The last couple of weeks have seen me become distracted from my goal of using digital literacy as a tool to improve my teaching. I have however, been building my skills on a much more personal level and have been investigating the internet's amazing ability for social networking. Part of this is about connecting to the types of things my students might be using and partly for my own benefit.
I signed up to friends unlimited, a UK internet network, and have already found one friend from the high school I attended. We have exchanged a couple of emails and though A was not a close friend at school we spent seven years together in the same form and took mostly the same subjects. Unfortunately A does not live in my home town so I won't be able to catch up when I go back to the UK next year.
I have been playing with my new camera and as well as creating a file of useful photos for my PowerPoint presentations -and I have used a couple already - I have also uploaded a video from the camera to YouTube. I discovered a little space on the side of my laptop to insert the XD card form my camera directly rather than using a USB cable. This saved me a little search time. It took ages to upload and then wasn't available for 8 hours except via the email link I sent - but it was worth perservering. I have already had several comments from family overseas and see this as another great way of keeping in touch.
I have learned a few tricks with my camera including panorama shots which I have never tried before - for once I actually read the manual after playing around without for quite a while. The menus etc are very easy to use on this Olympus ( http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1363) - much simpler than the Canon we had originally. Iwould recommend it to anyone. I took it out in the big storm a couple of weeks ago to photograph the damage done to our property by all the rain without worrying that it could be damaged. I also took it out for rainy walk in the forest. The phot at the top of the page is of a basket fungus I found .
I also got back onto Facebook after deciding not to use it because of the difficulty of deleting material. My brother in England and my husband, who often travels, have both set up pages too, to add to others in the family. My hotmail Spaces site was not being well used as most people seem to be on Facebook so I decided to go with the majority. My youngest daughter (20) has not accepted me as a friend. We discussed and agreed to this -there can be too much sharing. I am not concerned about what she has on her site - we have had several conversations about Internet safety and consequences, and I trust her. It is about maintaining privacy - just like I wouldn't read her diary.
Facebook is a very interesting and interconnected network and friends of friends keep turning up. I don't add them. my intentions is simply to use it as a way of keeping in touch with family overseas. I am sure it can be very time consuming - I know my daughter is on it most days.
I was discussing Second Life with a group of students last week and I was interested to find out that very few had heard about it at all. No one used it, though one student shared that her father was totally addicted to it to her mother's horror and spent a lot of time and money riding Harley Davidson's in cyberspace.
I have been involved in strategic planning this week and want to work towards more blended delivery of the two courses I am responsible for as well as the Degree I teach on as a whole. The shifting price of petrol makes this even more important as many of our students travel for over an hour to reach class. I also taught a night class last week and found several students too tired to engage. If there was more on line learning they could have the choice of when they wanted to study. Interestingly quite a few of the students said they preferred to attend a class which will need further study. I need more time to pursue this and so it has to be written into the strategic plan otherwise development resources will not be available.
During the last DIL session I tried Snagit software and liked the way it could capture a video of the screen as well as a still shot I want to install it on my computer and try it out. I also started to set up a wiki on PBWiki (http://pbwiki.com/). I can see how wikis can be a really collaborative creations and could last over several years (how permanent are such sites?).
I would like to set up one for each of my courses and also an alumni wiki to keep in touch with our students when they have graduated. For my creativity class I can see that the students would be able to develop an online gallery of the creative work they produce. I wonder if a wiki is the best thing to do? perhaps a website is better though I like the collaborative nature of the wiki. I need more information.
My reflection on my involvement in this project is that I have tried out may things - making and editing sound files; editing, downloading, and uploading videos; improving my PowerPoint presentations by adding video and sound files and decluttering the visuals, developing personal connectedness through the web, keeping a blog, investigating eportfolios, making a wiki, developing my skills with a digital camera amongst other things. What i have not yet done is actually complete the project i set out to do. That will have to be the next step. I have followed my curiosity and developed a much bigger toolkit than I had previously - and that has been fun.
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