Thursday 29 March 2007

Alternatives to Copyright - Creative Commons and the public domain

Thank you to everyone who attended this session. Please use these materials in as you see fit (they are all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license) and share your improvements back with us, too!

Session description

"The World Wide Web, peer-to-peer networks, and other evolving technologies make it easy to locate digital content. Easy access to content does not always include rights to that content. Participants in this session will learn the basics of copyright law and the principal of "fair use", then explore alternative sources of audio, video, text, and graphics. Participants will learn how to find and use copyright-free stock photography and clipart, public domain works of classical literature, free-for-non-commercial-use video clips, and other forms of unrestricted content suitable for ntegration into classroom instruction. Participants will also learn how to label their own work for further sharing with the educational community and the world at large."

Session resources: Presentation

Session resources: Handout

Sunday 25 March 2007

Keeping Up with the Natives

Whole-School Staff Training in ICT

Many thanks for those who attended my presentation on our approach to staff professional development in ICT. I hope there was something in there (somewhere!) of use to you, although I do stress that this is just one approach – and the one that appears to be working for us. I am particularly grateful for those of you who offered your suggestions and ripped holes in my presentation! This is what makes events such as this so valuable to us all: we come along with an idea, present it to our peers, listen to what others have to say, go back and improve it further.

My notes are available on my fledgling wiki page (many thanks for Julie Lindsay for providing the inspiration for this!) and this will be a work in progress as time goes on. If anyone would like a copy of my presentation on Interactive Whiteboards or would like to chat/visit our school, please drop me a line.

On that note, I would like to thank Pat D'Arcy for organising such a high quality conference and the staff at ISD for making us all welcome.

Saturday 24 March 2007

A Really Wonderful Conference!

This was a very special conference, with excellent speakers and powerful issues. On the social side there was plenty of time for networking and bridging interests, or simply hanging out. Pat D'Arcy brought it all together with style and made everyone welcome - thanks Pat for making it all look so easy, and thanks for the months of really hard work that led up to it.

More speakers' links and resources may be posted on iSkoodle in the coming days at this link.

Remember you can also author blog entries here by emailing Chris to request author status (this requires you have a gmail account)

Podcasting fun!

Some pics from the podcasting session today

Julie and Chris at Podcasting Tools and Techniques


JulieChris

Creating podcasts at hands-on workshop!

laptop_trio

podwshop


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Podcasting resources

Here are some links to resources to support the 'Podcasting in the Classroom: Tools and Techniques' presentation by Chris Chater and Julie Lindsay.

and for something different...
Further resources from presentation
Online places to upload podcasts/MP3 files: evoca.com, podomatic.com
Audacity tutorials: (from the University of Alabama) for downloading and using and editing


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Friday 23 March 2007

Seth Ruef 'Get's with IT'

The ISD ES Choir conducted by Mr. Ian Thompson performed these two pieces:

Colors of the World
Make Peace

After this musical introduction, Neil McWilliam, Director of ISD opened the formal part of the conference with an overview of the realities of a fast moving world and the relevance of content that is growing and evolving.

Keynote speaker at the ECIS IT07 conference today is Seth Ruef from the International School of Luxembourg. Seth gave a sincere and passionate talk about how he sees teaching and the role of IT in this ever complicated world.
Seth

Notes from Seth's keynote:
Seth ponders his contribution to the educational field. He speaks about the globalization of education and a celebration of teaching. Appropriate technology to assist us in learning. "Communication is one of the best impacts of modern IT"

IT natives: use of terminology, speaking a new language, new experiences

Digital divide between young people today (born post 1987?) and us as (more mature) educators. Historical perspective is different now for our students.
IT has had a tremendous impact on teaching and learning...Seth relates 'before' and 'after' scenarios. eg Before students who missed school, missed school, NOW students logon. Before, students were given knowledge, NOW they create it!
We teach WITH technology now, not ABOUT it.
The great schools today never stop looking at themselves. Evaluation and re-evaluation is essential.

Ethics is what remains when creating global citizens. Never let them think technology is an excuse or reason to do wrong things...plagiarism, bullying, theft is wrong online or off.

Issues such as online music being free(?), use of digital literacy tools.

Define your passion: what gets you out of bed before your alarm goes off in the morning??
The challenge is to find yours and follow it.

Teachers follow a noble cause and we should celebrate this.

Seth's Keynote complete Speech Notes (pdf)
Seth's Speech - LoFi mp3 stream

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Thursday 15 March 2007

Tagging the ECIS IT Conference





David Warlick has kindly added this conference to his online RSS tool at HitchHikr. This means that all images and blog posts that are tagged with the Technorati tags of ECISIT or ECISIT07 (lower case works as well) will feed into this page.

This facility is a great way to keep track of who is saying what about the conference before, during and after the actual event. If you are not sure how this works follow these easy steps:

For Blogs:
  1. Create a blog post.
  2. Open the ECIS IT Conference page on Hitchhikr.
  3. Click on where it says 'make tag code'.
  4. A new window will open with the two suggested tags for this conference already processed. If you wish to add any other tags do so but leave spaces in between individual words. I tend to run two words together (see davidwarlick example on this post).
  5. Now, click on 'submit' and the code is created for you.
  6. Copy and paste this into your blog post in the Edit HTML window.
  7. Don't forget to then use the 'Ping Technorati' feature David has also added to the tagging window by pasting the blog address into the window and sending it to Technorati.
For Flickr:
  1. Post an image or picture relevant to the conference.
  2. Use the tags ECISIT and ECISIT07 tags.
  3. Watch how they feed through hitchhikr!

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