Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

This morning I worked with Grade 5 and 6 students who all have a tablet PC.  I’ve been talking to them about building networks and wanted to demonstrate mine in meaningful, fun, engaging way.

So I decided to take them on a tour, using some interactive maps and showed them the power of networks, open API (don’t worry I didn’t actually use that term) and personalized learning.

At 9:17 local time I sent out a tweet looking for help. In 2 hours we managed to talk with 10 different people from mostly North America, save for Jeff Utecht who was in Malaysia at a conference.  We got to have a brief chat with each one, found out a little bit about them and even asked one or two intelligent questions.   Using Community Walk (as you can see my community is not walkable) we created placemarks and I added some video snapshots as well.

Here’s the map we created on the fly.

Wedding map to share with guests
CommunityWalk Map - Skype Me

Kids were amazingly focused, running around the room helping each other, teacher laptop in hand right beside her students asking questions, looking like a learner herself, talking to people who help me learn. The students were customizing their maps and adding items of personal relevance and also making connections to the activities and whereabouts of the various guests.

A pretty cool morning.

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This is what I saw today from back to back entries in my aggregator:

What to do????

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I’ve also appreciated the use of time lapse photography. From watching a flower bloom to the changing of seasons, it’s a powerful technique.

I checked my Canon SD750 and realized it had the feature. So let’s give it a try.

I set it up tonight while I prepared a meal for my family and our friends. The total time of preparation was about 50 minutes. I set the time lapse to shoot every 2 seconds. What you have is about 2 minutes which I cut down to about 80 seconds. If you look carefully you should see a spill, boy in underwear and puppies.

This will prove to be a valuable tool for me. Check your digital camera and see if you can do time lapse. I think it’s very cool.

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