Friday, January 29, 2010

Week 3: Open Lab Q&A (T4T Spring 2010)

Since the university was closed due to our ice and snow storm, we conducted our "open lab" Q &A on January 29th over Ustream. This is the recorded archive. I addressed questions submitted on our T4T FAQ as well as posted to our Etherpad backchannel on January 27th. Learn more about Technology 4 Teachers on wiki.powerfulingredients.com.

Week 3: Digital Storytelling (T4T Spring 2010)

As human beings, we are hardwired for storytelling. The motto of the Center for Digital Storytelling is "Listen deeply. Tell stories." Digital storytelling projects can provide ideal opportunities for students to acquire and demonstrate the literacy skills required to thrive in the 21st Century, as well as SHOW their mastery of traditional curriculum content. We will explore a variety of web-based and client-based digital storytelling tools, as well as frameworks for facilitating student-created digital stories.
(This video was recorded 27 January 2010 at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. This course is taught by Wesley Fryer. Learn more about T4T on wiki.powerfulingredients.com.)

Monday, January 25, 2010

Open Lab Opportunities Jan 22, Jan 29, and Feb 5

If you have questions not answered on our T4T FAQ blog, and you'd like to get them answered in person, please come to one of our upcoming "open lab" opportunities like we had on Jan 22nd.




I (Wesley Fryer) will be in the UCO Education building, room 310 tomorrow (Jan 26th from 10-11 am) to answer T4T questions. A computer lab was not available at this time, so if you have your own laptop please bring it. Wes will bring a couple laptops to share.

We have reserved the UCO Education computer lab 110 for the following T4T Open lab times on Fridays:

  • Fri Jan 29th,  9 - 10:50 am
  • Fri Feb 5th, 9 - 10:50 am
Remember to use all our course communication tools to stay up to date with our T4T course! Hope to see you and an upcoming open lab.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Week 2 Summary

Adam Schovanec

Pam Taylor

T4T Scribe- Week #2

This week we as a class focused on the topic of social bookmarking. In a nutshell, the idea behind social bookmarking is that it allows people to save the links to interesting websites on a virtual server for future referral. Besides allowing us to save websites in a readily accessible location, social bookmarking also gives people the ability to categorize the links in a flexible and searchable manner by using tags that collaborates with other people.

To broach this new subject, we were instructed to create our own personal accounts on a website called Diigo. Upon doing so, we were introduced to the concept of tagging which allows users to classify their finds based on key words. We also were taught how to join social groups tied Diigo. This allows us as users to interact and share material with other people who have similar interests.

As an added bonus we got to watch the music video “Welcome to the Future” by Brad Paisley. We took a few minutes to briefly discuss our takes on the video and then moved on to the video “Cry of the Dolphins” which brought up the issue of leaving constructive feedback when commenting on the blog posts of other people. This was important because much of our assignments this week were tied to our commenting on several blog posts other than our own. A final point that Wesley Fryer touched on in class was on how to embed videos directly into our blog posts. He used the video, Digital Youth Portrait: Nafiza to demonstrate this new method and then allowed us to work on the week’s assignments on our own.

We have embedded the Nafiza video for easy viewing.

Weekly Information

During class on Wednesday January 20th, we were given a truck load of information that is of great use to us furture teachers. We can use this information and ideas to enhance our teaching experiences. We began the morning with a tip on saving videos in advance to ensure a completely uploadied video ready to play for our students. Then, professor Fryer indroduced us to our main focus for this week, social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a way to save wesites and store them in an easy assessable location. This makes finding previously viewed websites wasy and quick. We were given a free service called Diigo, that will help us explore and master social bookmarking. Near the end of our class period we were instructed and taught us how to attach videos and favored websites onto our blogs.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Things I Want To Model As Your Teacher

Here is the 15 minute / 19 slide presentation I shared on our first day of class this term, titled "Things I Want To Model As Your Teacher." I've shared this as a synchronized Slidecast on Slideshare, which means the slides will auto-advance as the recorded audio of this presentation plays. Slideshare is free to use.

