UserPage:nickjrea

Hi welcome to my homepage!

My name is Nicholas Rea although I prefer to be called Nick. I currently teach English in the Foundations Department at Dubai Men's College in the Higher Colleges of Technology in the UAE. Before that I spent 11 years working in Cambodia. My last position was ESL Coordinator at an international school where I spent 3 years. Prior to that I was the General English Program Manager at an English school where I worked for 7 years after starting as a part time teacher.

I have a Masters degree in teaching English which I did as a correspondence course. The only technology was a list-serve which I soon unsubscribed from after being inundated by emails. I am also a certified Cinema 4d trainer. Cinema 4d is a 3d modelling and animation package.

I have a number of interests with education and especially technology in education. I have just had my first article published on using Audacity to record and edit role play exercises.Innovations in Speaking Using Computer-Based Audio Editing Software

In my free time (when I have some) I tend to be quite active. I like sports and play squash, football, go running and cycling. In the UAE winter we go camping in the desert and in the mountains. If we have longer we go to Oman where there is some excellent trekking.

Please feel free to browse my pages and add any information or links.

Nick

Pages I am Facilitating.

Mobile phones in the English Classroom
Media Scapes

Contributors to this page

Name	Comment	Date
yourName	whatYouHaveContributed	todaysDate
yourName	whatYouHaveContributed	todaysDate
yourName	whatYouHaveContributed	todaysDate

Important links

• fet8611 2009 semester 2 home page
• EDU8415 Multi-modal texts and new literacies

Links to Pages I am contributing to.

• Audacity
• Mp3 Technology
• Exploring the educational value of Web 2 applications
• 3D Authoring Software
• Camtasia
• IWBs Friend or Foe of the Educator
• Online Pedagogy: Creating a Presence
• Using mobiles for learning in museums

Progress Report

My facilitated page(s)
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Mobile+phones+in+the+English+Classroom

Links to 5 other pages
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Audacity
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Mp3+Technology
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Exploring+the+educational+value+of+Web+2+applications
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/3D+Authoring+Software
http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Camtasia

Strategy for facilitating the page
The strategies for facilitating the pages are several fold:

• I intend to email everyone in the cohort inviting them to view my pages and invite comment from them. There will be a link in the email directly to the page so they can access it easily.

• I will try to link to my pages from as many relevant other pages as possible.

• I will endeavour to update them at least twice a week and inform the other users of the changes through shoutbox

• I will incorporate useful links to other sites of interest outside knowledgeGarden

• I will incorporate images and video as well as text to try to make it more visually appealing

• I will actively solicit input and opinion from the other users and update my pages as necessary

Any problems

One of the main problems I foresee is finding enough time to create the images needed for the site. I am all too aware of copyright issues and cannot take images from Google as they are generally protected. For the images I have used already I have taken clip art and modified it within Gimp, a free image editing software package that has photoshop-like functionality. However, it is very time consuming to locate suitable images that can be modified and then adapt them.
Another problem is the coding. Although it is not too steep a learning curve it is my first time creating an environment like this. It has taken a lot of stumbling around to get this far. Experimentation has left some of my pages looking rather awkward, for example an image is now in the middle of the page although the others are on the left. I don’t know why as I followed the same procedure for all of them. I’m still not sure what I am doing for a lot of things and end up copying and pasting code from other people’s pages and modifying it for my needs. I still can’t find how to blog and I can’t see the blog menu the FAQ mentions even though Blog is checked on my preferences.

Anything else

I have found it difficult to make ‘significant’ contributions to others’ pages while creating my own pages. There are other pages I can contribute too but as they appear to be ‘dead’ sites I am concerned about spending a lot of time contributing to something no one else read as well as the desire to contribute to the pages of others in our group. I see that this issue has arisen in the forums but as it is an assessment requirement I will have to balance my needs with those of the group.
I was also concerned about the structure of my page(s). I have structured my information across a number of pages for ease of use, navigation, and brevity of page; more like a website. I’m not sure if this is ideal on a wiki site or not. Personally, I do not like long pages and prefer the website structure.

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