How well do you use technology?

Wow, the school holidays are quickly coming to an end. I have been doing a few things over the holidays, checking emails and following TL news on the social networking scene, but I have not been as much of a participant as I could have been, and I have been terribly slack with my blog.

I am going to work on that. From now on, when I come across an interesting email that I think may be of use to myself later on, or to anyone who stumbles across my blog, I am going to share it here.

For a start, I am going to share a link to a website that provides outlines for rubrics to assess the level at which staff are using technology:
Doug Johnson's Website, CODE77 Rubrics
What an important thing for schools to use - rather than just assessing students, assess the staff that are teaching them, and ensure they have training to fill in the gaps. How important is our understanding and use of technology in this day and age?


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by * Polly *

I felt encouraged to find that I was at level 3 or 4 for many of the sections :) Still have some things to work on though. I think I will make student assessment using technology a focus this year. Prepared assessment (too often I rush into an amazing unit, and the students gain a lot from it, but then it is difficult and time consuming to assess them afterwards, and to compare befores and afters).. I look forward to discussing and planning this with the TL I am job sharing with this year.

Where do you, and your school's teachers sit within such a rubric?

Having a go at Metadata

We have been asked to have a go at coming up with what we think are the important data attributes for our textbook and for a given website (i.e. what we think people might use to try to locate it). I have a feeling this may be an interesting exercise - I wonder if what I think now would be different to what I would come up with at the end of this subject...

Firstly, a book (Hider, 2008):
Author
Year of publication
Title
Publisher
Colour of binding (if they remember that it was blue, but cannot remember what it was called)
ISBN
Overview of content
Key/tag words. In this case things like: information organisation, metadata, cataloguing, digital information resources, tagging, Web 2.0, Resource Description and Access, RDA, information retrieval systems, bibliographic description, bibliographic data, subject access, classification, standards, OPACs.

Secondly, a website (Handpress - I am not sure if it is intended that we analyse this page or the one it links to):
URL
Creator (changed from Author)
Title
Date most recently updated
Overview of content
Key/tag words. E.g. handpress, printing, presswork, books...

I am unsure as to whether I have completed this task correctly. I originally collected the actual information and included it with the aspects I had outlined, and I am not convinced that we are not supposed to do that, but at this point I think that will take time and not really teach me anything that I don't already know, so I will leave it as is and move onto the next activity.

Reference

Hider, P (with Harvey, R) 2008, Organising knowledge in a global society, rev. edn. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies.

Fantastic website

www.arkive.org

I am working hard on my assignments still, extension and all, but had to share this website - it is amazing, and you realise just how amazing it is when you watch the promotional video. You also realise that is has great potential as an educational tool. I look forward to using it in the classroom, or helping/encouraging others to use it. It has received a positive evaluation from me for my ETL501 assignment.