Goals and technology

Just a short post to note the coincidence of appraisal goal setting and some ICT preparation.

It may be possible to use some of the voicethread class as a relevant part of the appraisal process – e.g. if someone is in the class then feedback from that would be evidence of a peer observation. This would make the observation a bit more authentic.

To help with this it would possibly be a good idea to review the technology goals that Kim distributed.

Advertisement

Voicethread redux

With 7th grade classes it is time to run through a voicethread project again and a chance to work with IT support on a project.

So far Kim has set up all the voicethread accounts and so we are good to go with that part. There seem to be some issues with existing accounts so it is not possible at the moment to put them all in the same group, but this could be fixed by posting a link. As long as sharing pictures goes smoothly then this part should be fine.

The peer assessment through blog might be a big step further as this will also be a new tool for some of them and I am not even sure if these are all set up. This isn’t a necessary step in this project but would be useful to include if the blogs were likely to be used more.

It seems there may be an IT use committee being formed and this might be good to get involved with, time permitting.

Blog updates

Blog updating reminds me to have a look at some other things that are interesting. Rather than use ‘press this’ to make separate posts, I will put a couple in one:

Danah Boyd on information access and the rights and wrongs of accessing information from social networking sites – if we can find it on google is it fair game to use?

Netgen skeptic provides a collection of nuggets on a theme, for example:

Look at the popular Net Gen literature and you won’t find this kind of methodological rigour. And you won’t find this conclusion:
“Students rely greatly on search engine brands to guide them to what they then perceive as credible material simply due to the fact that the destination page rose to the top of the results listingsof their preferred search engine.”

And this post about “the fact that too much of our discourse is self-referential and self-congratulatory, happening in an “Ed-Tech bubble.””

Some updating

Nothing really particulalry new to add here but a few things might become important in the near future:

There is a new computer available for me to move to. This one is not giving me any problems right now and I am a little worried that it will take some time to check everything is where I want it when things get migrated. It seems that – in theory – everything just gets moved and that is that but it may be more complicated than that if things don’t all migrate. Fingers crossed.

The school is going to look at internal communications and websites – I have said I would be willing to be involved in this. If anything comes from it I will need to have a think about priorities for this.

Logger pro is good for generating stuff quickly, but has a lot of buttons and a lot to learn – some tutorials or learning activities might be indicated here. I am a little skeptical that online video tutorials are well used by a broad spectrum of users, but this is not founded on any evidence.