Showcase Blog2Blog-ConnecTVETy

Hi Folks

Visit our wiki for the slide show from the 10 minute presentation Paula Williams and I did at the E-Learning 06 showcase last Friday (sorry everyone isn't in the main pic).

The showcase went well and we received lots of positive feedback from the other delegates. Well done and thanks to the managers who gave the project their approval and support, those who particiapted in the project and those who covered for us when we were off learnscoping throughout the year.

Our section's two teams are in the final stages of preparing their student focussed activity ready for the new years enrolments.

Rob & Anthony are preparing an induction web site for property trainees that provides info & assistance for trainees and host employers. We are in the process of obtaining written and aural responses from trainees who have completed their traineeship and host employers to help new trainees get a feel for the course and we are also incorporating a blog where trainees can interact and create an online community amongst themselves.

Carole & Sandra have a similar focus with TVET students to aid the communication and learning of TVETs hoping to encourage earlier interaction with the learning materials. In the longer term they are looking to use the technologies that the project investigated to reduce the need for face to face visits to far flung schools around the state.
You can check out the progress of the projects at:

Rob & Ant's trainee site - www.propertytrainees.wikispaces.com
Carole & Sandra's TVET site - www.propertytvets.wikispaces.com

These two sites are works in progress and will continue to evolve as we further develop the level of support for these students.

thanks everyone !
Rob Wales



Blog2Blog Team

Two members of the team will be presenting at the AJC Showcase on Friday 20th October 2006 at 9.50am.

Rob and Paula will give a quick overview of where the project has been and what it is up to now with teachers implementing social software and Web 2.0 tools into their TVET courses for 2007.

The Journey is nearly over.....

ConnecTVETy project To-date

“Blog2Blog ConnecTVETy” aims to develop the skills of WSI-OTEN teachers in supporting TVET and Trainee students studying by distance or classroom delivery.

To date, the group has been exploring various open source social software tools and their appropriateness in supporting students. We have conducted workshops and activities to develop teacher’s technical skills in the functions and features of a range of Web 2.0 tools and are in the process of implementing student focussed activities designed to create and develop online learning communities.

Most teachers in the project are managing TVET or trainee cohorts of students studying by distance and are keen to improve communication and facilitation with their students. With many students already using many of the various social software applications such as MSN, blogs, discussion boards, etc. in their personal communications, this project is helping teachers to develop their skills in using Web 2.0 applications to create online communities and innovative learning experiences.

The project has two distinct phases. The first involves team members investigating various open source social software tools and their appropriateness for the project. The second phase involves teachers developing the use of web 2.0 technologies to create a student focussed activity.

Phase 1 consisted of a number of activities to expose teachers to some of the technologies available and get them using those technologies themselves. Central to this is the project’s wiki site and the blog which has developed into a repository of information and the central hub of the project.


Getting started

Teachers throughout the institute were invited to join the project by completing online EOI form this was located on the project wiki. From here an initial team meeting was held where the scope of the project was discussed and agreement reached on the way forward. The first practical activity was an online scavenger hunt in which team members were directed to a number of web sites and find some information relating to the first technology topic, blogs. This proved popular with everyone agreeing that this was a useful activity and one that they could use with their own students.


Workshop 1 – creating the blogosphere

The first workshop was held in late May in the OTEN computer room. In this workshop we started building the foundations of the project by creating our blogosphere.



Each participant created their own blog and made their first post. We then shared blog addresses, joining other participants’ blogs and making comments. Finally each person set up a bloglines aggregator account creating feeds to the blogs and wikis that had been created.

To finish off the workshop participants were introduced to two open source social bookmarking tools, del.icio.us and flickr. Rob felt that both of these two sites are useful in an educational context and worth investigating.


