G’day
Autumn is upon us in NZ, although you wouldn’t think so with the prolonged summer weather, 20 centigrade in Auckland today and it’s the 1st of May! However, the rains have already signalled they are a coming with flash floods (nothing to do with a sudden increase in animation resources) all over the place 🙂
E-learning continues to cement its place in the concrete jungle of education with an increasing range of resources for the mobile learner and more extensive use of Blogs and Wikis, many developing their own community of followers like edubloggers
Web development is providing more opportunities for users to collaborate, communicate, create and interact in a potentially seamless Web enabled environment
Some of the newer developments like Flock and ‘Skills for Access’ are encouraging user participation. Other sites in this posting include ALT-C 2006 reminder (of course) plus some resources on mobile learning, edublogs, educational use of Webcams, directory of open access journals on the Web, European school communities, the elearning content village (Europe) and the odd one out.
June will soon be busting out with another lot of resource, in the meantime hope you find something useful in this month’s offerings
1. A sampling of edublog resources
The original site for free hosting of your edublog
Ewan McIntosh provides some useful resources and links from his site. He is an advocate of the Macintosh and Apple innovation in education. Good lad 🙂
This one has a good overview and some suggestions on practical use
http://www.ecolenet.nl/best/edublogs.htm
and one from Germany with a list of ‘top’? 20 edublogs which generated some interesting discussion (some in a foreign language :-)) The list does give you an opportunity to explore some nice resources
http://www.petersheim.de/node/350
The ultimate edubloggers network? More grist to the mill.
Extract from the site
‘the Educational Blogger Network (eBN) is a community of teachers and education professionals and supporters who use weblogs for teaching and learning. The network assists members to advance weblog integration in education.’
http://www.ebn.weblogger.com/newsItems/departments/blogsToNote
What about PedaBlogs?
http://ferret.bemidjistate.edu/~morgan/cgi-bin/blogsandwiki.pl?PedaBlogs
and finally, where is everybody edublogging? Are you there?
http://www.frappr.com/edubloggers
2. Using Webcams in education. Some ideas and examples of what works. Worth considering for a wide range of subjects.
Combine with podcasting and mobile devices and a different multisensory learning environment can be created.
http://abirdseyeviewof.com/WIE.html
3. Flock, a very different Web browser (in Beta) and probably pointing the way for browsers in the future.
4. ALT-C 2006 Edinburgh
Getting closer to the registration date be quick to be in. It’s shaping up to be an event never to be forgotten!
ALT-C 2006: the next generation
5-7 September 2006, Edinburgh, UK
Conference co-chairs: Prof Terry Mayes and Prof Ron Oliver
http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2006/
Keynote speakers: Stephen Heppell, Diana Oblinger, Tim O’Shea.
Theme leaders: Terry Anderson, Phil Candy, Gilly Salmon, Chris Yapp.
Registration will be available from Monday 8 May
Key deadlines:
Presenters to register by 9 June 2006
Earlybird rate closes 30 June 2006
Registrations close 11 August 2006
http:// www.alt.ac.uk/altc2006/keynotes.html
5. What is Mobile Learning?
Introduction
The term mobile learning (m-learning) refers to the use of mobile and handheld IT devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile telephones, laptops and tablet PC technologies, in teaching and learning.
http://www.aclearn.net/display.cfm?page=958
Some related sites:
This one provides a whole raft of tips and techniques for developing and maintaining mobile learning resources. Explore the drop down menus.
http://mlearning.rave.ac.uk/mlearning/how to/main.htm
Mobile Learning and Pervasive Computing
This website is designed to provide a portal to the latest information on mobile learning and pervasive computing for trainers and educators at all levels from elementary education through higher education.
http://www3.telus.net/~kdeanna/mlearning/index.htm
6. Accessibility to Web resources for everyone is always a good thing to pursue. This site gives some guidance on what is happening and invites contributions to expand its resources.
http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/resources.php
7. The Directory of Open Access Journals is a very useful and expanding site. You might find some good stuff for your research project here.
Extract from site:
‘This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2209 journals in the directory. Currently 604 journals are searchable at article level.’
8. Developing school communities is an interesting project from Europe and one which could be adopted/adapted on this side of the world?
‘Tools: within communities there are forums, file uploading, bulletin boards, link treasuries and calendars, available in five languages’
9. Another initiative from Europe, the ‘content-village’ provides a huge list of links to a wide range of resources relating to educational and e-learning content worldwide. Plenty to occupy your time here. A new initiative for 2005-8 is underway.
Explore the vast amount of e-content information on each of the EU members (drop down menu)
http://www.content-village.org/articles.asp?id=147
10. The odd one out: The Gutenberg project
This has been developing for a number of years and hosts a large number of ‘e-books’ for free download. More books are added on a regular basis as volunteer readers check accuracy etc
Richard Elliott
E-learning Watch
http://elearnwatch.falkor.gen.nz/
Auckland New Zealand
‘Learning in the Driver’s seat, Technology turning the wheels’
Member of the Programme Committee for ALT-C 2006