Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

Last week I attended the Saturday online session in Classroom 2.0 about Social Networking, Ning, and Classroom 2.0 given by Steve Hargadon. Here are the links to his blog and to his most recent Ning called The Future of Education. He used the session as an opportunity to let slip that he’s been hired by Elluminate to be the Social Learning Consultant for LearnCentral -- Ellluminate's new contribution to the ‘edu-connect-osphere’.

It’s a free service just for educators that will be in open beta in about 2 weeks. Steve is billing this as Facebook for educators. Once you complete your profile, they’ll be able to match you up with other LearnCentral members who have the same interests so they can share best practices, create groups, etc. The big thing is that Elluminate will be freely (no subscription/no cost) available for conversations between teachers or between classes. When you fill out a form to offer a web event, it will be posted to a central calendar. These will have to be public and recordable so an archive of events can be built.

To join the beta, you can either click the picture above and register at the bottom of the page or email Steve. LearnCentral's formal launch will be at NECC at the end of June -- so in plenty of time to practice over the summer and be ready for school in the fall. Assuming many districts don’t block LearnCentral as they have other social networking sites, this should give educators and classes a great way to connect, share, and collaborate.

If you think you might want to use Freepath or myFreepath some time in the future, now’s the time to sign up.  They are coming out of beta very soon and are getting ready for the commercial release. I’m hoping they’ll consider educator pricing, but in the meantime they do have special offers for people who are already in the group of early users.

This is a great multimedia presentation program and a wonderful way to:

·         package lecture/lesson/presentation material --> no desktops showing; drag &drop resources into place; just click your way through the frames

·         help students collect research information quickly and easily, and later reorganize it by sliding the frames around

·         help them create oral presentations individually or in groups, or

·         build lessons that can be easily adapted to meet individual needs.

I’m a Freepath fan. Even if you’re not sure of what you’ll do with it now, downloading soon makes sense as you can get in on the beta discounts listed below if you decide to make more use of it later on. You can also join the ‘bigreturns’ group in myFreepath and download any of the playlists that might interest you or upload your own for the group to use.

Finally, this came from my Mum in Australia. When I’m done here,  I’m going to check out my wax paper roll. That’s the one that always gives me the most trouble. I’d be interested in finding out the original source. If you come across it, please let me know and I’ll send her a thanks and attach a credit. She deserves it!!

Note: Mum writes that Aussie boxes are ‘tab-less’. To think that for 70 some years she didn’t know such a wonder existed and now every time she handles aluminum foil, she may experience a tiny pang of regret. I guess sometimes ignorance IS bliss!