Teaching Hacks.com

Online professional development offered by the Ontario Ministry of Education through TVOntario. This Flash Based resource concentrates mostly on K-6 teachers by offering self directed learning in Literacy and Numeracy, but there are sections on Leadership which will interest other educators. These workshops are interactive, provide screencasts, and a toolkit containing printable resources is also available.

There will be more modules available as these project develops so keep an eye on this webspace. If you haven’t been there already it is worth a look

Gamemaker is a great bit of software that will allow students to create their own video games without having to learn a programming language. The software also includes six editable games in order to get students started. You can make games with backgrounds, animated graphics, music and sound effects, and even 3d games! And when you’ve become more experienced, there is a built-in programming language, which gives you the full flexibility of creating games. There is also an online community that has sprung up around this software to help support its use as well as encourage the educational uses of this product. There is also a teachers section that includes teaching and reference materials.

Ontario elementary teachers might consider connections to the Science, Language, and Mathematics curriculum, while secondary teachers in Media Studies might also find this program useful.

The Co-operative Learning Object Exchange (CLOE) is a collaboration between Ontario universities and colleges for the development, sharing, and reuse of multimedia-rich learning resources. This occurs through the CLOE Learning Object repository. Each institution develops multimedia learning resources to address instructional challenges shared by the other partners, or uses/adapts learning objects created at another partner institution to use at their own institution.

The CLOE stories are quite useful especially as a primer for designing reusable learning objects as well as another explanation of learning objects. There is also a CLOE Camp from May 9-13, at the University of Waterloo for CLOE members.

Ask A Teacher is free sychronous homework help from TV Ontario and ILC from Sunday to Thursday from 5:30-9:30pm.

This is a great resource for Ontario high school students who would like to get homework help from certified teachers using synchronous communication. Teachers and students communicate via an enhanced whiteboard and chat area to go through challenging homework problems.

Students can also use the essay feedback tool to submit an essay to a certified english teacher for suggestions and improvement. Did I mention it’s FREE!

The Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee (OSAPAC) keeps Ontario educators informed about the status of provincial licensing of classroom software through their online database. The committee consists of members from across the province, who advises the Ontario Ministry of Education on the acquisition of provincial software licenses for publicly funded schools.

The Microsfot Software agreement, as it is known in some school boards, is a software agreement which allows the staff at participating school board’s to purchase Microsoft software at only a few dollars. For example, a copy of Office XP might be offered at $4 for board staff. The participating school board pays a per workstation fee in order to offer the Microsoft products to staff at a reduced rate. This fee has not been confirmed ~ but has been estimated at the $15 dollar mark.

A medium size school board with 5,000 workstations would pay approximately $75,000 per year to be part of this event. A number of school boards across Ontario participate in the MSA event and pay the per workstation licensing fee. This seems like a good deal, board staff members get Microsoft software at a ridiculously low price.

There is however a problem that some of the software titles available through the MSA Event are duplications of software that are already licensed through the Ministry of Education.

Ministry of Education Licensed (OSAPAC)	MSA Event
Star Office 7 Office Suite	Microsoft Office XP
Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Academic	Microsoft Office 2000
Turing 4.0.5 for Windows	Visual Studio.Net

I’m just curious if school boards are paying for a class of software products that they already have access too? It is hard to tell with a big corporation like Microsoft. They can put up lots of smoke and mirrors if they want to.

The Curriculum Resource Bank is a great place to download great video and print resources to use in a k-12 classroom.

The CRB has over 20,000 different learning objects which are connected to Ontario curriculum expectations. The video clips are curriculum focused and include entire television shows from TV Ontario ( PBS in other places). The search engine is good but needs to be a little more intuitive. It would also be nice if it could remember my previous searches to save me some time. The organization and indexing of segments of shows helped me save time when searching for content matching the curriculum expectations I was covering in my classroom.

One of the features I really enjoyed was the ability to download video content to my home computer and burn it to a CD to ensure the videos were ready for classroom presentations. Copyright allows for classroom presentations for educators. The lessons associated the videos were good, but I preferred using my own lessons.

BEST feature - � The CRB is now available as a no-fee resource to public educators and students throughout Ontario.� It is available to other users with a modest subscription fee.

I hope you have filled out the eLearning Iniative Stakeholder survey at the Ontario Knowledge Network for Learning (OKNL) website.

Here is a sample of my response to a few of the questions.

