Northlands College Inservice

Every year at the end of October Northlands College employees get together for Staff Inservice. This year I am in Buffalo Narrows representing the edcentre.ca staff.
I look forward to the Inservice every year (this is my 12th). The networking is amazing. The people that work at Northlands College are so diverse. It is important to remember that we can always learn from one another.
Dakota House is the Keynote speaker. Other presenters include Franklin Carrier (King Trapper), Picaboo (working with photos) and Pahkisimon Nuye ah Library System.

1 Minute VoiceThread

Voicethread has a lot of potential for sharing, collaborating and learning. Anyone can sign up. It doesn't cost anything to register. Educators can set up areas for class use for a fee.

Blogs for all reasons

k12 online conference: it's on until the end of this week.....check out the presentations on this blog site!

Classroom blog: 21st Century Skills class

edublogs: a place to get your own class blog started

english 11 honors : a senior english class .....it's all there with web 2.0 tools. Nothing "canned" here folks! Theme: The Hero Journey

How are we using the Internet

Thank you to everyone who participated in the online assembly on Wednesday. The monthly assemblies are great opportunities to get together with others to chat, share ideas and experiences online. Our "special guest" was a beautiful baby boy sitting in on the session with his mom.





The online learning community is enriched each time we are able to come together to interact. The assembly topic was, "How are we using the Internet?".





This is the group brainstorm we did on the whiteboard:




If you would like to view the session, here is the link: October Assembly

Free Rice

FreeRice is a website that allows you to answer questions about Art, Chemistry, English, Geography, Language Learning and Math. For each answer you get right, FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Careful, this is addictive!

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide education to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Here is what a teacher has to say about freerice.com.

“A teacher of fourth and fifth graders on the Yurok Indian reservation in Klamath, CA, . . . emailed the WFP. ‘My students absolutely LOVE the FreeRice site. Almost daily they earn several thousand grains of rice!’ she wrote. ‘You cannot imagine the joy in my heart when I look out and see 25 kids doing vocabulary work and enjoying it.’”

- School Library Journal

Classroom 2.0

Here is a post for teachers visiting this blog:

At the Northern Area Teacher's Association Conference on Tuesday, Oct 14, the edcentre.ca team members had an opportunity to share ideas and experiences with participants at the conference. I have a feeling that there is a genuine interest in in Web 2.0 tools and people are beginning to shift the way we think about learning in this digital age.

An good site to visit and find out more is Classroom 2.0. This site is an excellent place to visit, observe and learn about new ideas and find out what learners are doing with collaborative tools.

The Classroom 2.0 site was created using Ning, a free tool for creating social networks. There are links on the Classroom 2.0 site to Ning for folks who want to find out how easy it is to set up your own network for your classroom or interest group.

edcentre.ca is at NATA

Ted, Debbie and Kona are presenting at the NATA convention in Prince Albert today. Kelly is presenting from La Ronge.
Most of the staff will be back in the office Wednesday.

Vote - October 14th

Are you going to vote? Voting is a privilege we have as Canadians that many people around the world do not have. How can you decide who to vote for? The best way is to spend some time learning about what the issues are and what each candidate's opinions are on that issue. In this election it seems as if the main issues are: environment, troops in Afghanistan, health, economy and crime. In addition to the links given in this post, check out blogs and other things to find out what is going on - it can be pretty interesting once you get involved.

Both the following sites have up-to-date news on the Canada Election 2008. Watch videos, read news and keep yourself informed
CBC - Canada Votes
CTV - Election 2008 There is an interesting game of choice on this site that you can work through to find which party is closest to your views. Play the game - Click

Party Websites: All the parties have information about their parties platform (that is what they propose to do if they are elected as a government) Remember, when you are reading from any of these sites the view is of that party only. Use your thinking skills to evaluate what is being said.
The following parties have candidates in our riding - Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River
Liberal - David Orchard (Bio)
Conservative - Rob Clarke (Bio)
Green Party - George Morin (Bio)
New Democrats - Brian Morin (Bio)
First Peoples National Party of Canada - Rob Ballantyne .(Blog)

Political Party Leaders - info on main leaders of parties

Elections Canada website provides information on voting etc.

Your vote is important no matter who you vote for.
Have your say -- Vote on October 14th, 2008

Setting up blogs

There are many different places to Blog. For teachers and learners here are a few blog sites you can get set up on. These blog sites have features that lend themselves to schools.

21Classes ( This one is free for a basic account. If you want access to more features, you pay a fee. )

edublogs Edublogs.org is a site specifically for teachers, students, librarians, researchers, professors, administrators, corporate trainers and anyone else involved in education. I find it interesting to note that this tool is Currently powering 225,294 blogs.

Blogger.com This is the one you are viewing right now. It has some really useful features and templates.

If you are interested in setting up a blog, I suggest exploring some of these links to determine what sort of blogging service would be most useful for the blog site you would like to set up.

Google docs rocks!

If you don't have a google account yet, I strongly urge you to get one and start exploring the features. We are using google docs at the school to collaborate on documents on a regular basis. We also use google docs to send information to other communities.
This morning I reviewed over 20 documents that five other people have also reviewed and made changes to. These documents will in turn be reviewed by support people in each of the participating schools and programs. The time saved this morning using google docs was refreshing. Another huge positive here is that no paper was printed to share and collaborate on these documents.


Click on the googe image to go to set up your own google account.
If you want to find out a bit more about google docs in plain English, watch the video below. ...Yes, I know it is already here in the blog somewhere, but here it is again. This is an amazing set of tools.