Twitter and Seniors

This clip was shown on the Jay Leno show. Thought the business educators who are learning about Twitter and their PLN would enjoy:

Great Presentation About Shifting to 21st Century Learning

An Introduction to the Principles of 21st Century Learning and Web 2.0

View more presentations from Credenda.

Twitter in the classroom

Thanks to those teachers who attended my presentation at the BMIT Conference in Indy today. Here is a link to the video interviewing the principal who encourages his teachers to use Twitter in the classroom.

Blogging resources for the classroom

During a recent presentation at IBEA's state conference, I presented web 2.0 tools for teachers. Here are some additional resources for blogs in the classroom:

Learningweb2 - table of tools for blogs & wikis
MiddleWeb - has a list of middle school blogs to follow and a simple guide to RSS feeders
Additional (school-friendly) sites to create blogs:
21Classes
Gaggle Blogs
Education 2.0-Edmodo A private social platform for teachers and students to share ideas, files, events and assignments.

Web 2.0 Literacy Tools Master List Fall, Naomi Harm, Innovative educator Consulting 2009

Finally, SupportBlogging.com - is a great resource of blogging ideas and links.

Using a Wiimote as a Whiteboard

One of my favorite blogs to follow is Free Technology for Teachers written by Richard Byrne. Recently, there was a post of Johnny Lee presenting how to take a Wiimote and turn it into a whiteboard. Amazing!! For about $50 in hardware and a projector and laptop, you can have a whiteboard. For details, go to Johnny Lee's website or check out this video of his presentation at TED.

Example of an Animoto video--Web 2.0

I am presenting at the BMIT Conference in Indianapolis on Saturday, November 21. This is a sample video to show the attendees how easy it is to create a video with Animoto. The presentation is call, Building a PLN with Web 2.0 Tools

Student Video Production

Check out this student created video recently posted to YouTube.

Strengths listed in student evaluations

This semester I am working to refine the CAPP130 course. Recently, I gave an online mid-term evaluation using a form created in Google Doc. One of the questions in most evaluations is professor's strengths. This is a word picture of what the students wrote on the evaluations. Sometimes we need to remember our strengths:

Mobile Searching using ChaCha

Blogging

Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Andrew Sullivan

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog

www.flickr.com/photos/adampiggott/2562599160

Say goodbye to a great show.......

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it's in a book—a reading rainbow...

How many of you grew up watching this popular children's show. According to a recent interview in usnews.com Reading Rainbow will end its 26-year run. I know my children learned "Why" reading was fun through this show.

Generation Y

i m gen Y

View more presentations from drtrupti patel.

The Amazing Internet

The Amazing Internet- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Developing your Personal Learning Network (PLN)

There is a lot of discussion today about developing a personal learning network. Through many social network sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Nings, wikis, blogs, and more, students and teachers are able to connect with other in their field and share resources. This summer, one of the ways I have expanded my social network has been using Twitter, wikis and Ning. I am a member of a wiki called Twitter for teachers where I found many contacts of educators to follow and gain valuable resources for the classroom. One of the other wikis in which I belong is called Wikis in Education. Here is a picture depicting someone's PLN.

You're only as good as your community

Welcome new students in CAPP130

One of the first sites we visited this semester was wordle.net. Students created wordles including their names and other terms to describe themselves. This wordle was created from the course syllabus.

Are social networks making students more narcissistic?

In a recent

article

in USA today, the author believes that social networks are adding to the narcissistic attitudes in college students.
Take the

narcissistic personality test

to see for yourself.

reBlog from Kristin Hokanson: The Connected Classroom

I found this fascinating quote today:

I have to be honest, the more summer professional development I do, and the more in-service workshops I do, the more I worry about this. I spend a day or two, sometimes a week “teaching folks to swim.” I give them the skills and we go SLOW. We work on voice threads, and wikis…easy entry points. I model (swim along with them) give them support (sometimes putting on water-wings) but at the end of our time together I feel like I am still throwing “non-swimmers” into the deep end. My greatest fear, is that without a guide swimming beside them, they may find themselves close to drowning and perhaps no longer want to go to the pool :(Candace Hackett Shively explained this beautifully in her post The Swimmer’s ObligationKristin Hokanson, The Connected Classroom, Jul 2009

You should read the whole article.

