Switch on your speakers and Click Here.

Go beyond spreadsheets and word processing to truly engage your students. Today’s technology has made it so simple to create rich multimedia content. The ITSC conference provides yet another (besides Beyond Chalk) opportunity to learn from the experts.

The different Streams allow you to immerse yourself in whatever field is of particular interest to you. For example: Digital Literacy includes sessions on Podcasting (Introduction and Advanced), Blogs and Digital Portfolios. There’s even a session on Web 2.0 in the classroom!

The Leadership Stream includes sessions Engaging Your Community and Teacher Professional Development and more…

Other streams include Fundamentals &  Media literacy.

You can register online here.

Dates and Locations:

If we want to continually learn and adapt to today’s environment and keep our classrooms relevant and engaging, conferences such as the ITSC can be a real help.

Mr Greg Whitby, a prominent advocate for embracing today’s technology in education had this to say on World Teachers Day in 2008:

Google recently held a competition for higher education titled ‘Model your Campus’. The winner’s can be found here and boy are they impressive results. You’ll need to download Google Earth to view the Winning Models.

Integrate your model with the Earth

Creating the 3-D model is just the beginning. You’re then able to deposit that building into Google Earth! A popular classroom project has been to re-create landmark buildings in the area then ‘drop’ them into the appropriate location. Here are some Brisbane building re-creations. Users are creating walk through models of actual buildings. We have map view, street view, satellite view.

How about this for a K-12 example?!

… There are any number of lessons – from learning about area and volume to studying building and community design …

… SketchUp is one of those products that will easily get kids learning – and thinking they’re just having fun, as your classes apply SketchUp to geography, social studies, history and industrial technology…

“… We’ve got a lot of different software packages in our applied technology lab, but SketchUp is by far superior to anything else in terms of ease of use.”
- Dan Zahner, Teacher, Boulder High School, Boulder, CO.

The above excerpts were taken from Google Sketchup for Educators.

Here’s an example I found on YouTube where a student displays a 3-D tour of his school. Head over to YouTube and do a search for Sketchup for some more amazing examples.

Further reading:

• Download Sketchup
• An Australian case study: ‘Solar Passive Cabin Project’.
• Classroom activity examples
• Go Green Project
• Some personal experiences shared by teachers using Sketchup in the classroom.

How do you think YOU could use this remarkable freebie?

Just like a lot of other Web 2.0 services, there are loads of social bookmarking sites on offer in a variety of flavours, all with weird and wacky names. What they all have in common is the ability to tag and categorise sites you like. Your tagged bookmarks can be kept private, shared within a network (your class or fellow staff members for example) or shared with the world. I started using Delicious as a repository for all those sites I knew I’d probably never visit again but were interesting enough to be tucked away somewhere ‘just in case’. It wasn’t long before I realised there’s a whole lot more to it.

The more popular social bookmarking services include; Delicious, digg, reddit, Technorati, Furl and Blinklist. Services such as Diigo enable you to even add sticky notes to web pages (particularly popular among other Education Blogs I read).

I’m going to Delicious for the examples below. When I refer to ‘bookmarks’ it may be what you’re used to calling ‘Favourites’.

So how do I ‘tag’ a site?

First of all
Simply head over to Delicious and sign up for a free account.

Then
Wherever you see the Delicious symbol , click on it. You’ll be taken to your Delicious account and asked what you would like to tag it with. Add as many tags as you like.

Or

If the delicious symbol is not present, go to your delicious account, click on Save a new bookmark, enter the URL > click Next > add the relevant tags > click Save.

You’ll notice from the screen shot on the right, if people have already tagged that site delicious will even recommend tags for you.

What are the advantages of bookmarking a site socially?

• You’re helping others looking for information on topics according to the relevant tags
• If you know other people using delicious you can recommend and share links within a network
• Other people can subscribe to your additions
• You can collect as many bookmarks as you like without cluttering your browser’s bookmark menu. It’s like you’re building your own library of resources.

Follow up posts will include instruction on how to use social bookmarking as a research tool, how to subscribe to bookmark feeds and how to share sites within a network.

If you have any questions or would like to share how you are already using social bookmarking we’d love to hear your comments.