Edina Digital Age Learning

After spending time last night in Second Life at an ISTE social with 50 other people (avatars), it was nice to get back to the real world this morning to see that Google has made some great updates to Google Earth! Version 4.3 includes clouds and lighting, so you can actually view the sunrise and it's affect on an area within Google Earth. They have also improved the 3-D building rendering and have now imbeded the Street View images from Google Maps inside GE. Check out the video here to see all of these cool features. Thanks to Dean Shareski for posting about this. You can learn more about it here .

Saturday I had the opportunity to attend a Second Life workshop at TIES titled, "Get a Second Life!" For 6 hours, 8 other educators and myself explored the virtual world of Second Life , a multi-player 3-D Virtual world, and had the opportunity to look at resources that may have an application in the classroom. Second Life requires separate software downloaded on your computer, and a fairly robust computer to keep things running smoothly . Given the fact that iMax movies and other simulations make me nauseous , by the end of the day I was feeling a bit woozy!! Here's the avatar I created. I stopped by the ISTE Island and got the free t-shirt I'm wearing! Several organizations provide freebies when you visit their sites on the grid. I tried to make my avatar appear as close to the real thing as possible. Hard to get patchy grey hair to work very well, but pretty easy to lose a few pounds!! After getting an orientation on how to move talk, gesture, fly and teleport...

I was planning to write this post today, and then I saw a post from Scott McLeod with a chart showing student learning curiosity and engagement with content. To answer Scott's question about whether technology is to blame for this, I think the answer is NO ! The other day I saw a post on Clay Burrell's blog regarding a webcast he attended from a group called Teachers Teaching Teachers titled, "How to Make YouthTwitter Less Schooly" or something to that affect. Clay has had some interesting posts in the past about "schooliness" or "schoolishness" if you prefer as it relates to student blogging. It got me to thinking about, whether "schooliness" was a digital/technology issue, or whether it has been around regardless of technology's influence. I see my own two children's experience (admittedly a small sample) similar to McLeod's chart on learning curiosity. They are both naturally inquisitive, and excited about learning, but I ...

Saw a g reat blog post today on Twitter. I admit that I could have written the first paragraph myself! I have a Twitter account, and I've "tweeted" a few times regarding what I'm doing, but since I don't follow anyone, and no one is following me, it hasn't become a common habit. This post with it's resources may get me to do more and see the benefits and how it might work in your classrooms. Do any of you use Twitter?

Slideoo is a new tool that allows you to create a horizontal slideshow from your Flickr image sets. It is very easy to then imbed it in your blog or wiki, as I have done here. It allows up to 25 images in a set. You can see all of the photos by dragging the scroll bar on the bottom of the set. You may want to try this with field trip photos or pictures of student projects.

Two articles came across my desk recently that I thought I would share. The first, is an article about student blogging from 21st Century Connections . It speaks to some of the concerns that staff have had about student blogging being too "schoolish" and offers up a way to engage students and allow them to drive the discussion. What I also liked about the article was the concept of not just getting students to write thoughtfully, but also to use blogs to get students to read critically. The second article was an interview Daniel Pink conducted with Thomas Friedman on education in a "flat" world . In the interview they discuss the need for a liberal arts education, and both left and right brained instruction. Will Richardson had an interesting video post on the brain from Jill Bolte Taylor that has some good left and right brain information.

Bored with the Web 2.0 tools we've shown you this year? Yearning to try something new? Then check out Go2Web20.net! This site contains more Web 2.0 tools than I have ever seen before. Amazing!