an interview with Carmen Harris

Recently I spoke with Carmen Harris from Yooralla adult education. Carmen was involved in the North-West e-learning mentor projects back in 2011. She told me all about the amazing work they've been doing with literacy and technology over there, including blogs, facebook, email lists and zines.

You can listen to the interview right here. I was aiming to edit down to 5-8 minutes, but Carmen just kept on saying interesting things. Highly recommended for an insight into creative classroom practices.

Please use the comment area to give us your feedback.

Find out more about Carmen's work over here at their LitnTech site.
 

Tech notes:

We spoke over Skype and I recorded the call using a thing called "Amolto skype recorder". Really impressed with the sound quality.. but it was interesting that the Amolto app gave no warning it was recording. Just so you know.. it is possible that someone could be recording you in a Skype conversation without telling you.

I've used soundcloud to host the audio files, which is a very impressive app used by musicians and podcasters around the world. The free account gives you 200 minutes of sound files.

Investigative Teachers at Community West

A wonderful project at Community West in St Albans, where Dinna Tayao has invited teachers to join a weekly session of exploration and sharing.

I went out to visit Dinna and her team of investigating educators. They have been running a fantastic in-house exploration of all kinds of e-learning.

Each week one teacher explores a new strategy, software or other resource, evaluates its usefulness in class with students, and then reports back to the other teachers. 2 hours a week. They've had visiting expert speakers as well. Brilliant work from Dinna and the teachers at Community West. What a great job they are doing.

One teacher had researched the idea of using powerpoint to engage students in the colour, language and meaning of signs. What impressed me most was the way she had given such close attention to noticing how the students responded at each stage.

*Question of the Week*

I showed the teachers at Community West how google docs/ drive can work for collaborative writing. There was some enthusiasm around its potential, and also some reservation around the complication of requiring a login (too challenging for lower levels).

And a great question from one of the teachers: tell us who's been using this, and how?

[Oh no, did I really turn up without any case studies in hand? Yeh, I don't think they were too impressed actually, and fair enough.]

So who can tell us of some great examples or case studies of teaching and learning with google docs? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.

best regards, michael