Learning, Teaching & Technology

The first time I viewed this session was shortly after it was posted in October of 2007 as I wanted to know what the authors thought the “Cool Tools” were at the time. I tried to skim the session and didn’t view it very carefully (or successfully).

This time through I learned a lot from Alan, Brian and D’Arcy; I will be referring back to it and using these notes to help me remember what is here. The first thing that struck me was that they were writing about RSS in 2003 and I really didn’t grasp the value or start using RSS until 2007. I could feel badly about that time lag, but as I work with educators in Southern Maine most are still unaware of the uses for RSS, or classroom blogs, wikis, personalized web pages, del.icio.us accounts, etc. The goal I have for this 08-09 school year is that each teacher will have and use all five of those tools for themselves and their students.

Starting off with a tutorial on embed code is for me an example of a quick “how to” for people like me who have avoided learning to write in html code, but I can just copy & paste to use online content in a blog or wiki.

I didn’t know what “API” stood for (later described as: Application Programming Interfaces), but digital storytelling has been an interest for many teachers I work with, first with iMovie and now web 2.0 tools. I have used Alan Levine’s http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools with teachers and in courses as a great compilation of sites that can be used to build a better way to present a story. One note is that some teachers were frustrated that a site may have a cost that isn’t clear until teachers have uploaded images and done considerable work. This may have happened since they were posted.

The descriptions of tagging using flickr, del.icio.us & slideshare as examples would be very useful to show teachers in a instructional setting (they always like listening to outside speakers, not just me).

I enjoyed Brian’s bit on the earliest days of Google docs and the debate about moving from Word. It will be interesting to see if Google docs and the various Google for Education resources remain free to all users. Certainly the iPhone and handheld tools are allowing us to access online content just about anywhere, freeing us from paper and even our own laptops.

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