Thursday, April 30

the 23 things

Hello! Welcome to the Tassie Toolbox, 23 things for VET practioners and content developers. This ongoing tutorial is part of the Australian Flexible Learning Network Toolbox initiative. On this blog you'll encounter the tools of the new Internet: Web 2.0 tools that are bringing our students and trainees in touch with the entire world through social networking, video, audio, and virtual reality. As a group we'll spend the next 10 weeks exploring and enjoying 23 tools of this new Internet. There are many places for you to discover, experiment, use in creative ways to deliver your training.


Tutorial Format:

Each week begins with a brief explanation of a new web 2.0 topic, followed by discovery exercises. These exercises give you the background you need to understand the tools you're learning about. Don't skip them! After the discovery exercises, you'll find a thing -- activity -- to complete. After each thing you will write about the experience on the blog you will be creating in week 2. In other words, you will comment or "post" to your online log (Blog). This is a tool to communicate your thoughts, new found skills, ideas, questions, and favorite websites. You'll receive feedback and encouragement from other participants. In turn, you will provide feedback and encouragement to others. It's your space!

The program kicks off in May, but I've put up the first two weeks ahead of time, to give you a taste of what's to come. From May 21st on I'll be filling in the links below to take you to each new week's specific lessons - so remember to come back each Thursday for a new week's worth of things to explore.

Week 1: (May 7th)
1. Please begin by reading this blog & finding out about the program.
2. Discover a few pointers from lifelong learners and learn how to nurture your own learning process.

Week 2: Blogging (May 14th)
3. Set up your own blog , add your first post, add an avatar.
4. Register your blog and begin your 23 things journey.

Week 3: Photos and Images (May 21st)
5. Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site.
6. Have some Flickr fun and discover some Flickr mashups & 3rd party sites.
7. Write about something technology oriented

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders (May 28th)
8. Learn about RSS feeds and set up your own Bloglines newsreader account.
9. Locate a few useful VET and training related blogs and/or news feeds.

Week 5: Roll your own resources (resuming after the school holidays: June 18th)
10. Tell a digital story.
11. Build a resource of your own using ARED
12. A look at open courseware (wikiversity, MIT, Rice, the Commonwealth of Learning, iTunesU)

Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati (June 25th)
13. Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site)
14. Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.
15. Copyright, Creative Commons, and What's Coming Down the Road with Web 2.0.

Week 7: Wikis (July 2nd)
16. Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that educators are using them.
17. Add an entry to the Tassie Toolbox wiki.

Week 8: More free tools (July 16th)
18. FOSS (gimp, audacity, kompozer), eXe, hot potatoes
19. Take a look at some online productivity (word processing, spreadsheet) tools.

Week 9: Podcasts and Video (July 23rd)
20. Discover TeacherTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos. An introduction to camstudio and wink
21. Podcasts - no iPod required!

Week 10: Downloadable Audio and wrapping up (July 30th)
22. eBooks and Audio eBooks
23. Summarize your thoughts about this program.

14 comments:

Jaqson said...

Hi Peter, I had a bit of trouble locating the toolbox wiki - can you please post the link.

Unknown said...

Can't find the wiki? I'm guessing that's because I haven't quite gotten around to building it yet :) I'll let you know when it's done (hopefully sometime before July 2nd, when we cover wikis in our 23 things).

Rachelann said...

Hi Peter,

My first challenge today was to try and work out (remember) how to post here :)
I am having a little trouble with my avatar on my blog. It says I have loaded it and when I log in to Edublogs home page I can see it, but when I go to my site, there is just a blue and white box. Are you able to help with this?
Rachel

rosie said...

Hi Peter, i registered then changed my blog name, so how will I change that on my registration. Still finding my way around (and making mistakes).
rosie

Unknown said...

Hi Rosie, I haven’t actually written a web interface for editing your details (showing a typical lack of foresight). In the meantime it's not too hard to do this manually. I've gone into the database and updated it with your blog address.

Unknown said...

Hello Rachelann,
your avatar might just be missing because of a cached page - meaning that it's been updated on the web, but that somewhere between you and there is a computer thats sending through an old copy of the page. Sometimes you can force the browser to ask for a new page (Ctrl F5 in firefox or internet explorer); or you can wait for a bit and try again (sometimes it will take a day for the cache to clear).

Leigh Blackall said...

great looking course.. I hope you guys can document your progress well.. we need more clues on how to teach this stuff better.

witchypoo said...

I am not sure how all this works, this is my first time at blogging. How do I create my avatar in Blogger?

witchypoo said...

I must have done something right, my comment has gone through. I am really keen to do this course as I had a taster of ARED last year and I really enjoyed it. I want to do more and more..............

Unknown said...

welcome witchy - to get an avatar you need to create one somewhere else (blogger doesn't have any tools for making them from scratch) - say: http://avatars.yahoo.com/. Once you have an avatar you need to export it to your local computer and then upload it to blogger to include in your sidebar. There are some detailed instructions on the tassie toolbox and some much better ones on The Technically Challenged's Guide to Blogger. Good luck.

Rachelann said...

Hi Peter,
I went to Gravatar and uploaded a picture - seems like though I really can't work out how to get my image on the Edublogs blog! Maybe I should have gone with Blogger. Anyway, I will keep giving it a go every now and then and see if something works :)

David Gutteridge said...

Hi Peter - I have got a blog already set up and have registered it. I had a blogger account before and have been trying to add the photo to my profile, but it won't work. I have resized photo etc, and saved, but it never appears. Any tips?
Cheers, David

David Gutteridge said...

Hi again Peter - I loaded the photo successfully at home, so it must have been work firewalls or something!

Anonymous said...

Hi everyone - I got an email from wikispaces that took me here:

http://www.wikispaces.com/site/mailing/aug09?u=marliesbugmann/3P5mE7sMun2ALnbUnczE9y

It might just be of use to those who actively work with wiki.

cheers
marlies