Travel Through Space and Time
Travel Through Space and Time by Silvia Tolisano
Ms. Tolisano shared her story of her student activity to stretch traditional boundaries, school, students and take them on a personal learning journey. She has taken the ”Flat Stanley” and Letters to Felix” stories to a new dimension. She traveled to China and virtually has taken her students and teaching coworkers with her via online technology. She combined a blog, podcasts, photos and videos to educate students about cultural universals such as education, transportation, food and culture.
The internet has truly opened up our world and its traditional boundaries for student learning. The ideas used were simple enough with a bear mascot for the younger students and an Amazing Race game for the older students. However, I found it fascinating how she used the various online tools for this learning experience. I’m starting to become familiar with some of the software mentioned but in this podcast she has explained how each of these were incorporated into the journey. She mentioned WordPress, Windows movie Maker, Audacity, Delicious, Flickr, Skyp to name a few. Each of these programs had specific and important functions for the overall project.
Even though as she stated, the equipment was too much for one person to carry throughout the day, I was amazed at the simplicity of the hardware and equipment used. The equipment was such that most people would be familiar with their operation. A laptop, webcam, digital & video cameras, mp3 recorders, and their chargers were among those listed.
This is a fantastic project. I applaud her for incorporating the Web 2.0 tools and sharing this project with others. Her organizational skills and preparational tasks were phenomenal and led to the success and wonderful global studies for students, staff and now sharing with others to continue the amazing learning experience.
k12online07 | Comment (1)More Than Cool Tools
Keynote #2 Alan Levine, Brian Lamb & D’Arcy Norman
This is a great presentation by Alan, Brian & D’arcy. “More than Cool Tools” highlights numerous applications available from the internet. Most of this software is free of charge. They talked about the evolution of trends in how educators are socializing, collaborating, sharing information along with filtering and disruptions. Using Web 2.0 tools can be liberating and also disruptive. A person’s work is never finished because with Web 2.0 tools there will always be opportunities change.
I’d like to speak on the collaboration portion of the presentation. To begin with, even with the collaboration tools available on the internet, the first challenge in collaboration involves shared activities and responsibilities between partners working toward their shared goal. Next with any type of collaboration, it requires assembling the appropriate set of resources and maintaining a shared flexible process.
Collaboration is becoming a networked organizational form that provides an electronic workspace. It is becoming a laboratory without walls that allow for a virtual organization. With this virtual network the possibilities expand and move outside of the building or district boundaries. Technology has relaxed the constraints of distance and time allowing for colorations to take place in new and exciting ways. The use of blogs, wikis, RSS feed and other free web based applications have become collaborative spaces to share experiences along with practical application ideas. Some other applications mentioned for collaboration were Google.docs, Zoho, Del.icio.us, Twitter to name a few.
Using Web 2.0 tools for collaboration offers current, exciting, online continuing-education programs for all involved. Opportunities for collaboration will continue to change with new technologies to our learning environments.
k12online07 | Comment (0)
