teachNbabble

By way of  Jesse..added ToxBox to a page. You can access it from my tabs. Have to experiment with it a bit but it looks like a cool app for F2F video chatting. With telecom companies here blocking sites such as twitter or Skype I wonder how long it will be before they realize that this battle is fundamentally over and they need to find other ways to recoup the losses they incur from the drop in long distance telephone calls.

Took a look at Coursefeed today and added it to my Facebook. Coursefeed is a Facebook application that connects with Blackboard to provide links to Blackboard content. The application creates a course list as shown below. I am only enrolled in a demo course as I am not part of a network using Blackboard. When you select the course you are sent to a page that includes Classroom, Announcements, Content and Roster as tabbed page links. Classroom includes a classroom wall, a file upload section and a course roster. The announcement tab appears to pull information from the class announcements section of Blackboard but I could not tell as only one of the posts I saw on Facebook were part of the actual announcements found in the demo Blackboard site. The application pulls in course content as seen below. These are links to the actual item on the Blackboard site with each major item corresponding to one of the Blackboard menu items holding course information.

This is a tool where a student would have the option to bring course information into a social networking site and based on this information create new social groups. I remember doing something similar to this with university study groups back in the dark ages.  According to my daughter,  students currently use informal systems such as using  course related Facebook networks to keep in touch with other students in a class.  All in all this is an interesting mixture of the social aspects of Facebook with the organizational aspects of Blackboard.

The Thinking Stick has been in charge of my PD this week. Looking at the way they are organizing themselves with respects to technology made me look at how we plan to structure our Tech Team. Mixing their terminology with ours then adding the two graphics to a Google presentation so as a Tech Team we could examine and collaborate on our structure will help us better understand how we might more effectively divide responsibilities.

The next day my reader pulled down another Thinking Stick gem, When it all goes Right featuring a Voice Thread from an IB art class. What a great way to display student art. Have them post the graphic then discuss where the ideas came from and how they created the piece. I thought it was impressive, as did the kids and the art teacher I quickly showed the thread to later!

[audio:saddle.mp3]

I had a conversation with Sara in early November about changes in online personal/professional development. I have been enrolling in classes and through these classes learning more about different topics that interest me. The classes require that I read, write, collaborate and consider new ideas. More and more, the ideas I find the most interesting are the ones that appear in my GoogleReader, Netvibes or Bloglines account. It is eerie how often a post on a blog matches or enhances a topic currently being discussed in school.

Our school is modifying how it structures IT services. I read a post by Doug Johnson referring to changes in a tech planning model he had created. These changes suggested by Jeff Utecht modify the plan slightly but in a way that enhances the original plan. When I read his post in noticed, Jeff had labeled his posts in parts and this was part four of his thoughts on a Tech Plan. Looking at part three of his Tech Plan, however, I found a diagram that would have helped with the discussion our administrative team was having with respects to how they might reorganize our Tech services.

From The ThinkingStick, Jeff Utech

Next step is to look at our structure and map it out in a manner similar to above.