Tag Archives: large class

Omnium – great collaborative online space

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This is a great product developed here in Australia by the University of NSW, College of Fine Arts (COFA) about 5 years ago. http://omnium.net.au/

I like their metaphors for the different spaces. Each student has a “filing cabinet” which is their personal files.

To share these they “publish” them to “The Wall” which is a shared gallery space for the equivalent of your workgroup/workspace, where you can add comments. This works best when the files are images or video (which is what it was designed for, developed by/for the College of Fine Arts.) Then if the teacher thinks your work is great, they can publish it to a “Class Wall” for the whole class to see.

The best work in the class can be published to a Public Wall, ie a virtual art gallery space that anybody can view. Great promo/marekting for COFA.

Would you like to be able to promote your student work in this way? With their permission of course…

omnium

Grad Diploma Education

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 I met with Sharon Tindall-Ford from Faculty of Education today regarding  The Grad Diploma Ed. It’s an intensive 10 month program with about 350 students in each intake ie per year. It is taught across 4 different campus: Wollongong, BB, SH and Bega.

The students spend 55 days in the classroom – about 20% of the total learning time.

Their program consists of core subjects from Wgong in the main plus eduStream for large classes and some video conferencing (vcf). Sharon said they are moving away from co-ordinators in each location, hence they have an ESDF project to harness appropriate technologies for Multi-location teaching, and ongoing professional development for interactive teaching ie 2-way approach even in the large classes. Richard Caladine working on this aspect with Tess Snowball. They are looking to move from eduStream to interactive vcf even for the large classes.

New requirement: Sharon wants to offer scheduled syncronous staff/student consultations to facilitate feedback and reflection on the classroom prac experience. Could be one-on-one, could be scheduled for tutor to whole tutorial, could be opt-in sessions on key topics eg Maths lesson plans, Classroom management. Also good for interventions for students struggling and under strees, to keep them in the program.

Who else wants this kind of facility?

Ning Social networks in teaching

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Currently there are 3 undergrad classes that I’m aware of that use Ning as an entire learning environment, after a trial use by one class last session.

Ning lets anybody create their own social network and you can have sub-networks or special interest groups inside each network, which usually has a theme. I explored one called “Classroom 2.0”

After navigating thorugh to this network from an “education” themed newtwork i clicked on a network called “Classroom 2.0” and then i clicked on a “visit” link to go there. Once inside (ie on the Classroom 2.0 homepage) it looked remarkably like a WordPress blog. I wondered if it was based on WordPress with some additional code to create a visual clustering and linking between the different sites.

Can anybody comment on what exactly the students like about this particular site/network? How do they use it to stay in touch? Is it particularly easy to link through to find friends’ contributions?

The Classroom 2.0 social network (Ning) homepage      Another part of the homepage, with the special interest group links.

It certainly was easy to set up a new network, see images below you just name and pick a url, theme and colour scheme, and drag and drop the items/features to set the layout.

Setting up a Ning network

And here is what it looked like after i’d set it up. Empty. But ready to roll.

45 seconds later, a new Ning network site.