I have been working with Helen from Woodford Schools, Plymouth, UK for a number of years.  Back in 2007 we started to collaborate between our schools in New Zealand and England.  We used tools such as Skype, Dim Dim, Skrbl to collaborate and I spent many late evenings remote teaching her students in the UK from my desk via web cam here in New Zealand.  The students were not at all phased at being taught in this manner, it was the adults in the room in the UK observing this who had the hardest time!  The collaboration only worked because the two of us at either end of the asynchronous communication plan had energy, vision and drive to see it through.  We had never met, but decided to write and present a paper on our collaboration.  We presented at the VIASL IFIP3.5 conference at the Charles University, Prague in June 2008.  You can read about that here. We wanted to prove that remote teaching and asynchronous collaboration between students could work in a meaningful manner.  I have always been and remain fascinated by the potential of remote learning to reach out to students in remote locations to enable a rich, bespoke and meaningful curriculum for them.  I am currently working on a side project to facilitate such opportunities for students, I am currently dubbing it a school of passions.

I am now about to embark on another round of  remote collaboration with students.  Again I am working with Helen and this time Megan from Wakaaranga School in Auckland.  Our aim this time is to see if students can collaborate, negotiate, design and construct a game in Gamemaker.  They have already been organised into teams of four, two students from the UK and two from NZ.  This team of four will be designing and collaborating asynchronously.  A wiki has been created for them as a staging post for them to share their work.  It is from here that the students will collaborate.  The students will work on their Gamemaker program once they have agreed the objectives and plans for the game, locally on their computers, then usin tools such as Jing or Cam Studio they will take screen shots of the work they have done and submit those to the wiki.  They will then communicate with each other using Talkwheel to monitor what the other groups are struggling with, to share ideas and successes.  However, rather than typing their messages the students will be recording their messages using Audioboo so that they will in effect be leaving ansaphone messages for all to listen to via a hyperlink.  The project is all prepped and is about to commence.

I have to say a big thank you to Patrick at Talkwheel who has been very supportive in setting up student accounts for us and providing me with some training and also to Kate at Audioboo who has offered her help towards this project too.

I was working at Westmere School today it is a school where e-learning has really taken off in the last year.  I have been working with the team for about 18 months now and in this school you do not just see isolated pockets of e-learning passion, it is rapidly seeping its tendrils into every aspect of teacher planning and into every class of the school, even the SMT are experimenting with social media as an effective communication tool.  The school vision for e-learning states that:

“By 2012 Westmere School will project a philosophy and school culture of e-learning from the front door to the back gate.”

They want you to know from the moment you cross the threshold, something special is happening in school.  Today a great leap was made towards that goal.  I have been working with Mel all the time that I have been associated with the school and I have highlighted her great work before, you can see her e-learning innovations on her class wiki http://room14discovery.wikispaces.com Today Mel invited parents and grandparents into her year 1-2 class.  Nothing unusual here, parents in class is normal.  The difference here is that they were coming to learn.  The students were going to teach their parents and grandparents how to use wikis, customise their computers, use Pivot Stick figure animator, Photostory3 and more.  It was very powerful to watch and it was very empowering for the children.  They were witnessing life long learning, the parents were engaged wanting to know about these tools and where to get them from.  The students wanted the parents to know particularly about how to add content to the wiki as this has become a central plank of the student’s learning environment and they want their parents to be part of it, to engage with it.  The embeded video shows the students in action, the audio quality is not good, the video was taken on my iPhone and the student voices were not strong, but the visuals tell the storyeloquently enough.  These students are in charge of their computers and software and are empowered by it, empowered enough to be effective teachers.  Long may this role reversal continue to be valued at Westmere, it was powerful stuff.

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I have been approached by an author in the US who is writing a book on bartering, the book title is The ABCs of Barter and Trade Exchanges by Trish A. Truitt. The book is due for publication at the end of July at the earliest.  They will also have a web site which is due to go live soon  the link is:  http://www.ABCsOfBarter.com The reason for the contact is that she wants to reference one of my tutorials on You Tube in her publication, I have of course said yes.  The tutorial that she is interested in is my Open Office tutorial, which is just an introduction to the program.  I figured that a tutorial was not really necessary as most users of the Internet would already be familiar with a myriad of word processing programmes.  However Trish thought that the style was clear and conscise enough to warrant a mention in her book.

We have been chatting for a while now and it was clear that she did not want to reference a You Tube link in her book.  I suggested that I create a wiki and embed the video there.  The result is that I have now created an open source wiki for all of my Open Source software tutorials.  It is a repository of tutorials organised by application and will continue to grow in the weeks and months ahead.  Indeed today I will be sitting down and re-creating the ‘addons’ tutorial that I have already created and will also create a series of Calc tutorials for inclusion on this specific Open Source wiki.

The address is: http://opensourcesource.wikispaces.com