Exploring the guts

I have been enjoying the pleasures and sorrows of the world wide web long enough to consider it decent to add some HTML basics to my usual user-oriented web scratching.

These two lovely websites got me started:

• http://www.w3schools.com/ 

• http://www.codecademy.com/

The first one doesn't require any registration, the second one does.

I browsed through the first one but actually did the second one. I like Codeacademy's:

• integrated approach; read and code, no switching between apps is necessary,
• insistence on completing quick practical tests before moving on to next topic (I tend to skip or do partially such stuff...),
• feature showing the progress you make as you go along.

I really appreciate the magic of well-designed online courses - the way they not only save time taking you places but also make you feel good by showing you your progress and letting you know you have accomplished something.

A lesson for the teacher in me - improve the tracking of progress and accomplishments in your school Moodle.

Schema activation is essential for learning

...is just a fancy way of saying learning is built on prior knowledge. :-)

I enjoyed Sinead's link to how this video could be explored in class.

Just a different way of thinking

I used to think that stupidity was the cause of people not being able to see things that were obvious to me. Today I realize it was not stupidity; it is just a different way of thinking. Dr.Temple Grandin

Dr. Grandin is autistic - a gift and a curse that gives  a more profound visual, pattern or verbal functioning at the expanse of social one. Through her gift of seeing differently, she can see what most fail to perceive, and has used this successfully, among other things, to make farming and slaughtering facilities somewhat less cruel to animals. The world needs all kind of minds, she shows in her TED talk, bringing autism closer to non-autistic population.

Her quote made me think how easily we tend to use the word stupidity for things, we don't understand - stupidity around us or within us?

...Hence my Week 4 Neuro homework:

She's a long-distance runner

My Dan Pink sentence, finally. Because I like to think that journeys matter more than destinations, as does finding and following your pace of life.

I want you

Week 3 – attention. Needless to say, essential in efficient and focused learning. Or teaching. Or any other thing we want to do well. There's a battle going on in our brain for it all the time – and it is not completely in our power to choose the winner...
 
So, what can I do to gain more control over my attention? In theory, reflecting should help, kind of what we are encouraged to do here; think about what sort of things I do, why I do them, how I do them, could I do them better, should I do them better, am I aware of my priorities, can I improve my juggling - or should I perhaps expect less of myself.
A large part of our behaviour is driven by our subconsciousness. Getting to know ourselves better should help us do things better.

How to Focus infographic

p.s. I'm still thinking what my Dan Pink sentence might be.

I feel you

 
It's week 2 in my Neuro EVO and we are mostly uncovering the science behind emotions; how amygdala, dopamine, serotonin and prefrontal cortex can get to make us enjoy exploring the world around us as well as fight or freeze or want to flee - needless to say all processes which greatly impact our success in class.

Anamaria shared a TED talk I remember watching too - how our emotions are reflected in our body language - and surprisingly - how this works the other way around too.  Marineide followed up with a tip she had once received that seems to suggest an even  broader see-show-feel relationship; if  you dress up kids nice, they would naturally behave better. And the same is true for adults. I have to agree with this. I know that I like wearing what I feel comfortable in - and if I have to put on something else, this affects the way I feel.

The discovery I shared with the group is Technology-Enhanced Social-Emotional Activities - a website with practical activities to use in class adaptable for various ages. I'd already come across most of them at some point or other in my life, so I clicked the one that sounded least familiar - What's your sentence? The link takes you to Dan Pink's tip to discovering and nurturing our inner motivation. A simple answer to 2 questions:

• What's my sentence? (the thing I want to be known for) and...
• Was I better today than yesterday? 

...and suggestion how to use this in class. I'll work on mine after my badly needed beauty sleep.

I think we teachers have mostly come across such activities in terms of different sort of vocabulary (warm-up, getting-to-know each other activities, ice-breakers...) - so its kind of interesting to pull them together in this context - which basically tackles the same topic from the other end (activity leading to emotions vs. emotions leading to activity/non-activity).

