Category: 2.0

Zentation: Where Video and PowerPoint Meet on the Web — The Mom Song

A student made me aware of Zentation.com, a place to combine video and slide shows in a pretty powerful way.

Here’s a short, fun example to give you a quick idea of how this works. Hats off to all the Moms out there!!!

The Mom Song
3:15
What a mom says in 24 hours condensed into 2 minutes and 55 seconds! Hilarious!

Does this resource hold any application for you, your students, your project team, etc.?

Social Bookmarking (with del.icio.us) in Plain English

This 3 minute video is an excellent tutorial to help you begin using del.icio.us bookmarks on your own. NOTE: You can use my del.icio.us bookmarks by clicking on the My Bookmarks link in the main menu.

There are many more great tutorials like this one available from the commoncraft show.

AECT’s Teacher Education Division’s Online Convention Activities and Resources

Introducing the Teacher Education Division’s most recent venture into the world of Web 2.0 technologies. TED Live! 2007 is a member generated e-newsletter of anything and everything related to TED during the 2007 AECT Convention. TED Live! 2007 has robust RSS capabilities and will mashup blog posts, images, podcasts, vidcasts, social bookmarks, file attachments (slide shows, handouts, papers, etc.), tags/keywords, and more into an easy to use e-newsletter. This information will be archived and will be available on The Playground. Consider the possible benefits of being able to provide your students access to particularly relavent information and materials, for those with research interests related to the social aspect of a professional organization, professional development communities, online learning and callaboration, social networking, and much more.

Virtual Attendance and Participation
We realize that everyone can not make it to Anaheim this year, but you can stay connecTED with us and enjoy the presentations and content via TED Live! 2007. If we don’t see you at the convention then we hope to see you online!

Contribute Content
TED Live! 2007 can only be as rich and useful as we make it and we need your help to make this a valuable resources for us all. Please read TED’s Legal Disclaimers.

K-12 Online Conference

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

Click here for information about podcast channels and conference web feeds.

Wikis in Education


GUEST BLOGGER

Gina von Esmarch

 

Schools are increasingly under pressure to incorporate the latest Web 2.0 technologies into the education process, since many students commonly use them in their personal lives to collaborate with their peers. They come to school expecting to access Websites and applications like MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, instant messaging and blogging. The challenge for educational institutions is to find ways to best incorporate these existing tools into the classroom experience, while also identifying new tools that can provide value in the education process.

 

Boston College depends on web-based tools that facilitate learning and increase communication between faculty and students, as well as collaboration between the students. They chose to use a wiki-platform because:

  1. They were looking for a social software to stimulate the education process and create lively interactions between students and faculty.
  2. Had tried Facebook and found that it was not flexible enough for classroom purposes.
  3. Wikis enabled up-to-date content development and active discussion, which ultimately led to students achieving better scores.
  4. It was easy to learn and enabled email, RSS feeds, and search integration.

Educational institutions like Boston College, use the Socialtext wiki, a valuable framework for real-time discussions so that in-class curriculums can be modified on-the-fly to reflect the latest events in the business world, and incorporate input directly from the students based on topics they want to cover or have interest in.

‘How to make your wiki your text book’ is something that Intro to Management professor, Jerry Kane faced and based on his experience, he notes that using a wiki as new educational tool has made him move from being an expert teacher to at times being a moderator of content collaboration. In many ways, using a wiki decentralizes the education system but also drives the learning process forward.

Teaching and Learning in the 2.0 Era

Many of this blog’s readers and many of my students have asked me to provide an overview of the buzz-term 2.0. As you’ll see in just a moment, it is reported to have all started with the use of the phrase Web 2.0 back in 2004 and was soon followed by phrases such as Learning 2.0, Presentations 2.0, School 2.0, Identity 2.0, and Office 2.0 just to give a few examples. All of these are ideas that represent a change/ evolution/ revolution in thinking and practice. Clearly each of these terms has really cool and innovative technologies associated with them, but we must not get distracted by the toys. I think it’s far more important that educators and instructional designers consider the philosophical, theoretical, pedagogical, and pragmatic implications of these ideas as I think each could potentially influence education in the future. I intend on posting more about this later, but for now let’s start at the very beginning. Here are introductions to the terms Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0.

Let’s Set the Scene

  1. If you have access to Integrating Computer Technology into the Classroom, I encourage you to read Chapter 1, Rethinking Computers and Instruction. Otherwise, proceed to the next item.
  2. Consider the information presented in the Shift Happens presentation.

Web 2.0

  1. An Introduction to Web 2.0 – This post includes 2 videos that will provide you with a quick introduction to the concept of Web 2.0.
  2. Web 2.0’s Potential Impact on Teaching Learning – Includes the viral video Web 2.0…The Machine Is Us/ing Us.
  3. Web 2.0 entry from Wikipedia – Look over this information and become somewhat familiar with the big ideas. I’m not expecting you to become an expert on this. Spending 5 minutes here should be just fine.

Learning 2.0

  1. Learning 2.0 entry from Wikipedia – This is a very quick read and provides a basic introduction to the idea of Learning 2.0.
  2. Example of teaching and learning 2.0 – 13 Yr. Old CEO of Innovative Educational Gaming Company

For Your Consideration

  1. Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Demo of an AMAZING New Technology

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo…Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images. — from TED Talks

The potential implications this kind of technology could have on education are mind blowing. Off the top of my head I can see connections to math, science, geography, art, architecture, photography, mass media and communications, and language arts just to name a few. Then there’s the unbelievable potential for semantic mapping/concept mapping. I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about this. Please leave your response using the Comments link below.