Scott McLeod, who blogs at Dangerously Irrelevant, recently put forth a thought-provoking challenge: might student-delivered PD be an idea whose time has come?
Scott argues that much current professional development simply isn’t good enough, doesn’t deliver what school vision statements typically promise about life-long learning, and doesn’t draw upon the often considerable expertise within schools, including that of the students (especially when it comes to technology).
Here are the notes from the in-service on creating Custom Google Search Engines and embedding them in your portal class site:
How to Create a Custom Google Search Engine
Click here to download the original notes.
Scribd is an excellent site for publishing your documents to a wide audience, and also a place where you can find a lot of useful documents. A number of posts on this blog lately have touched on the idea of embedding documents in your webpage (e.g. embedding in your portal class site), so I will embed a file I found on Scribd on developing maths skills:
A good PowerPoint presentation (and a good presenter!) can make all the difference in the world. Will you walk away from the meeting feeling inspired and excited or as a tight bundle of resentment and frustration? There are many, many resources out there explaining what to do and what not to do when presenting, in order to avoid the dreaded “Death by PowerPoint”.
Here’s one of the better ones I’ve seen (thanks for digging it up, Ringo):
One of the things I find quite effective in this slideshow is the way he inserts little comments in the bottom right corner (marked by an asterisk), little aside comments adding a bit of humor and making the whole thing a bit less formal.
Here’s another slideshow with similar information, and a lot more detail. Notice the contrast in design - to some extent you could argue that this second slideshow doesn’t quite practice what it preaches, as it very obviously uses a standard Microsoft PowerPoint theme. Nevertheless, it very effectively demonstrates the effect of committing some of the big DON’Ts in slideshow design:
PS: for those who wonder, these slideshows are posted on SlideShare.net - a great source of informative slideshows - and you can embed slideshows like this in your portal class site if you like (see my last post on this).
Did you know you can post custom search engines, online slideshows, podcasts and videos on the portal? For an example, go to http://portal/HS/computer/CP/test/default.aspx?PageView=Shared. On this test site I’ve posted one hilarious Youtube video, one powerful slideshow and a sample custom Google search engine.
Cuil is a great new search engine that displays its search results in a neat visual format, displaying results in columns and including images to give you an instant visual clue as to what each listed search result contains. (For those concerned about inappropriate material, the default setting is to have SafeSearch turned on.)
Since many words have multiple meanings, Cuil also interprets the rest of the content on all the pages included in the search results and groups them in subcategories. By analyzing the contents of the pages and grouping in categories, it reduces the need for careful crafting of complex search expressions. It displays subcategories in tabs on top of the page and a box on the top left groups search results in relevant subcategories. When you hover the mouse over links in the subcategories, a little popup menu displays more info about the link.
Finally, as you type in a search term, e.g. “Skiing”, a menu will pop down listing suggested specifications, e.g. “Skiing holidays”, “History of skiing”, “Skiing equipment”, “Skiing and snowboarding”, etc.
In case you’re wondering, Cuil is a gaelic word for knowledge and hazel (background story for this name can be found here)
Another interesting thing that came up in Alan’s sessions yesterday was the use of RSS feeds. For those that don’t know what they are, you can read what Mark wrote about this last year. RSS allows you to subscribe to your favorite news sites, blogs, podcasts - in other words, any update will come to you, rather than you having to go to these sources and check if there are updates.
Where to begin…? Yesteday was jam-packed with ideas, many of which were new to a number of the faculty (based on what I heard from people). As mentioned during both of the smaller sessions, follow-up workshops will be available for those who are interested. I will also include some practical info here on the blog on many of the topics Alan mentioned.
In this time of political convention speeches, debates, rhetoric and spin, it’s not always easy to keep track of the candidates’ positions and viewpoints. Here’s one approach to analyzing what the candidates are actually saying: Read the rest of this entry »
Hi, this is a short plug for a newsletter - I received an email today alerting me to a “Free Subscription Offer” to a (frequently excellent) email newsletter I subscribe to and how I can refer my colleagues to this resource. If you’d like to spend a bit of time once a week or once a month reading up on what’s happening in the intersection of education and technology, then eSchool News is one of the better places to start.
You can find their website at http://www.eschoolnews.com/, but the link to the free subscription offer is at https://www.eschoolnews.com/freesub/referral.cfm. According to the email, you have until September 30, 2008 to get the free subscription. If you go to their website, they actually have several newsletter with slightly different foci, depending on what interests you the most.
[UPDATE Nov. 13: it seems there’s no deadline for signing up.]
Interesting recent articles include Survey: Nearly every kid a video gamer and Digital debate: Prepare kids for exams or life?.
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