So during my SL adventure tonite, someone made a reference to Wordle. I learned about this application earlier this year, but never posted about it (that I could remember). I think using this application would be a cool way to teach students about Main Idea. The application make a word cloud from your text. Words that occur with more frequency are larger in the cloud. Like a tag cloud. I think this might be a great application to help students learn about summarization too. So I took my post about Warlick and turned it into a wordle:
I’ve got bunus points because I’ve got Plurk open!!
Learning to Speak Native:
Reference to Prensky: Natives are multitaskers, they prefer graphics BEFORE text etc… they think differently because they grew up connected. Our schools were not created to accomodate these kids. If educators want to reach NATIVES we will have to “just do it”.
We’ve had an information explosion…161 Billion GB of information. Another key trend flattening the world. Open sourcing and tools on steroids (like cell phones). Also Wikinomics - everyone helping to build something better than they can do on their own. Look at the www.curriki.com project or the fact that some things like Gmail are in perpetual beta …not everything is a final draft. The idea is finding innovative uses for things and not necessarily inventing everything. This is the intersection of tools, experts, and knowledge. It’s the idea of a listserv vs. plurk. It’s a conversation and it’s personal. It’s impromptu professional development. You get ideas and professional development that you didn’t even know you need. People share discoveries, request info, social and personal connection, explore new things, professional development opportunities in real time. We are all DEN STARs and we are supposed to share, so we should use these things. VA has a guide on social networking in grades k-12? I need to get my hands on it…Apparently it’s published by the DOE?
Networking allows us to learn how o do what we do and using WEB2.0 allows us to share what we are learning in bigger audiences. So now teachers are becoming as connected as the students we teach. Then we start doing the same things kids do to try to stay connected at work. If you give a man a fish, if you teach a man to fish, ic you connect a man to a fishing community he’ll have variety in his diet.
Natives attends conferences using Live blogs, podcasts, backchannel, skypecast, twitter, ustream even in second life. During packed sessions folks who stream it out can help folks who want to attend. Then you can sit is second life next to others who couldn’t physically be there. www.mogulus.com a virtual broadcasting studio in your computer? www.qik.com plays nicely with mogulus and you can do truly mobile recording. Can’t get parent’s to come to an assembly during the day? broadcast it live and then they can attend while on break at work. Create an on demand video library…
Find a way to share the info that fits you and stay connected.
Mrs. Taxson asked me to do a review activity with her class, so I decided to try out the VoiceThread application with them. They had fun, I had fun, we all had fun!! Wanna see what we did? Check it out:
Thanks to Chrissy for the tutorial on embedding VoiceThreads. I would never have been able to figure it out on my own.
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