I see you

Our brain is a network of neurons that talk to each other – there are neurons over 1 m long in our body – as well as teeny-tiny little ones. They connect and branch out on the needs basis – the unnecessary connections wither away, the necessary ones grow stronger. And bigger. Our course of life is mother nature's co-designer. It gives and it takes. Except for the untouchables buried deep inside our reptile brains - the automation (heartbeat, breathing....) that keeps us going. No one messes with it.

Apart from that, it's "practice makes perfect". The more you do something, the better you get. The more you depend on something, the more you care about it. The more you care about it, the more you nurture it. The more you nurture it, the more it proliferates.

There are sections of our brain dedicated to performing different functions (planning, remembering, recognizing, counting, speaking) – and the obvious learning differences between us are usually written down to the differences between us in this respect; e.g. we may be described as either left- or right-brained, or as having a particular learning style (auditory, visual, kinaesthetic...). Carla's Neuromyths Test bluntly dismisses these as myths and, so like many others, I can't help but feel a little unhappy about it - I've internalised them ages ago!

Sarah Hilyard's enlightening Use it or Lose it nicely breaks the illusion of such oversimplifications:

"Let’s say I’m captivated by a painting in a museum. We would immediately conclude that what I’m doing here is visual. However, I am probably also feeling, thinking – not only creatively but also logically about what I’m seeing -, maybe even hearing sounds that come to me from the image. Therefore, I would not solely be relying on my visual domain." 

So true. So, she says, if we teachers...

"…offer a wide range of styles and use diverse teaching tools then we will be reaching all of our students. We can provide visual, auditory and kinaesthetic means simultaneously, we can supply concrete experiences, creative play and active learning opportunities. The best way to do this is in holistic ways using songs, dance, drama and art. By making it memorable and fun, we will grasp our students’ attention and interest, they will become involved and hence, they will learn."

Makes me think a bit about children and adults though. Little children are so open, so direct. They jump in with both feet – or shamelessly ignore you if you fail to attract their attention. They say what they think. As adults, on the other hand, we tend surround ourselves with protective walls – think politeness and decency, saving faces, keeping appearances… We tolerate things we hate. And are generally way more hesitant to open up our hearts - doorkeepers of our minds.

Braining up at EVO

Yep, it's that time of the year again. :-)

I'm taking Neuroscience in Education - I feel that as educator I really should know more about what biology has to say about learning. And I can't imagine a better way to do this than with my dearest online friends. 
Like always, there is a cool mixture of new and ancient participants - and there are 2 other Slovenian teachers - from Ajševica of all places!

My week 1 - checklist:

1. joined the course spaces, dropped some comments, 
2. haven't shared my story yet, plan to cheat and share my good old Becoming a Webhead ;-); checked some other lovely stories though,... Azhar's made me want to go to Egypt, 
3. haven't shared my reflection space yet, plan to share this Cyberkitchen,... even though it tends to hybernate every now and then ;-),
4. complete the remaining weekly tasks (eventually).

SIRikt 2011

I was in Kranjska Gora again this year, but only for the last day of the SIRikt conference. Thanks to its dedicated organizers, the conference has grown into a major national educator's event with over 1200 participants this year and some truly amazing presenters. Like before, this year's events too have been recorded and are already available online.

It was wonderful to meet friends from the national Collaborative projects online community and hear examples of good practice shared by fellow teachers. Two dear colleagues of mine – Tatjana and Lorena are this year's well deserved winners of the national eTwinning Golden Cable award. Way to go!

After the early Saturday morning plenary I attended a most refreshing workshop led by Tim Rylands and an always useful one – How to make a good presentation by Dr. John Collick.
Tim and his partner-in-crime Sarah lit up our minds and hearts with their humour, passion, creativity and team spirit. They took the 20 and something lucky participants to a refreshing journey in the iPad wonderland – a most appreciated reminder of how invigorating it is to relax and let your imagination roam free and of how this can work fabulously constructively in a group context such as a class. We had a walk through a medieval town where I got a new husband and son, we created some weird sounding music, made and baked some pottery and carved a watermelon among other things.