Workshop 2 - wiki

The second workshop built upon the first with Paula leading the group through a blogging assessment activity where each person put on their teaching cap and created a simple assessment event in their own blog. Everyone then put on their student cap and were allocated a teacher. They accessed the blog of the teacher via their Bloglines account to find and answer the question. Answers were posted as comments to the teachers’ blogs for marking.
Each person commented on the potential uses of this activity.



It was then time to introduce wiki’s. After introducing some of the more prominent wiki’s such as Wikipedia, we presented an overview of Wikispaces. Rob had created a “sandbox” page on the project wiki and participants were asked to try out the tools and make a posting.

Chat

The next event was a chat session using MSN. We chose MSN as this is the chat tool that the student target group use. The plan was for those of us who hadn’t used MSN to learn how it works and to assess it’s suitability in the education environment.

In the chat we investigated some of the tools and features in MSN and discussed ways we could use chat with our students. This brought some interesting discussion and a number of ideas for how to get the best form the chat.

Workshop 3 – audioblogging,moblogging and videoblogging



The third workshop was held on Sept 12th in the OTEN computer room. The morning session was well attended with a Bronwyn Davies from WSI and number of non-learnscopers from OTEN attending to learn about audioblogging, moblogging and videoblogging.



Paula took the group through the mechanics of audioblogging and moblogging before letting everyone loose with a fun practical task that involved each group setting up their blogging account, recording their audio and video blogs and then posting them to the blog sites.

Visit audioblogs posted below!





The future

The afternoon session focussed on the team mapping out their student focussed activity. Most groups are focussing on establishing relationships with their TVET and trainee students who are studying by distance. Activities such as developing wiki sites for students to access, blogs to give students the opportunity to interact and creating audio and video presentations for helping students as part of an induction to their courses.

Blog2Blog visits Sydney Institute

Listen to MLearning Workshop for LearnScope at Sydney Institute of Technology.
http://ssielearning.tafensw.edu.au/audio/tlnw_20060916_paula_williams.mp3

mLearning in education
Paula Williams (Teaching & Learning Development Unit, OTEN) & Phil Lantry (Head Teacher, OTEN)
Friday 15th Sept from 11am to 1.30pm at Ultimo College, Library Building D, Ground floor, Room 53.

• 
  What was learnt:
  mLearning – the distributed classroom - using moblogging to record assessment tasks
  mLearning - how to engage students without spending a fortune
  mLearning - devices, tools and softwares ( what we are using and why )
  mLearning - is it elearning or is it mlearning ? Do they differ and why ?

Benefits to professional work and teaching practice: network knowledge and current pedagogy involving the use of mlearning current online mlearning communities social-mobile web 2.0 links resources and ongoing contact / mentorship into 2007 .

Showing how its done...........

Blogging Downunder

The Blog2Blog learnscopers enjoyed a great day audioblogging,videoblogging and moblogging using their 3gMotorola phones. The workshop covered the power of web 2.0 services in supporting evidence-based assessments. Visit our wiki for more details of the workshop. Here are some enthusiastic olympic trainee volunteers using audioblogger.com to submit their evidence to the olympic committee.

Allo Allo...
Listen to the audio files sent to the blog in 'Mind your Language'


Visit Ken Thompson's Blog Bioteaming in the UK
http://www.bioteams.com/2006/08/07/mass_collaboration_and.html#more

Tools for Skools

Delivery eTools

Learn how to deliver your materials in novel ways to engage with your students and to enhance collaboration, communication and motivation using current and emerging technologies

Workshop 3 - Putting it together

Our third workshop is a full day session that will investigate some more social software tools suitable for our project and then start preparing your student focussed activity. To date, we have created the platform for our community activities with blogs and wikis and have looked at a range of other social software tools such as del.icio.us, bloglines, flickr.

During the morning we will look at a few more online community building tools including audioblogger.com and moblog.com and also take a peek at an online word processor and spreadsheet that allows multiple people to contribute to the one document.Most of the morning will be taken up with moblogging and audioblogging combined using the free open source software and 3G mobile phones. We hope that participants will learn about the benefits of educational technologies in their teaching areas that will enhance greater communication with students empowering them to creatively demonstrate their learning. The afternoon session is for designing your student communication activity.


