TeamPresent?id=ah72qvg2hjwz_19gzmxjdfk&fe=false

Why is our first impulse to believe something that we see, read or hear? Especially if it is in print, online or comes in an “officially” looking packaging?

How do we teach ourselves and our students, that another impulse has to follow the first one immediately: Evaluate…critical thinking… learn to listen for and to your own “gut feeling”… cross referencing…

Information literacy is an important part of being literate.  Being able to know how to read and write alone, just doesn’t “cut it anymore”.

There are many useful references and links in this post.

Another useful resource I’ve just come across is Identify Bias. This is an Austalian site which has a lot of relevant info in regards to research skills.

Thanks to Allanah for alerting me to this

I am totally exhausted with discovering time doesn’t stand still, commitments, just generally being asleep, dreaming and chancing to every man and his dog, my day starts with the dawn patrol from 4am to way past dusk. I am convinced that I absolutely deserve this after all my hard work. life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.

I make a solemn vow to post at least once a month. Seriously! Don’t hold your breath though, you’re likely to turn blue..

The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

After a week of major Firefox frustrations I updated to Firefox 3 this weekend. The reason I hadn’t updated earlier was my beloved Unplug addon is not available for the latest version of Firefox but I have found that Download Helper is more than adequate in replacing it and it even converts the flv files to avi ones!

An even better experience has been Google Reader. Following the advice from someone, somewhere on the web I installed Greasemonkey, which for some reason I hadn’t bothered with before. This allowed me to update my Gmail and Google Reader with addon scripts (at least I think that’s what they are). Well, Gmail is not a lot different to what I had played with before with Stylish but Google Reader now allows me to add comments to the actual blogs that I subscribe to. Wow I don’t need to leave my reader and I can actually view the blog within my reader window. While others may have been using this new function for ages its a newbie for me and one I really greatful for.

Overall I am really impressed with Firefox 3, even though I lost some recent bookmarks in the upgrade!

Another new tool I have had a play with is Feedly. I installed the downloaded requirement and went through the process of putting all my RSS feeds into Feedly which meant that all my bloglines feeds (yes I had been using both Google Reader and Bloglines) were integrated into Google Reader. While I was initially doubtful at the wisdom of this (there is an undo function available in Feedly) I now have no regrets, especially with my ugraded functionality in Google Reader.  I don’t know if I will use Feedly though – so far I have been unable to integrate Twitter into Feedly and can’t really see the use for another ‘homepage’ type interface. Maybe someone can convince me of the usefulness of Feedly.

Link to an article about Feedly by MakeUseOf.com

Phenomenal video! What a great way to summarize the learning in a professional development course for a school! What a great way to let the teachers at your school understand what all of this means.

This video was created to inspire teachers to integrate technology into their curriculum and celebrate great teachers.

This is just a start! A few teachers, myself included, have just linked what they were dong with wikis and blogs but now the whole staff is finally online! The next goal is to get teachers deciding what tool they will use to develop e-portfolios within their class. Options include using the feature within Ultranet (which teachers have not yet been exposed to), blogs or wikis. This is a focus for term 3!

If you are reading this from somewhere other than NZ please vist our school site ultranet.teawamutuint.school.nz so that our staff can see that having online presence does get interest from people around the world.

If you can’t access it please do try again in a few days – It is presently hosted on our server and tonight I can’t access it from home via my PC but it’s OK on the Mac!