Scribe Post Assignments (Spring 2010)

Based on everyone's randomly drawn numbers from this past Wednesday, these are the scribe post assignments for this semester:

During the semester, each student will be assigned the responsibility for ONE WEEK to summarize the highlights and learning points from the week on the course Shared Learning Blog
Be sure to post your weekly scribe post NLT (no later than) midnight on the Sunday following class. Remember you do NOT need to detail everything from class, but summarize the highlights and main points.

You will need to contact other students in your section assigned to write the summary post for the week. Since there are two sections of T4T taught by Wesley Fryer in Spring 2010, there will be TWO scribe posts each week.

Only ONE person will be able to actually post to the blog, and edit that post. As partners you will need to collaborate PRIOR to posting your weekly summary / scribe post. You can also edit and add to your post after it is published, but the same person who originally created the post will have to do the editing.

Check out the example scribe blog posts from Darren Kuropatwa's "Blog Post Hall of Fame" to see how scribe posts have been used with great success in other classrooms.

Open Lab tomorrow (Fri 22 Jan 2010) from 9 - 10:50 am

T4T Students:

I will be in the UCO College of Education computer lab (room 110, our regular classroom on Wednesdays) from 9 am to 10:50 tomorrow (Friday Jan 22nd) to answer questions and provide assistance about anything you'd like to discuss regarding our Technology 4 Teachers course. Please drop in if you'd like to ask questions, listen in on Q&A with other students, or just work! I've reserved the lab just for our class for this time.

I've had several requests to get together for Q&A outside of class time, so I thought we'd try this and see how it goes.

Please remember to continue submitting questions you have to our class FAQ blog, I've answered two new questions there today.

I've also added some graphical icons to our "Course Communication Tools" page which may make this easier to utilize.

Last of all, for week 1 and week 2 I've added some checklist-style questions under "review" at the bottom of each page. This is summarized on the FAQ post, "Checklist for Weekly Assignments."

Hope to see you tomorrow if you can make it to the lab in the morning. Have a marvelous weekend!

Wes
--
Wesley Fryer
http://www.speedofcreativity.org
twitter/skype: wfryer
http://claimid.com/wfryer

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Course Communication Tools

I've added icons to our Course Communication Tools page. Hopefully this will make it easier for all of us to navigate and use these sites.

T4T - Course Communication Tools (Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning)

Week 2 Q & A: Social Bookmarking (T4T Spring 2010)

This was the question and answer period following our class lecture about social bookmarking on 20 January 2010. (This Technology 4 Teachers is taught by Wesley Fryer at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Learn more about T4T on wiki.powerfulingredients.com.)

Week 2: Social Bookmarking (T4T Spring 2010)

Have you ever found a great website online, but later because you didn't save it or you didn't have access to the computer where you viewed the website you couldn't locate the website address again? If so, you need social bookmarking. By using social bookmarks to save good websites we find online, we save our "finds" in the cloud of servers which are on 24/7. Social bookmarking not only lets us save our websites in a location where we can find them readily on any computer, it also lets us categorize them in a flexible way using tags and collaborate with others. This week we will explore social bookmarking by using the free service Diigo, and also review our work from last week on blogging. (This video was recorded 20 January 2010 at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. This course is taught by Wesley Fryer. Learn more about T4T on wiki.powerfulingredients.com.)

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Week 1: Intro and Bloggging (T4T Spr 2010)

This is the video archive for our class on 13 January 2010 or week 1 of "Technology for Teachers." Access all our week 1 curriculum and links on the Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning wiki.



Access weekly lecturecasts like this one using a computer web browser or a smartphone / iPhone or an iPod Touch using the web address: t4t.blip.tv. Since I am teaching two sections of T4T this term on Wednesdays, I will just publish one of the two lecture recordings each week. This week's recording is for section 62, the 9 - 10:50 am class. This is the overview of our class today:
Hyperlinked writing is the most powerful form of writing, and forms a cornerstone of literacy our hyper-connected information and communications landscape. We will explore how educators and students are using blogs for a variety of constructive purposes, how microblogging with Twitter differs from blogging with other tools, and how blogs can be used to share professional reflections for this course. We will discuss the importance of building and maintaining a professional digital footprint, and explore the free K-12 Online Conference. (Resources on www.powerfulingredients.com)