Second Life

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world full of different island themes.  It is fun to just wander around and chat with people, but it is also the latest tool in education.  It is a place to meet in a virtual classroom with amazing visuals and demonstrations.  It is also a great way for people to discuss current events in education.  I sat in on the Thothica group, named for an Egyptian God who brought water and life back to Egypt.  This community has regular meetings to discuss current events, ethical/moral issues, and philosophy. 

I also visited Eduisland, which has many teaching tools for educators to use.  This island was created by Seminole County Public Schools.  They have tools assorted by content and teleports and notecards for each of them.  There are areas made for collaboration, areas with tutorials, an art gallery and more. 

 

Second Life in Education

This is a very informative Wiki.  It explains what SL is and different ways it can be used in education.  It provides the reader with SL islands that are divided by subject and content area.  It has movies and slideshows that are like mini-tutorials for SL.  One of the islands described is Music Academy Inworld.  On this island there are places for music performances, discussion, lectures and classrooms with audio/visual capabilities.  The Island of Svarga is a fully-functioning ecosystem.  The plants and animals reproduce and pass on by themselves.  It is a great way to study how and ecosystem works and how different things can influence the life of a plant or animal.  This is a great place to find content driven SL islands for education.

 

Educational Uses of Second Life (YouTube video)

This video describes different ways to use SL for education.  It describes how teachers can use scavenger hunts, time period reenactments, guided tours, co-creation, simulations, quizzing, tutorials, joining professional networks, collaboration, and information sharing via whiteboards all using SL.  I found this video to be very informative and entertaining.

 

SLED Blog

This blog site focuses on what different groups are doing to promote education in SL.  One that caught my eye was an entry that related to University of Michigan-Dearborn, which is very close to where I live.  In their sim, they are trying to solve a real life problem that their local food bank is having, by playing it out in SL.  Having this sim provides educator with case studies and builds community awareness to a problem close to home.  Using SL as a community outreach/awareness program brings a new and interesting twist to ongoing social problems.

 

Second Life and Education from Crossroads the ACM Student Magazine

This article describes mainly two applications of SL: SL classrooms and SL libraries.  It discusses the advantages to teaching in a SL classroom, such as outstanding visuals, simulated fictional or historical characters, accessibility, and the ability of students to participate in the actual creation of the classroom.  It also discusses Sloodle, which is the SL presence of Moodle.  The Moodle tools can be used in SL.  It also discusses the breakdown of racial barriers, since people do not look or speak like they do in real life, there is less apprehension to talk to others in SL.

SL libraries are online libraries that give off the feel of a real library.  They are able to take advantage of the same browsing and searching databases and social tags as other libraries, but the SL libraries are able to have different buildings for different genres of books, and the buildings can be decorated to fit the genre.  The Mystery Manor, for example, is built as a haunted house with visual and audio effects that set the mood.

 

101 Uses for SL in the College Classroom

This article discusses 101 uses for SL in the college classroom.  What interested me the most were the different assignments the professor gave.  One assignment was an interview based assignment that discussed body image.  Students had to create their own avatar and then ask other avatars about their personal appearances, discuss modification options, money spent on personal appearance, and contemplating what sorts of appearances would earn positive appearance ratings.  The professor also had an assignment in which the students had to build a chair and put some personality into it.  He also mentions contests that students can participate it.  He goes on to discuss the relationships of people in SL and the different cultures to be found there, very informative.

Podcasting in Education

Podcasting is an easy way to distribute a series of audio or visual files on the Internet.  There are two things that must occur before your audio or visual file can be deemed a podcast.  1.  It must be stored somewhere online.  2. It must be made available through a subscription.  Once those steps are complete, voila, you have created a podcast.  Below are some articles that explain how podcast are being used in education today.

 

Podcasting Just Might Be the Tool to Revolutionize Education

This article explains how college professors are using podcasts, or coursecasting, as study tools for students and as a preview for non-students to see how the course is run.  Some educators are requiring students to subscribe to podcasts as well as create their own.  The benefits of podcasting are especially helpful to foreign language students, so they may hear the different intonations and speech patterns of the language being studied.  Educators are also creating videocasts.  These are very useful when conducting labs, or virtually visiting places classes are not actually able to visit.

           

The Education Podcast Network

This website is a collection of educational podcasts with the express purpose to help educators find podcasts they need or want.  They are arranged according to subject and there are also student and class podcasts available.  This is a very helpful site for teachers not sure where to look for subject related podcasts.

 

Podcasting in the Classroom

This website outlines a lesson for students to create their own podcasts.  This could be a monthly class news bulletin or they could be the assignment itself.  It is based on the California state standards for technology integration.  This lesson plan is open to interpretation in that the podcast could be an oral report, interview, a reproduction of a lesson for absent students, and more.  It is not narrowed down to only one application.

