View my page on TechnospudProjects My on-line friend, Jen Wagner, has recently created a Ning for primary school teachers as a place to met up, share ideas and find other teachers around the world who want to collaborate on global projects and meet up with other like minded teachers. Joining this Ning would be a great way to join a PLN, Personal Learning Network, and move out of just sharing your learning with your class, school or parent community.
Lisa Parisi, from New York, and I have recently collaborated on a Hemispheres Wiki. Lisa’s class set a couple of questions that could best be answered by people living in the Southern Hemisphere and we set about answering them from our own experiences showing photos and videos of our findings. The seasonal differences were highlighted by our class photos on the ‘about page’. Lisa’s children were standing in their playground surrounded by snow and mine were on the beach.
This week’s highlight has been an impulse buy- Parallels for my TELA laptop. I was going to buy a new 17inch MacBook Pro but got the speed wobbles when I realised how much it was going to cost. This is my compromise. I may still buy a MacBook at a later date. The installation went smoothly and now I not only have a back-up of my PC on my TELA Apple laptop but I can access my books and other Publisher files from my Apple. I even got my new Polycom Communicator that only runs with Windows XP to work with a quick test Skype call to Lenva Shearing just to check. With the Communicator you can make Skype call with the speaker to a larger audience and not have to worry about feedback. Tino pai rawa!
I can’t wait till our next Skype collaboration- maybe with Lisa Parisi from New York as we learn together via our hemispheres wiki to find out about how things work in our different hemispheres.
After an all day Sunday session at school tidying up for move to another classroom and a new level of children. I felt in need of a little light relief as I had cleared my Bloglines and checked out the tweets and thought I would ‘Google‘ myself. I was amazed that this German blogger had found his/her way to my Teacher tube Video, One Woman’s Wanderings with Web2.o. These links are truly incredible.
Over the last so long I have become an avid follower of the conversations brought about through Twitter.
There is much talk about ‘getting’ or ‘not getting’ Twitter. At first I thought it a bit of a toy but realise now that it can be much more than than that.
I follow the ‘Tweets’ of these people and 115 people follow what I say. Through Twitter I have been able to share some of the things we have been doing, get the word out about events, happenings and new tools, find out more about the thoughts of others, link to new blog posts, share ideas and feel connected to other teachers globally.
You can tweet from your mobile phone and receive tweets even when you are away from your computer and you can privately direct message individuals within the 140 character limit.
The way to ‘get’ Twitter is to leap in- find some people that you want to share information and ideas with and ‘follow’ them and follow some of the people that they follow. From there the conversation spreads.
Here is my Aussie mate Chris Betcher’s video on how Twitter works if you are more of a visual learner…
Through Twitter we invited the world to join our “What have we learnt with ICT? Voicethread and Lisa Parisi from New York had her class add valuable input into it and make it so much more richer. We are about take part in the new collaboration with our Northern Hemisphere friends who want to find out more about life below the equator. Lisa has made this comparing hemispheres wiki and we are going to help her class find out some answers to a couple of questions that I have always wanted to know the answers to as well- like which way does water go down the plughole at latitude 43 degrees north- clockwise or anti-clockwise?
Today Tweeterboard was brought to my attention , via a tweet of course. With Tweeterboard you can gauge how influential and ‘clickable’ your tweets are based on your conversations with other Twitter users.
