ejourneys

Holidays – A time 2.0 catch the Web
Summer holidays –students and staff can’t wait for them each year and now they are finally here! It has been a time to catch up with all types of things but particularly time to look further into web 2.0 and associated tools. This year, I have been granted 20 days professional leave to work on laying the eplanks for the virtual classroom.

So during the holidays, I have:-

• Updated some existing blogs by trying to improve their presentation
• Created a new one(despite my resolutions)  and worked with Le Enchanteur on visiting Lemuria. (Currently I am still in Rainbow Beach). This has been rather fun and a great collaborative acitivity as many experienced bloggers (not school teachers) are part of the adventure and there has been so much to learn about  successful online writing styles, presentation, use of images etc.
• Uploaded student videos, from 2007 to teacher tube (at least I am still trying to because our home computers are refusing to upload images or videos at the moment.) Time caught me up at the end of the year.
• Commenced work on a wiki for laying the eplanks and started to use www.twitter.com seriously. Although I had registered earlier, I used it periodically and then only for social talk. Upon reading Liz Davis discussion on classroom2.0, I realised that there was a lot of PD, collaboration and virtual cooperation to be had. Some time has been spent establishing a network which will be used extensively through 2008. (I am murcha in twitter.)
• Bookmarked many sites in delicious for possible use this year. I hope I have time to look at them all or at least find the ones which really took appeared to be of note.
• Read many blogs of interest to our eplanks project.
• Enrolled as a contributor to kolson29’s grade 4 student blog, establishing a vital potential link for my grade 4 IT students and collaborative projects.

Further to 2007
I received an email a few days ago from Heather in Canada whom I befriended whilst working on the webkinz project. Heather is a classroom teacher and though not involved in the kinzexchange blog  was interested in establishing a pen pal relationship. It is interesting to note, that email and web 2.0, gave us snail mail connections. However, it is a great activity as students have handwritten or typed letters which are posted by bulk mail to their partner pen pal, encouraging neat handwriting skills, validation and comprehension activities.

And now 2.0 catch more of the web!!