Swing

I have the AVS suite of multimedia software and made this animated gif with the image converter. Click here to see how.

It was cold outside when we took these, but now she'll be forever swinging!

The Power of the Internet

Alec's about.me page.

This week Dr. Alec Couros { @courosa } shared with our class using adobe connect. I'm a fair hand at skype, but simultaneous video, audio, chat, presentation is awesome, even if the audio crashes every few minutes.
Alec started with talking about.me. About.me provides a place to unify your online presence with a bio blurb and links to all your online spaces. As someone with a growing digital footprint I think this is great. It's like an iBusinessCard. Give your about.me page to someone and they have all the ways to connect with you! I've made one for myself and have started using as my default URL/website for any service that asks what mine is.

Alec presented the power of the internet in five categories and gave us some tips to get started.

tools

Our tools keep changing. Smart phones have become the norm. (I guess this means I'm abnormal?) One just has to take a quick peak through her or his facebook feed to see that everyone is highly connected and sharing everything, seriously, EVERYTHING! Yet schools are a few tech generations behind and most force students to disconnect from their personal tools when at school. Alec said that the share button has changed everything and I agree. If we don't acknowledge this we do our students a disservice. We need to teach what TMI is if we don't want TMI.

content
The internet is open, well at least for now, ulp, and education is moving that way. If everyone can access information, why not make instruction available to everyone too! This the idea behind massive, open, online courses, henceforth MOOC. Places like coursera and edX offer many MOOCs to anyone interested. Alec is also involved with #ETMOOC, an education technology MOOC. I've joined and am enjoying it so far. I haven't been in sync with the synchronous sessions yet, but I've made use of the archives and have already made some valuable connections!

networks
The internet is a inter-connected network of computers, but it's real power is the networks of people that inhabit it. Sites like tripadvisor, urbanspoon, and couchsurfing allow people to help people in new ways. My friend introduced my wife and I to couch surfing and we found it invaluable in our travels around Australia.
Alec also mentioned crowd sourcing - getting many people to work together on small parts of a large project.
Like:

These projects are incredibly fun! I'm currently involved in two:
Star Wars Uncut is getting fans to remake Empire Strikes Back 15 seconds at a time.

#ETMOOC lip dub of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now. 

Screen shot of my line - "I'm havin' a good time!"

These are great ways to collaborate and have so much potential to use with our students. My friend Miss L came up with some great ideas for using these with our students. Those got me thinking and I've come up with a few of my own:

• A lip dub of Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech as a History project.
• A collaborative final project for pen pal or skype pal classes.

new possibilities

Alec talked to us about an internet phenomenon - memes. I love that memes are defined as idea viruses. Most people know them as funny, or almost funny, pictures with captions, but we can use even these with our students. They can use them to learn from and to show their learning. They can be social commentary, like the pepperspray cop meme.
Alec told us about know your meme, a site where the latest and greatest memes are tracked. This allows us to keep up with the pulse of the internet and bring current content into our classrooms.
I like memes and I like to make stuff, so I decided to participate in meme-dom. I've made a cheezburger site - Memes for Learning where I'll store the memes I've made and archive ones I think will be useful to educators. Maybe one day you'll see one of my memes features on know your meme?

activism
The internet has enabled everyone to have a voice and to use their voice for change. We can stand up for what we believe in and have people take notice.
Alec talked about Martha Payne, a blogger who turned her commentary on terrible school cafeteria food into helping provide meals for schools in need. There are also websites, like kiva, that allow those with more to give a leg up to those with less.

where to start

1. Embrace new communication tools (appropriately).
2. Experiment with new forms of expression. Focus on how students can learn from them.
3. Teach (and MODEL) Digital Citizenship
4. Find hashtags about what I like and connect with people. Cybrary Man has a list to start us off.
5. Make learning visible.

I'll end with a few good quotes Alec shared with us.
"It is no longer enough to do powerful work if no one sees it." Chris Lehmann
"Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time." Tagore

Visualizing PLNs

I have spent a lot of time this week pondering connecting. It's been the overarching theme of the first weeks of my Internet for Educators course at BU. I joined #ETMOOC and the first topic was connected learning. I've heard speakers talk about it. I've had assignments to research it and visualize it.

I think connecting with one another is so important. Through the internet we have access to more information and more people than ever before. However, making good use of this depends the connections we make. There is no possible way I could scour the entire internet to find the best physics resources, but if I connect and share with communities of physics teachers, physicists and like minded individuals we cover more of what's out there and all get access to more and better resources. This is just one example of the benefits of being a connected learner.

Here is a map I made of the connections I've forged so far.

 

Click here for a closer look.

It's also important to remember that everyone has a personal learning network, even my students. This is what I imagine what my future students' learning networks will look like:

I've found thinking about the connections my students use to learn on their own a very productive exercise. If I can align how students learn in my class with how they learn on their own I hope to connect the classroom to their lives, to change school learning from a chore to a natural process.

Learning - A visual journey

Learning, a set on Flickr.

I've just created a set on flickr where I will share my learning. I'm very visual and usually study by making pictures. Everything in here will be available to use through a creative commons licence.
I will put things I'm learning in here, things I've used to help students learn, and anything learning related.
I added a slideshow of the set on the pictures page for easy access.

hello #etmooc

After much humming and hawing I've decided to join #etmooc, the education technology & media massive open online course. I'm still not really sure what it is all about, nor if I really have the time to add something else while I'm finishing my last semester of my Ed degree. However, I've heard a lot of great speakers in the last week talk about the participatory nature of the online learning space and I want to participate.
I look forward to learning new things, but even more to meeting, and collaborating with, great educators.
Here is a little bit about.me.