Watch a YouTube video of a virtual storefront here

The few seats on the platform are taken so you can’t sit down and read. How do you kill the time? Try doing the grocery shopping maybe.

Last year, British-based global retailer Tesco made waves by setting up amazing virtual stores on the walls of underground transit stations in Korea. Commuters could do their shopping simply by scanning their smartphone over a two-dimensional barcode on the station’s wall.

Now the idea is being mimicked in the US. How long before virtual storefronts becomes a regular feature of the daily commute worldwide, including Australia?

Continue reading from The Age

SHOPPERS will no longer be left in the dark about refund policies as the ACCC launches an advertising blitz on the laws of returning goods.

The consumer education campaign aims to help those left out of pocket when retailers pick and choose what is eligible for a refund – whether it is a microwave oven or a pair of socks.

According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, only 10 per cent of Australians understand their rights when it comes to dodgy products and substandard services.

From tomorrow, the ACCC will advertise online, on multilingual radio stations and at bus stops to inform shoppers they are entitled to demand any product or service not up to scratch be repaired, replaced or refunded under the new consumer laws.

“Whether you are buying a watch or a washing machine, brand new or pre-loved, at full price or bagging a bargain, consumers can put their faith in the products they purchase, or expect the retailer or manufacturer to fix the problem,” commission chairman Rod Sims said.

“We now have a single national law, so that no matter where you shop in Australia, you have the same rights to a repair, replacement or refund for a faulty product or unsatisfactory service.”

But the wider awareness will mean the ACCC is hit with an onslaught of complaints.

The watchdog receives 200 complaints from grumpy consumers every week, with state fair-trading agencies also filtering their share.

“I expect to see a spike once the campaign is up and running,” Mr Sims said. “But we are ready for it.”

He expected the number to subside once companies realised the commission had empowered consumers to better understand and stand up for their rights.

Mr Sims vowed to crack down on rogue traders who continued to flout the laws, and haul them through the courts if necessary.

This article was reposted from the Herald Sun 

This is their advice:

1. Research product infomation carefully.
2. Read the fine print, especially in contracts.
3. Check a range of prices.
4. Make sure the product suits the purpose for which it was intended.
5. Make sure the purchase fits within your budget.

Thanks for visiting my blog during 2011. You’re one of 9,100 people who visited this site during the year. The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people, so if this blog were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Before we start, lets think about what you want to achieve from this session today. To do that we are going to use a Web 2.0 tool called Stixy. You will need to create your own Stixy account. To get started click here.

Once you have created your Stixy account, click here for this sessions activity.

Activity 1: Creating Your Online Space

• Get a WordPress Blog
• Change the theme
• Make a Post
• Embed YouTube (remember &rel=0)
• Try TubeChop.com
• Get Firefox for extensions like the video downloader?
• Embed all kinds of media in WordPress (maps, images, documents or polls?)
• A practice post with embeds

Fine-tuning your Blog

• Comment Settings
• Siderbar widgets
• Various How-to Videos from WordPress
• Add as a link to your Sidebar (video) or Add a link (page)

Pause for Reflection

From the Dashboard or your blog, go to “Pages” and edit the “About” page.  Use this to reflection on how you think you might use your blog in a range of ways for yourself, your students and colleagues.

Activity 2: Look to Learn – Learn to Look

• Look to Learn – overview
• Look to Learn Web site
• Look to Learn Sample Prompts
• Thinking Routines overview
• Thinking Routines from the Visible Thinking team at Harvard
• Article on Making Thinking Visible by David Perkins

Online Samples

• 1984
• Miniature Earth
• VisionShift: Whose Future?
• “I Can”
• Nuclear Giving
• There’s Data in them ther Kids (cartoon)
• The Global Rich List (interactive site)

Activity 3: Some more Web 2.0 tools

The next activity is to explore some more Web 2.0 tools that you can use in the classroom.

Click here to get started.

