Through scanning across the material I had in my Google Reader (which is #3 in the list), I discovered via Judy O’Connell’s blog heyjude the release in March of survey results which give us a picture into the Top 100 Tools for Learning.

Yes, it’s only a small survey sample, but still worth reading to see what’s out there and what gets used.

Are there any tools on the list that you use with your students.  Are there any towards the top you don’t use?  Maybe you’d like to set yourself the challenge of learning just one new tool (drop it into the Multimedia Monday suggestion box)?

There’s more information about the list in Judy’s blog post.

P.S. Our much-loved tool at St. Michael’s, del.icio.us, came in at #1!

This video hopefully contributes to the journey we’re currently taking at St. Michael’s, both with renewing our teaching and learning in HSIE (and later Science and Technology, etc.), and the emerging conversation around a whole-school learning pedagogy.  I think the HSIE-focussed members of the Curriculum Team have implemented a great idea with the “parking lot” in the staffroom.  Unfortunately, I can stick the video up on a piece of butchers’ paper!

This video, which captures a teaching and learning experience (for both teachers and students) within our own diocese may be entitled Teaching and technology, but when you listen carefully, the teaching and the learning takes the fore.  The laptops don’t jump out at you as such because they’re not the focus of the learning, just one of the tools - but one where “the possibilities are endless.”

I’m contributing this video not to push technology into our conversation because it should (and is) already there.  Rather, pay close attention to the teachers explaining how they planned for this exciting and engaging learning.  I’ve tried thinking from a similar viewpoint as I’ve planned my own class’ work this term on British Colonisation of Australia.

Let’s keep embracing our big ideas and seeing how all the steps fit together.

[slideshare id=56786&doc=parents-friends-meeting-30-may-2007-14453&w=425]

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting at our school’s Parents and Friends Association meeting. I was invited some time back to inform parents of the great things happening with technology at St. Michael’s in 2007. My 20-30 minute presentation went significantly overtime, but as Anne said to me afterwards, there’s so much to tell, and I couldn’t have gone any faster.

So our small group of parents in attendance can follow up from the meeting, I posted the presentation to SlideShare, knowing also that other parents who couldn’t make it could also access it. Not happy with that alone, my desire to share what I wanted to say (as my PowerPoint presentation, like all good PowerPoint presentations supported my talk and was not a visually-displayed transcript), I decided to make it into a video as well.

The result is the video embedded below, which I posted on TeacherTube - essentially at YouTube for educators. Remember how we were all into the program Photo Story a few years back? Well, I saved all the slides at images (which is really quite easy), put them into Photo Story, recorded a narration for each slide, then exported it and uploaded it to TeacherTube. It really is quite easy. In fact, if we’re using PhotoStory in class, TeacherTube would be an effective way of sharing students’ work with parents and friends over the Internet.

I also created a del.icio.us page for the parents that contains links to what I discussed and related resources. All in all, I think those who were there were pleased with what we’re achieving.

Download: Posted by E=2>stmbtech at TeacherTube.com.

Dale Spender may wish so, but perhaps isn’t holding out too much hope.

Some people may remember that Dale Spender was a presenter at the 2003 Diocesan Focus on Learning Conference.  Last week she contributed her thoughts on federal political education policies and their relevance to the 21st Century world our schools need to prepare children for.  I was alerted to this Sydney Morning Herald article by the Diocesan Library blog, Edlib.

As we approach a federal election this year, the party leaders are talking about “vision” and “the future”.  We as educators need to pay attention to and critique the education policies to see how visionary they really are.

As learned professionals we need to make informed and objective choices.  ABC’s Stateline on Saturday reported on the NSW State Government’s disagreement with recently announced Federal Government policy.  While the Iemma Government is opposed to performance pay for teachers, it also sought to criticise levels of Federal funding for government schools vs. non-government schools (always a touchy subject for those in Catholic Education, but not one for discussing in this forum - I’ll use a personal space to express my personal opinion), presenting the data in a way supportive of their own perspective.  “There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and…”

For those people interested in learning more about the education policies in the lead-up to the federal election, below are links to the policies of the two major parties:

• Australian Labor Party
• The Liberal Party of Australia doesn’t have a dedicated policies page yet for the current election, but read the news on the home page and in the archive for the latest policy announcements