Last night I had the privilege to get a tour within Second Life from Kevin Jarrett (aka KJ Dax). He showed us a couple of places within Second Life. Even though we fell out of the sky while riding Kevin’s magic carpet I had a good time. Second Life is something that I’ve been curious about and dabbled in but there isn’t enough time in the day to balance another life. I’m going to try to carve a little more time this year as more and more educational events are going on that would help me grow as a professional.
The whole concept of virtual learning environments is starting to take off. Kevin got to spend quite a bit of time last school exploring Second Life and their educational impact. More and more entities have started to realize that this is the future and want to get in on the ground floor. Students can use Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to take advantage of offerings that might not occur at their school for whatever reason. VLEs offer a different style of education than one can get using Blackboard, Moodle, or any other Content Management System (CMS). CMS seem to offer a single direction in communication. I’m currently taking a course using Blackboard and I’m not sure if I miss the face-to-face communication or interactivity that Web 2.0 tools take on. VLEs seem to offer the bridge between those two styles of e-learning.
I don’t believe that Second Life is in a final form to be the cat’s meow. I don’t like the fact that Linden Labs seems to be profiting from all of the commercialization within Second Life. Ideally the VLE should be based on an open source project so that it can be customized to meet specific needs that groups may have. I would hope that a voice integration is built in, like a merging with a VoIP product. For all I know these components may be in the works and that is why I’m not abandoning this use of technology.
Today I surprised my wife and got her a Nintendo DS web browser to thank her for her support this summer while dealing with my accident. Earlier in the week I had watched a session for the K12 Online Conference from Steve Dembo called Mobile Learning. Steve mentioned that in Japan children were using Nintendo DS’s as a wifi web browser and he stated that is was coming to the states in 2007. After the session was over I did a Google search and found out that it was available. I went down to BestBuy and purchased a card about the size of normal GameBoy Advance cartridge. In a short amount of time my wife (not me) got the machine up and running. She let me borrow it for a couple of minutes to put it through the paces. Here are some pictures for your review…
I’ve try to give you some different things to look at: Picture 1-Gmail Picture 2-My School’s Website Picture 3-Wikipedia entry on the State of Maine Picture 4-Showing the Keyboard Picture 5-flickr pictures. The browser is an open-source title called Opera. I’ve haven’t tried it on a desktop but it resized things on a mobile device pretty well.
For about $30 you can turn a personal entertainment device into a personal web device. Will it be useful as a 1-to-1 solution? NO, but if you need something to look up this better than nothing. The speed wasn’t too bad either.
Who knew a disruptive device could be this educational?
A very traditional Web 1.0 tool, mailing lists, can be transcribed into a Web 2.0, RSS feed. This Lifehacker article takes you through the steps necessary to make this happen. I know there are a few mailing lists that I’m involved in that I’m interested in doing this with a few mailing lists I’m on where I just lurk. Now I’m not as tied to the email to stay current on things.
Miguel Guhlin found this video and I thought it makes a powerful statement about using podcasts as a professional development tool. Watch it here
I truly feel that podcasts are an easy way for teachers to develop new skills, hone established one, or just find out what other professionals in education are doing. I was doing that when Bob Sprankle was doing his Room 208. He was giving me ideas of how to incorporate blogging and podcasting into the classroom. Social Studies teachers have no excuses as each of the nightly news from the networks are podcasted, as well as Meet the Press and Face the Nation (talk about current events on demand). Apple Computer, through iTunes, has made it so easy to get to podcasts.
If you haven’t tried listening to podcasts what are you waiting for (you don’t need an iPod).
We needs to give our students true ownership of their work. This method would give validation to students that their work has importance to it. This is definitely something my staff will be seeing this fall.
At first I was having nightmares of my days in Chemistry class (how did I get an A in that class?). Then I noticed that the periodic table is broken down with some thought and intellect. When you check it out from the site you will notice that each block is a hyperlink to the homepage of the block.
This is a nice compliment to the map of online communities
Let me start off by saying that this section of George Siemens‘ book “Knowing Knowledge” was a very technical, philosophically approach to Knowledge and Connectivism. I avoided philosophy in college until the last possible moment so this blog entry is not some of my best work…(I know excuses excuses)
“The more we desire knowledge for our intended purposes, the more inclined we are to filter and select based on our goals. The story of knowledge becomes more about us and less about letting knowledge speak for itself.” George Siemens’ Knowing Knowledge (50).
Isn’t this the truth, in our adult lives we seem to specialize in our desire for knowledge. When we specialize we can get tunnel vision and ignore knowledge that might enrich us in what we’re trying to accomplish. As David Warlick stated in his keynote of the K12 Online Conference, “we need to take the side trips.” When we take these side trips often times the end result is better.
Knowledge is based on how well we can relate new information to prior experiences and information. When we encounter new information it is about the connections we make and how we sync that information based on our knowledge. The stronger the connections we have to those prior experiences and information the stronger the change the information will stick and turn into knowledge.
“Knowledge will be less of a product, and more of a process” Siemens (55). In today’s world of information overload we need to be able to organize the information so we can translate information into knowledge. Web 2.0 tools have a common feature to many of them, a RSS feed. Those RSS feeds are aggregated and allow me as well as others to organize the chaos of information contained in blogs, wikis, and other forms of information within our personal learning environments into a network that can be processed, internalized, filtered, and connected to create knowledge. This doesn’t work for everyone but it works for me because my time is spent of processing, internalizing, filtering, and connecting instead of going out to find the information.
Slideshare has take a good product and made it better. For those people who are not aware of what Slideshare is all about here we go…Slideshare can take a PowerPoint presentation and turn it into a flash file that can be put onto a website or blog.
There was one feature that was missing, audio to accompany the slides. Notice I said WAS because Slideshare has now added the audio track. Now one can create an online version of a presentation that is not bullet based but taps into the creativity of presentation. It looks like you need to create an mp3 of the Slideshare and store it on a website (you can’t upload the mp3 file to them directly) to create what they’ve deemed “Slidecast”. According to Slideshare, once audio is processed, you can choose how audio should play with the
slides You can synch each slide to a particular point in the audio
file. Or you can leave the audio unsynchronzied. The third option is to
do a quick synch using the “divide audio equally” (suited to musical
slideshows).
This looks interesting and pretty easy. Something else that I missed on the first view was the fact that an RSS feed is created so you can now create “enhanced podcasts” or whatever you called it. Too Cool! Now let’s hope the filter issue is not a problem.
Often bloggers talk about what blogs they read and follow but we don’t often recognize the podcasters out there. Well today I’m changing that idea. Here is a screenshot of my iTunes podcast feeds
Here are some of my favorites:
David Warlick–Enough Said Wes Fryer-How does this man have the time to do everything? Great insight on so many topics. Bit By Bit–Gotta give some love to some Mainahs. Geek!Ed!--To have the bravado to say some of the things they say is refreshing. On Deck and U Tech Tips- They’re not bad! Just kidding Jeff, I’ve used your tutorial vodcasts with staff members.
Each of these podcasts have made an impact on me, professionally. As you can see I have other podcasts I follow and some not even educational related, GO PATRIOTS!
Take some time and give some love on the podcasts that have made an impact on you!
About Me: I am the technology teacher/integrator at the Mildred L. Day School in Arundel, ME. Technology is a passion of mine since I was in junior high in the 80's taking a fortran course through my math teacher's account at USM. Outside of work I am a husband, father of 2 girls, and rabid Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots fan. When I have free time I would like to golfing (despite the short season).
