flairandsquare.com

ask your readers to do some self promotion.
So… “I’d like to get to know you well…” (sing it)

As well as giving you the opportunity to promote yourself on this blog, I’d like to take the opportunity to get to know you, on a more… personal level. Yes, I’m going to ask you to share something personal with me.

If you’re not comfortable with that, then share something that you use to strengthen your networks, encourage collaboration and, or resource sharing. I’d love you to post a comment, include a link to your Flickr/Facebook or other social networking site…

In an effort to minimise inbox overload, and in response to your great feedback, enthusiasm and determination, I have decided to dedicate this blog post to you. Accepting the role as a Faculty or Workplace e-Learning contact is a massive commitment considering how busy you all are. I am aware that you are all devoting more hours to this project than allocated and I am seeing some wonderful blog’s, wiki’s, Del.icio.us pages, Moodle Courses, etc as a result. I am also getting some great feedback from teachers, head teachers, faculty managers and our Institute Director about the wonderful support and work you are all doing.

Please Don’t stop the Innovation

The availability and access to these tools and this technology has resulted in so much innovation, collaboration, creativity and excitement from teachers, students, community and industry. While this has been very inspiring, there is obviously material out there, on these spaces, open to the world wide web, that legally shouldn’t be, may be against policy, unsafe, breach privacy and child protection legislation and therefore, those websites get blocked inside the DET world.
I do NOT however, think the solution is to block everything.
So what can we do?

Who’s responsibility is it to guide young people in these spaces? Their parents? Do they understand it themselves? How can we, as teachers, coaches and mentors, guide them in these spaces, prepare them for use of this technology in the workplace if we can’t access them?

There’s an obvious effort by educators to “engage youth, get on their wavelength” (article by Khyiah Angel from the NSW Teachers Federation), there are generation studies emerging at a rate of knots as the Baby Boomers and Generation Jones try to embrace technology, get their head around the effect that video games have had on Generations X & Y, and how this all might affect us in the workplace. How can we do this if we can’t access the technology that our children “live” in and work with?

Sue Waters is a part-time aquaculture teacher and educational leader in e-Learning for Challenger TAFE in Perth, Western Australia. She has many online spaces, called Mobile Technology in TAFE on which she shares her thoughts and experiences on and with m-Learning and e-Learning.

Here latest blog post about why and how she uses PDA’s in the classroom is really worth a read – Why I use PDAs in the classroom.

A training day with a small group of Faculty and Workplace e-Learning contacts was an ideal way for each staff member to catch-up with where the rest of the team is, collaborate and support each other. Looking at one relevant technology and focusing on it’s application for teaching and learning with colleagues seemed to be an extremely succesful way to get engaged and motivated.

I started creating a list of sites offering free online eBooks, audio files, videos, learning tools and materials for educators, then I found this great wiki – Librarian Chick that has so many amazing listings already, I thought why create my own?

Here are a few of the tools and sites listed on – Librarian Chick that I thought were good.
Tiny URL – Have you noticed a lot of the links that come via the Australian Flexible Learning Framework start with http://tinyurl.com? This web tool allows you to transform lengthy URL’s that often get broken up during a copy and paste, into a shorter more manageable URL. Check it out. There’s also a Firefox extension for this.