Ulearn, Ilearn, WElearn

During week two of the school holidays, rather than sunning myself on a crowded beach on the Gold Coast, I was up in a shaky Christchurch for the 10th Ulearn conference.

The BIG question for me was how can I ensure that the learning is shared through the cluster and that we make the most of the professional learning opportunities we all access?

Hence the title, Ulearn, Ilearn, WElearn.

My aim and the aim of Dave, Alistair and Sarah who attended is to share some of the highlights, the new learning, the 'where to nexts?' as well as some national and international best practice.

Over the next couple of weeks, through this blog, we will be sharing our experiences, posting links, ideas and discussion points.

We welcome your feedback, questions, ideas, links and examples and as we have said previously, to learn from one another is immensely valuable. We invite you to take the time to read, to comment, and definitely TO POST!

So without further ado (drumroll please...), WELCOME to Karla's conference experience:

I decided to utilize the pre conference workshops and though disappointed to miss out on the ipod/ipad option that would have enabled me to learn how to design and create my own apps (which I will definitely be following up independently) I attended a workshop with

Suzie Vesper entitled 'Utilising web 2.0 tools to support today's learners'

Those of you who have been lucky enough to attend a workshop with Suzie before will know how knowledgeable and inspirational she is, for those of you that haven't yet, keep an eye on her blog http://sharetheaddiction.edublogs.org/ to share her love of learning and keep up to date with new ideas!

The session was highly interactive and explored a wide range of FREE online tools that can be used easily by teachers and students.

For ideas about some of these recommended tools, follow this link:

http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com/Table+of+tools+for+blogs+or+wikis

In the afternoon, we had the chance to focus on a particular area. I chose to focus on Voicethread: http://voicethread.com/ which I know many of you have already been exploring, but for those of you that haven't yet, this is another tool that can be easily utilised

How to use Voicethread

To get a completely free educator account that allows you to make up to 50 VoiceThreads, start from this address: http://voicethread.com/products/k12/educator/

Choose the VT Educator option and complete the steps (the apply button appears to be grayed out but it still works).

Using this tool you can:

• Create an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos)

• Make comments about the media in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam

• Share a Voicethread with anyone so that they add comments to your Voicethread or are even able to edit the media as a collaborator

• Use the Doodle tool to draw on the media as you add a comment to illustrate your point.

• You can download a VoiceThread as a movie file (but this costs if you don't have an educator account)

• You can embed your VoiceThread into online spaces

For ideas on how Voicethread can be used in your classroom, Suzie has put together a great presentation that can be accessed from slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/suziea/voicethread-examples-in-education-presentation?type=powerpoint (even though it is 3 years old, it is still very relevant)

I worked with Tabitha, an AMAZING Secondary teacher from Auckland, and building on an existing VoiceThread on 'Interesting Pants'. We wanted to have fun with the tool, to focus on the tool itself, rather than the content, so we explored pants in Christchurch, link to our VoiceThread is below, this is simply for a giggle so I hope you enjoy it!

http://voicethread.com/share/1369597/

Until next time

Looking forward to your comments

Karla