Alatoba07 February 1st

Our second collaboration went today. This time Chrystal and I decided to test out Elluminate's Academic version. This allows you to use Elluminate with most of the bells and whistles except the recording feature.

There were some issues because we decided to video and audio through skype and it bonked on us a couple of times. It was nice to have it there for back channels though.

The problem was to do this from The Man Who Counted. I had created a slidecast at slideshare a few weeks ago. The student then had time to work on the problem and then share their work on the elluminate white boards.

| View | Upload your own

This part of the collaboration was excellent. With both of us being moderators we could manipulate the white boards and have them at our disposal. The kids enjoyed this part too. The could see the writing going on the boards from 2500 kilometers away.

This still wasn't the perfect fit. I have 3 fifteen minute screen captures sitting on my desktop at school and they will be too bi9 to upload anywhere. I will have to import them into imovie and then split them up.

Actually I slimmed them down and uploaded them to viddler. You can also see them here at the Alatoba wikisite. I just love viddler because you can leave comments behind at all of the videos. It is a mini pop up video. Please leae comments behind.

On the bright side I was able to get ustream to work at school and this means that the next session on February 19th will be streamed. much better for all I hope.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will try collaboration out.

My first Solo Skypecast

Flickr Link

I had the pleasure of hosting my first solo skypecast where people came to talk about the 21st Century School. I called it the When Night Free Fall Blog club. The hour and a bit skypecast was hosted using skype and tappedin. I had a great time even though my recorder did not work. Note to future hosts and hostesses of these chats..... do not upgrade to a beta until you know what you are doing.

Speaking of beta. I was using Skype 3.0. It has some nice features like a built in recorder (found that out too late) and an interactive whiteboard much like elluminate. The feature I liked most about 3.0 was that it helped control the skypecast better. The user interface was clear to read and it grouped people in to open mic, wanting the mic and no mic. The mixup with my powergramo was that I downloaded skype 3.0 and then did not reboot my machine.

I would like to thank all the people who attended the skypecast. Glenn, Jeanne, Sharron, Cheryl, Darren, Joyce V, Paul, BJB, SusanR and anyone else I am forgetting. Since my recorder did not work I am asking everyone to post comments behind here on on the wiki. I know we all live busy lives but if you spent 10 minutes reflecting on our conversation. I would appreciate it.

The questions were...

Question 1

What obstacles are you encountering using 2.0 tools in your classroom?

Question 2

In the movie about the SLA, Chris talks about the aim of School 2.0 as being 'student-centered, constructivist, to teach kids to be critical consumers and producers of information'. What professional development approaches and methods are being used to raise teacher awareness and use of information and digital literacy tools?

Question 3

Has anyone defined "best practices" for different content areas using 2.0 tools? If so, where can this be found? If not, would this be an idea worth exploring?

I had read Clarence's students comments earlier in the day. One of his students comments hit home when this question was being talked about.

I used Elaine's reflective comment to start the conversation

1) Indeed I think that blogging is different from writing on paper. Why I think this is because that you know that you will be sharing your knowledge and what you have to say, with the rest of the world on your blog making you want to do the best you can and put as much information as you can on your post.Also to find this information to make this blog , while surfing the net you learn to tell the difference between false and true information.


The advasntage of having a pln learning network is that you have the chance to explore sitwes and other blogs from all over the world and to leanr about there culture, recent weather, there nation weather and issues and the list goes on and on. the part i like baest are the photography on the blogs of other places from all over the world and get the chance to see the way there cities, towns live and opperate. this can make learning differnet and defintly no tin a bad way. it makes learning different and funner this way.giving you the oppertunitie to share our thoughts, opinions with one another. letting us leave the classroom and across the world to share our ideas and learning experiences. i personaly think this is totally ok that we arnet learning that exact same thing but actuallly when you think about it we are almosrt learning the same thing. we read our pln networks write anout what we learnedon a post. the rest of the class goes and reads it and learns from it. so no not all classrooms are about learning the same thing at once you can say. i would say that reading and writing blogs from all over the world and sharing our learning experiences is a heck of a lot better than reading a text book…what do yuo think?

Question 4

The idea of collaboration to me is the biggest benefit for the 21st Century. Does anyone have a progressive introduction of Web 2.0 Tools for the resisters amongst us?


Thank you for reading. Comments appreciated.

Chris


We also played with some flickr tools. Here are some of the results.