Badge 3

Games in Schools

Ollie presents scratch and kodu.

In scratch you can create code like lego bricks. You put them together and create code. You can see into other projects and you can comment on other projects. The most stuff is translated into the most languages. He proposes to participate on a scratch day.

Itching for more is an extension of scratch which include ohter pieces of software which is called "Build your own blocks"

Kodu is available on the xbox and on PC. It has very advanced graphics compared to scratch.

Finally Ollie presents minecraft and points out the educational value and potential of this game.

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Website Design

Ollie is giving us a look at website design. He shows us some tools to use. It is very important to deifne the purpose frome the beginning. You need to be thinking about the layout, what pages, what content and of course what purpose.

Wordpress.com and wordpress.org is an open source bloggin platform. You can create websites for the whole school.

Another tool is weebly. Other features here are totally free and others are freemium, that is they can be use them for a certain amount of time and after that time there will be some kind of cost.

Moonfruit is another example of free or freemiumbased website like weebly.

Another option to develop a website is Google Sites.

Wix is a freemium service for developing a website which is very popular.

Blogger is one of the first and more popular platforms from Google.

Another option is the google webdesigner with which you can create html webdesigns and graphics that can run on the most devices.

Facebook is a very easy to use platform. It's quick and cheap.

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Audio and Video

Ollie presents us some audio and video tools and the possibilities to use them in the classroom.

One of his favourite application is the application crazy talk. There you can take pictures that young people draw and animate them and add a text.Ollie shows us a number of examples drawn and animated by young students. The opportunities for creativity are according to Ollie quite endless.

A simpler version is an online tool called blabberize. 

Students can use a green screen to produce their own background in a video. They can speak to an autoque and produce very powerful videos.

It is important for the students to publish their animations so that

• they are provides with an authentic audience
• for summative assessment
• they can review comments of the audience so that they can improve their work in the future

Youtube is a very powerful tool for teaching as well as video conferencing tools, like google hangouts and skype.

You can collaborate with classes all over the world with education skype. It is very interesting because it is happening in real time.

Further more Ollie introduces us to Mystery skype where the students can be motivated by being detectives trying to find out the places from where other schools are skyping. Check out this site as a resource for mystery skypes.

Wevideo is a free online video creator and editor but one can also edit a video directly on youtube editor.

Ollie presents us Office Mix. It is a free plugin for powerpoint and it allows you to capture video on powerpoint, eg to capture yourself as the presenter. In this way you can prerecord your lecture and the students can watch it as a learning activity and the teacher can check then in the classroom the understanding level of the students, provided the students have watched the video.

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Collaborating Online

Collaborating online is a very important skill that we must teach our students. Ollie points out that it is not only good for peer assessment but it is a good way for providing audience to our students. With this in mind Ollie defines "collaborative writing" as a process that enables student sto generate ideas together, build on each others contributions, provide peer feedback to one another and demonstrate their learning in a new creative ways.

There are a number of tools for collaborative writing. Ollie underlines that two of the most popular are: a) Google Apps for Education and b) Microsoft Office 365.

First we have a closer look at Google Apps for Education.

Google Docs

Google Docs has many similarities with a traditional Word Document. The difference is that it is on the internet and therefor can be shared. Up to fifty people can collaborate on a Google Doc, contributing to the document but also contributing to the discussion. There a a lot of other built in features.

• You can review the revision history
• You can provide instant feedback to your students
• You can provide other links to tools, games or quizzes
• You can improve individualised learning by using the "comments" feature.
• One of the "hidden gems" of Google Docs is the research tab, because you can save time, since you can search and research on the internet without leaving the Doc and you can find copyright free images
• You can work with  Addons like Kaizena in order to provide feedback. the grat thing about Kaizena is that you can leave voice feedbacks for your students. 

  

  feedback in Google Docs
  

  
  

  
  

  

  create conversations with Kaizena

• Another feature of google doc is a feature called draftback, which is a Chrome Extension and can be applied on Google Doc. You can see with draftback who ist typing in real time, so you know who really worked and how much on a project. It's easy to see who is copying andpasting into the document. So it can serve like a kind of plagiarism checker.
• Another good feature is online forms to collect information. Information is automatically saved on a spreadsheet
• Another interesting feature is easybib. With this feature you can keep a list of your sources in an organized way.
• Track Changes helps you keeping track of changes made to shared collaborative documents.