Some presenting tips by Dr. Collick - in addition to those classical ones about not turning the ppt into a karaoke exercise by reading out loud, about theimportance of using only keywords on slides and of quality visual support and, of course, of practice, I found interesting the following exercises for voice and posture:

- 20 sec mouth stretching before giving a presentation
- A breathing exercise involving slowly inhaling and exhaling air with your hands spreading out and closing back in thus shaping an imaginary ball – from a tennis size one to a volleyball one. This should be done 3 times as slowly as possible without fainting.
- Step with your feet reflecting your shoulder length, turn your shoulders backwards and straighten up your head as if trying to touch with its top an imaginary thread hanging down the ceiling.

Another interesting piece of info new to me was the fact, that our brain reboots every 10 mins or so. That's why it makes sense to include breaks in presentations. And that we can generally only remember 3 things. So it makes sense to put no more than 3 points on our slides, if possible using no less than 6 words.

In the afternoon my 3 boys and I climbed up the way-too-many-to-count stairs to the top of the Planica jumping hill – a lovely and most useful after-conference exercise. ;-)

...which rewarded us with a spine-chilling view downwards.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Here goes my object story.

My favorite mirror. Small - but big enough to cram my face in. I got it for my 31st birthday from my husband cousin's wife Katarina, a young talented artist with millions of creative ideas.
Katarina had bought the little mirror with the simple bright orange frame and painted my family on it – the 3 stick figures are my 3 boys (my husband and the kids) and me.
I like the way there's just the 4 of us depicted against the lively orange background – blank, with no background noise or any other distraction - just us. Life sometimes runs faster than I'd like, and is often filled more with things I need to do than with things I want to do. The little painted mirror makes me feel good – its lively colors, its simplicity, the way it magically dispels everyday clutter and brings a smile to my face when I rest my eyes on it. I like it. :-)

Digistorytelling 2011

Photo: Olena Crawford
A new round of EVO worshops started. :-) I'm on the Digistorytelling team and right now we are in week 2. Over 240 participants joined in from all over the world - many of us are 'old' friends from previous sessions. Like swallows, we keep coming back for more. :-)
One of the Week 2 tasks this week is a 6 word story along with a CC-licensed photo - it's amazing how much can be said in so few words.

eTwinning project idea

Dehbia, Evelyn and I adapted and elaborated the Walls Talking Poster idea into what is to become a 2 month eTwinning project.

The idea is that students describe what really matters in life using a combination of images and texts and share and compare class production.

Tools to be used are:
Twinspace user walls, Twinspace and/or class blog, Twinspace forum, SP Studio, Big Huge Labs, others.

Aims:
Connect with a partner from another country and collaboratively explore each other's culture and view of life.
Reflect about things that matter and share and compare class production.

Work process:
Step 1 : Introduction (creating avatars & editing Twinspace profiles)
Step 2 : Choosing partners and connecting with them.
Step 3 : Creating an image/text combination about something that matters to you
Step 4 : Checking production, commenting and voting for the best three posters.

Expected results:
A collection of posters displayed in the schools or on the web.

eTwinning in France

From the 13 to 15 October I was a lucky participant of the Hungarian-French-Slovene eTwinning PD Workshop. It took place in the lovely French town of Reims in the land of Champagne.

