Who is Shane?
ShaneTechTeach is a secondary school HPE teacher with a passion for Health Education and Digital Pedagogy. I am particularly interested in pedagogical worth / application of the ever expanding range of digital tools and content available to learners today.
Stemming from my passion for Health Education, is a keen interest in equity. I am particularly concerned with the “digital divide” that can be contributed to by schools, utilising tools and content that are no accessible outside of the school environment. As such, I am a supporter of open source software and the open source community approach. Where open source software or content is not available, I will utilise and share free software and content.
I believe my most significant challenge as an educator is the issue of copyright. There are considerable misunderstandings regarding ownership and rights of digital content, and quite often these rights are not adhered to. This unfortunately occurs with educators and learners.
Institutional:
- Head of Department (Health and Physical Education).
- Regional Facilitator (South Coast) – ICTs for Learning.
- Chair – Health Education District Review Panel (Brisbane East and Gold Coast).
- Member – Syllabus writing sub committee (Health Education)
- ICT Pedagogical License Advanced.
Online identity:
- On Diigo, look for shane-tech-teach
- On Flickr, look for shane_tech_teach
- On Delicious, look for shanes_world
- On Twitter, look for shanetechteach
- On Netvibes, look for Shane’s world
- On Skype, look for shane.tech.teach
February 7th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Hi Shane
An excellent blog! (a friend sent me the link) I read with interest your post on elearning spaces and adapting them to suit Education Qld. I am also a teacher with Education Qld (Cairns School of Distance Ed) I find the whole EQ attitude and their LMS incredibly frustrating and restrictive….Blackboard is the pits and I am exploring using Edublogs for digital portfolios with my students. They will work really well I believe. Student portfolios will be hosted on Edublogs, but my thinking is that EQ does not own student work, (as they own our work) therefore, as long as I have parental permission it should be ok. Well, I hope so! The blogs on Blackboard are really not good enough for what I want to do with Years 10, 11, 12 students. I am an Accredited Facilitator for the ICT Ped licence so I really find that I am in a dilemma. (I see you have your Advanced….I got my Advanced last year. Phew!! What a lot of work that was) I have to toe the EQ line but I find that difficult at times. Students do have their own webspace on MIS though, and some of our students use it.
WordPress is great, I have set up a blog on my mis webspace, using WordPress. I got my MySQL database set up, installed WordPress and it all works really well. My WordPress blog My blog has just started, not nearly as developed as yours. My original plan was to use my database and have student blogs connected to my database. But I think you would have to have WordPress MU (multi user) installed. I think Edublogs is an easier option. But, if you wanted to investigate installing WordPress on your MIS webspace, I can tell you it all works very well.
Keep up the great blogging.
Regards
Carmel Mayer
April 15th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
The terms free software and open source are usually interchangeable. You would have to read the free software definition to really understand what I mean. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Its worth checking out.
Thanks for blogging, I enjoy reading your work.