What is Skype?

Skype lets you make free calls to any other Skype user from your PC. It’s free and has more than 29 million registered users worldwide, with an average of two million using the service at any given time. Here’s the really cool thing . . . my colleague and I downloaded, registered, and hooked up on a Skype call between our classrooms in less than 15 minutes, all while our students were observing, learning, and being wowed by the whole process. I will definitely use this cool tool with my business technology class. And here’s my vision for other uses: Hooking up with business professionals on location at their organizations for a chat about their job. This could be a virtual “job shadow.” Hooking up with another classroom, from another school, from another country to share ideas on a given topic is a great way for interactive exchange. You can do this with Skype. How about the co-teaching possibilities, with synchronous, real-time give and take of expertise. And Skype has safety in mind for those who fear the “bad” side of connectivity. Here’s a link and another for helpful suggestions for using Skype safely in your classroom.

isms, schisms

Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and now Connectivism. The first three isms are well-defined learning theories developed, studied, utilized, and followed by educators and scholars for centuries. Names such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner, Pavlov, Bloom, Gagne, just to name a few, are associated with these learning theories. . . and now Seimens. George Seimens has proposed a new learning theory for the digital age . . . the next ism in the list . . . Connectivism. Notice the root word—connect. You are connecting to me right now as you read this blog. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, Web 2.0, folksonomy, the wisdom of the crowds--this is all part of the whole “connect” learning theory. We are now learning through interconnected, ever-connected, always connected means. Is it time to put a new learning theory in the books? I say, yes. But rather than in the books, better in e-books, blogs, wikis, podcasts, del.icio.us, digg, flickr, twitter, youTube, chat, blogger, skype, google reader . . . shall I go on?

Word Up

Whether you’re reading them, writing them, speaking them, or listening to them, words are wonderful. Everyone should work toward a masterful vocabulary from your A, B, C’s to your doctorate degree! When reading a book, keep a dictionary handy to look up words you don’t know. Stretch your writing skills by experimenting with thesaurus options and sentence structure of words. Learn a new word each day and use it in conversation. Keep an aware ear while listening to music, TV, radio, your teachers. Chances are you’ll hear a new word. Practice random acts of reading and writing often. Not just the stuff your teachers assign, but stuff you assign to yourself because you want to read better, write superior, speak expertly, and listen discerningly. Communication is a skill that everyone can always improve upon from birth to death, and the hub of good communication is words.

While looking around at podfeed.net, I found a podcast that will expand your vocabulary and understanding of words. Here’s a description:

Open your mind every Tuesday and Thursday with a fun 3 minute vocabulary lesson! Desmond teaches you “smart” words and how to use them to help you feel more intelligent and civilized or to just have fun!!! For more check out http://www.yakkyakk.com/ --the home of Desmond Ortega!

I love how Desmond is always in a location surrounded by books. His podcasts are short, interesting, and well-made. He makes you want to come back for more. Click here and then on episode archive. Choose an episode and click play episode and begin your journey toward a better understanding of words. And definitely add the RSS feed to your reader to have Desmond’s vocabulary lesson come to you twice a week. Don’t be insipid in your word usage. Go forth with intrepid vigor to a better vocabulary. (from Word Up’s Episode 12!)

Oh students of mine, please post some comments using new and exciting words you learned from Desmond.

A Lesson in Flickr

Flickr boasts itself as “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” and has two main goals:

• to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them


• to enable new ways of organizing photos

The user-friendly, fun, and social website gives this overview:

You can use Flickr to:

Organize your photos in a meaningful way
Share your photos and stay in touch with your friends and family
Form a group for a wedding, reunion and event
Find beautiful, cool or intriguing photos
And much, much more!

The much, much more part is a way understatement! Wow, just check out the Explore page then take the tour. You’ll see the cool things that are going on and continually being developed at the Yahoo-owned site. And here’s an interesting article on how Flickr got its start.

So how can this site be used in the classroom? Here’s a few ideas:

*single image writing prompt
*collaborative story writing based on an image
*digital storytelling project
*creating slides shows within Flickr
*virtual field trips
*visual debates
*illustrating poetry
*geotagging images
*visual documentation of school events
*visual documentation of student artwork and school projects
*creation of digital visual portfolios
*teach about social software: how to tag, how to make comments
*teach about the intellectual property using Flickr Creative Commons licensing
*motivational posters, movie posters, mosaics

My inspiration came from this wonderfully comprehensive site. Thanks dj.

