Eastnet Cluster Expo 2010

I was fortunate to present at the Eastnet Expo last Wednesday. View the slideshow and supporting materials below. Despite some technical hiccups I thoroughly enjoyed presenting using skype and the share your screen facility. The idea behind my workshop was to share my recent journey into Action Research with other professionals.

Digikidz Workshop for Eastnet Expo 2010

View more presentations from Shelly Park School.

In organising this workshop I reflected upon my experience from last year's workshop eLearning for Little People at the 2009 Eastnet Cluster Expo and tried to progress from that experience.  I took a different approach when preparing my slideshow this year where I incorporated some aspects of Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and also video examples to share with the audience.  The workshop began smoothly with the setting the scene clip Piano Stairs from http://thefuntheory.com/ :



The idea behind this being that when learning is fun, children are engaged.  Shortly afterwards the audio started fluctating on skype which was disappointing.  Possibly it was a bit ambitious to expect to be able to share my screen and talk for 50 minutes without any problems.  So we quickly went to plan B: I rang the classroom that the workshop was being held in at Elm Park School and spoke on speakerphone.  Once we'd turned down the volume on both my laptop and Belinda's, who was helping me at the NZ end, from this end it there was a bit of an echo but not at the other end which is a relief!  Fortunately this didn't mean I ended up running over time and I was pleased I didn't get flustered, probably because I'd already thought through all the possible problems and was prepared!  There's a lot to be said for practise and preparation before presenting.

I hope the attendees at the workshop found it worthwhile.  I am excited to see if anyone adds to the Discussion section of my wiki and have created a How to sheet to support them to do this.

Action Research Wiki

I have put together a wiki to hold all the data and examples of children's work I am rapidly gathering together at the moment! It can be viewed at: http://fairvresearch.wikispaces.com/ and I would welcome any feedback you might have as this is my first experience with action research. I am currently struggling with a couple of things: the first is how to export Kid Pix slideshows, photostories etc into Quicktime or YouTube to allow me to embed them in my wiki. Photostory is really simple to add to a blog but I have not found Kid Pix slideshows as easy. Hopefully I will solve this problem soon so I can add some of the super work the children have been doing and this will show the progression as they have opportunities to explore the software. The second problem I have encountered is that I can't record long sentences on Kid Pix slides. The Pod 2 Digkidz I am working with did a great job of finding out information about a chosen native tree. They drew a leaf from their tree in Kid Pix then we recorded the audio but I noticed that the program stopped before they had finished speaking and when I played the file it only had recorded part of what they said. BJ said this might be a memory problem. I have looked in the Teacher's Notes and the Help and Settings and can't figure it out. I am now going to Google so watch this space and I'll report back if I have success. Otherwise any Elm Park teachers who are Kid Pix experts I'd appreciate your advice!