To Learn Twice

Several of my colleagues at NECC have been asking how the website is coming. I thought I would just blog an update... The tools are coming together better than we ever imagined. Teachers will have 8 tools to add information to their website. Each of these buttons opens a form based interface that allows teachers to input specific information very quickly. This is a sample of the teacher's page where their information is populated. Here is the cool part: We are also building a personalized page where information from all of a student's classrooms and activities is collated in one place. 1 stop shopping for students and parents. You can see the student page graphical design here .

After a lot of planning yesterday's presentation went real well. I got some great feedback from the participant's evaluations, and have several things to adapt, but it went well. I still want to add podcasting resources, more on google groups, make mention to second live and VLE's, and some other things I left out. It is amazing how fast 8 hours can go. It was great to be in front of a class again. I really miss that everyday.

Following up on my Web 2.0 presentation using Zoho Notebook I have collated together a collection of my favorite Digital Storytelling resources in a new notebook for a presentation later this week. The challenge of this presentation is that I am running it in 2 labs at the same time. So here is the plan: Intro about the power of storytelling and follow it up with the added advantages that telling it digitally does. Demo the basics of how photostory works Individuals work on their own story for about an hour. Quick Q&A - share successes. More playtime Close by letting people circulate and show off their work in progress. What do you think? Is there anything I am missing?

I am working on a presentation on Web 2.0 Tools and how to use them in education. I am trying something new and using Zoho notebook as the presentation tool. I have really liked how easy it is to insert video and webpages directly into the pages. Once I got more comfortable with the UI and where to click I was able to put stuff together quite quickly. Of course I am borrowing and stealing from across the web. You can see the presentation here I am open for suggestions or stuff I missed. I am going to start one on digital storytelling next.

I took a moment this morning to start my day off with a TED talk ( Based on Ewan McIntosh's recommendation ). I watched this presentation by Seyi Oyesola that talks about solving problems with high level healthcare and surgery in Africa. He is using inovative technologies to create solutions to impact change in a difficult setting. This isn't so different from what is going on in education right now. The quote the Ewan focused on in his blog was: We the willing have been doing so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing This may have been the case (and still is - in some places) when it comes to educational technology. It has been for many years in the district I am in now. My question is - if you could do anything with nothing, what are your responsibilities to your students once you have everything you need? I believe that your responsibilities change. That my responsibilities change. My favorite quote by Dr. Oyesola was thi