I found this video on Fulltimecasuals blog and it really made me reflect on the discussions we have been having at Oz/NZ educators and through twitter on copyright and intellectual property.  I think it is a great conversation started and would love people to add their comments below.

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Today I was given some software to play with called Crazytalk and I have fallen in love with it.  Crazytalk turns photos into talking movies with facial recognitions.  I have had a play with it and so far I am in love, the possibilities in a classroom are wonderful where photos come alive.  I have seen a heap of photostories and this leaves the, for dead.  I have attached and example for you to have a look at

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I have attached a wordle of my delicious tags and would love other to share their word clouds.

Thanks to Jo McLeay for sharing this with me :0)

Well my first week at edsoft was wonderful.  I spent the week learning about different software applications and brushing up on my promethean and teamboard knowledge.  It is wonderful to have the opportunity to develop training packages with IWB’s that relate to effective IWB usage not just tips and tricks on how to use IWB software.  I believe that effective professional learning needs to be in the forefront of anyones mind when looking to purchase IWBs and am very excited to be in a position to provide this. 

I have been conducting my own personal professional learning lately with the assistance of jo kay and the wonderful residents of jokaydia in Second Life.  I have recently become a resident of Jokaydia in my quest to further explore and understand the fantastic potential of 3d virtual worlds in education.  Personally I have been reflecting what an amazing learning experience Second Life has been for me over the last two weeks.  As an educator who has done the rounds of the ict festivals and conferences where blogs, wikis and social bookmarking have been the flavour of the year it is great to be inspired about the potential 3d virtual worlds have to offer. 

I have rented a space “Interactively Utopia” where I hope to further explore building and learning in second life.  I am being helped along in second life in my learning journey by an amazing group of educators such as Al Upton, HeyJudeJenns, Dean Groom, and Sapphire .  I thought twitter was a great network (and still is) but the personal support I am finding in Second Life is just amazing. 

I encourage everyone to come and visit me (Dewi Kittaj) in Second Life at my new home which you can find at http://slurl.com/secondlife/jokaydia%20II/196/141/25 and I look forward to sharing many tales of my learning journey through my blog.  I would also love to hear how others are using second life in education.. 

Here is a photo of my second me

Hi All,

As a few readers of my blog might be aware I have started a new job this week.  My new position is at Edsoft working as an Interactive Whiteboard Specialist across Australia.   I am extremely excited about the opportunities this position brings.  I really believe we need to make a shift when schools are purchasing IWB’s.  The push needs to move from “what tricks can the board do?” to “what professional learning is provided with my IWB?” and “who from and how much support will I get ?”  I am hoping to make that change that I wanted when I was purchasing IWB’s at my previous schools.

Anyway enough about my new job, to support teachers who have or want Interactive Whiteboards I have created a group on diigo called Interactive Whiteboard Pedagogy.  It is my hope that we can build this group to be a place for rich discussion and support for all interactive whiteboard users.

I have started a discussion on the group website regarding the different changes and stages of IWB practice that are occurring in schools.  I would love group members to add their views on what practices are currently occurring in schools.

I look forward to  collaborating with fellow IWB users and enthusiasts

Hi All,

As promised here is my presentation and resources for my coaching plans.  The main points from the presentation was that coaching is a  partnership where teacher and coach discuss, observe and reflect on specific aspects of teaching practice whereby it:
?Reaffirming strengths in teaching
?Models good practice
?Provides opportunity for professional learning
?Promoting the exchange of good ideas and resources
?Shares the demands of the job
?A confidential process

I am very keen to hear how other schools are using coaches to improve classroom instruction.

Resources:

Coaching Presentation ICTEV 2008

Coaching Action Plan Example

Coaching Reflection Pro Forma

Last night I made time to attend the weekly oz/nz educators flash meeting. This is a fantastic meeting where educators meet to discuss elearning issues, innovations and developments. Last nights meeting was hosted by Chris Betcher of http://betch.edublogs.org/ and centered around the discussion of copyright and interactive whiteboards. In my new role I will be posting more about IWB’s so I thought I would focus this post on copyright. If you are wanting to revisit the meeting from last night you can view the replay here .

In regards to copyright the discussion centered around the lack of information regarding what students can use and cannot use in their work. Jo McLeay cited a video on youtube which looks at copyright with Disney .