 

Ideas for Podcasting in the Classroom

This website defines exactly what a podcast is and then supplies the reader with several resources that are related to setting up a podcast and how to use it in the classroom.  Some examples for classroom use are science field notes, audio experiment observations, material distribution, art critiques, self-produced museum walking tour, historical audio diaries, and many more.  Once recorded these podcasts can be shared with family and friends.

 

Incredible @rt Department: Blogs & Podcasts

Because I am an art teacher, I chose this website, which is specifically geared toward art podcasts.  This site has student based podcasts as well as lesson sharing podcasts, discussion podcasts, how to’s for creating different art projects.  It also has an index of art podcasts and podcasts in general.  I found this website to be the most beneficial for me.

RSS & You

RSS or Rich Site Summary, also known as Really Simple Summary makes it easy to keep up with the blogs or news sites you enjoy reading.  Once you have created an aggregator (a collection site for all of your sites) you simply have to input the sites you would like to subscribe to, and whenever those sites are updated they are automatically sent to your aggregator.  This saves time, because now instead of going to each individual site, they are all in one place.

 

RSS: The Next Killer App for Education

This article, by Mary Harrsch, explains what an RSS feed is and gives four classroom examples of how to use it in the classroom.  Her first example describes how we usually share information, by sending out mass e-mails to everyone we know.  She suggests you post your findings in a blog that can be subscribed to by friends, family, and colleagues.  Her second example is to subscribe to a newsfeed to get the most current information in your field.  Her third example is to subscribe to all the school Web logs in you district to keep up to date on what is going on around the district.  The last example is of a researcher blogging about an unknown artifact and posting a picture of it.  An archeologist from halfway around the world then contacts the researcher with information about the artifact.   Harrsch is also an RSS advocate e-mailing webmasters without XML links to ask them to add a link.

 

RSS and Education

This article demonstrates 15 different ways to use RSS feeds for school use; teacher or student.

1.     Share resources with colleagues or students

2.  Syndicate your class blog

3.     Keep an updated sports schedule

4.     Subscribing to podcasts for current information

5.     Monitor news and search engines for research

6.     Use for professional development feeds

7.     Job searches

8.     Collaborative research

9.     Create a search feed

10. Study guide feeds

11. Medical education-subscribe to medical podcasts

12. Monitor scholarships

13. Monitor funding and grant opportunities

14. Keeping up to date on school news by subscribing to school blogs

15. Staying up to date on financial aid news

 

 

RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators

This is a PDF that takes educators step by step through RSS, from set up to resources.  It recommends using RSS feeds to keep track of students blogs, showing students how to use it for keeping track of research, and it describes how to use it for searches.  It explains how to search for news, blogs, websites, and news groups.  It then supplies you with interesting sites and more resources for learning about RSS.

 

Educational Feeds

This website is full of educational feeds that you can search and subscribe to.  This website does not explain how to use RSS, in fact it doesn’t discuss RSS at all.  I added this website to my collection as a resource for RSS feeds to search.  Any number of these feeds could be useful to teachers.  They range from college fairs to English, from blogs to journals, all very useful feeds.

 

What is RSS?

This site once again defines RSS and how to use it, the application mentioned here that has not yet been mentioned is the iCalendar.  One can keep up to date with any changes in the subscribed to iCal.  This could be very useful for students and parents trying to keep up with individual class calendars.

 

RSS feeds are a great way to stay current with your favorite sites.  I am already using mine regularly.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way to collect websites online.  Each website collected can be tagged with multiple tags or descriptors.  Once tagged, all like tags are kept together.  If you wish to look for other websites with like tags, you can simply search your tag in your social bookmarking network or search the sites of people who have tagged the same site as yours.  Following are a few sites with more information on social bookmarking.

 

Nine Notable Uses For Social Bookmarking

This website discusses nine different uses for social bookmarking. 

1.     Using it as a calendar of events

2.     A “people” database, keeping track of and gaining new contacts

3.     Maintaining research documents

4.     File indexing: images, audio, video

5.     Determine popularity of a website

6.     On-line portfolio

7.     Make new contacts

8.     Website rating

9.     Specialized networking, different networks have different angles and applications

 

Using Delicious in Education

This article written by … discusses the history of Delicious, how to use it, and different tagging methods.

1.     The Selfish Style

a.     Tagging only for oneself or people close to you

b.     Tagging an article Oliver for my husband to look at it when the article has nothing to do with any “Oliver”

2.     The Friendly Type

a.     Tagging for friends, colleagues, project partners, etc.

3.     The Altruist Type

a.  General tagging in order to share with as many people as possible

4.     The Popular Type

a.     “Artificial” tagging

b.     Tagging something as “interesting”, “top 10”, etc.,  has no social benefit

It also describes how Delicious can be used to support teaching and learning by creating learning communities, supporting lectures, research, project support, bibliographic aid, informal feedback, and developing management abilities.

