Tomorrow I’m starting the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course being offered online by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.  There are over 1,600 people participating in the course.  It will be quite an experience!  I’m going to start some of the readings tonight, but was disappointed to find that many are pdf. documents which don’t allow me to highlight or post comments on directly online.

I’m going to look for a support group to see if anyone else has found a good way to read 60-75 page articles online without downloading them.

I had been trying to keep both this blog and my Blogger one going in order to compare their capabilities and offer my students a choice of blogging sites to use to create their own blogs.  By using both sites, I hoped to be able to answer some how-to questions as they would come up. However, I’ve decided that i just don’t have the time to keep up with both sites, so I’m going to concentrate on the Blogger site for educational technology issues and use this one for more personal journaling on life.

  Yipee!  I found how to get back my original sidebar.  In the Word Press forum someone asked the same questions that I had, “How do you delete a widget?”  The answer was to go to Presentation>Widgets and then click and drag the widget you don’t want into the widget box with all the icons.  After clicking Save the sidebar reverted to its original form.  Now I can work on modifying it!

I have been trying out Voice Thread and think it has a lot of potential for teaching.  However, I experimented by copying 4 photos of my daughter from when she was younger and asking my relatives to post comments on the photos for her birthday.  The uploading and commenting with the webcam were easy for me as the creator, but everyone else seems to have had  problem.  It may be that they have to register.  That makes it more complicated.  I’ll have to check that out.  I was hoping that they could just comment.  Perhaps if I make the site completely public that would help.  I’ll keep working on it.

Well, I’ve messed up my sidebar by adding del.icio.us tags.  I wonder if there is anyway to get back the former sidebar?

Today I had a great time with Dave’s EVO Tips and Tricks group.  We used our webcams to chat in WizIQ, a virtual classroom.  Next week the SMiELT group is going there to try it out too. on 2/10 at 19 GMT.  Dave took us to another site Mebeam with fewer options (no whiteboard, no uploading content, etc.) , but which allows up to 10-12 webcams at one time.  Really cool.  I can see many possiblities for each of these teaching tools.

As usual I’m way behind on what I should be doing for the Social Media in English Language Teaching course I’m in, but as I was tagging some sites into my del.icio.us account I just had to post something about my favorite teaching tools, videos from Common Craft.  Sachi and Lee LeFever have created marvelous vidos to explain Internet tools such as rss, wikis, social networking and social bookmarking.  I’ve incorporated many of their videos into my courses because the creators have definitely used a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas.  I hope some of my classmates in EVO will check out these videos if they haven’t already.

Now I’ll try to catch up on my homework for SMiELT

I am in the first week of the Electronic Village Social Media in English Language Teaching free, six-week, online course.  As part of our homework for the week we were to sign up for the various tools we’ll be using and compare them to each other and to a conventional LMS.  I have created a table comparing some of the tools.  I haven’t added information about the trio of 43 (Things, People and Places0 because I can’t figure out how they work.  I’ve posted a call for help on the EVO site, but haven’t received any intput yet.  What I have realized in comparing the tools is that all of the oneswe are using are asynchronous.  I wonder why that is.  Here is the chart so far.

Comparison of Social Media Tools 

 New online tools appear everyday and existing tools continue to add new features.  In general, for example, BigThink seems to be a more sophisticated version of ChinSwing and Community walk seems to be a simplified version of GoogleMaps.  I don’t mean that these tools were developed from each other, but that they incorporate more or fewer features of the related type of tool. 

As far as how the tools in the chart compare to a learning management system such as Blackboard, it depends on which tools we are comparing.  Here are features of the version of BB that my university uses:

• Asynchronous discussion board
• Synchronous chat
• Uploading of audio and video files by both teacher and learner.

For me the biggest difference is that BB is a closed system whereas most of the tools in the chart can be public or have varying degrees of privacy.

This fall semester teaching at SUNYAB has been quite overwhelming.  Having had 50 students to provide feedback to was rewarding but extremely time-consuming.  I found that I didn’t have time to explore new online  tools myself or to refine my skills at using the tools that I am familiar with in order to keep my courses as up-to-date and as accessible as possible for a wide range of skill levels.

I have also seen that I don’t have time to keep up with all the very informative blogs that I have rss feeds for, so I think the solution is to choose just two or three of the most useful.  However, I want to keep a list of some of the very best ones to use as suggestions for my students.

In the interim between semesters I hope to review some new sites for recording podcasts since trying to have the students record directly on Podomatic was a real disaster.  The site is very unreliable in that aspect.  The students who were successful were mostly those who recording elsewhere and uploaded their mp3 files to Podomatic.  I know that recording in Audacity is an option, but it seems complicated for newbies and my purpose is not to have the students create fantastic podcasts, but, simply, to have them start to envision how podcasting could enhance their teaching.  I’ll have to remember to mention that video podcasting is an option they can also use.

The purpose of this blog seems to be evolving into a repository of reflections and how to type instructions.  Let’s see what the new year brings.

I’m really excited about a new tool that was mentioned in the online conference run by George Siemens called The Future of Education.  One of the presenters mentioned a program called screencast-o-matic which sounded like just what I have been looking for in order to let students watch demos that I create about using various Internet tools.  To me it’s like a very simple, free form of Camtasia.  You use a box to enclose the information on the screen that you want to demonstrate and then you record as you procede to explain the steps you are taking.  I’ve created an episode on how to use Odeo Studio.  You can see it at http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/ci1Z6TqN

Now that the semester has ended, I’m going to try to establish a daily routine (starting tomorrow) of reading blogs and commenting on what I find there in my own blog.  Having recently inherited a 14-year-old Cocker Spaniel who suffers from separation anxiety, I’m am very much house-bound for a while.  That circumstance may be a blessing in disguise.

Yesterday I finally make a visual showing my personal learning network.  I used a tool called Gliffy.  I had tried other ways to do this, but was unable to upload them to a blog.  Here is the link to my visual. http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1174587/

The Gliffy site says that you can embed the diagram, but I’ve tried to embed tha script several times and can’t make it work.  I’ll try again another time.  For the moment the link will have to suffice.