I’ve been meaning to post on this presentation Ewan McIntosh gave recently at the Tipperary Institute’s Education futures event, and now have time.
It’s an exposition of the power of social networking and how pervasive it is for many 21st century students. Given the audience, the time available to him, and the message he wanted to get across, it says a lot about what people are doing on Facebook and the like, but it’s a little light on the pedagogical relevance (he does more of that here). It’s worth a look and listen, though, and the challenge Ewan has for us to learn why students want ‘go to these places’ is an important one.
Set up to discuss and share good practice around the PYP exhibition, it’s a wonderful use of Ning’s social networking capabilities, and I encourage any PYP teachers among you to drop by some time.
Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:
An interesting meet-up is being planned around BETT next year. Called TeachMeet08, it is a gathering of education technologists, willing to share their experiences and expertise. It is being led by Ewan McIntosh among others and he has blogged about it here.
If you want to sign up, please do so at the supporting wiki: TeachMeet08.
For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:
Just a reminder re. the K-12 online conference starting in just over a couple of weeks time.
From their about page:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone.
Earlier this year, Paul Fairbrother and I presented at a couple of IB conferences on the use of emerging social media tools in education.
In preparing for these presentations we constructed a wiki using wikispaces. There are many other platforms, including mediawiki (the software originally written for wikipedia) and wetpaint, but this one appealed because of its simplicity and the fact that at the time they were giving away a number of free wikispaces to schools.
Initially, the intention was to keep the wiki to ourselves, but it soon became clear that others would benefit from having access, in order to find more examples of what we were talking about in the presentations themselves. So we decided to release it; first to conference participants, and now to readers of this blog.
Wherever possible, we have tried to give examples from IB schools, but occasionally we’ve had to go beyond this community in order to illustrate certain tools or concepts that aren’t yet fully established. As you can imagine, so much of what we refer to changes so quickly.
I’ve just seen some screen grabs of the new version of del.icio.us. Techcrunch are blogging about it here and the official preview site is here (invite only).
Upon first glance it looks good. Much cleaner interface and some interesting new features:
A new search engine that includes contextual search. You can now search your own bookmarks, all bookmarks or just your network
