This is the last post on Reflection 2.0 and I’m moving to my new home at Kate Says – my brand new site powered by self-hosted Wordpress 2.5. I have loved being on edublogs, but as I’m getting more and more involved with Wordpress in other professional projects I decided that it would be best to have my personal blog on the same platform so I can use it as my sandbox……….as Mike Bogle said perfectly this morning on twitter, “If we can’t get our heads around our own blogs, what hope do we have for other people’s?” I believe in learning by doing, and working on edublogs has been the best experience for helping other teachers get set up here. I still have my class blog on edublogs as well as some student blogs, so I’m not completely leaving this awesome service for educators – I just need a site to “play” in so I don’t break any of my paid projects I still have a TON of design work to do at the new site, so bear with me while I move everything over and dig into the CSS – I’d love input as well, so head on over and let me know what you think!

If you currently subscribe to Reflection 2.0, I’d love if you could take a few seconds and update your feed information – I tried making it a little easier by including the link here in case you don’t have time to actually visit Kate Says right now

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I have an email subscription option set up in the sidebar at the new site, so if you’d like that option, head on over!

I’m interested in public opinion on this topic: Is it appropriate to have email contact with students? Please weigh in!

After class I created 10 group pages that I will now be using for individual group research. I’m actually glad that this happened because I realized that it will be great to have the group pages – now I can have each group draft their blog posts on the wiki rather than in Word. This will make it much easier if a group member is gone or if one group doesn’t finish before the 10 day rotation is over. A group in the next rotation could just pick up where the other group left off.

This situation is one of many that needs to be addressed before embarking on new technology projects, but what is interesting is that I couldn’t have actually tested this out on my own at home. You can only be logged into one wikispaces account at a time on any computer. What I should have done is send out a tweet to make sure that my idea would work. After class today, I even found a discussion on Classroom 2.0 about this very issue.

Lesson learned – I will make sure to do MUCH more research before trying another new tool in my classroom!

“Hi Kate

I once taught part time at Singapore’s National Institute of Education after work at Nanyang Technological University. I also had the good fortune to consult on a number of IT projects with the Singapore Ministry of Education.

Singaporean teachers are easily among the hardest working teachers in the world. The pressure upon Singaporean teachers for their students to succeed is enormous. The pressure comes from the parents and the system. The teachers work incredibly hard, even conducting additional classes during the school holidays.

Singapore is a city-state. It does not possess natural resources and land like countries such as the USA and Australia. Singapore’s resource is its children. The pressure placed upon students is significant as well.

Cheers, John”

I replied

John -

Thank you so much for offering a different perspective on the teaching situation in Singapore. The article covered it in a very utopic view and I appreciate the information you provided. With the benefits come much more pressure, which must be considered. Many teachers in the US might not appreciate this……….

and John replied!

“Hi Kate,

Thank you for the reply. Singaporean teachers do work very hard. The trainees deserve the income and the teachers deserve their pay.

I conducted workshops in neighbourhood schools and the most influential schools. Teachers at both ends of the spectrum worked just as hard as the other.

I also had the good chance to meet teachers from across Asia while I was in Singapore. If you ever have the chance to work in an International School in a city such as Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or elsewhere then take the opportunity. While you are there make an effort to get to know the local teachers.

My wife and I buried ourselves in the Singaporean culture while we were there. I became involved with local environmentalists, bike-riders and teachers. I also conducted free IT workshops for parents and children on weekends from time to time with other Singaporean friends. That enriched the entire experience. Our photographs can be found here:

http://www.larkin.net.au/040_gallery.html

Working with Singaporean teachers was a real eye opener. Class sizes are much larger than here in Australia and students sit for a significant series of exams from the very earliest years through to matriculation year.

Interestingly enough Singaporean students picked up blogging much more quicker than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Singaporeans are tech savvy. Three of my favourite blogs are by Singaporeans:

Siva ~ lecturer, environmentalist, blogging for many, many years
http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/%7Esivasothi/blog/index.php

Kevin ~ social networking researcher and lifestreamer
http://theory.isthereason.com/

Marcus ~ biologist and nature photographer par excellence
http://budak.blogs.com/the_annotated_budak/

Cheers,
John

PS. I am off to Singapore to work with Singaporean teachers next week! ^_^”

John is currently in Singapore and has been blogging about his trip – he just posted some great photographs and information on Singapore’s Chinatown today. You can check out his blog here: TeachTech – Technology Tips for Teachers.

Exchanges like these are what make blogging such a valuable experience!

1) Add me to your del.icio.us network – I’m kolson29. I tag everything worthwhile that I read, but I have to warn you that my tagging needs work. I plan to tackle that soon, I promise!  You can also add my del.icio.us feed to your aggregator.

2) Follow me on twitter – kolson29. I tweet many of the articles that I’m reading or resources that I find. If for some crazy reason you think I have REALLY great stuff to say or resources to share, you could do a tweetscan for kolson29. I’d be honored

3) I am constantly updating my Parent Workshop wiki with links to social networking resources. I just added a section for educational uses of social networking. Right now the wiki is geared toward the sessions I’m leading at my middle school, but after that I plan to just keep adding to it for interested educators and parents. Please request to join if you think you have great stuff to share! If you are interested in just finding out about the new stuff when it’s added, you can create a wikispaces account and then visit the space-wide notification page to sign up for email notification of changes. If you don’t want to create an account, you can visit the notification page linked above and grab one of the feeds for your aggregator.

4) If you want to contact me, you can email me at kolson29@gmail.com or through the contact form on the About page on this blog.

I’m always looking for resources, so if you are on del.icio.us, add me to your network (see above) and tag links for me – I’d love you for it! Many of the resources I use for blog posts, in my courses, or on my wiki are from members of my PLN – thanks to you all

This tip deals with web document composing.  I have been frustrated when typing blog posts and MANY things in moodle because every time I press “enter” after a line, I end up with a double-space.  Now, I’m coming from heavy Microsoft Word use and teaching about single, double, and 1.5 line spacing (in business ed classes), so this is new to me.  I’m used to being able to type my text and then go back and do just about anything with the formatting toolbar or keyboard shortcuts, so editing and composing online has been a bit difficult.  It’s a whole new world to me!  Makes me wonder if teaching all of the intricate formatting in Word, etc is becoming a thing of the past with the numerous options available online today?  I hope not, I’m still kind of partial to Word for anything more than simple text input – old habits die hard   I’m all for new things, but I hate letting go of the old!

Anyway, I learned that in moodle and edublogs, to achieve a single-spaced line, I need to press SHIFT + Enter instead of just pressing Enter.   Just pressing Enter gives me a double-spaced line and that’s not appropriate for all of the instances in which I choose to start a new line.  Now, that may seem exceedingly simple and small (and possibly not important) to many people, but I get very into the vertical alignment and appearance of documents and I really don’t like publishing anything to the web without proper appearance.  This tip helped me greatly! 

I’m working on learning more HTML to make things even more customized, but until then, my new knowledge of  finally being able to do “single spacing” in moodle and edublogs is making me smile