We're all Really Blended...

We had another after school PD session today for an hour. This week's topic was blended learning.
I set up a simple scanner with one of the Asus netbooks, so staff could have a go at scanning work, book pages and worksheets straight into a netbook. I showed them how Google docs rips out the typed words from a worksheet, and lays it out for you. This works for a scan of something or a photograph of a page.
I made a "How To" on this topic here.
At the moment, Google docs is poor at doing this if there is columns in the page you are converting, as it mixes it all together, but we are hoping for improvements from Google here.
I showed the staff how easy it is to install "Simple Scan" onto the netbooks, so they can pass this onto students. It will be good when students can just take their netbooks to a scanner, connect it on and then easily scan the work that they have produced on paper, ready to upload onto their Google drive.
Next, I showed them how I use Flickr in DVC to upload the student work. I have links to this Flickr site on the DVC site so it is easy for the students to find it so they can then find the photographs of their own work, download them and use them on their own sites or documents.
Link to the DVC Flickr here.
I use Flickr for this rather than Picassa as I use my Picassa for images that I want to use on my DVC Google site and I don't want to fill it up with the student work photos. I take a lot of photos as the students are working, especially when they are producing 3D work.
Making the students responsible for finding and downloading their own work saves trying to remember who's work belongs to who and emailing it to them.
We discussed having some kind of camera available in the class when you know when the students are going to be doing something you will need evidence of. I personally have an iPhone, so I always have a semi decent camera in my pocket.

We all work in classrooms where we do a combination of work directly online and on paper  in books or 3D. It is good to have a variety of methods where you can get the work online so it can be all together, be able to be embedded onto student Google sites and documents, and appearing on the teacher dashboard to be checked and marked. This saves staff looking in lots of places to find work. It is all in one place.