The education and social networking workshop at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) yesterday was quite enjoyable. There were particpants from NTU, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Polytechnic and the Ministry of Education. The participants worked very hard and were most studious. I was asked excellent questions and had a number of good problems to resolve. In a day the participants:

• considered why they should set up a social~education network
• how and why they could make a difference
• looked at good examples
• learnt how to locate good blogs
• located useful blogs via technorati and bloglines,
• bookmarked them in their new del.icio.us accounts,
• created a blog
• embedded images, movies, badges and Google maps in their blogs
• added links to their blogs
• tagged their posts
• reviewed Picasa and/or Flickr accounts ~ some set them up
• set up Google Reader and subscribed to blogs, podcasts, flikr and TedTalks
• added Google Reader widget to their new iGoogle page
• added “Blog this” and del.icio.us buttons to their browsers
• set up a Twitter account and added it to their blog

Three issues came up:

1. Could not add a del.icio.us feed to Google reader ~ why?
2. Twitter home page design changed in the last few days ~ “difficult” to find badges now
3. Jaiku bought by Google the night before so they could not set up a Jaiku ~ bad timing

It was an enjoyable workshop. We were busy all day and ended the day with a Twitter fest like birds coming home to roost as the sun sets.

I use the following code just before the default code and after the name of the template creator to block the Blogger Navigation bar:

#navbar-iframe {
display: none !important;
}

The detail on how to achieve this is described at this web site.

I have just discovered that Jaiku has been bought by Google. My workshop participants were unable to open an account today! How is that for timing?

I am presently conducting a Web 2.0 workshop at NTU here in Singapore. I demonstrated the Blog tool in edveNTUre and the participants had a hands-on experience with the blooging software. We are now working with Blogger.

I attended a number of workshops at NavCon but three stand out… workshops and spotlights given by Greg Gebhardt & Bettina Sho, Steven Harris and Tom March.

The Spotlight presentation given by Tom March on Web 2.0 was well attended. There were a quite a number of enlightening moments and items that provoked thought. Tom is an eloquent speaker and an enthusiastic educator. He spoke on his CEQ*ALL approach to teaching, learning and curriculum integration. He pointed us to his 2nd10 and its rich set of resources as well.

I attended an excellent workshop given by Steven Harris of St Bernard’s Catholic Primary School in Berowra. He demonstrated how Web 2.0 technologies can be integrated into the Year 2 classroom. His workshop was well documented and backed up with excellent data. His examples were excellent and overall he generated a great deal of interest among the participants. It is worthwhile to explore his Pageflakes site [click cancel when the log in window appears].

One of the best moment’s of the conference was when I attended Greg Gebhardt’s spotlight on Web 2.0. I have wanted to meet Greg and Bettina and although I missed the workshop given by Greg and Bettina on the first day I was determined to catch up with them both. During lunch on the second day I sat down with Steven Harris to talk about his work and the types of applications he was using in the classroom. While we sat there two other delegates took a seat and began talking. During our conversation it dawned on me that they were Greg and Bettina. We had a great chat and shared some productive ideas. We are all like-minded educators ~ there was a synergy if you like and in many ways was the highlight of the three days. Greg created a NavCon workshop page page specifically for the conference and it is rich with Web 2.0 resources and examples.

Greg, myself and Bettina