Teachers need resources

Quentin D’Souza in his blog teachinghacks.com has some good posts on professional development resources.
This post about Video on Demand for Professional Development leads the way to a media rich website packed with curriculum based information organized by discipline and grade. The program created for Ontario Teachers does not require registration so any teacher can benefit.

Every member of Ontario Teachers Federation is invited to access in-depth professional development workshops from leading educational producers. There are hundreds of hours of Professional Development streaming video content available here. The programs will be available from early November 2007 to November 30th,2008.

There is no registration to access the materials at this time, although the registration process will be simple enough for any educator to access the content.

http://www.iriseducation.org/b2b/otffeo/

One can only speculate why this information is not more widely known to educators in Ontario, or promoted by other organizations under its umbrella. So spread the word!

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People are blogging all over the world and in Ontario too!

The amount of information about blogging in the classroom is endless. The experts are varied and located in all parts of the world. The expertise is phenomenal. For the past 2 years I have watched from a distance how the technology is unfolding and in particularly in Canada. For some time the number of teachers and educators in Canada seemed to be meager. It is my neck of the woods and so I am thrilled to find committed individuals like Diane Hammond promoting the use of blogging as a way to enhance student learning at Ontario Blogs. I have watched with admiration as David Warlick, Wesley Fryer, Victoria Davis set the stage for the 21st century classroom. As a former trustee I am skeptical about any immediate adoption of blogging in main stream schools. In my previous post “I need permission” I discussed the biggest barriers to incorporating new learning strategies that include blogging, administrative support and funding. I don’t blame administrators for hesitating when it comes to technology and innovation. All too often administrative decisions are predicated on funding. But the buck needs to stop some where and in Ontario that is Queen’s Park. When students have 2 computers in the classroom and 40 minutes a week in a computer lab it is unrealistic that teachers and students become bloggers without a committed energetic teacher who embraces technology. Ontario Blogs is a strong indication of how funded projects can generate change and professional development but it takes more than one or two time funding to see every student with a computer. I have found excellent examples of blogging teachers Darren Kuropatwa, Quentin D’Souza for example and Diane Hammond and the iss07.yesican-science project So often the pioneers set the stage but they can’t do it alone. If that is to change, perhaps the following video should be required reading for all politicians.
Thanks to Matt Montagne at Middle School Ed Tech Blog for featuring this youtube video.

Centre d’Apprentissage du Haut-Madawaska uses a blog for its school website

Diane Carver at thecanadianteachers.com talks about how Centre d’Apprentissage du Haut-Madawaska uses a blog for its school website.

The C.A.H.M. weblog links to individual blogs kept by students, teachers, department heads and administrators to present a dynamic and up to date picture of the school. Each week, the school’s director uses feeds from classroom and student blogs to post an update of what’s going on in the school. The front page may include recognition of students or teachers, short summaries of classroom work that’s being done and information about upcoming events.(3)(4) The RSS feed makes it easy to pull in and format all the information, and the recognition encourages students and teachers to post their work, questions and information.

Use Blogs to Organize the Internet – RSS feeds

Blogs often seem nothing more than a run on personal diary of one person’s ideas and experiences. Blogs offer so much more to students and teachers researching for information. More and more teachers and students own their own computers and use them for student projects and lesson planning. There is an overwhelming amount of information and it is hard to validate and search for relevant and dependable information. A blog in its basic structure offers a way to distribute information using a feature called RSS feeds. Real Simple Syndication. This technology is used the same way that newspapers distribute information. RSS feeds allow readers to setup a personal folder on their own computer and collect information that interests them. Once you the user finds a website you trust and find valuable, if it is created as a blog you can establish a link from the blog to your own computer. Web browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 offer built in systems to setup RSS feeds.
Diane Carver in an article at thecanadianteacher.com talks about using RSS feeds as a learning and teaching tool.

While RSS feeds started as a way to aggregate news into one application, the possible uses for educators go far beyond the basics. According to Stephen Downes, a well-known voice on the subject of the use of blogs and RSS in education, RSS aggregation “provides greater exposure of (education and training resources) to the wider community. Aggregation also promotes the reuse of resources and encourages the development of interoperable resources.”(2) Downes adds that by creating repositories of ‘learning objects’ and making them accessible by RSS feed, educators can capitalize on each others’ work in true collaborative fashion rather than reinventing the wheel. At eLearningOntario for instance, educators and the Ministry of Education are actively working together to build a learning object repository that will include lessons, lesson plans, content for units and more.

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