Power Up Your Personal Learning Network

The DEN Virtual Conference (where I am participating in-person) continues with Jen Dorman's session on learning networks. Of course, the Discovery Educator Network leads the pack, but she also made us aware of a network created by PBS and Google. Twitter and Plurk still prove to be the best, but Twiffid filters only web addresses that are posted on Twitter. You can also follow plodt on Twitter and it graphs Twitter posts to give you an idea of the conversations happening so you can join. Phweet turns Twitter into an instant message chat. This might work if Twitter is blocked in you district.

Diigo and Delicious are similar, but Diigo allows you to create groups and share annotations/bookmarks with others. Diigo will also automatically post to blogs.

I had to tune out because there are dozens and dozens of other resources Jen is sharing, so I am going to focus on posting to Diigo and Delicious, signing my students up for accounts in Wikispaces for collaborative purposes and beginning my blog on the DEN web site...and cross-posting here and on blog.mtlsd.org/cybrary.

Oh, Drop.io looks pretty cool too. I'll check that out also. Jen rocks!

Igniting Student Creativity Though Digital Storytelling

At Sci Tech High in Harrisburg, Jen Dorman's Digital Storytelling sesion focused on new formats for students to use to use multimedia to create a story. I'm ready to have students create movie trailers as soon as I get back to school now! :)
Here is the link to all of Jen's resources: http://jdorman.wikispaces.com/digitalstorytelling

Ideas:
Public Service Announcement
Breaking News or Olds Broadcast
Movie Trailer
Reenactment
Oral History
Documentary
Virtual Tour
Story told from the perspective of an object

Scaffolding ideas:
-Stories from one image--have students make up a story based on one image or a series of images in a sequence
-Stories from a muted video clip
-Stories with student-found images and set narrative

The Process
Write, Develop script, storyboard, locate resources, create, share

DEN Virtual Conference-Dembo Keynote

What do the classrooms of the future look like?

Innovators in the field of education...according to Steve.
Darren Kuropatwa (Created class Scribe Hall of Fame), D'arcy Norman (first educator to begin podcasting), Jerome Burg (created Google Lit Trips).

Camstudio, Prettymay, Odeo, Aireset--Horizons Project with Vikki Davis...Those are the sites I didn't know

Eric Langhorst
Guerilla Season

YackPack--acts like a walki talki on a web page
The KinderKids page--Kindergarten blog--Uploads pictures to BubbleShare for parents to see what happened during the day
Jenuine Teach--Creative projects for the PreK-6 Elementary Class
*Good ideas for kindergarteners and younger students

Riptide Furse's podcast safe music/audio

Andy Carvin--created his own version of dialtest using twitter and plodt