Future Learning

Our course has ended, yet the journey to Techland continues. I'm planning to have some future fun with adding gadgets to my blog, so I'm embedding a video in my wiki to remind myself how to add a gadget. I'm so glad that our study group plans to continue to meet to share ideas and learn together.

Another Cool Tool for School

The newest cool tool in my tech toolbox is useful for brainstorming, organizing, and mind mapping. Bubbl.us provides opportunities for sharing ideas, collaborating, and editing. Tasks involving brainstorming or semantic mapping can be visualized using Bubbl.us. I used it in conjunction with a problem-solving activity with one of my social skills groups. I also made an initial attempt to summarize my 21st century learning in this course with the aid of this tool. Check out two examples that I embedded in wikis: Savoring Satisfying Sections and Social Communication.

Quick and Easy Classroom Applications

After viewing the K12Online presentation, Little Kids, Big Possibilities, by Kelly Hines I have successfully utilized Wallwisher with my language and social skills groups. The students enjoyed posting their comments to summarize speaker and listener roles and rules, sort observations of effective and ineffective usages of nonverbal communication cues, and brainstorm vocabulary pertaining to emotions. My students also enjoy creating Wordles, another tool mentioned in this presentation. It was encouraging to quickly and effectively apply new tech tools after viewing the presentation. I embedded examples of both in my wikis.

A New Wiki: Social Communication

I just created a new wiki, Social Communication, as a compilation of resources and lessons for facilitating effective social communication skills. I was pleased to realize that I still remembered how to create new pages and use edit navigation to order the pages and link them to the wiki. Maybe some of this learning will actually "stick" and become part of my repertoire of tools for teaching. This is actually quite amusing since I started this course as a "ludite", according to the beloved members of my family.

A Good Find

Last night I found a website that has instant application for simplifying my life. Recently, I exerted incredible effort to recall a book (without any success) that I read several years ago. Since I have been borrowing books from the library, I couldn't just peruse my many bookshelves to find the desired title. I decided it was imperative to start to track my reading of fiction and nonfiction books. This will serve as a resource when I want to recommend a book or reread a favorite one. Yesterday during our "study group" I was introduced to Goodreads, the solution to my dilemma. I can't wait to read more books to add to my bookshelves! If you are an avid reader, or a forgetful reader, take a moment to investigate this site and join in the fun.

Blog-Wiki Linking

I just learned how to use an external link to link my blog Becoming Tech Savvy with 3Cs Learning with my summary of personal learning wiki, Savoring Satisfying Sections I had a momentary set-back this morning when I was adding an linking an article to my wiki. Suddenly all of the pages except for the home page were invisible! When I checked recent changes to wiki, I saw that all of the pages had been edited, but I have no idea how. I had clicked on edit navigation because I couldn't find my Introduction page, but when I tried to add one it said that I already had one. What confusion, but thanks to the assistance of a colleague, we were able to re-create links to the pages. Whew!

Hearing is Learning

I just added another way of experiencing my blog posts, added with the auditory learner in mind. When I discovered this web 2.0 tool, I thought of the many possibilities for using this my students who have difficulty reading and need to listen to books on tape. See the odiogo website to add this gadget to your blog.