nstoneit.com E-learning Experiences

This Summer I’ve been a bad blogger despite having so many posts up my sleeves and in progress. 2 weeks left until school starts and I’m setting myself up a mini office (a laptop ona table) to mark coursework, learn a programming language, get up to date on the new A2 course and of course write some blog posts.To put a little pressure on myself here’s some blog posts I’m planning on writing and finishing – if they don’t appear somebody hassle me until I do! I guess as I write them I’ll edit this post to link to them.

1. A review of a year of VLE and e-learning at school.
2. A few great examples of VLE use this year at school.
3. My experiences of creating a scorm e-learning resource.
4. Nintendo DS in the classroom.
5. My MA research into “What gets kids on a VLE and what difference does age make”
6. Some cool bits of a cool school I visited (in Boston)

Doing all of those in the next two weeks is a little ambitious but at least I now have a plan. Hope everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is enjoying their Summer and everyone in the Southern Hemisphere their Winter.

I’m currently at the Mirandamod Conference on “Teachers as Bloggers” - click here for the “Teachers as Bloggers” page with information and also links to communal mindmaps that are being created.

We’ve been discussing blogging all day. One point of many that resonated was how long it can take to write a blog post. So I’m taking a few minutes to see if I can write a quick post about something that has impressed me – and I’m going to go a little off topic. The conversation about blogging has been superb, the collaborative mindmap has been great fun but I’m so impressed as to how well the videoconferencing is working.

In the room at the IOE we’re all sitting around a table and at one end of a room is a projector showing a display of a flashmeeting videoconference. Currently there are 19 people joined to the flashmeeting and they are very much participants not just online but in the room. We’ve 10 in the face to face meeting and 19 online. Having attended so many presentations and conferences where the technology doesn’t work it’s great to have a solution that just works!

Credit to flashmeeting and credit to Leon Cych for doing the filming here. It’s time to get some videoconferencing working in my school.

• ps – I got this blog written in about 15 minutes, result or rushed?