Technology for Beginning Teachers

This week, a colleague and I begin teaching technology basics to a small group of area teachers in a "Beginning Teacher Institute" offered by Independent Education (formerly AISGW). There are only a few sessions and our task was to figure out what beginning teachers need to focus upon the most in their first year of teaching. We set up a grou.ps page to introduce the idea of developing a PLN and are posting our first day's lecture there. For the first time, I'm using Issuu instead of Slideshare. So far I'm impressed:

Open publication - Free publishing

Forget PowerPoint! Use These!

Here's a great overview of some tools that you can use to present content that doesn't involve bullet points on a slide. It's called "A New Way To Lecture" and it was put together by Michael Zimmer. Thanks to Kathy Schrock's weekly "Help for Busy School Teachers" for bringing it to my attention. I shall definitely use this both with my own faculty and with the Independent School's Beginning Teacher Institute technology lessons I will offer beginning soon.

Open publication - Free publishing - More education

Prezi

The Free Technology for Teachers Blog, he highlighted a new Web 2.0 "presentation" tool called Prezi. They are now offering free accounts for Educators and students. At first, I ignored it because it seemed kind of gimmicky. It's a visual presentation that gets rid of the slide concept and uses a widescreen boardspace instead. You use the size of text to indicate relevance and relationship of ideas. You can embed documents/images, draw arrows, etc. There are different styles of backgrounds and a presentation can be set to "autoplay" by indicating the path the "animaton" should follow when play is clicked. I have recently been tasked to outline the navigation structure of the World Leadership School's Web site (including revisions). I was just going to use Excel, but decided to give Prezi a try instead. Here are the results. I am not sure it's useful...but then I am a very linear thinker, so it might not seem so to me, but might seem great to some other kind of thinker. What do YOU think?

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

Downloading YouTube Videos

There have been a lot of videos on You Tube I wanted to download and then include in, say, a slideshow. If did not have Internet access for some of my presentations and wanted to share some of the clips, I'd be outta luck. As many of you may have experienced, downloading them isn't as easy as it should be. They save as FLV files and WHO HAS THAT READER anyway?

I read a great tip in the Oct 2007 Tech Learning magazine from an article entitled "You Can Take It With You." If you use a site called Zamzar, it will allow you to choose the file type for the movie, will encode it and then email you a download link all within a few minutes. I tried it for a grad school presentation this week and it worked well. Try it!

Yack Pack Begone! Voicethread, hello!

My inbox hosted a dastardly email this morning: Kim Cofino told me that Yack Pack has decided to go all capitalist on us and start charging for their service. Everyone has to eat, I guess. I was pretty bummed out, since a big part of one of my global collaborations projects was based upon the tool. But in the same day, I also learned from Kevin Jarrett that there's a new tool that could easily take its' place called VoiceThread. The demo is pretty exciting, but what's more exciting is that it's a lot like teaching class using a slide presentation. It integrates the sound and allows folks to comment on each page.
Imagine this: You post a slide presentation for the parents in your community about an Internet safety issue, like Facebook. You record your presentation material and parents can access it whenever they'd like. They may also post a comment or question for each slide and you can respond next time you log in. It's basically distance education. I like it. I like what it can do. I don't so much like that the world we live in requires/allows us to distance ourselves from one another. But I'll stop whining. This is GOOD NEWS.

Exhaustion: My First Podcast

My lecture on Web 2.0 at the PEP last night went long....2 1/2 hours of talking with no break. I was so drained afterward that I felt like crying--not because it didn't go splendidly, it did. I felt like crying because I had given practically all of myself. A lecture or course is fundamentally an exchange of energy; you connect with the audience members and hopefully pass along your knowledge. In the process you are also sharing your personal energy. Last evening, those fifty parents needed so very much from me and I was happy to give all that I had. In the end, all I could do was drive home and settle into a yogic child's pose.

Here's a link to the podcast of that evening's lecture. I have posted it, along with the entire slide show onto my school's Web site so that attendees can have access to the hyperlinks within and share it with their family members and friends who could not be there.

You can also view a page of hyperlinks related to the topic here.

Today, I'm not talking very much.