Educators spoke about how they were increasingly encouraging students to make use of creative commons work through sites such as flickr. The discussion went on to remind educators of the importance of attributing work from creative commons and cited John Connell’s blog in the UK as an example of the consequences of not attributing CC work. I spoke about how at Caroline Springs we try to get students to create as much content as possible through the use of camera, illustrator and garageband and then for students to CC their work and push their work up for the global society instead of always pulling information down.

So where to from here???? This topic made me think and I went back to school to search for policies in regards to attribution of Creative Commons work and I couldn’t find any. Once again I found that disparity with my own practice with my student mentors and the greater practice of the school. I then started to look for definitive information that we could implement in regards to the appropriate way of attributing creative commons work. Well let me tell you it was quite a search but alas I found answers.

I came across http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/ which is currently under development by the Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), a committee of the Schools Resourcing Taskforce (SRT) of the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). The completed site, scheduled to be available in late 2008, will provide a comprehensive guide to copyright issues affecting Australian Schools. On this site there is a wealth of information for schools looking to guide them in regards to copyright issues. Of particular interest to me was the information sheet which looked at resources for schools in regards to creative commons licensing. This sheet became my mini bible for the day as it gave specific examples on how to attribute work licensed under creative commons and gave a great list of websites where such work can be found and used by students.

I am interested in hearing from others on what policies they have in their schools in regards to copyright and attribution. I have only touched the side of the iceberg in this post as I need to further think about the issue myself and would love further food for thought. If you are new to creative commons I have posted a video below which explains creative commons in their own words.

Hi All,

What a week this has been. After some long deliberation I have decided to have a break from teaching for awhile and gain some skills in the private sector. I have secured employment working as an Interactive Whiteboard Specialist. This should be very exciting and although I am extremely sad to be saying goodbye to my school and teaching it is also exciting to have this opportunity. In addition to this news I was lucky enough to take part in a DEECD Professional Learning Day at Coburg Senior High School this week. It was a collaboration day with Marco Torres. I have been lucky enough to spend time learning with Marco before and have to say it was just as inspiring this time round. I took a large amount of notes and have condensed them into a pdf document for you to have a look at. Sorry if it is a little jumbled but it makes sense to me so if you have any questions please ask me.

Marco Torres Notes

I thought the most powerful part of the day besides the chance to network and collaborate with others was the notion that technology in the majority of schools is a pull down experience where it is used to pull down information and pull down support when really it needs to become a push up experience where students are actively contributing to the web. We are lucky because in the age of web 2.0 this is a whole lot easier.

At the moment I have been working with teachers coaching predominantly around Interactive Whiteboards. Working with these teachers and students I have further seen the potential of these tools to enact positive elearning changes within a school.

To set the scene the teachers I am working with have never been that tech savvy and tended not to use the technology in the area for a multitude of reasons (access, wireless, upkeep etc). These are teachers that have an IWB in their room because they wanted to have a go and saw the potential to take that leap of faith into ICT. Since the start of the year I am observing that these teachers through trial and error are having a go and changing their practice so that technology is embedded. They are also actively engaging me in coaching to support their risk taking. This is resulting in a more dynamic open learning space where new teachers are seeing more experienced teachers having a go and succeeding but also learning from their challenging lessons.

I have read a lot of posts about how IWB’s are not changing pedagogy and that it is not embedding good elearning. After a lot of contemplation and research I have to disagree. IWBs are taking our teachers out of their comfort zones and are driving these teachers to take risks in their teaching. Teachers are beginning to delve into the web for resources and having conversations about elearning which have never occurred before.

So what does this mean for the students in the classroom?

I believe it will result in a more challenging environment where risk taking is supported and technology will start to make its way into the curriculum. For my coaching with staff it provides a method of delivering and modelling all of the wonderful opportunities with elearning that our College and the world has to offer.

An interactive whiteboard by itself will not be a magic pill to a schools elearning integration issues. I think we know this ! and I have never claimed that it would be. If the introduction of computers in school did not provide a magic bullet then IWB’s were not going to either.

However they are a wonderful ‘trojan horse’ for ICT integration in classrooms and I am loving seeing teachers begin to look at different ways to alter their lessons with technology in mind. The other benefit I am seeing is that software that has been purchased across our college is suddenly being utilised for a larger number of learning opportunities thus providing our school with an argument for further ICT spending as leadership will be able to see it being used and celebrated with teachers having a go.

I think right now in Victoria we should be encouraging and celebrating this ’sandpit’ time with IWB’s as it is exciting teachers to use technology. Once the sandpit time is over, like any innovation we would work through the change cycle to further integrate the technology. I think we need to remember that change takes time and involves several stages and right now we need to celebrate the beginning.