And Now for Something Completely Different

Today I am moving on to something completely different from technology. As well as being passionate about technology my other passion is books. I don't always recommend books as they are a very individual thing, however, I believe these books deserve a mention.

The Ultimate Study Skills Handbook by Sarah Moore, Colin Neville, Maura Murphy and Cornelia Connelly

The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell

The Buzan Study Skills Handbook by Tony Buzan

I have recommended three different books as , as I say, books and the style you prefer are individual. These are all excellent in their own way. The first book has only been published this year so is completely up to date. You can browse through them and buy them at amazon.co.uk if you click on the link to the right of this post.

However, all is not lost on the technology front either. I have also been exploring my IPod touch and the apps which can support learning. A quick search for Aatomy, Health, Philosophy and Business found many apps some of which are free and others cost a small amount. Of the ones I looked at the most expensive was £2.99. I am reliably informed via the Smartphone Essentials magazine that there are also many educational apps available for the Blackberry. In fact they say that there are more apps aimed at the adult market and less at children, so for those of you with a Blackberry it is worth a look. I will be blogging about the use of Blackberry to support learning in a future blog when I upgrade to a Blackberry Storm 2 in June. Watch this space.

Cloud Computing

My last post leads me neatly on to this one which is all about computing in the clouds. The reason my mind and brain are focusing in this direction is that I have recently signed up to use mobile me. Mobile me is Apple's cloud computing application which allows me to back up and store information off my computer. This has the advantage of allowing me to access it from anywhere that I have Internet access. I have to admit I have had a somewhat rocky start with this and have spent many a "pleasant" hour chatting to technical help online. However, they have always managed to help me with my problem and I am now aware of how to overcome any minor issues which occur. One such issue was that of my calendar entries on my IPod touch not appearing on my online calendar. The easiest way is to delete this and re-enter they usually appear within seconds. This happens rarely and is not such a problem that it would put me off using mobile me. Also it took a little while to work out how to open documents from mobile me, but this is now a simple and quick process. One word of warning to all those PC users, of which I am one. If you talk to the technical people at Apple they keep asking you to install outlook. This is a bit difficult if you have Windows Vista as it does not support outlook. So this may be one reason why anyone with windows vista may want to consider using another application rather than mobile me.

However, Cloud computing has uses other than personal. It allows multiple users to access documents online and therefore work on them together. This is very useful if people from different companies, or educational establishments are collaborating on a document. Taking it in to the educational realm, it would also allow students to collaborate on projects. I can also give others access to my photograph gallery, again useful whether you want to share photos with friends or collaborate on projects. It could be argued that Flickr does a similar thing, but this keeps everything in one place and easily accessible.
So what other alternatives are there. You can use google in a similar way, and this is free. I went for mobile me as I am using my Ipod as my diary and this was the best way of backing up the data for my calendar. overall, I am impressed with mobile me. I like the way I can store all my photos and look at them on my IPod, I like the space on Idisk, and overall the calendar is good. Mobile me might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I am certainly finding it useful. My advice is to find one that works for you and use that one. This is as individual as all other computer applications, and should exist to make your own life easier

Mobile Blogging

In the spirit of learning all things new to me about blogging I am trying out mobile blogging. This has been a somewhat frustrating experience so far as my attempts to use sms or mms have failed. So not being one to give up I am now trying via email on my mobile. I have to say if this works I am quite excited about being able to blog on the move. Mind you could this lead to blog overload and some measure of boredom for my readers. I guess it depends on the circumstances or situation as I said in a previous post. Anyway onwards ever onwards into the deep space exploration of all things technological and their impact on learning.

As an update to this post I sent the above paragraph from my mobile and it appeared immediately as a post in my blog. Pretty impressive and very useful for all those times I am away from my desk. I think this would have been very useful during the SITE conference to update on the sessions as they happen. This would give a real time feel to the blog and let others know what was happening in the world of technology and learning. I will certainly be using this in the future, but as I say will be careful that I am not just blogging for bloggings sake.

Cart Before the Horse or Opportunity to Grow

I have been reading Blogging for Dummies which has made me decide that my blogging history is a bit "cart before the horse". I started blogging and then read the book. It should really have been the other way round. Or should it? To be honest I think I have done it the right way round. If I had never written a blog before or used the blogger.com site I don't think I would have got so much out of the book. Knowing the basics has provided the foundations on which I can build and develop my blog. Also I think that looking at the screen captures of outstanding blogs provided in the book may have put me off starting. My initial feeling would have been, I can never do this. However, as I have already started my blog, reading the book has made me excited about finding out how I can develop my blog. To any of my students reading this, starting a blog is simple, don't be put off by the seemingly perfect blogs out there, you can develop things later as you grow more confident.

Advice is, to update my blog frequently, which got me thinking about what frequently means. To some people, using twitter for example, this means every few minutes. To others it can mean daily, and to others once a week or two or three times a week. I think it is important to make sure that I have something to say. Posting several times a day could become repetitive and boring, however it could be relevant and timely when undertaking a specific project or attending a conference. The frequency could change depending on the situation.

I have found out about simple things like adding links using the add link button on the toolbar. This is the small picture of a globe with a chain link above it which allows me to add a link such as this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging As I say simple things but it is small steps such as this which will allow me to develop my Blog and make it more powerful and meaningful.

So I will continue to grow and develop my blog with this particular book helping me. It is no use reading the book without putting what I learn into practice so I intend to do this over the next few posts. I am enjoying the journey and enjoying my exploration through technology and learning.

