Voki

Voki is a site where you can create a character and record your voice. It's an interesting way to deliver a message or to create a scenerio. This is the speaking character I created to deliver a message for week 5 of our summer 09 Moodle course. Click on the play button to listen.

NECC 2009 - Library of Congress - PD for Teachers

I attended a presentation by representatives from the Library of Congress. As you know, the Library of Congress has wonderful learning resources for teachers and students. What you might not be aware of is their newly designed professional development website for teachers. You can go to the Library of Congress link to learn more. Select teachers from the sidebar, and then select professional development. Click on TPS Direct (Teaching with Primary Sources) to gain access to their PD site. You have the option of putting together your own professional development plan or you can select from a list of self-directed modules. There are several modules. Some examples are "how to use the Library of Congress, one on how to analyze primary sources, another on understanding the inquiry process. There are 10 pieces of content totaling 12 1/2 hours of PD. However, you can select as many hours as you'd like and the modules that you'd like to study. There are PDF files of lessons and activities that are downloadable and the best part about this is it's free! They plan on collaborating with an online PD organization and their goal is to be able to upload some of these resources to Moodle. They also plan to add 10 more content pieces.

Be sure to visit the Library of Congress website to check out this newly designed PD opportunity. You might also want to peruse their website. It's chock full of wonderful resources.

NECC 2009 - Jamie Mckenzie Presentation

I had the opportunity to attend the NECC 2009 conference in Washington D.C. at the end of June. In each of these posts, I would like to share one of the sessions or share something I found interesting. In this first post, I will share some of the points that Jamie Mckenzie made in his session: "Beyond Mere Gathering: Converting Social Networking into Collaboration and Synergy". You can go to his website to view his thoughts.

One of his key points was the importance of synthesis and the need to train people on how to synthesize. He spoke about Edward De Bono's "six colored hats". It's a great model for thinking. Jamie mentioned that we are great at "vertical thinking", but most of us need to become better at "lateral thinking". That's the intentional wondering, how we find another way of doing something. He highlighted this by using a visual thesaurus. You can type in a word and get synonyms for it. Click on a synonym and it takes you to other synonyms. It branches out in many interesting ways. There is a fee to subscribe to this program, but it is quite powerful in developing this kind of "later thinking". I would imagine it would be a powerful tool to use when studying content in any subject area.

There was reference to allowing some trial experiences of social networking. Microsoft is trying something that mimics Facebook, but in a safer environment. It's called "Sharepoint". It might be worth taking a look at this to see if it could be used in our schools.