Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Spring Break in Victoria


Magnolia trees blooming, cherry trees spent... wow - a nice change from snowbanks and the "dog days" in PG when the melting uncovers successive layers of canine droppings. neways...
I attended an interesting discussion at Royal Roads University last week. It was a meeting of people interested in the role of Arts in Health Care with the aim of forming a basis for national dialogue and organization. An amazing assemblage of people: artists who did paint therapy with cancer aptients, hospital admin looking for info on how aesthetics and wholistic architecture affects healing, a plant therapist (who uses gardens and person-plant connectons to aid in rehab), an interfaith chaplain looking at the role of meditation in healing, an aboriginal artist/filmaker who developed a shield-making workshop to uncover and discuss personal symbols, an educator who focused on healing the mind/body split through ecotherapy, directors, artisans, health care workers... very enlightening discussion. I was a guest of one of the organizers, and tried just to listen, but was pulled in a few times when the talk came around to ecology, identity and technology.

Friday, March 03, 2006

March 3 workshop links

Blogging and Beyond... Educational Technology to bridge the gap between curriculum and identity. Here are the workshop links:

Formal Webquest search site
Tree octopus... the result of an informal webquest
Free & easy blog service (Blogger)
Geography 12 course blog
An English teacher's blog
Committed Sardine blog (education)
Wikipedia... the big wiki
Amazing collection of fiction
Example of a forum (Bigfoot)
Example of a Web Portal
Example of a community (msn)
Example of a community (Bjork)
Example of a cybrary (Holocaust info)
Instant Messaging service
Peer 2 Peer information
Class project involving realtime/RSS
Podcast.net (free) directory
Zencast - free podcasts

For public_html (web share folder) try http://www.dpts.sd57.bc.ca/~gthielmann/education/docs/ as an example. The idea is that anything you put in your public_html folder (which most of our district techies can "enable" for you) will appear at the addres http://(your school address)/~(your username) --if you have trouble with this, email Jason Mager (techie) at the board office for help. He has done some workshops on this.

Try itunes music store to see their free podcasts and video podcasts. My Geography 12 webpage should have podcasts up as soon as I have permission forms in.

Try any of the above tools with a Google search in your currciuluar area (e.g. blog, wiki, portal, rss, podcast with science, math, elementary, language arts) -- it won't take long to find something you can use.

Thanks for attending and good luck experimenting!