Tag Archives: school

Student Voice

Student Voice, , , , , , , , ,

Below is a short presentation for the EBE ICTPD cluster focusing on student voice in schools.

Unfortunately I am not able to present this in person nor am I able to Skype in to facilitate the meeting. So I have undertaken a new learning experience in creating a slidecast/webinar in Slideshare. A straightforward process but the recorded voice just doesn’t have the same impact as F2F…

Student Voice

View more webinars from Nick Rate.

In the presentation I have tried to give a brief overview of student voice in four areas:

  1. student voice in reflections on learning
  2. student voice in student led conferences
  3. student voice in learning and school design
  4. student voice in a democratic curriculum

Pulling together all the threads of student voice has been a great process to go through for me professionally. There are some great resources out there that support the importance of engaging students in discussions about learning and school. This quote sums it up nicely:

What pupils say about teaching, learning, and schooling is not only worth listening to but provides an important – perhaps the most important – foundation for thinking about ways of improving schools. Rudduck, Chaplain & Wallace (1996).

Have also being playing with LiveBinders to act as the online portal for this presentation. This allows me to collect all the resources the audience needs for the presentation, organize them neatly and easily and present them with ‘pride’.

For example, the Livebinder below has a tab for the presentation, my blog, two videos to view, my Delicious tags for studentvoice and a Google doc of the presentation notes. Essentially a one stop shop for supporting the ideas presented and any follow up.

Thanks to @janenicholls for alerting me to this tool. Would appear to be a really simple way to effectively support a presentation you are giving.

Although, having seen Jog the Web (thanks @miriamtuohy) used before for a similar purpose, and liking the layout and look better, will probably jog rather than bind. What do you think?

[iframe http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=20133 600px 350px]

#HelenBarrett #school #design #student #democratic #slidecast #reflection #voice #studentledconferences #IanFox #webinar #SlideShare #LiveBinder #learning

Edublogs – the perfect ePortfolio solution?

ePortfolios, , , , , ,

Edublogs has always been a fantastic service for educational blogging by both students and teachers. The service utilises the same WordPress MU software that this site uses to present student’s learning and facilitate reflection and feedback.

Edublogs have recently upgraded and now include a number of new services including domain name hosting so that you can now have your domain name i.e. http://www.mysite.com point directly to your Edublogs blog (instead of the usual http://mysite.edublogs.org). This opens up a number of new hosting possibilities for you or your school and lets you secure your online identity through Edublogs.

If you are looking at investigating or setting up eportfolios then you really need to look no further than

Edublogs Campus. This service allows you to create a secure portal for all of your eportfolio requirements and even your school’s website using WordPress MU.

Features include:

  1. Create, manage and control all your blogs
  2. Run your site at your own domain, with your own look and feel
  3. Enjoy private, safe and secure blogging
  4. Simply embed videos, podcasts, slideshows and more
  5. Over 90 highly customizable themes to choose from
  6. Import from other blogging sites, or export back to them
  7. Great tutorials, personal assistance and a thriving community
  8. Unlimited bandwidth, storage, upgrades and support

Awesome. A great service that takes the technical know how and worry away from you so you can get down to facilitating learning and with unlimited storage and bandwidth, you can truly archive student learning from the time they enter school until… well, who knows!

There is a cost involved for the Campus service but if you are serious about eportfolios and want to provide an environment that incorporates all the possible features necessary to promote learning and reflection, I would think it is money well spent.

Why don’t you have a look or at least sign-up for your very own free Edublogs blog.

#Storage #school #eportfoliosolution #blogging #domain #bandwidth #ePortfolio #campus

Creating and Strengthening the Links between Parents, Teachers and Others

ePortfolios, Parents, Research, Teachers, , ,

Futurelab is one sight that I often visit even though their RSS feed from their Projects page zips into my Google Reader automatically.

I recently revisited a project named My-E, which initially caught my interest after reading the project pdf:

The central aim of this project is to pilot an idea which aims to strengthen the ‘personal learning networks’ of young people – creating and strengthening the links between parents, teachers and others significant to the child’s learning – and to encourage dialogue within this network that will form the basis of more personalised learning pathways.

While the My-E project is directed at 5 & 6 year old students, it has a number of commonalities with the underlying themes and aims of this ePortfolio project. In fact the whole ePortfolio project was initially based around the idea of creating a community of learners, fostering a greater shared understanding for learners, their parents and staff of formative practice.

Our ePortfolios can facilitate, as described in the My-E pdf:

how digital technologies can be used to document, enable and enhance meaningful two-way home-school dialogue

and additionally dialogue between students.

I looked forward to reading the results of the project which begins classroom trials in August of 2008.

#school #personallearning #dialogue #home #Research