 

Social Bookmarking in Education blog from Frequently Answered Questions

This is a blog created by Rebecca Hedreen.  In her blog, she describes all different types of social bookmarking.  With FURL, even if the site you bookmark changes or expires, you can still access the information in your FURL account.  Flickr is a network for photographs.  Connotea and CiteULike are networks for academics and researchers.  She goes on to describe different ways to use social networking in the classroom.

 

Social Bookmarking in Higher Education

This website goes over everything you may need to know about social bookmarking.  It explains what it is, how to do it, ways it is used in education and in business, and lists many different networks to choose from. 

 

Social Bookmarking in Education blog from Openweb.com

This blog describes mainly three different social networks that either are solely or include bookmarking.  They are Pligg, Elgg, and Posh.  The author takes you step-by-step through the bookmarking procedures of each network and discusses how one can use this in the classroom.

 

 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Twitter is becoming more popular daily.  We have seen effects of Twitter recently with the elections in the Middle East.  Twitter is being discussed daily in the papers, on the news, on my favorite morning radio show.  It can be used simply to state what one is doing at any given moment (which Aston Kutcher has become well-known for), or it can be used to as a tool.  In education it can link teachers to resources as well as other teachers and teaching tools or websites.  It can become a discussion board for students to bounce ideas and question off each other.  Below are some articles I found that discuss some educational uses for Twitter.

Online Tools for Poetry in the Classroom

Greg Smith, an Instructional Technology Specialist, discusses how he has used Twitter to help teach poetry.  He lists and explains the different ideas he received from other teachers’ tweets.  He was able to connect with teachers from around the country through Twitter to enhance his poetry unit.

The Twitter Experiment

This is a video of Dr. Monica Rankin, a college professor, who uses Twitter during her class of 90 students.  She uses it to fuel discussion and to create more interaction between her and her students.  One point of particular interest is that she was able to participate and guide her class when she wasn’t even in the same state. 

Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter

Cole Camplese, director of education technology at Penn State, uses Twitter much the same way as seen in the video above (The Twitter Experiment).  However, the most interesting part of this article comes afterward.  The comments about the article are what interest me.  There are comments from supporters and those who oppose Twitter.  It is very interesting to see the back and forth commentary.  Some commentators appear to be very old-fashioned about how teaching should be done and are very verbal about it, and others want to share and use this in their own classrooms.

Home Alone! Still Collaborating

Mary Ann Bell and Tricia Kuon discuss how technology is important to use in and out of the classroom, particularly in online classrooms.  One aspect of this article I found particularly interesting was their step-by-step guide to introducing a new technology.  I found it to be very helpful.  Twitter was also discussed in terms of collaboration between like minds and making connections.

Twitter4Teachers Wiki

This website is very useful for new teachers trying to find some meaning in Twitter.  When first trying Twitter it can seem like a solely social network; however, if a teacher goes to this website http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/ , they can find other teachers with like interests and content areas who are more than willing to share their thoughts, ideas and lesson plans with one another.

While Twitter can be used for fun and simply wasting away the day with senseless Tweets, it can also be a fantastic collaborating tool connecting people from across the country 140 characters at a time.

Educational Uses for Blogging

Educational blogging is the new wave in education.  It can be used as a sounding board, a classroom bulletin board, a planning station for group projects, or for assignment clarification.  Blogs can also be used to find information.  The site  http://www.kqed.org/arts/?gclid=CM-tpvzcyJsCFRIeDQodzGf1Jg is an arts current events blog.  It poses critical thinking questions and articles.  There are similar sites out there for every subject matter.  Discussion and questions are highly recommended.  

Blogs create a discussion board for the topic at hand.  In this site, http://thoughtsonteaching-jdunlap.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-blogs-with-students.html, a teacher explains how she uses blogs to engage her students in a classroom community on-line.  She also describes how using blogging in her class has lead to deep discussions and reflective thinking in and among her students.

Universities are making good use of blogging as a means of “flexible delivery” (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/13066/1/13066.pdf) of class material.  Power points, lecture notes, web links, and past exam papers can be posted to give students every opportunity to do well in class.  They are also used as a reflective journaling tool with the purpose of sharing and discussing ideas; however, as discussed by J. David Betts, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.1802&rep=rep1&type=pdf, that is not always how it works.  Students are sometimes reluctant to share their thoughts with others and in turn discuss another student’s ideas.  If a professor or teacher wants students to use a blog in this way, they have to weave it into the requirements of the course, or it may not happen.  

For those who are apprehensive about blogging and do not know where to begin, visit this website http://www.wtvi.com/teks/04_05_articles/educational_blogging.html.  It takes you through blogging step by step.  It discusses blogging safety, how to search for blogs, and how to maintain your blog