New Ventures and Twiddla Team WhiteBoarding

The start of this school year is different for me in two significant ways: first, I will only be teaching technology part time at my school and second, I am now the Global Partnerships Director for the World Leadership School. This transition has been a year in the making, with some trepidation but mostly excitement. My role at the World Leadership School was one I basically imagined, molded and then reshaped with the founder of the organization. They offer service-based student travel experiences to developing nations, and needed someone to help them expand their trips into year-long programs. We would of course use technology to accomplish that goal. So far, we have just the right number of schools participating in this, our first year.

I've been working for a bit over a month and I've had more Skype meetings than I can count, compared curriculum for partner classes, evaluated technological capabilities for possible sites overseas, led an inservice for a huge group of teachers and jet-setted in and out of schools within a day. I'm busy, a bit tired, but still excited about everything.

This morning, I'm conferencing with a teacher in India who is partnered with his colleague back here in the States, a 9th grade Geometry teacher. We will be deciding if a wiki is the best possible organizational structure for collaboration or perhaps some other tool. But what I'm most excited about is the tool Twiddla. It's a "team whiteboarding tool" that allows you not only to share a screen and upload documents (which you can then edit together), but you can also use the screen like a shared whiteboard. Perfect for math, right? There are even built-in shapes and graph "paper" for the screen. Of course, it's free, because that's me: miss spendthrift. Try it out yourself!

Open Source Teaching Project

The June/July 2009 issue of T.H.E. Journal featured an article highlighting a new site: the "Open Source Teaching Project." According to their page:

1. We recruit people to share lessons learned about life, careers, culture, and academics.
2. We apply social media as a seamless tool for teaching, managing, and collaborating with others.

Essentially, they are a community of experts who agree to discourse with students on particular subjects...direct access to expert information. You can schedule a class interview or watch a video of a previously filmed interview. Participants range from Nobel Laureates in Medicine and Physics to the president of the Global Fund for Women and the founder of "How Stuff Works."

WolframAlpha

Although my husband assures me that I'm out of the loop, and that WolframAlpha has been out for at least six months or so, I've only recently discovered the new tool and I'm wowed. This self-described "computational knowledge engine" is a kind of numbers-facts database that also calculates things as well. So for instance, if you type in Cusco, Peru, you will be given facts about the population, maps, even things like the average temperature historically. Other bloggers have referred to it as the Google Killer. You can see a demo of what the new tool can do here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
image: chattahbox.com/.../05/wolfram_alpha_logo.jpg

Global Ed Programs Presentation

Global Education Programs

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Statistics About Global Education

Next week, I'll be presenting a keynote at a school in Nashville, TN about Global Education. Their school has made a commitment to expanding global programs and has engaged my services (via the World Leadership School) to aid them in that endeavor. When preparing a new presentation, I always like to include facts and research proving how it might be beneficial--that appeals to the science-minded and fact-minded among us. While looking into this, I discovered an interesting Pew Internet and American Life research study (such a fantastic resource) called "The Strength of Internet Ties." This study compares, among other things, how much help people felt they had available to them in making important decisions. The finding was that those who had a larger network of "significant" contacts (not core contacts) online felt better able to make that decision. This was largely because a) they had better access to "experts" and b) because they had a wider range of feedback. I think this will be an interesting addition to highlight in the presentation as a way to show how giving our children access to "experts" will enable them to make better decisions. More to come during the week as I prepare.
Image credit: www.urlwire.com/news/uw-pew.jpg