And lastly, I've included in this post one photo of the billions in Flickr. The search possibilities are infinite, so I chose “snow” for starters, then “snow landscapes,” and when I saw this photo, I was awestruck by its surreal beauty. Someday maybe I’ll see Mt. Rainer in real time, but for now Flickr will do.

Image citation: dherrera (2006, July 20) dherrera 96’s photostream. Retreived November 19, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/56181704@N00/472809315/

Wiki Whati?

A few years ago I stumbled upon a website called wikispaces. As I am always open to exploring new tools on the web, I played around in the site and used it “a little” with one of my classes. I still have my wikispaces account. However, since using Moodle for facilitating an online class as well as a resource for my F2F classes, I’ve been utilizing the wiki feature of this course management software quite a bit. It really is a great way to have students come together for a common purpose, to allow each to have a say or piece of the action, and to give the students a sense of ownership in the whole process.

However, this comes with some words of wisdom. Before jumping into the wiki world, you’ll need to educate yourself in using this tool. Although it’s relatively easy, you need to have a bit of knowledge of hyperlinking and a sense of how to structure the wiki. Definitely try out a wiki, spend some time playing with the features, and even set up a practice run before turning your students loose in it. And you should have a clear purpose and guidelines for the project so that students will be able to work in a direction toward a common goal and not feel frustrated.

I’ve also just completed a wiki project in wikispaces in an online class that I am taking. As a participant in this group project, I found it challenging only because “I” like to be in control. But the whole premise of using wikis is to collaborate and share. So if you plan to use wikis in your classroom, be open and aware of the different personalities and learning styles of your students. I learned quite a bit while completing this project for my class, not only about wikis and the content we included in our project, but also about myself.

Here’s two sites to try if you are considering using wiki technology in your classroom:

wikispaces

pbwiki

A Del.icio.us Lesson

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarked or "favorite" web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them.

The social bookmarking site that we will explore in this lesson is del.icio.us

Begin by reading information about the site at: del.icio.us

Then set up your account by following these instructions:

Go to del.icio.us and register as a user. (upper right hand corner)
Fill in your user name, full name, password and email
Follow the instructions and begin your delicious experience!

Here's your first assignment:

Go to http://www.podcast.net/ and search for any podcasts that have to do with Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Web. Add at least five podcasts to your del.icio.us page. Finally, share your findings with the class.

Pageflakes . . . organize your interests

Pageflakes is yet another site on the internet where you can organize your interests so they are available from any computer and share your page with your friends, colleagues, or the world. Here's info from their about page:

Pageflakes is revolutionizing how we use the Internet. With Pageflakes, you can easily customize the Internet and make it yours using "flakes" - small, movable versions of all of your Web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos - even interactive tools like a calendar and a to-do list - and just about anything else you do on the Web at school, work and at home. The Pageflakes community of users create and help each other discover more new flakes and share more new Pageflakes pages every day.

Here's my personalized pageflakes

Personally, I like igoogle better. :-)

About RSS

So you are flipping through websites, surfing around, and you notice this RSS button. Wonder what it is? Depending on how you obtain your definition, RSS is either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Either way, RSS is a format for sharing content among different websites. Sites can syndicate “feeds” (content) and Internet users can use an application called an RSS reader or aggregator to download and organize feeds such as google reader.

Why you ask? Well with soooooo much web content by sooooooo many people in soooooooo many topics, using RSS can help you organize the wealth of current information being posted to the web as I write and you read this post. There's RSS for blogs, news and current event web sites, and other web sites that update content frequently. So RSS is like getting your newspaper delivered to your door perpetually 24/7.

Here's the advantage for the classroom. Use RSS to subscribe to sites that deliver up-to-the-minute information that your students can use for assignments and discussion. Notice the RSS feed for CNN Money on this blog. I use this to make current news stories easily available for my Business Technology students. I also incorporate RSS feeds into my Moodle courses. And with Google Reader, sharing your feeds is easy.

RSS is just another example of how the web is becoming more read/write everyday.

Literature Circle Blog

Here's a way to take the traditional "literature circle" to a new level . . . develop it in a blog!

Check out this group of 7th graders from Auckland, New Zealand, who are very nicely completing their assigned tasks in their literature circle roles and then posting their work on a blog where it comes together in a creative, organized, always available online project.

http://goodnightmistertom.blogspot.com/

The are reading Good Night Mister Tom, preparing creative posts, and learning about blogging all wrapped up into a 21 century skills great project!

For my classroom, I'd love to have a "virtual book club" where my students and another class from anywhere in the world could read the same book and then share their views . . . all in a blog.

Here's a comment that I wrote on the Good Night Mister Tom Blog.