Some more web 2.0 tools to try:

• Dropbox: Cloud storage 2gb free
• Diggo: Social bookmarking
• Netvibes: RSS feeds. Create pages for your own classroom
• Wordal: Create online word clouds
• Jot Form: Create online forms
• Will you type with me: Colaborate on the same document
• Mind Meister: Online mind mapping tool
• Slideshare: Share and download PowerPoint presentations
• Poll Everywhere: Online interactive polling
• My Fake Wall: Create fake Facebook pages
• Gap Minder World: World Statistics
• Paper.ly: Turn your Twitter feeds into an online newspaper
• About Me: Creat your own online business card

Finally

Please provide some feedback on today’s session using Jot Form.

We began this process by sending out an invitation for people who might be interested in exploring the use of Web 2.0 technology in the classroom. Nine teachers responded to this email invitation so toward the end of Term 2, 2011 we met together as a small group. Jackson and I led these teachers through the process of how to set up a blog using WordPress.

Since then, this project has grown in scope and depth, with a huge level of interest amongst staff and students. Other teachers have seen what we have been doing and have wanted to join or small group of nine project members. We did not allow other people to join the original group, but instead have used the original group to teach others how to do the same thing

Have a look at some of what we have been doing:

▪   Mr Rouse’s Classroom

I had been playing with blogging for several years but struggled to understand how to engage students with the content. I used this project to bring together what I had been doing and to develop it further in the classroom. My blog has separate pages for Accounting, Business Management and Commerce as well as Professional Learning. Earlier in the year I continued to just add content either as a summary of a topic or to add value to what we had been doing in class. The blog really began to take off in the middle of the year at exam revision time. I found that students were going back to the content to assist with revision and in the four days leading up to the exam there were over 500 hits on the blog.

Since them I have explored the concept of class portals and set up a portal on Civics and Citizenship for my Year 9 Commerce class. This was the point were I really began to see the benefits of Web 2.0. Students were allocated a topic and worked in pairs to develop content and a learning activity. Students then had to present this information to the class and run a lesson using the material they had developed. This flipped the learning process from teacher focused to student focused and I truly became a facilitator rather than a teacher.

▪   English Classroom

Jackson’s English/IT/Professional Development blog has been a moderate success. Jackson has experimented with all of the techniques that have come up as a result of the workshops, but some have been more successful than others. The biggest challenge has been finding the time and space in an already crowded and quite prescriptive curriculum to implement his ideas. The Look2Learn stuff has worked well, and with a little bit of repetition and consolidation he thinks this will be great for his classes at all levels. The Survival portal has engaged students, but had to be suspended as he took on a student teacher in that class. It showed some promise, though, and he thinks by giving it a higher priority in the curriculum from the outset next year it will really take off.

▪   Year 9 Commerce

Mark teaches Year 9 Commerce along side me. He set up a separate blog for his class and then used this as class portal as well for the Civics and Citizenship project.

▪   Library Project

Our secondary library has rolled out a blog with the aim of someday-incorporating student reviews and posts into the main site. At the moment the site is used for distributing information to students about new acquisitions in the library. The site seeks to get the students more involved in the library, so there have been competitions associated with the site, an online suggestion box and even little take away bookmarks with the library WordPress site emblazoned on it, so they know where to go for the latest information.

▪   Mrs H’s Ocean

‪At the start of the year our Literature teacher had a conversation with me (Director of teaching and Learning) about how she was struggling to integrate technology into her classroom. She joined the Web 2.0 project and has used her blog to distribute information to her classes and other staff members (she also has a role working with me to facilitate teacher development). She has also included some personal posts about her life outside of school and she has said that this has really helped her to connect with her students. She has also had her students create their own Literature class portals for all of the texts they are studying and she has been impressed with the thoughtfulness her students put into their online work. While some of the class portals have fizzled out a little, she has learnt some good strategies for engaging the classes and is confident to continue using these media in the future.