Website of the Week

I am often faced with the dilemma of how to control the flow of technology information to my staff so that they are not swept away in a flood of new websites, tools and ideas but rather can receive enough information to stay informed, at a pace where they can absorb the information. My first step in this direction has been the implementation this term of the “website of the week”.  The idea is that I put one new website on our Moodle Virtual Staffroom every week and showcase that website at the faculty meeting.  So far this appears to be working. Teachers can access the information when they are ready and utilise it when it is appropriate, while being aware that the technology exists.

The websites that I choose are not in any kind of priority order but rather are things that are relevant to my faculty at the time. I must also add that within my faculty are teachers of English, Italian, Drama, Dance and Film so that makes a broader audience to target with the websites.

The websites of the week so far are as follows:

• Week 1: Movieclips – over 12,000 movieclips to use.
• Week 2: Glogster – create posters online
• Week 3: Wallwisher – online collaborative space
• Week 4: AudioBoo – a mobile and web platform that allows you to effortlessly record and upload audio.
• Week 5: DERNSW Tutorials - Brad Bennet’s fabulous site of tutorials to help teachers with the DERNSW laptops
• Week 6: Wordle – make a word cloud.
• Week 7: Reading Rewards - a website to encourage reading and offer incentives for pages read.
• Week 8: Lino It - create a canvas of online multimedia sticky notes (similar to Wallwisher).
• Week 9: Prezi – a fantastic non-linear presentation tool

I am a week ahead of myself at the moment as we are only just going into Week 8, but I realised that I had not yet showcased Prezi, so put it up a week early so that I would not forget!

For the Wordle week, I gave them a ready made example, showed them how I had used it with a class and three other teachers have now used wordle within their classes.

Overall, so far this experiment is working as a way to disseminate a trickle rather than a flood, of useful information in a timely manner. My next thought is to have “play time” in some faculty meetings, where I give them four or five similar web tools and they play and explore. Then they brainstorm usages, evaluate usefulness and decide which is their preferred tool.  I’ll let you know how that goes!