Useful Educational Blogs

Belmore South Public School has created a sensational blog that is full of fantastic ideas for primary classrooms. Check it out at http://www.allstars.edublogs.org

An other useful blog is one created for the digital media elective for the Master of Teaching which shows how information can be conveyed to students a week at a time. I can imagine that this would be a useful way to set homework for primary students once all students have on-line access at home. Have a look at this blog for other ideas http://mtchdigitalmedia09.blogspot.com/

This is a really bad attempt at a text innovation of Monkey and Me By Emily Gravitt.

Copyright

Can I copy material from the Internet for research?

Basically yes however conditions apply, ie it must be fair use.

What constitutes research and fair use?

See the link below however you need to be researching or studying something for yourself.

You must use no more than 10% of pages or 1 Chapter.

http://www.copyright.org.au/pdf/acc/infosheets_pdf/g053.pdf/download

Can students use music in videos that they make?

Music is a much trickier issue basically you need permission to use someone elses music in a film or video.  Most schools have a joint licence agreement with AMCOS ans ARIA that allows them to make certain recordings.

For research purposes students may use music in a fair way for classroom use only. It may not be distributed further.

http://www.copyright.org.au/g038.pdf

Week 4 Key Ideas

Pericles, K. (2008). Happily blogging @ Belmore South. SCAN, 27(2), 4-6http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/schoollibraries/

-Kim Pericles advocates the use of blogging for many classroom activities.

One such example is writing a book in stages and posting it on a blog.

-Blog is short for weblog, which can be defined as "an easily created, easily updateable Website that allows an author to publish instantly to the Internet from any Internet connection..."Richardson, 2006 p17

-Blogs are interactive. they open up communication between the author and the audience.

Barone, D., & Wright, T. E. (2008). Literacy instruction with digital and media technologies. The Reading Teacher, 62(4), 292-302

-Two thirds of teachers feel unprepared to use technology. I am definitely in that category.

-A useful resource is (thesaurus.reference.com).   It provides information about a word of the day, a dictionary and thesaurus support

-Another useful resource is (writingfix.com). This can be used to teach writing traits and students can use interactive prompts.

  

Tree Climbing Octopus

This video is a classic example of the difficulties students and teachers face when using the net. So many children honestly believe that anything they find on the internet is reliable so this would be a fantastic tool to show children that they must check the source of all sites. 

Review of Club Penguin

The web site club penguin is all the rage with young primary students. It provides a safe site for children to interact with other students, play games, post their own art work, digital images ect. One down side is that for some activities and games students need to pay for membership. 

New Literacies

From what I can see 'new literacies' refers to a new way of communicating involving technology. The development of web2.0 now implies an interactive way of sharing and creating knowledge.