Archive for January, 2009
These past few days can be categorised as know your blog, and know the blogs in your niche. This has meant becoming familiar with Technorati and Google blog search.
Technorati is fascinating. You put a URL into it and it will tell you the number of people linking to it (known as reactions)and who they are. It will also allow you to add your blog to the list to get the same information on it. This meant that I could look at blogs that were similar to mine and find out what their key tag words are and who is linking to them. it is then worthwhile looking at those blogs. Google blog search allows you to set up alerts in Google Reader of blogs that use key words you have identified. Through this I have identified a couple of blogs that are similar to mine and linked up with them.
I have also set up Google Analytics on the blog Literacy Resources to see who is visiting and where from. I don’t have many visitors so the data is not overwhelming but I can imagine that it could become so.
From looking at the style of blogs in the same niche, there are several things coming through. (I am looking at the Masters here). Most of them have a regular feature such as Chalk Talk from Angela Maiers and from Jenny Luca , School’s Out – Friday. These people post every day, and are also frequent tweeters. I can’t manage such frequent posts but could manage a regular post every month. I had thought of videos that are useful in the literacy classroom. They also both have a friendly, informal style and I think I have too formal a style and too many How to … posts which just become a series of instructions with little personal input. So, a slight style rethink and a little more inspiration!
Image An Old Mirror by Storm Crypt licensed under the Creative Commons Licence
January 24th, 2009
We should be teaching the verbs not the nouns. This is the basis of Marc Prensky’s articles – Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants in 200l. Rather than teach children Powerpoint, Word, Excel (the nouns) we should be teaching children to present, to communicate and to create (the verbs). There are several reasons for this: the nouns may no longer be around in their current format when today’s children enter the workplace and each company probably uses different nouns. Far better to learn the principles of effective communication using image, text and sound. This will be relevant whatever the noun.
It was with great interest that I then read that Bloom’s taxonomy had been updated in 2001 by Lorin, et al. Here the nouns had been converted to verbs to take into account new technology and the notion of the read/write web.
Knowledge to remembering; comprehension to understanding; application to applying; analysis to analysing; synthesis to evaluating and evaluation to creating.
Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)
- Remembering – Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding (digital world – bullet pointing, bookmarking, socialnetworking, social bookmarking, searching, googling)
- Understanding – Interpreting, summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying (digital world – advanced searches, Boolean searches, blog journaling, twittering, categorising, commenting, annotating, subscribing)
- Applying – Implementing, carrying out, using, executing (digital world – running, loading, playing, operating, hacking, uploading, sharing and editing)
- Analysing – Comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating (digital world – mashing, linking, validating, cracking, media-clipping)
- Evaluating – Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring (digital world – blog commenting, reviewing, posting, moderating, collaborating, networking, testing)
- Creating – designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making (digital world – film, animating, blogging -video and podcasting, mixing, re-mixing, wkiki-ing, directing, broadcasting)
Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)
So how does this affect what we do in the classroom? It means that we now have a language to judge the challenge of tasks that involve ICT and Web 2.0, in particular. It means that we can evaluate the cognitive challenge of our lessons and shows that blogging etc is not just a diary or random thoughts but can engage us at the most challenging levels.
Other resources: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy - original article that stimulated this post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_Educational_Objectives, - description of taxonomy: http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm - explanation of updated taxonomy and sub-categories
Image Once a noun now a verb by Twm licensed under the Creative Commons license
January 20th, 2009
Day 10 already and there is so much I am finding that I need to keep going back and doing some of the tasks again as I think of a better way or don’t get it right first time. The time consuming task was changing the categories on the
resources blog as I had too many. I have narrowed them down to about five now but had to go back and recategorise each post. It is fortunate that I am new to blogging. This has made me realise that I really will have to be disciplined to go back and link old posts to new posts.
Still a focus on commenting and joining in with the challenges of finding forums to join and new blogs to comment on. I have joined several forums but the one that is really buzzing at the moment is the Images4Education group as we undertake a six week course in using images. If you are interested, do go along and join in.
Image: Tens all round by Kentigern under the Creative Commons License
January 19th, 2009
Visual Ranking Tool – This is a rather marvellous, if a little quiet, online tool for use in the classroom to stimulate and generate discussion.
The site consists of two parts; the teachers workspace and then the team workspace. The teacher must set up a task that involves teams of learners considering a list of items which they must then rank in an order determined by the teacher. I used this tool with a group of 30 trainee teachers looking at texts and ranking them in order of most suitable to use as a core text when teaching about narrative structure to least. I gave them four choices of text which they had to read first. The tool then allows you to add comments to each object which can be justifications for that placing in the ranking. This is extemely useful because the comments can be used as a great assessment tool.
Once everything is ranked each team can then go and at the press of a button, compare their ranking with other teams. I asked them to go and find a team who they were least similar to and to go and talk to them and see if the discussion would change their minds about their ranking.
So, what did I learn about this tool?
- the more knowledge that the learners have about the items to be ranked, the more items you can include in the list.
- this activity could be asynchronous. The learners do not need to all be sitting in the same room or all doing the activity at the same time.
- the tool is better used over a period of time rather than in a one-off session as that would allow for more discussion between the teams and between the teacher and teams and for further thinking and reflection to occur.
The trainee teachers fedback about the tool and said:
- because they had to justify their reasons on the computer rather than something like a post-it, it made them think more about what they wrote
- a great tool for those who are in classrooms that are very cramped and don’t allow for much movement around the room (this was us because the normal venue had burst water pipes so we were squashed into a room that wasn’t big enough)
- the comparison tool and the ability to comment on the other teams’ rankings was found to be very motivational
- one team would have liked the facility to have images/snippets of text included in the tool from the books just to remind then which book they were talking about
This is definitely a tool that I will use again. Has anyone used the other two tools available from INTEL?
January 15th, 2009
So much learning and not always directly related to the tasks! Today’s challenge was to link backwards to older posts which makes sense. I quite often click on these when reading other blogs so I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this on my own blog. I had also never thought about linking forwards from past blogs to new ones. Although I can see this is a task which I think I will do, it will probably be the one I don’t get round to. However, I think it would make for a more complete experience for visitors. I suspect this is an activity I will need to set time aside for every so often.
I have also realised that I don’t yet have a ’style’ of writing that I am comfortable with. At the moment I think that I need more story in my posts. They seem to be a bit click here, look at this, watch this. I have asked those in the challenge to let me know how they write posts to see if there are any tips or strategies that I could try out.
To go to the blog that I am trying to improve go to www.literacyresourcesandideas.edublogs.org
Picture by RedMar licensed under the Creative Commons LIcence
January 14th, 2009
I am currently undertaking two more formalised pieces of learning.
- European Pedagogical ICT Licence
- 31 Days to improve your blogging as blogged by Sue Waters
and therefore over the course of the next few months many of my posts will be reflections on my learning and some of the challenges I am meeting.
So Day 1 of the being a better blogger challenges me to email a commenter. The difficulty is that I don’t have many commenters! I have had a few but they are mostly companies wanting to link to the content. I did email one of them but I don’t think that this will increase the traffic to my blog or encourage the company to come back again. However, I do agree with the principle of the idea and will do so as soon as I get a commenter.
January 11th, 2009
These past few days can be categorised as know your blog, and know the blogs in your niche. This has meant becoming familiar with Technorati and Google blog search.