The workshops included:
• Getting familiar with the project work basics,
• Examples of good practice,
• Getting familiar with the eTwinning portal and Elluminate,
• Networking, creating projects and registering partnerships.
One of the examples of good practice came from Slovenia – Tatjana Gulič from the Preska primary school wowed the audience with a 'Your Tube' project idea linking music and physics classes in two Slovene schools – a primary and a secondary one. The project idea was developed in collaboration with Lorena Mihelač, a music teacher from the Metlika secondary school.
The main idea is exploration of scrap tubes from various materials – during the physics classes students study them from the point of view of physics and during the music classes they write and play music using them.
Participants tried out the 'tubes' – it was a lot of fun and sure worked!
Inspired by great examples we rolled up our sleeves, exchanged our project ideas and started connecting. We registered a number of new eTwinning projects which should connect Slovene, Hungarian and French students and teachers in the current year. 
Such eTwinning seminars are a wonderful experience – I'd say especially for teachers who already have some experience with collaborative project work and are interesting in finding an international partner.
I presented the Things that matter idea from the Walls Talking project and was then approached by two lovely teachers from Reims, Evelyne and Dehbia, with whom we developed an eTwinning project idea and registered it on site. I’ll post about our activities on the class blog.
Lots of interesting happens behind the walls of out schools – it's nice to be able to see and learn about these things – and get inspired dip our toes. All you need to do to attend such a workshop is check out the national agency’s site in your country – in Slovenia it's Cmepius.

Exploring slideshow options

Many interesting photo and comment contributions have been pooled within the Walls Talking project. On the project site and in the Flickr group. The flickr group pool contains is a complete collection of photos gathered so far.

I was wondering about the simplest way of displaying thematically related photos with pertaining info and comments... The only way to do some of this in Flickr (photo + info slideshow) seems to be to tag items in the pool and then share the tag-generated slideshow. Or am I missing something?

I've gathered some of the sets here and here.

Flickr slideshows look good and have this great embed function, but to see photo related info viewer needs to watch them full page with the 'show info' option on.

So I was wondering about how to display things by showing more information about contributions more interactively and I remembered diigo slideshows I once played a bit with and liked a lot.

This is my attempt number 1 - a longer Listen to the Walls Talking diigo slideshow covering more or less the same topics as the above Flickr sets. The default transition speed is rather slow, but you can always use the buttons below to move on faster or speed it up bottom right.

I like diigo a lot. Miss an embed function but appreciate a lot the fact that the slideshow is interactive and can include any webpage.

Why do I blog?

Jen asked why do we blog in the Webheads YG. This was my reply.
I don't blog much and faaar from regularly but enjoy it a lot - and also enjoy going back to what I've done.
My blogs are my online spaces where I occasionally retreat to reflect, record, share, or simply keep things I care about. I've got a cyberkitchen, a cybermill, a cybergarden and a cyberattic. Even though the first two are a bit more alive than the others I don't think I'll ever pronounce dead any of them.
I like the way conversation is kept open this way and people can get in touch with you. I am not a well organized person by nature so I also like a lot the way contents on blogs can be simply and meaningfully organized using tags. It comes handy when you need to show sbd. what you are working on, or what you've done/planned to do at some point, and to aggregate contents from various sources.
I like the way you can feel the writers behind their blogs, easy follow numerous blogs using an aggregator of some sort, and learn so much and meet so many fascinating people that it's incredible.

Online safety basics

Just sharing here a presentation I created for collaborative online learning group led by Viljenka Šavli within the national project called e-Šolstvo, which promotes e-empowerment in schools across Slovenia. It's in Slovene.

Varnost na spletu

View more presentations from sasasirk.

Garbage related sites that make you think

Another English version of my post from the Smeti Ning.
Plastic bags are one of the first things that comes to my mind in connection with garbage.
1. Battle of the bags is an interesting American documentary comparing the use of plastic and paper bags – which are more damaging for the environment? What has been done so far in various places to fight unnecessary pollution, what we can do ourselves... The documentary is split into short 1-2minute chapters, is partlčy interactive and I find it useful for English listening comprehension (B1+) as well as a good starting point for a simple research into our bag policy.
2. The Battle of the Bag – is about 40 minute long Canadian documantary about plastic bags.. lots of interesting facts – production, history, issues, responses, ...
3. Series of shocking photos of dead birds from a remote Pacific island away from civilization – their rottening dead bodies are full of plastic garbage from the ocean. The island is 2000 miles from the closest continent.
4. http://explorethecycle.com/ is a nice, animated visualisation of the recycling process at a materials recovery facility – an easy to follow animation consisting of short chapters