Blog Cartoon--Blackmail

Inbox Zero

As I am working on professional development during the summer, one of the most time consuming tasks can be email. I have viewed several presentations on the concept of Inbox Zero--good tool for joining the world of business.

Inbox Zero: Action-Based Email

View more presentations from merlinmann.

25 Tools: A Toolbox for Professionals

Check out this presentation taken from England of the top 25 tools for professionals:

25 Tools: A Toolbox for Learning Professionals 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jane Hart.

Develop your Personal Learning Community

As students are preparing for future careers, one of the goals of this class is to help you develop your Personal Learning Community. The Web 2.0 tools you have used in this course will be valuable for your continued learning. This picture is a graphical representation of what your PLC might look like. You can see that your continued education will be enhanced using these tools and resources.

“Building a personal learning network requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn. Even when you are a novice in a field of learning, you can still make contributions.“ (Daniel R. Tobin)

Semester is coming to an end!!

Our class is working on PowerPoint projects this week. Since this is the last week of classes, an integrated project is assigned as a final project. The project will include Word, Excel and Access activities. The goal this semesters was to increase your knowledge of Office 2007 skills for business and personal use. In addition, you should have gained some computer concepts knowledge. Finally, this course introduced many different Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, online applications and more.

Easter Week

Only three days of classes this week!

Welcome business education teachers

This is one of the blogs which I use in my computer applications class at Bethel College. All of my students create blogs at the beginning of the semester. Throughout the semester, they blog several times about various topics or articles from the internet. For some of the students, this is their first experience writing on the web (the read-write Web 2.0). In this course, we cover Office 2007 applications, as well as, computer concepts and Web 2.0 applications. Some of the activities using web tools include:

• social bookmarking using Delicious
• online applications (free alternatives to Office) such as Google Apps or Zoho Apps
• course wiki used for course management system. See article to learn about this free and easy tool.
• creating photo slideshows, collages, videos using online photo sharing (Flickr or Picasa) and online video sites, and embedding these creations into their personal blogs.

As business education teachers, you are familiar with the using content for our many courses. I encourage you to explore some of these Web 2.0 applications for use in your computer applications or DCT classes.

Putting Images in your Word Clouds

Check out this article which explains how to add images to your Wordle word clouds.


by Angela Maiers- Educational Consultant

Brain Rules for Presenters

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Brain Rules for Presenters

View more presentations from garr. (tags: reynolds garr)

Using some of the Web 2.0 applications

Today we will be exploring some of the social web applications such as social bookmarking, photosharing apps, and RSS sites. We will be adding to our blog how these applications can be useful. Some useful articles for teachers include:

• http://www.teachingtips.com/blog/2008/07/21/50-useful-blogging-tools-for-teachers/
• create an Avatar site
• List of top bookmarking sites

Using Widgets for your Blog

According to Wikipedia widgets are:

"Embeddable chunks of code have existed since the start of the World Wide Web. Web developers have long sought and used third party code chunks in their pages. It could be said that the original web widgets were the link counters and advertising banners that grew up alongside the early web.

A widget is anything that can be embedded within a page of HTML, i.e. a web page. A widget adds some content to that page that is not static. Generally widgets are third party originated, though they can be home made. Widgets are also known as modules, snippets, and plug-ins."

Since you have now entered the world of bloggers, explore the Web for some widgets to personalize your blog. You can add music players, calendars, games, and much more. Be sure to add a reference to the site where you copied the widget. Once you locate the widget, you will find a window of HTML code which you will copy and then on your blog in the Edit HTML tab you will paste the code.

Let's see what kind of widgets our classes can find!!

Welcome CAPP130 students!

Welcome students to my blog. I will post throughout the semester along with you. I hope you enjoy your adventure to blogging.