What concerns, if any, do you have regarding the quality of education that will be provided by e-learning? Please suggest how these concerns could be addressed. Relate to creators of course and learning object content that are not familiar with today’s classrooms. Do not use developers in isolation, but with connections to the classrooms that will see benefits of eLearning, with direct discussion with the teachers. That northern rural communities will not have the infrastructure to support the use of eLearning technologies because of bandwidth issues. Keep open the idea of using digital TV as a mode of communication be which eLearning might be delivered. Training will not be made available for staff using eLearning technologies. Educators need to be informed about how to best take advantage of eLearning whether as a separate course or in a blended model. And how to effectively use different learning techniques when teaching online, and not replicating what is done in the f2f classroom. Another concern I have is the underutilisation of eLearning courseware because of a lack of knowledge by f2f teachers. Educate - Inform - Train

What pedagogic concerns, if any, do you have with regard to providing quality educational experiences using e-learning? Please suggest how these concerns could be addressed. The pedagogic concerns I have relate to teachers, course and LO developers replicating what they do in a f2f classroom online and not taking advantage of the medium for what it can do. It will be more important in the development of HS online courses than LO because of the time that would be devoted to learning. I fear asynchronous content development will be the norm rather than adding elements of synchronous content created through real-time tools and holding real office hours. Meeting online similar to organizations like Tapped In, Learning Times or even as a Virtual Conference like KnowTips.ca, has real benefits with regards to the development of learning through synchronous methods. Those who have used this technologies (webex, Elluminate) know what it means to connect with someone in Austrailla sharing the same learning goals dicussing a PowerPoint Slide using audio conversations.

Do you believe that having all district school boards use a single development and delivery approach for e-learning would be beneficial? Please explain your answer. I do not believe this to be the case. The eLearning environment needs to be flexible for teachers so that courses can be customized. The ability to move courses easily based on CanCore or Ontario developed standards between LMS’s or CMS’s, should be discussed with major portal/LMS/CMS developers, or look at developing standards through open source community LMS solutions like Drupal or Moodle. AS an aside, it would also be nice to see that the Ontario Government provides technical support to the province’s schools on one Open Source LMS/CMS/Portal (ie Drupal) since this seems to be the stumbling block for implementation of this freely available software in school boards. I also believe that if we lock course content in inflexibly LMS systems like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel etc. We will not allow our teachers to take advantage of loosely connected tools that make up social networks and connect them together to customize elearning experiences for students. (rss through blogs/podcasting/screencasting, delicious, flickr, furl etc.)

Do you believe that having all district school boards use the same computer programs to develop resources and classroom materials would be beneficial? I do believe in standardization that allows the interconnectedness of software and data (i.e. open source) but educators should be able to develop materials in environments in which the feel the most comfortable. If a person has been using MS Word all their life and they like the product and can use it efficiently and effectively, they should be able to develop in that software. It might be wise, if at all possible, to push the software companies in order to make sure WordPerfect files can be read on MS Word and vice versa, rather than forcing a new variation of a tool on someone. I believe that getting software in the hands of teachers, students and even parents can have a profound impact on the general knowledge about the uses and extensibility of a particularly software product. If you want to promote learning web page design give everyone a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, but do not force others out of using MS FrontPage.

Would it be useful to store large amounts of curriculum resources in a central location in a board and have these resources identified and searchable by grade level, subject area, expectations, etc., and make them accessible to all teachers in all boards? This is a leading question. In some cases this might be an option when you need to ensure and validate the content that is being shared. Also, if you need to manage DRM and you want to maintain control of the resources. This might not be the best way to ensure pervasive distribution of resources. Putting the responsibility of creation and distribution can be done on in individual level and in fact it has been done for years. It is just repurposing an old tool for distribution - Peer 2 Peer -Kazaa, Napster, BitTorrents… Have creators define the metadata that goes along with their resource initially, but as the information is continually passed on to others new meta-data will be added to the resource as other users pick-up, modify and re-share the resource.

—————— On Search Ability If I was to have searchability I would want it at different levels as the question states, but I would also like to to be an adaptive search that responds to my profiles. If I were a grade 7 math teacher searching for algebra LO’s and I found some LO better than others, another grade 7 math teacher should be able to tap into my expereince and alsi chagne the meta data for a particular learning object. Perhaps having the meta-data of a LO in a sort of Wiki environment.