This week I received exciting news of being awarded a Core Education e-fellowship. I think of all the support that I have received to make this possible. So if you are reading this I am saying thanks.
In my application I had many ideas and I know that this opportunity will allow me the chance to choose one area and develop it further.
I spent some time reading what previous efellows have achieved during their year. I am excited by the opportunity given.
I have had a first hand account with phishing. I hope I have survived it.
What alerted me to the fact was the strange web link. Three of my inbox people I would have trusted. One being a school principal, the second being a Deputy Principal and another being an ICT lead facilitator. (Refer to the second image.) I would have opened their links immediately. However one said: I have been having better _ _ _ and longer with this link here. The other two said: Haha- this you??
Being unsure, I visited the victims twitter page instead of opening the direct link.
The same message was there. I then visited their blog pages and the twitter message was broadcasted there too because their twitters feed their blogs. Just like mine do. I visited one school site and could not get email contact. I searched white pages so that I could alert one of them but he was unlisted, as principal generally do. Luckily I remembered his old Deputy Principal online CV and located a cell phone number. The total time took me half a day. One’s educational reputation can be easily tainted.
To find out what was going on I searched Twitter virus, February, 2010. Phishing came up. Something else came up too, called Direct Messaging. That is the first image on this blog.
As a school what would you have done if your school twitter page started block sending lewd emails to everyone on your followers list. Your followers sign into twitter to see what you want and a DM comes up asking for confirmation of email and cell phone details. Both of which are correct. The Direct Message looks legit and gives a link to a fake Twitter login page. your follower clicks “Good to Go.” They are phished.
According to Twitter’s Blog: Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords.
The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust, eg: School Principal, Deputy Principal and a Leading Auckland ICT educator, may send you a Direct Message with a link.
As educators we have to be always aware and up to date with what is happening. We cannot leave our online reputation to chance. Some of the steps I regularly take are
1) Be active online and if I see something new- learn about it.
2) Regularly search my name using google to see where I am online.
3) Always be cautious with block email sends. I usually just bin those.
4) Practise Zip, Flick, Click-
a. Zip my personal details and keep them close.
b. Flick of weird emails and do not open them.
c. Click a search engine and keep up to date.
Now to learn about Spear Phishing.
A while back I had downloaded a reflective survey on how we are using SOLO Taxonomy from the Hooked on Thinking website and when I punched in the title into google so that I could reference it for my wiki, I ended up on Wesley Fryer’s website.
I was blown away by his creativity and dedication to teaching and learning. One important gem I picked up was placing a disclosure policy on my blog. I read with interest his extensive work over the years using web 2 tools. I liked the way he regularly records his thinking and reflection. He had heard Pam Hook speak at a recent conference about reflective practice. Again reflective practice keeps surfacing.
I was mentoring a young teacher recently and we were discussing the importance of ongoing reflection and having the opportunity and time to do this is so important.
(Wendy, have I said thanks again for giving me this opportunity this year.) I have currently cut back my hours so that I can reflect more on my own teaching and learning. I feel energised and remotivated with children’s learning. The upside is my own learning has exploded.
So back to completing that reflective survey. The current way of completing this survey would be to create a wiki for my school in preparation for our next milestone report and link our 5th wall evidence to it. I will think more on the process of this.
I keep reading about Technorati so must find out more about what this is. I also keep reading about moodle, I want to also understand tagging and labelling my pages better and finally this week I must follow up with wall wisher as was blogged by Dorothy, Bring on Wallwisher . Hey Luke, you really did bring tears to my eyes with your blog on Teachers can be the worlds best coaches. I always enjoy reading these two educators’ blogs.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
This policy is valid from 05 June 2009
This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact Sonya (van_schaijik[at] hotmail[dot] com.)
This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. I write for my own purposes. However, I may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.
The owner of this blog will never receive compensation in any way from this blog.
The owner of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If I claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, I will only endorse products or services that I believe, based on my expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.
The owner of this blog would like to disclose the following existing relationships. These are companies, organizations or individuals’ blogs that may have a significant impact on the content of this blog. I consult with: HOT and I are employed by Newmarket School.
To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org/
I have been away for a few days yet my mind is continuously drawn back to what I have been working on electronically.
