Art educators, or anyone working with Art and its history.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Web Gallery of Art

Yes, they’re in my del.icio.us account, just thought I’d put them here as well for those of you who haven’t done your homework yet and started using this wonderful web tool.

Take a Shortcut

Those of you who’ve been to one of my sessions will have lived through my evangelistic tirade on using keyboard shortcuts and will know that I make no apologies for challenging the mouse-bound. By becoming familiar with these shortcuts you will, without a doubt, be well on your way to Power-User status. The rationale is simple, why use a mouse (which can involve up to 4 actions) when the same outcome can be achieved by pressing 2 keys that are under, or close, to your fingers. Now, I don’t wear a t-shirt with an anti-mouse slogan, but I know that you will get things done so much faster if you’re able to use a combination of mouse and keyboard shortcuts.

My little brother (although not so little at 29 and much taller than me) has just bought himself his first Mac (a Macbook) and of course I gave him the Keyboard shortcut spiel. I discovered this widget in his Dashboard today and thought I’d share it with you. Now don’t think that you need to learn them all by tomorrow, that’s just silly. Take 2 and add them to your repertoire, use them religiously for a week and then add another 2, use them for a week….. you get the idea.

xCuts by Leland Scott shows you all the available shortcuts with a flick to the Dashboard.

Windows also has a range of keyboard shortcuts available to users but unfortunately aren’t as easy to find as they are on a Mac (where they are listed next to the function in the menu) so here are some links forWindows shortcuts.

List of Windows XP shortcuts

Useful Windows XP shortcuts

Web.a.licio.us

Ok, I know this has been around for a while but I finally created a del.icio.us account and I’m hooked. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this Web 2.0 feature it’s a place to store your bookmarks remotely. This has a number of benefits for educators. “What’s he on about?”, I’ll explain. While surfing the net, you stumble on a site that you think might be of use, either to yourself, your class or even other teachers, and bookmark it. Now normally you would add the site’s address (the URL) to the bookmark/favourites folder in your web browser but this has limitations. That URL is now only accessible from the computer you were on at the time, not very practical if you use multiple computers to access the net, and it’s not accessible for others either. Del.icio.us provides a solution.

Instead of, or as well as, bookmarking a site in your web browser, add the site to your del.icio.us account. Now that bookmark is available to you no matter which computer you access the net from. I’ll be extremely honest here, when I was first introduced to de.licio.us a while ago I was quite indifferent to it. It fell smack into the “Very nice, but when would I use that?” category. I’d even been told that it was great for educators. How? Would somebody please give me an example of how this feature was going to be of use to me as an educator? Then the penny (or cent) dropped.

We waste a lot of time getting students to research the web for assignments, and as we all know, there is a lot of mis-information out there, so instead of getting students to waste entire sessions searching invalid sites, set up a del.icio.us account for your subject area at your school. Name it something like music@yourschool or yourschooldrama so it’s easy to find by others and then add sites that you believe are appropriate and valid for the assignment. You can even bundle links according to their tags thereby grouping links for different tasks.

Now you could allow students to add further links to the account if you like, however, you would lose the ability to moderate the quality of the links. There are two ways to allow students to contribute to this collaborative research. The first is to simply encourage them to email you the link and you post it to the account if you feel it’s valid (of course provide an explanation if it isn’t). The second is to utilise the networking feature of del.icio.us. Encourage students to create their own accounts and include the school account in their network, you do likewise. You now have a forum for the collective research to be shared amongst the class with the initial account you set up acting as the “official” account. You can browse the links added by students and give the decent ones the seal of approval by adding them to the main account. Collaboration with some regulation, sounds like heaven.

The Lazy Blogger

For those of you who have been visiting to see what I’ve been up to, you might think that the lack of blogging may mean a lack of activity. How untrue this is. I’ve actually been a very busy bee doing lots of great things that I’m dying to tell everyone about, but, I’ve noticed that I can’t sit and concentrate on the computer for very long at the moment without getting a headache so I went and got my eyes checked. The verdict, I need glasses. I pick them up next week so you should hopefully see quite a few backdated posts after that. Until then….. keep doing what you’re doing.

Here’s a hammer, now go build a house.

Throughout my career as a Secondary Teacher I was always showing my peers how to use technology. Whether it’s getting a DVD player to work, setting up a data projector or getting connected to a network, so many teachers have no idea about how to use technology that differs from what they’re used to. It’s such a sink or swim situation for many teachers without a technological bent. Most of the time they rely upon other teachers or students to set things up, which solves the immediate problem but doesn’t address the overall issue of why these teachers are dependent on others in the first place.

My theory is that it’s simply due to a lack of appropriate education, we forget that teachers are learners too and so also sometimes need to be guided. We just expect that teachers will sit down with a manual and work it out in between planning, teaching, marking, reporting and the mass of extra-curricular duties that fills up the day.

Learning how to use a DVD player can be hard enough, a data projector even worse, so how can Education authorities expect teachers to implement computer technology into their curriculum delivery without ensuring that they are actually competent and comfortable with the technology in the first place. Sure, most teachers know how to use Microsoft Word (even if they only use 2% of it’s capabilities) and manage to get through reports each semester, but how many are really comfortable enough with an operating system and the specific software for their subject area to implement it successfully? Not many, I can tell you.

I do love it when a statement is made to the effect that training has been provided for staff. Upon further inquiry this training is usually found to be a day or two of information overload where participants walk out with their eyes rolled back as they try to process the 12 months worth of data they’ve received in 12 hours. Sound familiar?

Professional Development. Look up the definition for the word “development” and you will find something to the effect of “the process of being developed”. Now look up the definition of the word “process”. “A series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”, says my Oxford. A series? Does that not imply a gradual curve of growth? Technological competence is something that is gain over a period of time, gradually. If we taught our students the way we teach our teachers, it’d be a case of “Here’s the booklet with all you need to know, see you in 10 weeks time when you rock up for the test.” Need I say more?

I guess all I can add is, watch this space.

Winds of Change

Well here I am, finally with my own blog. I’ve avoided setting up my own for a long time, preferring to hijack the blogs of others with lengthy comments in response to their entries. So now they can hijack mine, I hope others do too. I would like to see this blog become a centre of Technological Convergence Education, a place where Creative Arts teachers can enhance their own learning thereby tasting the power of technological competence and its effects on Teaching and Learning.