Final Presentation March 2010 Social Media for Educators BCIU#22

1. Rose Burgman March 2010 Social Media for Educators

2. Why I took this course: To continue to teach and serve students well in this decade and beyond, I know it is critical for me to understand, incorporate, and keep up with the technological advances as they arrive. (yes, I am a little late…but I’m trying…… that is why I took this course!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

3. Modular Object - Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment is a free and open-source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As of January 2010 it had a user base of 45,721 registered and verified sites, serving 32 million users in 3 million courses.[3]Moodle is developed by Martin Dougiamas to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content.Moodle Pty Ltd (based in Perth, Western Australia) does most of the development of Moodle. Moodle's open source license and modular design allow any developer to create additional modules and features. wikipedia

4. …more about moodle… Moodle is the platform that this course was presented through. The philosophy of Moodle’sapproach to education is that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience. This was demonstrated throughout the course in discussions and forums as well as posting of student work. It took me a while but I learned how to navigate it and am interested in learning how to make one for future use.

5. , I learned , launched its platform publicly in October 2005. It competes with social sites like MySpace and Facebook by appealing to people who want to create their own social networks around specific interests with their own visual design, choice of features and member data. The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific membership bases. Wikipedia http://mathhelp4u.ning.com/

6. My ning.com site: NING

7. It was interesting to follow other educator’s nings. In the few weeks since we began no ‘stranger’ visited my site. I like the idea that I, as a teacher could set one up for my students to access content I would want them to have. An example of using the moodle and my first impressions on nings:

9. Twitter (Happy 4th birthday!) www.twitter.com is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors.[4][5] All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as "SMS of the Internet."[6] The use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter.What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it's not a social network, but it's an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world. -wikipedia

10. TWEETDECK is an Adobe Air desktop application, currently in public beta, that looks to capture the abundance of social media and display it in a unique columned user interface. In recent months there has been an explosion in social media with hundreds of services offering an abundance of information to the masses. TweetDeck is a realtime application that allows users to monitor that information in a single concise view. TweetDeck currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook.Anybody using Twitter will discover the mass of tweets can be somewhat overwhelming and difficult to digest. TweetDeck enables users to split their main Twitter feed (All Friends) into columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.But at the heart of TweetDeck is its ability to group people together and search across the twittersphere. Grouping friends or work colleagues separately means you have a window on all aspects of your twitter life. Searching across the twittersphere means you can monitor any subject within Twitter. These additional columns automatically update so providing the user with a very effective dashboard of realtime information. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tweetdeck

11. Some of my impressions ofTwitter and Tweetdeck: …fast… insane…amazing… informational…opinionated… ‘’precise’ whisper down the lane… timely… current… truth…untruth… better than a newspaper… wise… foolish…sad…funny…addictive… more information thatyou need to know…more information than you need to know… fun to use…frustrating to use…helpful… distracting…unending…

12. Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique URLs bookmarked URLs. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. (wikipedia)

13. I’ve included my Delicious site on the next slide…. but… I’ve only just begun my collection… http://delicious.com/rmburgman/This is probably one of the most practical and exciting tools I’ve learned about in this course.I’m telling all my students and colleagues about it!

15. Diigo/diːɡoʊ/ Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff is a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo or a special link forwarded to someone else. (wikipedia)

16. DIIGO continued… Diigo is going to be very helpful for me becauseI work in so many different areas of education and I have many outside interests as well. I love the idea of having a way to save information without paper and physical storage space. It is also fantastic to be able to access it whenever and wherever I can be online. I’ve been sharing this with high school students and it will be a great help for them in college also.

17. Animotoautomatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. Fast, free and shockingly easy. http://animoto.com/ http://animoto.com/play/WrEXMnaI12VyCvzEde1wmQ I definitely will try this again! I know my students will love to also.

18. Some challenges: For me, although I know more than I ever have about computers, there is still so much that I don’t know and find difficult to do. It takes me longer to do things than it should. I am currently developing my Philosophy of Usernames and Passwords. I’m also unsure of how much of my identity I wish to share on the world wide web with all the news about Identity Theft. I’m often uncomfortable giving out so much of the required information to the unknown. Curiosity… for me, since there is so much that is new, I know I could have completed this course much more quickly if I didn’t stop to investigate so much. The freedom a course like this allows can also be very demanding. I know that I will continue to search out more after the last day of class. Putting together a PowerPoint presentation is not an art that I have mastered and consequently it took me longer than it should have. (maybe I should have taken a course in PP first! ) Yet, I realize that is actually what I hope my students will leave class with- the desire to learn more- not feel that they have attained completion. Nice!

19. Some successes: Reading suggestions from other educators from around the world has been exciting. I especially liked a lesson suggestion I found for teaching positive and negative integers using tile spacers. You can watch it on my ning: http://mathhelp4u.ning.com/ Being able to share Diigo and Delicious with students working on research papers or deciding on college careers

20. …when I grow up, I hope I’ll be…