Google Sheets

You can create collaborative databases which you can also share with other schools. A Chrome Extension you can use with Google Sheets is flubaroo. Flubaroo helps you quickly grade and analyze online assignments and assessments, as well as email scores to students. It is a powerful tool on summative assessment.

Google Slides

You can create powerpoint presentations and class presentations. In the class presentation every student of the class creates one or two slides. In this way the students are working collaboratively 

Ollie conludes in pointing out the importance of communicating with the parents either in the traditional way or in the digital way.

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Writing for the Web

When we're talking about writing things on the web, we're going to try and split this into two categories:

1. Online discussion 
2. Publishing

1. Online Discussion

• an effective prompt
• preparation
• practice
• facilitation

Online discussions bring lots of benefits: a) watching, b) thinking, c) contributing. As teachers we must ensure that the student will take part in all three phases of online discussion. The have to watch, to think and to contribute to the discussion.

We have to create some community guidelines. The best community guidelines are made by the students themselves.

There are lots of different types of online conversations:
Back channeling
Online discussion (forum)
Open Concersation (#tag)

Neat Chat is a good way to create a quick discussion forum. It's free to use and you basically send a quick URL to the people you want to participate. It will save the discussion for a number of days, so that students who were absent from class can bo back and have a look.

Twitter is an example of a public conversation linked with #hashtags. The course is using #eLearningCourse, but there are a lot of hashtags we can use to get informed from specific discussions.

There are other tools, which can be used for back channeling, e.g. todaysmeet and scribblar. A backchanneling is a converation that goes in the background that's talking about the main learning task. Both todaysmeet and scribblar are very effective.

It's very important that technology doesn't turn into a distraction.

2. Publishing

Ollie points out that the power of online publishing is in the audience. Audience is an important thing for school and schools and classrooms should be built having the audience in mind. Further more he shows us an example from such kind of a school, the Monkseaton Highschool in the Northeast of England.

Forms of publishing online

• a website, eg. weebly or wix
• writing on a wiki, eg. mediawiki or wikipedia
• a blog, eg. wordpress or blogspot
• an e-book, like zooburst

The key principles of publishing

• Purpose
• Audience
• Features
• Application

Ollies conclusion is, that it is all about the audience and not about digital

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How to create digital content / resources - Introduction

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Google Guide

Anna Laghigna has posted this interesting resource in the facebook group. It is a Guide for Google in Danish, German, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish.

The overview is rich in content and very helpful.

Badge Module 2

Content and Copyright - digital plagiarism

Digital plagiarism is a problem in education because young students believe they can copy material from the internet and present it as their own.

There are a number of digital plagiarism checker available on the internet. Some of them are free, some are on subscription and some require a fee.

http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/

plagium.com

plagiarisma.net

tineye.com

alerts.google.com

www.plagiarismtoday.com


Read an interesting article on plagiarism here

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Content and Copyright - understanding copyright

Ollie presents a tutorial so that we unterstand copy rights in more detail. He explains the term creative commons.

Creative commons are resources that the teacher and the students can legally copy, modify and reuse.

This is very important, because lotsof stuff in the internet is copyrighted.

Creative Commos is filling the gap between the material that is on public domain and the material in which all rights are reserved.

Here you can see the page of creative commons in Greece for the colleagues who are from Greec and here the page in english language.

Take a look at the following video

Wanna Work Together? from Creative Commons on Vimeo.

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Content and Copyright - 7 things you didn't know about Wikipedia

Ollie introduces 7 things we didn't know about wikipedia. Wikipedia is full of interesting facts and information. We should teach our students how to use it.

1. Wikipedia is pretty accurate. When something isn't accurate then the site itself indicates a warning.
2. It is up to date. It instantly updates itself.
3. It has tabs on the top of the page. (Article, discussion, revision history)
4. It is available in lots of languages
5. It is easy to reference
6. Turn wikipedia into a book
7. It has lots of sisters by the wikimedia foundation

Read ten tips on using wikipedia provided by mashable.

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Content and Copyright - reliability of digital content

Ollie speaks about the first spam photo in the internet, which was a hoax, It showed an american helicopter in front of the Golden Gate threatened by a large african shark. The respon to the picture was so massive, that National Geographic had to pu a post on the site, explaining that it was a hoax.

