Aug

30

Collaborating on migrations

Filed Under Biology, Science | Leave a Comment

Just in time for the new school year is Journey North, a website that uses the help of students from K-12 to track the migrations of various species, as well as when certain plants first appear after the winter snow melts away. This is a useful all year activity since it tracks when species head south as well as north.

Anyone is free to use the site to check out what’s been posted but if you want to contribute observations, you have to register.

(This is a great little site from a technology point of view. It would be simple enough (but not as cheap) to phone in oberservations and mail out regular updates to the registered classes. Adding in the Internet doesn’t change what’s happening but makes this project that much more effective.)

Aug

21

WebCT: pros and cons

Filed Under Collaboration, Musings | 1 Comment

I’m spending the day taking a class on WebCT, an online “learning community” program. This is software to help you teach courses or collaborate with people who are not in the same room/building/town/province/country as you. It’s a pretty cool program but it has some significant strengths and limitations from what I can see.

  1. If you’re in Manitoba building a learning community for professionals, WebCT is free to use. If you’re using it for other purposes, well, you need to pay for the software and find a way to house it with all the costs that involves. Everything I know suggest that ain’t cheap. You might be better off looking at Moodle software since it’s free and does some pretty similar thing to WebCT. It seems to be pretty easy to find a place to host Moodle, but harder to find a host for WebCT.
  2. WebCT is complex. This workshop is three days all together. We’re trying to understand the basics of this software and then bring other teachers on board in using it. Three days is a long time. Wikis, blogs, and such can be taught in about 10 minutes. I can get other teachers to try those. Can I really get anyone to try something this involved?
  3. WebCT is powerful. You can upload and share tons of pictures, word processor documents, and other files. There’s all kinds of ways of ways to share these files, or to keep them private. There’s tremendous potential there, but, once again, as I look around the room at my fellow seminar participants, they’re having some trouble wrestling with the features that allow you to share. The people in this room are all pretty computer savvy. How well would the average computer phobic teacher do with something like WebCT?
  4. I’d like to see some kids work with this software. This is a useful package, and I can’t help wondering whether our hesitancy with some of its features says more about us as “old” people unable to fully adapt than it says about the actual software itself. We’re digital immigrants, not natives, and that can make all the difference using new software.

Interesting software. I look forward to learning more tomorrow.

Aug

18

WebQuests the easy way

Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

In days of yore knights would go on quests to win treasure, or, more interestingly, the attentions of a fair maiden. They’d fight villians, and dragons and brave untold dangers.

Well, there’s not a lot of knights now a days (unless you count Sir Elton John) but quests don’t have to stop. One of the most popular quests for a teacher is a “webquest” where you send your students off hunting for specific information somewhere on the Internet. You send your students to different sites and have them track down various facts relevant to whatever you happen to be teaching.

But how do you organize your quest so that students make it to the right sites with a minimum of fuss and bother? Ideally you set up a webpage and have the kids go to that, but, let’s be realistic, most of us don’t know how to do that. Enter TrackStar which provides one cool and easy way to do webquests.

You go to their site, and register for free. You then set up a “track” which allows you to enter the URLs/addresses of the sites you want your students to go to. You can enter the questions for each site just below each of the URLs. The great part is you can set up your entire track or quest without knowing a single bit of HTML for webpage making. When you’re done, your track is given a unique web address and you can direct your students there.

This way the kids need only one address to go to instead of 5 or 10 or more, minimizing the chances of them making a mistake and going to the wrong place on the Net. We’ve all typed in URLs and made simple and really annoying mistakes. Imagine having 25 kids do that with ten different addresses.  That’s about 250 possible wrong addresses. Setting up your webquest with TrackStar really should make your life simpler.

Aug

8

Google Docs Rocks!

Filed Under Collaboration | Leave a Comment

I’ve been trying to come up with an outline for my new Grade 9 Social Studies course. I’m collaborating on it with another teacher and, it seems, the two of us just can’t seem to get together.

Well, Google Docs provides a simple and pretty cool solution to that.  Last year Google bought the site Writely.com which was a basic word processor. They added a little jazz to it, renamed it, and, voila, Google Docs.

The beauty of Google Docs is not that it’s a pretty decent word processor (it doesn’t do footnotes but it does most other things), but that you can share you documents. I can make my course outline available to my partner teacher and she can edit it freely (apparently while we’re both online). The sharing can be done by as many people as you like. While it’s always possible to attach a document to an e-mail message and send it around, it’s difficult to know who has the latest copy and thus hard to stop people from duplicating each other’s work. With Google Docs the document is online and so you always know where the most up to date version is.

Very cool. I love this online collaboration stuff.

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