View from the Corner Room

Attending ACTEM’s Annual conference.

Just finished up sitting in on Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s keynote address. For me her discussion of the personal learning network and the importance of it validates my goals on getting this network established for myself.

To follow up on this point I have ventured down the hall to Sharon Betts‘ talk on 21st centuring networking. She introduces uStream, Twitter, Ning, Social Bookmarking with Delicious and Diigo, and RSS.

Shows the ease with which you can become a broadcaster using uStream. Get an account and a camera and off you go.

Next is a Twitter talk. Explaining how and why one would want to get into twitter.

Social sites began with Ning. She recommended Classroom 2.0 ning.

Ran out of time and ended with the k12Online conference plug.

Intermission check out the coffee and the vendors. Who needs a pair of Google Sketchup socks?

Next, a presentation with Dr. Tim Tyson.  Putting your class on the Grid.

Using blogs with your classrooms. This tool allows you to share everything that you are doing in your classroom.  How to get teachers started on a blog. Fried Chicken and a quick demo.

Gets homework home, gets class news home, and allows that communication to get started.

So blogs are easy to set up and then one can use RSS feed for blogs that you want to read.

I am keeping a blog not to give me more work but to give you the parent some work to do. The parents are then responsible for reviewing with their day with their child.

Mabry Middle School an illustration of how they used a blog in their school.

Teachers each had a blog and needed to post at least once a week. Also hosted field trip blogs, and podcasts blogs.

He then demoed the use of ScreenFlow. Looks like an amazing way to get material from class out on the web.

(ECTO, ScreenFlow, wireless mic)

Lunch on the fly and a visit to Doug Snow sharing the latest from Noteshare.

Workshop of wiki use with Terri Dawson.   http://tdawson.wikispaces.com

Easy, Collaborative, Global connections

Terri uses and recommends wikispaces. The discussion, history tabs look like a nice feature that I need to investigate in PBwiki.

Interesting comment was that it is easier for students to do comments in a blog rather than a wiki. Something I will need to think about with the staff wiki that we set up.

And so that was the day in a nut shell! Now time to answer my new questions and start putting some of this new information to work in my teaching.