Paula and Rob will help you decide on an activity that is suited to your students. We will then help you plan and set up the project.This is an important session and will be pivotal in getting from the "learning about the tools" part of the project to the "developing online communities" part of the project. Start Time is 9.00 am SHARP!. Morning tea and lunch are provided.There is space in this workshop for a few additional people who are interested in this area of communciation so please contact me if you want to be included in the workshop.

Hi Rob,

Here's my del.icio.us address to have a look at. I've also posted some notes on my TOURISM blog as a summary...just thought this was as good a place as any - I wasn't sure where to post it?!??!?

http://del.icio.us/dflakus

Anyway, I'm onto the next task - here goes!
Dianne -_-

Monday's chat transcript

I have posted the transcript of the chat to the wiki site. It might be worth taking a look and observing how chat sessions develop.
Some things to observe include:
- multiple discussions going on concurrently
- other issues that get raised that divert the discussion
- people coming and going during the chat
- The development of the main theme of the chat
- How the facilitator kept (or didn't keep) the discussion on track

You can then refer back the pre-reading notes and make some judgements about how the chat might have been improved.

Finally, PLEASE MAKE AN ENTRY IN YOUR BLOG reflecting on your learning about chatting, uses of chats, facilitating a chat and anything else you wish to add.

Dianne's User Profile finally launched!

Hello ConnecTVETY colleagues,

How's everyone else going with this task?
Me? Well, after 1-2 previous attempts and messages advising 'blocked access to resources' I've managed to get this far before 8.00pm!

Anyway, here's my User Profile:
dianne@TVETourism

PS: I've tried to add your TAFE email addresses to my contact list but was only successful with Rob's. Any suggestions?
Cheers
Dianne -_-

Chat session pre-reading

In the first chat next Monday afternoon we will be discussing two aspects of chatting.

• Reasons for using chat in education, and
• Important techniques for chat facilitators.
  

We will also have a quick tour or the MSN interface so that we are all familiar with it's features.

To assist discussion during the chat I would like you to take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with information contained in the following:

• Types of Virtual Communities - Section on Chat only
  
• Designing E-Learning - Chat Sessions
  
• Strategies for using Chat
  
• Chat Ettiquette - Tips for successful chatting

Be sure you have MSN set up and you are logged in by 1:50pm.

Rob

Preparing for chat session - 1

MSN should now have been installed on all relevant computers (let me know if you don’t have it on yours) so you now need to create a profile if you don’t have one.

This document shows you how to set up your account in MSN as does this one.

When you have set up MSN and your user profile please add a comment to this post advising that you have done so and what your profile name is so that everyone else can add you to their contacts.

A few tips:

1. Click the remember me check box so you don't have to remember your log in details.
2. Click on Tools - Options - General and uncheck the "Automatically run Messenger when I log on Windows" check box
3. When you close MSN it actually stays open in the system tray so when you are finished using MSN, right click on the icon in the system tray and select exit to close the app down.
4. Check this post regularly between now and Monday 2.00pm and update your contacts as others get set up.
   

Please attend to this ASAP to ensure everyone will be able to attend the chat. Please don't leave this to the last thing and make user you check back and add other team members to your contacts

I will be back to you before the weekend with some pre-reading for Monday's chat.


P.S. my user profile is rob@robonline.id.au

Delicious web site

Here is the web link to delicious - http://del.icio.us/

Be sure to:

• set up an account,
• add some of your favourite web sites,
• add some tags and a brief description to each site
• Post your address as a comment in this blog

Installing Hardware

Assessment Task

The assessment task is to search for online instructions for the installation:

1. Printer
2. Removable hard disk drive

Goto :

Hewlett Packard
http://www.hp.com

Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com