EDTAGS – social tagging for educational purposes

This is the website mentioned in the NECC 08 presentation (see last post) from Tuesday at 11am called edtag.org: Academic Social Tagging to Aid Learning and Assessment.

I strongly recommend listening to the presentation, especially if social tagging is a new idea to you. However, be aware that the sound sometimes goes.

Just to give you a summary, the idea is to bring together websites that are relevant in the educational area, including ESL/EFL. It is a place for you as a teacher to find resources, but also to add resources that you find so others can alos profit from them.

Social tagging also leaves the idea of folders with fixed names, becoming more flexible and more dynamic, i.e. you choose the key words that you find relevant. You can choose as many as you think apply so others may find the relevancy as well. They, in turn, may choose to use the same tags, but can choose other instead or in addition to make the tags more meaningful to themselves.

You will find this idea of social tagging in the delicious and blinklist, which are both under ‘Bookmarks’ on the left side bar, and also in diigo, from which I am posting this entry.

The difference to those mentioned above is simply that this site was made by educators explicitly for educators, so it is more limited in this way- not as expansive, at the same time perhaps making it more accessible to some teachers, librarians, etc.

• Edtags.org: Tags: esl

• tags: education, teaching, NECC08, learningwithcomputers, wiki, documents, web2.0, resources, edtags

Easy summer listening

If you are reading this around the time it’s been posted, then you are probaly home for at least part of the summer holiday with a bit of time on your hands next to cleaning up the office (which is what I’m busy doing)

So, I’d like to invite you to the NECC 2008 Webcasts (National Educational Computing Conference)

There are some very interesting and thought-provoking webcasts (audio and video broadcasting) about learning and pedagogics in today’s digital world.

You will need to sign up, but it is a short process of about 2 seconds and  the only result being that you can watch and listen to the webcasts.

Feel free to leave a comment about any which really struck a note in you.

And happy summer!

The 21-day challenge finished

I just wanted to thank everyone who collected or  donated to Matopo Primary School.

Quite a bit of materials has been collected and I’m sure the kids from the school will be thrilled.

You might want to take a look at what my own class actually managed. It was a magnificent opportunity for them to learn about geography and politics in the short informal discussions we had about the school

You can, of course, make donations at any time during the year. You can contact Cindy through the ETAS website at the teacher-2-teacher link.