Day 2 - EIT Class

Today was Day 2 of my Emerging Instructional Strategies class. We spent most of the day playing with Second Life. Dan Power from UNI Business Department, came in & talked to us about Second Life. I still am not sold on Second Life mainly because you have to be 18 to use and I won't be able to incorporate into my classroom. Although there are good informational tools out there for us to use. It was fun to learn & see some of the different things you can do in Second Life. It just astonishes me on what it can do.

Steve Hargadon talked to us this morning about Nings via Skype. The graphic to the left is the Skype logo, click on it to go to the website. Skype is really cool. I am going to try to incorporate this into my Marketing class and hopefully some others along the way. Marketing is a class that I teach that is hard for me to teach because all we have ever done is out of the book and I hate it. I want to change how I do things and I think using a Ning, Wiki, Blogs, and hopefully bringing in a guest speaker via Skype would be great and I think that I would enjoy teaching the class more. I like the subject but just don't like how I or the others before me have taught it. BORING. Nings are cool and I think they could be very valuable for our classrooms. Nings can be set up to be private and I like that idea.

We also worked on our final project for the class. My group is focusing on authentic writing digital tools. Very cool and useful for when I return to my school. I created the survey for the students (who are actually teachers in this case). Tommorrow we are learning podcasting. I already subscribe to a few different podcasts but after Wednesday I will know how to make one. Becky & I are in charge of doing a podcast for Voice Thread. Voice Thread will be introduced in class on Wednesday but some of my group members had already used it. Very cool. You can post a question and have people respond by voice. They can actually call from their cell phones to post comments. Our group also talked about Jing. Very useful tool also. I will be able to use Jing to show students various steps on how to perform tasks.

Another great day & I look forward to tommorrow.