This is an intersting story in credibility and important message to our student that we have to look at all kind of content, not only digital sources. The challenge for the educators is to teach the students what the digital clues are.

Helpful tips

They shouldn't believe everything they read

Look closely at the URL

Does the publisher of the site make sense?

Look at domain reliablitity.

• .edu or .ac extension indicates a college or university
• .org extension indicates an organisation
• .gov extension indicates a government entity
• .com extension indicates a commercial enterprise

Scan the page parameter.

Check the quality information

What is the purpose of the website?

In the video Ollie mentions the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus for which the below website has been created. This is a great example of a website that can be used with your students to investigate the reliability of digital content. Take a browse through the website and in the Padlet further below identify elements of the website that would indicate a lack of reliability.

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Searching the Internet - searching the future internet

Ollie is explaining the concept of searching the future internet. All the search engines we've been looking at until now are searching for things that have already been put on the web. We are always looking backwards. It is very important to set alerts for things that will be published about you or a thing online in the future. That's the meaning of "searching the future internet".

The best service for this function is google alerts. With google alerts you can set up certain search terms and google will update you on a regular basis.

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Hidden gems

In this video Ollie shares with us three "internet gems" : instagrok, bing, wayback machine.
Instagrok
In Instagrok you can "grok up" a term and the SE returns an interactive concept maps on the specific term, which include websites, images, images, texts. In the concept map you can explore a little more deeply. Ollie points out that instagrok is a great digital literacy tool to use with your students.

Bing

The video function and the mapping function are two of the strenghts of Bing. In theo right bottom there a some buttons with which one can flick through a number of beautiful educational high resolution images and video of the day.

Although the search engine is a little bit similar to google, it has an interesting way of searching videos with a very advanced way.

The maps feature is another hidden gem of Bing. One of the best feature is the Ordnance Survey Map

Wayback Machine

This search engine is from the Internet Archive. You can access webpages, videos, software, images and audio recordings. It is basically an archive for over 400 billion webpages of the past.

Here a snapshot of my blog in 2012

Advanced Search

 In this part we are looking at the advanced features of the search engines.
Ollie goes through the shortcut keys.

• If you put something in quotationmarks then the SE will look for the exact phrase.
• If you put a minus in front of a word, the SE will exclude a word
• You can search within a site
• You can include allintext
• You can use the word location
• You can search for a specific filetype
• You can use the asterisk to fill in the blanks, if you don't remember a word exactly
• You can use the word OR to look for things within a specific context

Further more Ollie shows us the advanced search function and expalins the different features.


Read here the 12 reasons one should use the advanced search.

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Searching the Internet - improving your search

Ollie strikes out the importance of selective attention. You have to know what you are looking for, without being distracted. For this puprose he presents a short video, where it is obvious that distraction can make us oversee something important.
He gives us some tips on how to look in Google and suggests this link too, where you can find certain tips by google itself.

Ollie's tips are:
1. Use tabs across the top of the page. Switch between web, videos, images, news etc
2. Use important words only
3. Search for multiple words using OR
4. Gradually add search terms if it doesn't return any answers
5. Use word that websites would use
6. Don't worry about the spellung of the words
7. Use descriptive words, different ways to ask the same questions
8. Use the advanced search

Types of search engines

Ollie presents the different types of search engines providing a piece of information about every search engine He recommends the "List of search engines" in wikipedia, where you can research about search engines depending on the purpose of search.

The search engines referred to in the video are:

Google - the  most popular

Baidu  -  the second most popular, especially popular in China

Bing - Microsoft's search engine, for maps, videos, images

Yahoo

Ask.com  -  specialises in answering questions

Askjeeves.com  - specialises in answering questions

Duckduckgo  - ensures your privacy and doesn't track, waht you are searching online

Dogpile  - unses metadata from a number of other search engines

Instagrok  -   visual search, really good for project work

Quora  - answers by specialists with credentials, refined answers

Google scholar  - search for accademic journals

Library of Congress  - search for accademic journals

Wayback Machine  - search websites that no loger exist, great historical source for recent history

and many others

To the question "What is your favourite search engine and why?" my answer in the padlet was:

You can see the answers of the other participants below in the padled

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