Moving Our Community Online

Last night marked our final f2f class before our 5-week online adventure. Fortunately, we have established a collaborative community and we should be ready to move our learning and interactions to an online environment. Our first online week (starting Feb. 20) will feature viewing our digital stories in our Facebook site and providing one strength and one suggestions for each story. Viewing these stories is an ideal way to begin our online experience together as it will help all of us know each other a little more deeply.

Robyn effectively shared her enthusiasm for and knowledge of the DropBox application and I download the application this morning! I look forward to Toni's online presentation next week. Fortunately, our f2f presentations have modeled well organized, clear and detailed approaches to sharing resources with others.

We also probed a little more deeply into Bransford and Papert and explored similarities in the approaches of the two scholars. Results from this group work will be posted on our Facebook account.

I look forward to this next step in our learning adventure.

My "old" hip made it very clear to me last night that it has no more 3 hour classes left in it (after 40 years of good service in this area), so I look forward to returning in about 6 weeks with the new model.

An Evening Emphasizing Visual Learning: IBooks and Digital Stories

Our focus last night was on using technology to provide more visual learning experiences for students. Ultimately, our new abilities to relate to visual learners could lead to schools and educators providing high quality visual learning experiences for students and to creating school environments that are successful with more students. Thus, the emphasis on visual digital affordances in this class.

Adam Wade kept up the tradition of high quality resource reviews with an interesting and informative review of digital textbook capabilities. I look forward to a lively discussion of this topic this week.

Diana provided a useful definition of digital stories and a useful way to think about creating a story line. Students then completed a quick introduction to the basic skills needed for creating a digital story in either IMovie or MovieMaker. I noted that most students already were quite comfortable with techniques in either IMovie or MovieMaker as evidenced by the quick and creative sample videos now on our class Facebook site.

I am hoping that students will be well started on their own digital stories by class time next week and that we can spend some time discussing these projects and providing suggestions to each other.

After next week, we will move online for several weeks and I am feeling confidant that we have the procedures set up for an interesting and successful online learning experience.