The cryptic math is meant to communicate that over the last 2 days (48 hours), I have presented 3 times online 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (if you do the math you get a bad pi).
Last night was a presentation for Dean Shareski‘s ECMP 355 Course (no web site?), which I believe is a University of Regina course for pre-service teachers, “Computers in the Classroom”. And I did two more ones today for the Powerful Learning Practice group from El Paso that Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach and Will Richardson leave. I gotta give Sheryl and hear team a to of credit in providing tech support to these teachers; they had them ALL verify and test their voice connection before I started, and rally provided a lot of energy to the back channel.
All the participants were highly active, and took on my game of story prompts, this time using an open white board in Elluminate (I squint and ignore the corporate name on the login screen). A lot of thees teachers are already making use of ones like Voicethread, Glogster and Animoto, but also a number them like Blabberize and today there was strong interest in Tikatok and Zooburst.
I did not have time to add it today, but my long time Apple buddy Paul Valach shared this example, which is a 2-fer– a teacher has set of a Clogster site for linking to student projects that explain math principles, each one of those links is an Animoto video. Check it out http://clsatb123.edu.glogster.com/math-animoto/.
I’ve found that with variable network connections, its not worth doing live demos of the tools, so I talk through examples I have screenshots for. I do upload a quicktime version of the Dominoe story which does play well in the space (it is disturbing to hear how many teachers have to work in environments of blocked sites, it suggests that school systems teach their most valued employees as children),
I don’t have links for Elluminate archives yet, but I recorded my own audio from the session for Dean’s class, and loaded it in Slideshare with my slides (I like doing this since this method is one of the 50)
I still enjoy doing this presentation, though I prefer not at this frequency. I dont want to become one of Those Guys Who Do the Same Shtick For Everyone. I still have a chunk of updates to do for the new wiki, and still have about 15-20 tools waiting in the wings to write up.
The new wiki format is designed for other people to edit the descriptions of the tools, add their own examples, and share some feedback on the usefulness of the tool (see how to add to the wiki). I have also created a new wiki page that lists the tools that have special features for teachers. This page, and the Tools by Type and Tools by Media Capability are generated automatically based on a structure of tags I set up.
After all this, I sure feel like Curly does in this photo
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by mfhiatt
