Alltop Education

I recently discovered my blog is included in Alltop Education‘s feeds. I’m flattered and grateful. Here’s a bit about Alltop for those that are unfamiliar with it.

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer. We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph…You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web.” (Source)

I think it’s worth your time to browse through the listings at Alltop Education and make some additions to your RSS reader.

Multiple Representations of Understanding through Digital Media (TAISTI)

I’m back in Nashville today for the TAIS Technology Institute. I’m excited about having opportunities to work with and learn from classroom teachers, media specialists, administrators, and more. I’ll be sharing a workshop on Multiple Representations of Understanding through 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.

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.

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.