Teaching-with-Technology

Years 7, 8 & 9 students all have their wikifolios created and I believe the biggest challenge now is how to support teachers in our school to feel comfortable and confident enough to create opportunities for the students to populate their wikifolios with examples that they have chosen that illustrate their thinking and learning. Last week in a PD meeting we brainstormed ideas of how we might do that. Teachers came up with lots of great ideas but the biggest challenge is still (I think) the organisation and preparation that goes with using technology. At our following staff meeting on Monday I tried to support that concern by showing some links on our school wiki to a couple of very useful and easy to use applications that can be embedded in the wikifolios. One is called SlideShare and it allows students to create Powerpoints, to upload them to the web and then embedd them into their wikifolios. And the second is called PhotoBucket. It allows students to create simple pieces of video and mash them with images, audio and text to create a cool little video which can also be embedded into their WikiFolios.

I have been thinking about the power of blogging and the way we use it in schools and as a reflective tool and collaborative tool for teachers and students. But I have been grappling for a while with the dilemma of where to place my blog. Until now I have been using blogger and have been very happy with the tools and ease of use. But my problem is that in many schools blogger is blocked and I wonder if this is not going to be an ongoing problem.
Edublogs on the other hand, is unlikely to be blocked in the near distant future and so I’m wondering if I should move over to edublogs. But what happens to all the posts that I have made up until now. What about the cool little add ons that I have on my current blog such as the flickr widget and the clustrmaps. I really love those things and would want to know that I can have them as well.
I think maybe the best thing to do is to contact a few of the regular edublogs users and see what they think about the value of edublogs and then do it. If you are reading this post and you have some thoughts I’d appreciate your input.