Our garbage - our concern

This is an English version of a post I've written in Slovene at the Ning site called Smeti, naše skrbi (Our garbage, our concern). The site has recently been created by my friend Vili (and will, sadly, need to be relocated due to Ning's new business policy).
The idea behind the site is to promote class collaboration around the topic of garbage - within and between schools and cultures. Teachers have been encouraged to post their project ideas to the Ning and I've posted this one:

DIY sites: practice English + learn about cool recycling ideas + connect with others

At http://www.instructables.com/ one can find numerous DIY ideas concerning recycling various materials. So why not directing students over to this site – they'll easily find there interesting and feasible ideas to carry out in practice – cross-curricularly within their school or reeaching out to other national or international partners in crime.
Interesting ideas could for example be gathered together at an English class and if necessary translated. Individually or within some practically oriented courses students could then create things and maybe organize an exhibition, an auction, or find some other meaningful or useful place for them (e.g. Biotechnical school students creating a scarecrow out of old CDs and setting it up on their school field...)
Older students could perhaps gather together interesting project ideas during their English class and pass them on for younger groups to create them... (Suzana and I have been thinking along these lines during one of teacher training sessions – she teaches young learners in primary school, I teach college students).
With this idea in mind I went to the before mentioned website and checked out some possible ways of recycling paper. I was amazed by numerous ideas there and by simplicity of this one here http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Paper-Beads/ - so I emptied my paper basket bin and used the paper and wooden beads to create this:

Here's a longish list of various DIY sites ... Worth checking out, I think.
Also worth checking out is http://earthcast.posterous.com/ - a great collection of nice green project ideas for teachers and students.

Copyright and right to copy

Image created using Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator

It's been 300 years since the world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. The British Council gathered ideas about copyright from renown thinkers of our time and posted them here.
I like Cory Doctorow's defense of our right to copy.

"We are that which copies. Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don't understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists - copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don't copy: 'dead'."

A must see presentation on this topic from 2002 is Lawrence Lessig's free culture.

Copyright at SIRIKT2010

I attended this year's Sirikt conference and participated in a round table discussion on copyright in Slovenian education together with renowned Slovene copyright lawyer experts Miha Trampuž, Mojca Pečar and Katarina Krapež.
I did a bit of thinking and reading on this topic in preparation for this event and saw that the more I read the more questions I ended up with... It's true, educators, kids and web folks in general often don't remember to credit authors, cite sources, and ask permissions for publishing things online... I think mostly unintentionally, because we tend to do things fast these days and do them the way we see others do them.
My schoolmate at secondary school had this fabulous T-shirt saying 'no school, no job, no problem' - if you can't tell right from wrong you are blissfully unaware of mistakes you make... it was sort of along these lines that my thoughts rambled as I was trying to make sense of the copyright act restrictions.
As I said, the more I read the more questions I had… Many of them were kindly answered during the round table discussion and earlier workshop given by Katarina, still many remain unclear.
There are no national borders on the web… which is just great. I understand I need to follow Slovene copyright law in Slovenia – also when I use foreign copyrighted works? E.g. I think that according to the Slovene law I could freely use copyrighted music in a non-commercial school performance as long as I credited the authors and cited my source… I’m not sure I could use e.g. American copyrighted music the same way here…
Theory and practice are a challenge to match if you are not a lawyer.
Katarina, a cc advocate, mentioned that people sometimes surprisingly know more about cc than about the copyright law. I don't find that too surprising since cc terms are written way more humanely and are a much appreciated successful attempt to reconcile the legalese with the language understood to common web folks. I'm a big fan of the 'for dummies' trend and think we should all create meaningful contents for our target users (teachers too ;-)) if we expect them to take it seriously.
Here's a lovely view I from my hotel window: