Community Blogs

Are you on Twitter? Do you tweet? Each tweet on Twitter is 140 characters in length. You can think of a tweet as the headline, and use the details pane to tell the rest with photos, videos and other media content. Unless your tweets are protected they appear on a “public timeline” page, which displays all public tweets in reverse chronological order, like a series of “micro-blogs”.

According to Educause, Twitter can act as a “virtual water cooler” for colleagues who do not live in the same geographical area. It can also be used during conferences for delegates to discuss information sessions and speakers together. Students can use Twitter to foster interaction and share information about topics discussed in class.

ABEL's Twitter account is @abelearn. Learning Connections' Twitter account is @lngconnections. What will yours be?

ePEARL is a free, bilingual, web-based electronic portfolio software. Based on sound research evidence, coupled with feedback from the field, ePEARL has been designed to encourage self-regulation in learners within student-centred curricula. 

ePEARL promotes:

PowerUp  asks players to try to save a planet is a multiplayer 3-D virtual world and companion classroom materials designed to promote science and engineering education in high schools. 

In honour of this afternoon’s Moodle webinar (Using Moodle to Engage Students and Improve Student Learning), today’s focus is on Moodle – a free open source course management system (CMS) used to produce websites and Internet-based courses. Moodle is designed to help educators create effective online learning communities with a focus on the learner’s perspective. 

ABEL members can view an archive of the webinar in the Multimedia Centre after May 12^th.

Members can also check out a webcast titled Moodle 2.0: What’s New in 2.0.

To request a Moodle account, please click here.

VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that allows people to post media artifacts — could be a document, a slide presentation, a video or a collection of photos — for community feedback. Commentators can add remarks by means of microphone, webcam, keyboard, or telephone. The resulting Flash-based animation contains the original artifact and the commentary on it. 

VoiceThread incorporates media from a variety of sources and allows the layering of sound and comments from many sources. In this way, the application may support completely new types of sharing and presentation. 

To request accounts for yourself, or your students, please click here.  

The morning of April 29, 2011 saw more than 30 Ontario teachers from 10 districts turn into storytellers with the assistance of Alan Levine at the LC District Champions Conference held at York University. 

Levine (@CogDog on Twitter) is widely recognized nationally and internationally for expertise in the application of new technologies to educational environments and was a pioneer on the web going back to 1993. An early proponent of blogs and RSS for information sharing, he shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog (cogdogblog.com). 

Based on his wiki, 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Levine took the teachers through the full process of digital story telling in three easy steps during the “Sharing Our Stories” workshop: 

1. Outline a Story Idea
2. Find Some Media
3. Pick a Tool and Build Your Story

Teachers then assembled their own stories based on the tools Levine showcased.  Stay tuned for a link to their work, which we will be posting shortly. 

Here are some Tweets from teachers who attended the event: 

@sky2004 - Great list of web2.0 tools via @cogdog to use with students in creating digital storytelling (and so much more) 

@fpanju - amazed by the wide range of tools available for digital storytelling! So many possibilities... 

@Lisa_Donohue - Love the list of digital tools....looks very useful: http://tinyurl.com/435xwq4 can't wait to share with kids! 

You can check out Levine’s PowerPoint presentation from the workshop here. 

Learning Connections is made possible by a grant from the Literacy & Numeracy Secretariat, Ministry of Education and is a sister program of Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL).