Second Life in the Classroom

We are working with and learning about Second Life in my class and I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of how it could be incorporated into the classroom as a learning tool? If you are unfamiliar with Second Life take a look at the links and explore! Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas as to how it could be used in education.

What's a PLN??

ALL ABOUT: The Flat Classroom Project

The Flat Classroom™ Project is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students. This project is part of the emerging tend in internationally-aware schools to embrace a holistic and constructivist educational approach to work collaboratively with others around the world in order to create students who are competitive and globally-minded. The project was co-founded by Vicki Davis (Westwood Schools, USA) and Julie Lindsay(Beijing (BISS) International School, China) in 2006. The Flat Classroom Project 2006 was featured in Chapter 13, 'If it's not happening it's because you're not doing it', of the latest edition of Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat' upon which it was based.

One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This is done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning.

The Project uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman.

Top Education Podcasts

A podcast has a news feed (known as RSS) that allows it to be cataloged in various podcasting directories like iTunes and Podcast Pickle. The popular directory, Podcast Alley, has cataloged over 41,000 podcasts and nearly 2million individual episodes. If you are interested in listening to the podcasts mentioned here, launch iTunes and type the name into the search field.

In addition, the news feed allows podcatching programs like iTunes to automatically download new episodes. Once you have found the podcast you want to subscribe to, simply click its Subscribe button. There's no need manually check a website to see if there's new content; iTunes does it for you.
For the Top 25 Podcasts in Education visit www.openculture.com's list compiled from iTunes!

YUMMY!!

Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.

Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services.[2] Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.


Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.[3] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

Podcasting about Podcasts

Click here to be redirected to Podbean.com and take a listen to my Podcast About Podcasts! Enjoy!!

Vicki Davis spent her evening with my Emerging Instructional Technologies class as she shared how she uses the social networking wonders to understand, reorganize and share the network of resources we call Life. We had the opportunity to then do a "brain dump" on a class Wiki and I thought I would share my reactions with you as well!

What struck you as you listened to Mrs. Davis?
What struck me the most was the way Mrs. Davis made everything look so easy and the way she ad everything incorporated into her life. The accessed everything like it was second nature to her. I like the fact that she has incorporated so much technology into her classroom because that is the way students today are learning. Even though she is a digital native she has chosen to stick with the times and continue to truly be a life long learner. I am so impressed and inspired by her!!

What have you thought about since then?
Since then, I have been thinking about all the opportunities and ways of including the PLN as a daily routine for my students projects. I have really taken into consideration the comment Mrs. Davis said during our conversation about there being a different tool for every task and that one tool is not going to get the job done in the most efficient way. You have to ultimately find the right tool for the job. This way you get variety and your sure to not over-use or burn out the tools and your students!

What would you like to ultimately learn from this?
I want to be able to access with ease like Mrs. Davis did. She found ways to incorporate everything into her VERY busy life like it was a breeze! The Diigo was neat too and I would really like to learn more about that as well!

To see my other classmates reactions and comments as well as Dr. Z's, feel free to visit the Wiki and read their responses!