Perils of Technology

Short post today, but one which is particularly pertinant, as I will be discussing with my students how technology can help them learn. However, today technology let me down. Firstly my work computer was opened up after 2 weeks break, and somehow or other had a virus. My machine had to be reimaged, thus little work done this morning. I went to the tried and tested IPod touch to acccess email etc. and it would not conect to the University WiFi. Again 2 weeks ago it was working beautifully. When I logged on after the reimaging, no printer drivers, and it took the tech guys hours to fix it. All credit to the tech guys though who were brilliant and didn't stop until everything had been solved. Fourth problem, the computer would not recognise my memory sticks. What a day. Still the tech guys came up trumps and everything is ready for a fresh start tomorrow.

Moral of the story, technology is brilliant, but it can sometimes let you down. I knew that, but it happened in a particularly spectacular fashion today. I've learnt to be patient, to work around problems and to make sure you have the tech helpline number to hand at all times. So I suppose it could be argued that technology has helped me learn today. Sometimes all is not lost, and there is hidden learning in everything we do. On reflection, not such a bad day after all, just different to that which I expected.

Where so far

As I said in a previous post I have been busy with family, but now they have gone it's back to the quest to explore technology. This has been an exciting time for me as it has made me explore and use many of my exisiting resources such as facebook and twitter more fully. I am now using twitpic to upload pictures to my twitter feeds which I have never done before and uisng hash tags. Also following many other teachers and teacher trainers, whose ideas have expanded my horizons even further. Interesting use of twitter was all the tweets from the PELC conference which I was unfortunately unable to attend. This gave me an idea of what was going on and links to many of the presentations. I followed all the tweets avidly and it gave me a sense of being there in the virtual world. For anyone who is not using twitter. I could certainly recommend it. If you are in education I would highly recommend you follow steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth as he has many innovative ideas and ways of using web 2.0 technology. In his blog he raised an interesting discussion about networking on twitter. This made me think about my own use of twitter, and how long it takes people to see the value. I would say it takes about 6 months for people to start using it regularly, and it has taken me a year to start to use it for other than social reasons. It is certainly a valuable tool, and one which I fully intend to use in my sessions.

Have also been looking at slideshare as a tool, but it is early stages for this as yet. My intial impression is that it is a useful tool, giving a sense of shared knowledge. I certainly intend to explore this more fully over the next week or so, and will report back on my impressions at a later date.

In a quest for greater mobility (my netbook is obviously not enough) I ahve downloaded quick office to my ipod touch. This allows me to look at and work on office documents whilst on the move. Again it is early days for this, but it looks to be a very useful tool. I like the idea of being able to use nothing but my ipod rather than carting my rather heavy laptop, or not quite so heavy netbook, around. Talking of IPOD's I would be interested on other people's views on the new IPad. It looks to me that they are having some intial difficulties in America, with many people reporting an unstable wifi. I guess we in the UK will have to wait as the European launch has been delayed as they have run out of IPads.

I am now off to download skype, nothing to do with work, I just think it is time for me to use this as many of my friends use it, particularly the ones in America. Also I will need to use it for projects I will be involved in for the future. Time to crack open the netbook, and back to technology.

Exploring the IPod Touch

Have had family here for the last few days so not huge amounts of time available for exploring the wonders of technology. I have invested in an IPod touch 3G 64gb and my 8 year old niece, Hope, who is staying with me now has my old 2G 32gb version. The technophile in me just had to have the new one, of course. I am currently trying to learn Khmer and have discovered that I can download UTalk (Formerly Eurotalk) Khmer on the touch. This is great fun and certainly beats sitting at the computer with the CD version. also saved myself a lot of money in the process. Hope, decided she also wanted to learn Khmer and has now downloaded the programme, compliments of Daddy's credit card. Well worth the £5.99 investment as we are both having a great time and learning a new language into the bargain. Hope doesn't think she is learning but having fun with Auntie Wendy, she'll be speaking Khmer like a native before we know where we are. I think this is a perfect example of how the IPod touch can support learning. Hope now has many apps on her touch including, dictionary, speak French and times tables. She will quite happily "play" with all of these, not realising that she is in fact learning.

But what of the learning for my students. I fully intend exploring ways in which I can use the touch to support learning for adult students, particularly those in Teacher Training and Health Care. Watch this space as I will share the best in future blogs. It is exciting times in the world of technology and in education, bringing them together is the most exciting journey of all.

Musings of a Blogging Newbie

As a fan of all things technological (ok fan might be a bit weak to describe my passion for technology), the only thing which seemed to be missing from my repertoire was blogging. I always felt that maybe this was taking things a bit too far, but inspired by a workshop I attended with Steve Wheeler yesterday, and my quest for using technology in all ways possible to support learning, here I am. This is something which fascinates me, and as a lecturer in both health care and teacher training, I want to use it to support the best learning possible for my students. What better way than to use it myself, whilst I am learning. But lets take this a step further. It is not just technology which can make us better learners or helps our students to learn, but every aspect of life itself. Every experience should fill us with a curiosity which makes us want to know more, to find out more, to explore further and to see the wonder of the experience in every way. This blog will explore my experiences and how each one of them can help me to support my students learning. Yes technology will be in there, how can it not when I'm a technophile, but so will many other things. Follow me and see what surprises may fall out of what I am doing, and what we can all learn along the way.