Interesting Reads

At the moment I am combining reading new books with a quick comment in Ed.VoiceThreads. You are invited to comment on the book with your thougts by going to Ed.VoiceThreads.com and typing in the title of the book. This adds to the coversation about a book. Both teachers and students may add in their comments about a book title. Teachers must sign in as an educator for their free educational account. This is a world wide service for teachers. Please listen to the piece "What is Ed. VoiceThread?"

The current book I finished was The Book Thief. It is told from Death's point of view. Listen and read comments in Ed.Voice Thread.com .This is not depressing but very insightful and a very good read.

Second Life Adventures

Last night ISTE had a very honest speaker on the adventures of one university teacher as she started with a bare island and started to set up a learning place. Graphic artists came in to help her and many beautiful buildings were created. Then came the learning and information architectures. The result was very creative.

KJ Hax selects and arranges for the speakers to come to ISTE island to present ideas on educational topics. The presentation was at the Band Shell but most are at the ISTE auditorium you see left. ISTE is the International Society of Technology Educators, a great group of people from all levels of education.

Here is another great seminar from ISTE auditorium: http://www.slideshare.net/mguhlin/tilt-second-life-presentation?src=embed

Winds of Change

Time and technological change marches on. I am learning new things this summer. Big learning curves as well in new versions of software in my graduate courses. Updating entries with web2.0 tools I already have and learning more about their options has taken up many hours.
Web Based Learning, a graduate course at NIU means getting my own laptop, a Mac to log into the course from various points in Illinois and Wisconsin. This is courtesy of my family. There was only one F2F meeting and the rest of the course is online via Adobe Connect. We all have earphone/mic head sets.  This is the face of the future and it enabled me log in from anyplace...as long as I had my Mac and an Internet connection.
The surprise was that all of the 24 other graduate level students were teachers from the north shore. I was the only western sububerban teacher. Our F2F meeting was in Lake Forest, IL.
We were in a Mac lab in the school Media Center Library. Everything was Mac orientated. Most of these teachers had their own MacBookPro with all the goodies.  The only person using a Mac lab computer was me since my laptop had not arrived yet. I did some real fast orientating into required web sites.  I was sure happy to get the laptop and catch up!