“To maintain engagement with creative forms of self-expression throughout adult life”, I hope you will join me by: A) writing a “7 Things You Don’t Need to Know About Me” post and B) tagging 7 other people in your PLN by listing them at the bottom of your post. See 7 Things You Don’t need To Know about Me

Yes, the weekly part has been a struggle. I was suffering a bit from information overload and instead of taking a step back, my solution was to make more work for myself and try to keep track of it all. The words ’snowball’ and ‘hell’ spring to mind.

But thank you for your advice Remy – I should pick up and share even the smallest shells or learning, even if my description doesn’t do them full justice. In this job I have so many new experiences and insights each day and it’s a pity that I’m letting them slip away now. (And how good to hear from you – any plans for heading this way yet? It’s beautiful here in the wine region and we have some spectacular cliffs to satisfy even the geekiest geologist ; )).

Sheryl, I like your idea of focusing on a particular project too, drilling down rather than going broad. I’m working on building a community of practice around e-learning and that would lend itself really well to this.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Doesn’t that sound like “grandfather tells a story” in denglish?
Well it is, actualy.

Hey, did you post the tweetup pictures you took anywhere? I have not (yet) seen them on flickr and hope that yours or Hans’ are better than ours!

Since I use blogger, I looked at the code and almost gave up. I couldn’t figure out what you meant by leaving out all the spaces. Then I remembered that your Wordles were smaller than mine, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try reducing the pixels in the code.

Reducing pixel size really worked, although I had to compromise on size and blurriness, because I used pastel or light colors. Next time, I will use bold colors.

Yes, I agree Wordle has great potential. I believe there are many ways to use Wordle in the classroom and enhance instructional strategies.

Once I pick a topic, I end up with a book (sort of)….so I leave them in draft form. It make take weeks or months before I can go back to them.

I could follow your system for blogging ideas. What did I learn this week? Reviewing new ideas or applications would be simpler, for me, because there is not as much emotional ownership or in depth research knowledge in my mind.

Right now, I am pursuing another method. I am focusing on beginning of the year ideas, instructional strategies, and activities. The use of picture books, new projects and various ideas for ways to make instructional strategies more interactive through technology represent meaningful information, and they are pretty well accepted by everyone.

Once I run this horse in the ground, I think I will pick up your idea. By they way, I hope you don’t mind that I am putting your blog on my blogroll.

In 2 cases the teachers introduced the wiki in the classroom. In one of the block courses and the online version, I did an introduction session.

Students in classroom and online really liked them. Tips for introducing wikis in Moodle:

- remind students that after a longer period of time, the page will time out. So to either save the wiki page regularly or do the work in word processor and paste,
- explain the history/versioning straight away, this provides much peace of mind,
- when using in the classroom, explain that only one person can edit at a time, but there is no warning and so may overwrite someone else’s work. (Mmm, suppose warning or locking the page could go on my wishlist too)
- nothing beats Lee LeFever’s common craft video Wikis in Plain English to explain how wikis work. I introduce this video by linking it to a problem they’ve all encountered, trying to write a group essay or group report. Start with one copy, send to 4 group members, they send their edits back, now there’s 5 copies, repeat and there’s 10 copies. This usually rings some bells, what, an entire glockenspiel ; ).