Multiple Representations of Understanding through Digital Media (NCTIES)

I’m enjoying the North Carolina Technology in Education Society’s 2010 Conference in Raleigh, NC. I’m excited about being one of the featured speakers and having opportunities to work with and learn from classroom teachers, media specialists, administrators, and more.

Today I’ll be sharing a pre-conference workshop on Multiple Representations of Understanding through Digital Media. This energetic session will demonstrate that with freely available digital technologies students can demonstrate their understanding of course content in multiple ways (images, audio, video, presentations, artwork, and more). Each student’s end product (learning artifact) allows them to personally self-express their understanding/mastery of the content/skills. Although teachers may not be comfortable using all of today’s technology it is important to consider allowing students to use it to communicate their understanding as they are often more naturally able to more fully express themselves with digital media. The PowerPoint presentation is below and the full workshop notes are available on my wiki. Note that the links and logos in the PowerPoint presentation are clickable.

Suggested Reading for 02/25/2010

The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change. – Pew Research Center

Phished through Twitter – Dr. Leigh Zeitz

The Thin Red Line… – Jenny Luca

Gifted Teacher Wins First STELLAR Award – Huntington News

The Facebook Imperative – TechCrunch

Encadré (Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro)

Learn with Us (IDT7078)

As I mentioned in a recent blog post I’m teaching a seminar this summer focusing on Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Technologies. I concluded the earlier post by sharing the following:

In keeping with the principles of Web 2.0 I encourage the participation of everyone with an interest or expertise in this topic. You may contribute to the discussion and fun by using the following tag/keyword: idt7078. Be on the lookout for ways (Ustream, Skype, Twitter, Plurk, etc.) to informally participate with us. I would certainly consider making it possible for those wishing to enroll in the course and participate from a distance, too.

Greg R. Fishbone replied to my earlier post and asked the following question regarding my concluding statements.

I’d love to participate informally, but how does one follow a keyword?

I think this is a GREAT a question and I suspect Greg is not the only one wondering about this. I’m sharing this information here in hopes of helping Greg and anyone else that may be interested in being part of our learning community this summer.

Google Keyword Search
You can add the following RSS feed to your aggregator (such as Google Reader or Bloglines). New blog posts, wiki entries, bookmarks, videos, podcasts, etc. tagged with idt7078 will then be “delivered” to you as they show up in Google.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=idt7078&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

An alternative to this strategy would be to setup a Google Alert for idt7078.

Twitter Search
You can also add a keyword search for idt7078 to TweetDeck or similar Twitter platform if you are using one. If not, then you can add the following RSS feed for the Twitter Search of the course tag to your aggregator.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=idt7078

Plurk Search
Add idt7078 to your list of Saved Searches in your profile’s dashboard.