The keynote was by Bridget Arend of University of Denver. Her main message was "be purposeful" in choosing and using technology. She co-authored a book titled "Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning." She suggests that instructors reflect on their courses and try allocating the percentage of time students should spend on particular methods of learning with a worksheet she provided (I have a copy, so let me know if you would like one). The worksheet is titled "what I hope my students learn."
There are about 15 common methods listed. She says that you can reflect on your distribution and think about finding a balance to what you really wish to focus on.
Here are the 7 ways of learning of learning: (no particular order)
- acquiring knowledge
- building skills
- developing critical, creative, and dialogical thinking
- cultivating problem solving and decision making
- practicing professional judgment
- exploring attitudes, feelings and perspectives
- reflecting on experience
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I also went to a session on digital storytelling.
The presenters were working with pre-college students but mentioned that they used a variety of tools to put together the digital stories. The first step to the process. they suggest, is to have the students focus on the story and the narrative. The instructors said that they don't place word limits on the first draft of the narrative because they will actually spend time in class to whittle down and apply some critical thinking to compose a more concise message of 300 words or less.
Once they have the narrative down, the next step is to record the narrative with audacity. They highly recommend audacity because it is easy to use and the user has the ability to go in and edit the audio. The audio can be exported and then uploaded to the storytelling software. They use iMovie, and another tool that is free called www.wevideo.com. The nice feature of www.wevideo.com is that it is easy to use, free, and cloud-based.
So students have some flexibility in choosing tools to edit and create their digital story. They can incorporate images with the narrative and bring the story to life. One fun thing that they do at the end of the semester is hold a "film fest" at have the students nominate their favorites and give out awards.
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Cool tool alert!
Just in conversation with a colleague I found out about tagxedo.com. You may have heard about wordles to create interesting tag clouds, but tagxedo.com helps you create word clouds that are in shapes. the possibilities are endless. Check out the galleries they have listed for inspiration.
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I learned more about the functionality of one of my favorite social media tech tools, Diigo. Although I tend to use it more for personal use. I certainly has applications for using with students. Diigo is a cloud-based social bookmarking tool.
Some features that I have not really tried that I am now interested in investigating are, the list tool and the groups tool. The list tool allows you to create a folder for a collection of tags. Groups allow you to push bookmarks out to special groups such as a class group. The participants may also add links for the group as well. Here is a good article from Educause that outlines all the basics of social bookmarking.
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/classroom-collaboration-using-social-bookmarking-service-diigo
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Nicole
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