Lunar eclipse

Linky Google are live streaming a lunar eclipse!  Technology is awesome :)

There's too much!

MAPS, flipping the classroom, doing my surveys for school, reading up on the MA, podcasting, screencasting, vokis, google groups with people in other countries, google earth now has a flight simulator mode, it's all getting a bit insane.  Can't wait for omnipresent wifi, gesture-based computing and a laptop with decent power that fits in my pocket, might actually be able to keep up with it all.

HTML coding a thing of the past?

I noticed two things today when I tried to put some HTML coding into this blog to show the diigo group on the right.  The first is I have absolutely no idea how HTML coding works, after 20 minutes the best I could do was it hanging at the very bottom of the page.  The second is that with a gadget allowing me to insert HTML code given to me from another site, I will never need to learn.

Keeping up to date

Wow, am finding it pretty difficult to keep up with the blogging.  I find I am inspired to write about something at school, but the filters prevent me coming onto the blogger, so I either just make a note of it for the MA or forget about it.

Ning isn't free apparently.  Back to the drawing board!

Collaborative learning at school

Been reading some interesting ideas over the last couple of weeks for potential collaborative learning methods.  I am trying to setup links with schools in foreign countries for the humanities department to use, but google groups seems a bit boring and text-based sometimes.  You can obviously post links to other sites there but I was hoping for a more interactive website.  Apparently Ning is pretty good for that, so I will have to explore there over the next week or two.  Pod and videocasting, as well as screencasting, are also areas that I want to focus on over the next months - I reckon we can get some good stuff going there in MFL.

Using Facebook for school-based work is also an interesting idea, but I really don't think that school will buy it for now, it spends too much time stopping people getting on there to look at the possibilities for collaboration.

Social Bookmarking

I've seen these links around for digg and delicious but never really put much thought into them (like a lot of things that I am just learning about now!).  Just reading through one of my MA books on the weekend, by Will Richardson, and wow the stuff you can do with them is amazing.  They are primarily a site where you can store links, webpages and bookmarks but you also tag these pages as you save them, meaning you can see what other people have tagged with something similar.  Diggo archives the webpage, meaning if it gets deleted you have a copy of it, and allows you to annotate the page for others to see!  Delicious is a little simpler but probably easier to use.

Need to test out the filter settings at school...

Rethinking education

Ok, this is an amazing idea, also from Alec.  In this day and age of digital media, why not simply record all your lessons/lectures and set them for your students to watch and work on as homework?  Then you can use your face-to-face time in class to discuss, clear up misunderstandings and work with individuals.

I can see a few problems in making this work, but talk about turning education on its head!