2009 is the year of Action for me

Supporting Colleagues

To reinforce and refresh my own learning I’ve started to roll out sessions with my colleagues especially in Retail, Community Pharmacy & Personal services.

This year I have had demand from colleagues who previously weren’t engaged are now asking me for help.  Which is fantastic because they knew where to go to for help.

Adobe Connect has been engaging my Community Pharmacy colleagues who are looking at viable ways to deliver workplace training especially in distance locations.

In Retail my colleagues are asking for help with: online resources, wikis, how to do powerpoint and use a data projector for face to face delivery to engage their students.

Personal services have asked me to help them establish units on Moodle.

This year has certainly started off to be a year of action!

Supporting Industry

Another exciting moment I had recently was being approached by a pharmacy. The business wanted to establish how they could learn to use technology because they would like to run instore health promotions in store.

After assessing their needs I was able to match a unit of competency to the desired training and incorporate it into Cert IV in Community Pharmacy traineeship for the senior staff member.  The unit is called ‘Select an eBusiness Model’. Initially, I put together a presentation of how they could use moviemaker as a stepping stone and to build their confidence in this area.  Last week they were so impressed, they can’t wait for me to show the trainee how to do this and then apply her learning to the pharmacy, they believe that both the business and the community will benefit from this.

It is so rewarding to share my learning from The Learning Technologies Team to our customers.

Being apart of this amazing team has given me so much knowledge which now I can share confidently with my colleagues and customers.

Hi All

Thought this site had great material for engaging students and teachers in discussions around children’s rights, use of the media and cartoons to get a message across, text types etc. It is the UNICEF site: cartoons for children’s rights

http://www.unicef.org/crcartoons/

Each cartoon listing is illustrated with a still image from the original animation, and has the following information:

• Number and theme of the cartoon
• Which Article of the Child Rights Convention the cartoon is based on, originating country, production house, and credits.
• Links to online clips, if available for that cartoon.

When you click to watch them online a box comes up asking you for a username and password for the unicef site – just click ‘cancel’. Then another box will come up asking for your DET username and password – enter these. The cartoons need to be played on Realplayer which comes on all the institute computers however if you have not opened it before you will need to register.

Call me if you have any problems and please pass this to staff who might be interested.

Cheers

Kate

Hi

I got my hands on an e-beam for the Gen Ed section at Great Lakes – how great are they! Teachers who where very ambivalent about technology were immediately engage, especially when shown all the fantastic Activstudio flipcharts that are out there that they can use.

One of the stumbling blocks for a lot of Gen Ed teachers is the literacy level of a lot of our students. Teachers don’t feel that giving computer activities to students helps when they are reluctant readers and writers. Flipcharts are colourful, interactive resources that you can use with the whole class. And if you have an e-beam you can direct everything from the whiteboard. Check out the Activstudio flipchart resources at http://www.prometheanplanet.com/ (You need a flipchart reader – download from TaLE www.tale.edu.au)

Cheers

Kate (WeLC, Great Lakes and Taree)

Today I read an inspiring email from Donna, one of our fantastic team members, who is very excited about a Moodle project she has been working on.

The email not only reflected the growth her own capability and confidence levels with the Moodle platform, but highlights her ability to effectively collaborate with her colleagues and encourage resource sharing in the faculty.

General Education Moodle course templates

As the Faculty e-Learning Contact for the General Education Faculty, Donna has been working tirelessly with her team to create some great ‘template’ Moodle courses for all Gen. Ed. staff to use. While these courses already contain some fantastic interactive resources, they can easily be duplicated and customised for other teachers in the faculty to use.

You can have a look at a tour of the Moodle template course by watching Donna’s CGVE Moodle template tour here. Donna gives you a comprehensive look through the CGVE English course and at the interactive resources that are currently available to engage and teach students.

Feel free to contact Donna if you would like to use this course.

In her email Donna says:

“I have to say that getting moodle setup is going to be really exciting- today Lyn Connors rang me with a suggested resource for CGVE- to use the new government anti-binge ads- so with a net search  I’ve located them on a video, also a podcast discussing their effectiveness and many related articles on the net- am putting them into a little work unit with activities to add as a web page in the English moodle- good fun! I am getting less afraid!“

Check out this great new free online resume tool. visualCV.com is a great easy way for students to prepare online resumes that look unreal, professional and will really create an impression. They can include examples of their work, videos, portfolio links and other supporting documents which can then be securely shared with potential employers family etc and it’s all free with no ads (not that I’ve seen yet anyway). They can also have different versions for different jobs.

VisualCV has a section specifically for students and caters for those trying to get their first jobs right through to CEO’s

.

What is iTunes U?

iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 75,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world.

Click here and watch this video on iTunes U

Hi LTT bloggers !

I’ve put together a little wiki and I would love you to check it out, and let me know what you think.

I would also like to know what is happening in your Faculty/workplace…all I need is one link from you…a wiki, a blog, a podcast…anything to show those IT geeks what others are doing with Web 2.0 tools.

Thanks and have a great break!

Cheers,

Neal

Training O2 is a social resource gathering site for Australian vocational education students and trainers.

On this site you’ll find links to over 15,000 nationally recognised subjects. For each one you can submit links to resources; vote and comment on what other people have posted; and form on-line communities with folks who are studying the same units as you.

Read through the FAQ or work through some quick tutorials, then register for free and start building your own web-based resource collection.

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics.

“Tell us what you’re interested in, and we’ll bring you stories from the best websites and blogs on the topic. All the topics, all the time.”

This link’s pretty amazing – watch the tutorial first. It claims to be an ‘online magazine rack’ and takes you to all the top blogs and web pages in one place and you can easily choose your topic or suggest more.

http://alltop.com/

Let me know what you think…..

Lexie

Hi All,

The web link below has a very extensive list of Aboriginal Bush Foods, some Aboriginal & European history and then on the Test Yourself page there are some clozes, crosswords, matching activities as follow up.

http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/bushtucker/index.html

There is also an assignment word doc (which could be adapted to suit your students) on creating a poster on Aboriginal Bush Foods.

This site may be useful for your students interested in Bush Food as a topic- the reading and the activities are fairly high but with assistance may be interesting to some.

Note on resource use

The site creator states the activities may be used for educational purposes.

Image: ‘coffee beans’

Try this great web activity for teenagers to develop knowledge in evaluating web sites- I have created a worksheet to use with the web activity which you can download here.

• HTML Link
• Flash Link
  

Some of the other activities on this site are excellent but have Canadian content/data.

The Allies & Aliens is a great activity which involves reading and interpreting info “to recognize bias, prejudice and hate propaganda on the Internet and in other media.”

Image: ‘three woman shoppping at the web’