Sunday, January 31, 2010

Twiducate socialnetworking for schools


I have really enjoyed using social networking websites with my students. I first started using 21 Classes  and had a nice experience with it. It had some limitations, though. One thing was the difficulty to embed other things into the pages. I liked to have all students in one front page from where they could access each other's blogs and explore the features they were so used to in their out of class social networks.
Next, I discovered ning. This one I have been using till today and I am planning to continue using this year. Ning is social networking at its best. Its features include forums, chat, blogs, photos, videos, integration with  twitter, and some more. It is worth exploring.
Just yesterday I found out about twiducate on twitter (actually I think I had seen it before, but just yesterday I decided to give it a try). It seems simpler than the other ones and a bit more complete than twitter for what I wanted. I will have a group of beginner students and I really did not want to use ning to avoid overwhelming them with so many features. I also did not want to use a blog because it would be very teacher centered. So twiducate seems like a tool that is not the complex and will allow all students to interact in one place.
I posted this screencast to give those who might want to use it an idea of how it works. I hope it is helpful.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Watching TV while surfing the web

 http://www.viewmy.tv/Index.aspx?srcid=3790
I really love multitasking. I guess once you discover the wonders of the Internet, you just cannot help. Something I also like doing is watching TV. I know that web TV is becoming a reality in the US, but some of the services are not available to other countries. I was really happy when I found out about viewmy.tv where you can watch TV programs from many countries around the world (such as this one where a storyteller entertains children with her story),


Saturday, January 16, 2010

2010-Horizon-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)


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via nmc.org
The Horizon Report is an important report released each year on emerging technologies. It discusses trends and issues related to teaching and learning. It is really worth reading.