cool tool discovered

I was surfing the internet this morning starting from a blog saved in my favorites and found this free drawing tool. It is so easy to use it's scary. You don't have to log in you can just start using it and save your image. After you hit the save button it gives you the url. which you can immediately cop and paste, as I have done here.
http://offtype.net/image_4361755357987.gif.html
another drawing that would be the type the students would create for the House Planning and Architectural Design class.
http://offtype.net/image_6663344382402.gif.html

Social Networking

I have signed on to Classroom 2.0 and added the class as friends. I have shared a few frustrations with "friends". I have explored the site and think it will be a good source for finding sites and material I can use in the classroom. I will also be able to continue the asynchronous communication with classmates through this portal, but I can also do that through the blogline feeder I set up. I think this some of the confusion I am experiencing with all this new technology all at once. Which is the best platform to communicate and gather information from others? As I use these tools more I'm sure it will become more obvious to me.

I was able to gather some ideas from the reading the article "RSS & Readers" that I thought could be useful as I am developing lessons for the coming school year and trying to embrace more technology in instructional design. There were many links to resources and that I will probably be referring to in the future.

Asynchronous and synchronous communication tools

The synchronous communication tools that I have chosen to use for this class are the blog I created and the class wiki.

I have finally gotten a clear vision of how I will be using the blog to organize the various tools we will be using and adding as we continue in this class. The blog I have created will of course be a reflective journal of the learning process. The blog now has a link to all of the students blogs in our class as well as the two that we selected relating to our profession. It will also be a base for accessing the RSS feed I have created in bloglines.

I chose to use bloglines as my aggregator because I already had experience with google reader and wanted to try something else. My experience with google reader was only for a couple of weeks so it's great to being trying blogline basically at the same time. I like the clean interface of bloglines and found it easy to set up. After seeing other students google reader usage last night during class I am seeing that it may be better than bloglines. I will keep experiencing bloglines throughout the class and see what the final judgement is.
The feauture that I think I will like the most as I continue to populate the aggregator with feeds is the ability to have one place to see whats new that I want to read. As mentioned in the WIRED article by Ryan Singel the information I want is going to be pulled by me and not push at me like the crap I get through e-mail spam.

I have participated in the classroom wiki as assigned but to be quite honest I don't like using it. The reason I am not a big fan is I have found that when I go back and look at it I can't really tell what's new and end up reading things that I have already read. I also find the format very unwelcoming to read. From a design point of view the sameness of all the entries is very boring and unappealing. I will keep working at appreciating the learning environment that the wiki provides and not focus as much on the aesthetics.

I have tried finding a professional development wiki that I can join and use as resource for teaching drafting and architectural design. I have not had any luck with this endeavor. I may be going about this wrong. I found a site that had an interesting narrative about Computer Aided Drafting, which is one of the subjects I teach, that I would like to edit but I have not gotten permission to edit the wiki. I doubt that I will get permission as it is part of a commercial site selling drafting services.

I made changes on wikipedia in the section on drafting here is the link to the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_drawing#Before_CAD. I rather enjoyed doing it. I kept thinking that I would not really have anything that I could contribute to a wiki until I got to this post on wikipedia and found quite a few things that needed editing. I think I may go back and work on it some more.

many ways to organize

I have created a blog here at blogger.com to post my thoughts as I continue to learning about all the amazing technology and assistance available through the internet. I think I will use the blog space as a portal to access the other tools we will be gathering and using in this class. A couple of the features I have discovered that are fun are the spell check and text coloring. These work just like most word processing programs and help my writing to be a bit more presentable.

Social Bookmarking http://del.icio.us/rgilcrist
The social book marking site I have chosen is del.icio.us. I agree with the author of the article from www.educause.edu/eli/ that the down side to this social bookmarking means that I will "storing data yet in another space" but from what I have seen and done with it so far it will be worth the effort. Having bookmarks stored on a website that does not live on my computer is great. I'm not always using my own computer when I'm working on school work or work at the University. I have also used the feature of checking out what others have saved in their accounts and have found intersting stuff that way as well.

The RSS feeder I will be using is blogline.

And the social networking site I have chosen is classroom 2.0.

Wikis

Wiki and blogs, oh my.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
5:40 PM
At this point I think I'm still a little confused about the difference between a wiki and blog. What I think I understand is that wiki's are created by a community and can be continually edited by anyone who is part of the community. I haven't spent enough time with wiki's right now to really get the motivation for using one.

I think blogs are a little more intuitive. Perhaps blogs are more intuitive to me because they look a lot like websites, and I've been on hundreds of websites. The navigation is like a website with links, resources, and usually an objective. But what I don't always get is why people would want to read someone else's blog. As I do more blog reading it may become clearer to me why I will want to be part of this communication community.

blogs I like

I found this blog http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/ through http://www.blogcatalog.com/learn . It got my attention right away because of the of the graphics and topics such as; no stupid questions…really, teaching habits that inspire you out of learning, I have bragging rights because I am…?, are point points evil?
What I read of the blog was interesting and inspired me to keep reading . The blog is really well laid out for navigation. This blogger has taken this format of collaboration and communication seriously and obviously has been active on his blog for quiet awhile.
On the right side of the website are categories of other websites, a list other bloggers, a list repositories, a list audio/video, a list open courseware, a list learning tools, the bloggers discoveries posted to de.lic.ous , and a list of RSS feeds.
Here is another interesting blogger that I found http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com/. I was in a work shop last week and set up a RSS feed to the other participants weblogs and low and behold I was connected to this blogger, Mr. Byrne. I think this illustrates the usefulness of this type of collaborative learning environment. If we find bloggers with common interests we can share the neat stuff we learn.

reflections on using Elluminate

Some thoughts on the first Elluminate session

Elluminate has an incredible array of functionality for teachers and students to interact at a distance. As long as the student and teacher have agreed upon a time to meet the work session can be synchronous. It is also possible for the teacher (or moderator) of the session to record the session for review later. This trumps live lectures for a lot of reasons. I don't know how many times I would like to have reviewed what I covered in a lecture, with no ability to do so.

The teacher needs to prepare material ahead of time like they would for a face to face lecture. I think I can get away with more ad lib in my face to face classes than will be possible using elluminate.

What I found in our first session was that my home computer was not able to receive and transmit audio until I did some messing with the computer. I wish I could say I knew how I solved the problem, but I would be lying. Like many things computer related for me, I stumbled upon the solution but have no idea what the problem was that I solved. Rather unscientific at best.

Though we were warned to test ahead of class I was confident I could log right on and join the session, so