I have been monitoring RSS feeds on my wiki so that I may better understand the relevance in teaching and learning. In doing so I noted that 2 blogs that I regularly followed had had updates so I read Onemanuprising’s blog on Good Leaders and how well they know their staff. He spoke about their EHSAS funding being cancelled half way through their contract and funds redistributed. I agree with the idea, that we can be sitting at the bottom shaking the trees, however school leaders have an enormous impact on the success of student achievement. I read with interest as Manaiakalani blogged about the gains made by their Maori students in asTTle writing only to have their EHSAS funding cancelled from the end of 2009 and redistributed for other MOE projects targeting Maori students. I then followed Artichoke’s blog on disparity of student scores and the discussion that followed about having ideas challenged by others reading them and that educators belonging to an institution can have their views blurred by their positions within institutions. I had just been researching teachers at a local secondary school and reading what their students thought about them on rate my teacher website. Artichoke is correct in stating schools do create links to ERO reports yet hesitate at linking to a site where the client discuss teachers in such a clear way.
I was having challenges creating student accounts on our school’s ultranet. So I ended up using a wiki instead. In one afternoon, I had created all students log in names and passwords and using a template idea from Constructive Alignment wiki, I had created each student a page for them to begin with. Unfortunately with all the preparation, the afternoon was taken up with cross country practise and the class wiki will have to wait until next lessons.
Earlier in the week, I watched with pride as teachers shared with their team what their children had created using SOLO taxonomy during blocks of ICT time in the classroom. Two of the teachers shared their pages created on the school ultranet.
We had an amazing turnout on Tuesday evening to the school’s parent mathematics evening. We had confirmation of attendance from 70 parents and nearly 120 turned up. For me it was wonderful seeing our teachers work together to create an evening for our parents. Parents are also busy. When thinking as a parent it is wonderful to see the school organisation to ensure that parents had an evening to remember about their children’s stages in mathematics. A lot of sharing took place with what could be achieved at home to help with the development of number knowledge.
I had a morning with our SOLO facilitator and our Assistant Principal planning our next term’s school unit. All I can remember of the experience is how easy it was to create our unit using a database to enter into the main sections of the planning. It was neat to be working with like minded educators co-construct an outline for teachers to work with next term. I was chatting later with our SOLO facilitator about the importance of teachers having the time to reflect on what they are doing. This year, I am having a huge buzz with what I am doing and the major change for me this year is having the time to reflect on what I am doing. Sometimes as teachers exhaustion and trying to keep on top of the workload can be so overwhelming, that reflection does not happen.
I am finding that the more I am teaching using the structure of SOLO taxonomy, the greater results I am having with my students. When I continually think ahead of an audience, I find that my teaching has clarity in procedure.
This week, I audio taped some children’s Maori Pepeha.
To be at extended abstract we agreed that presenting to an audience and having all the other success criteria in place would enable a student to achieve at this level.
( I need to check this out when Pam next comes for a visit.)
Creating the audio allows the flexibility of hearing our pepeha again. The children can then reflect on the sections missing or that can be added to.
We used a microphone and
Microsoft movie maker.
(Download how)
When Narration is stopped, work can be saved in any folder.
On personal reflection:
When I think of all the ways we could use this little beauty in web 2 tools
-.Audio blogs- http://www.audioblog.com/tour/tour01.htm/
-Class radio- http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
-Slideshows with photos- http://www.youtube.com/
Children can be recording their reflections on SOLO. They can prepare a piece of reading aloud as part of their reading activity.
The beauty of audio is that the size is not as great as video.
From personal experience highlights of an event using photos and audio is a lot quicker to edit and create than video.
I found voice thread great yet was not what I wanted to achieve with the audio. As teachers, time is limited so we want something that is at our level of skills. This would be like a pre voice thread activity or a pre video activity.
Yes I love equipment with all the bells and whistles; yet I do believe in exploring the tools we have before going out and purchasing a lot of new equipment.
My next learning is this: I could load the audios straight up. But where and how should the page look like. That is where having continuous dialogue with teachers at my school enables this thinking to take place. I saw, our AP with her thinking in a visual way spread out over a large table. And I thought yes, I can do that too and would like to spread my thinking out electronically. So if people come to see what I doing electronically- my thinking is continually evolving and like Twitter, they will receive a glimpse of where I am on my journey in this space of time.
Sonya @VanSchaijik 
