Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools

I was impressed with the variety of ideas that Liz Kolb discussed in her presentation about uses for cell phones in the classroom. A couple of the ideas that piqued my interest were creating podcasts through your cell and creating a phone number that people can call and leave voice mail (if you don't want to give out your home phone). If you want to advocate for the use of cell phones in your school, this presentation is worth listening to.

Where does the time go?

Subtitled: It gets sucked up somewhere in cyberspace...

I am observing my own behavior while attending this online conference. First I subscribed to the feed with the intent of viewing these on my iPhone - worked for the pre-conference workshop. Now I am just syncing my iPhone everyday with new content and saying - "Oh I will get to this sometime, maybe I will have more time at home to look at these."

I have also observed that about 12 of these videos do not download to my iPhone - I don't know if this is unique to the iPhone or not. Does anyone have a video iPod to tell me that all the videos run perfectly well or not on this technology? So I find that some are on the iPhone and others are not.

I also find myself jumping in and out of presentations - while this technology lets me do this without bothering other participants or hurting the presenter's feelings, I find that I have not returned as frequently as I would have imagined. But then again there is always tomorrow.

Well to that end I decided to mess around with embedding a little bit, so I copied a widget listing all the video presentations from K12Online Conference and placed this on Blackboard in the course documents page. (After looking at a presentation "LMS 2.0" about moodle and embedding widgets, I thought why not try this in Bb). So it is there to remind me (anyone) that these presentations are still available for me to view later.

Well I hope that I get to view more of these presentations, but ... I will be on a trip to Iowa these next four days so "time get sucked up" in travel too!

Happy traveling to all and to all a good night!

K12Online Conference - going strong...

Well I have started to attend the presentations at the K12online conference - how about you?

The pre-conference keynote by David Warlick was a first for me. I listened to his presentation on my iPhone in my living room. It was noteworthy just because I was sitting in a comfortable locale and he was presenting from his office, an airport, a Starbucks, a bike/walking path, his deck and so time/place shifting was very evident. His style was very casual and engaging and made a good case for "the times they are a-changing" (certainly giving away my age...) His closing three points included:

1. Students are Info-savvy
2. New Information Landscape
3. Uncertain unknown future for our learners

I was not able to attend the live Elluminate gathering, but looking at the archive briefly it seems like there were around 100 participants online with him. You can image that the chat window was pretty crazy...

Will my iPhone is filling up with video podcasts so now on to more presentations...

Anyone attending any of the sessions? I will look for your posts...

They are comin' to get you...

It seems that the first litigation settlement in favor of music conglomerates was handed down last week. I guess you could have guessed this was coming, or at least should have since many college students have been issued warnings about sharing music online. I know a close relative of mine who shall remain nameless, got a threatening email mentioning something about illegal sharing of music. This turned out to be bogus, but was upsetting to say the least.

What I can't help musing about (OK maybe angry about) is that the "first" person who was successfully sued is a single mother with two children who is a Native American. Having lived on a reservation for two years, this "cracking down" on illegal activities by multiple giant corporations (look at the end of the article for the listing of record companies) continues a pattern of pathetic "punishments" to send out "the message". Who better to make an example out of than a single Ojibwe mother who now is saddled with a settlement of $222,000.

Now I am not one to take copyright lightly but I am afraid the well privileged person in our culture would have been a more imposing person to sue by these multi-national corporations than the one they chose to follow through with on this trial. Not much is done by accident, particularly by high powered corporate lawyers. To me this is a sad day in a line of many sad days that evidence continuing oppression on the powerless by the "powerful". (read the the powerful are feeling threatened by the digital music age and so need to make a statement)

Baseball and the classroom

I am not a real baseball fanatic but in this season of baseball playoffs, my mind went to Cooperstown and wondered about any educational resources they might have. Sure enough the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has page called Enriching Education website that provides curricular integration ideas for schools. There are sixteen different online thematic units to explore for integration into the classroom. There are resources including field trips, video-conferences, podcasts, and blogs as well on their site.

So bringing baseball into the classroom might be something worth considering... there might be learners in your classroom who are already hooked on baseball and would be stimulated further with this classroom connection.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Rich Ingram's presentation to the class introduced the Partnership for 21st Century Skills so I thought that I would give you a website (click on post's title) for this initiative. We will again revisit this topic at the end of the semester.

One of the P21 frameworks is titled Information, Media and Technology Skills. Seems like we should look at these links and see what our take is to these skills. Are there missing categories? If so what would you add? How are we including these skills in our K-16 curriculum?