Darryle Bajomo is a junior Graphic Design major (in the journalism school) here at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina and likes to do video game design in his non-existient spare time, and plays on the UNC club football team.

Anthony Lobianco is a sophomore Computer Science major here at UNC, although he too is thinking of changing Graphic Design at some point.  He is from Hendersonville North Carolina.  He likes video game design, but also sports an iTouch for keeping up with life and things.

Both have started working with me on a regular basis and will continue along the same line I have been writing about for a long time: educational technology, web 2.0 technology and any technology that might help us better teach and reach students.  In addition to that, I hope they will add a new layer of insight form a student perspective. Welcome aboard!  We are so excited to have you!

Darryle Bajomo is a junior Graphic Design major (in the journalism school) here at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina and likes to do video game design in his non-existient spare time, and plays on the UNC club football team.

Anthony Lobianco is a sophomore Computer Science major here at UNC, although he too is thinking of changing Graphic Design at some point.  He is from Hendersonville North Carolina.  He likes video game design, but also sports an iTouch for keeping up with life and things.

Both have started working with me on a regular basis and will continue along the same line I have been writing about for a long time: educational technology, web 2.0 technology and any technology that might help us better teach and reach students.  In addition to that, I hope they will add a new layer of insight form a student perspective. Welcome aboard!  We are so excited to have you!

Presenters:

• Dr. Paula Hudson – Assistant Professor, Doctor of Physical Therapy Program – Elon University
• Rick Palmer – Instructional Designer, Instructional Design & Development – Elon University

Example Blog They Used in Classroom:

• Tests and Measures

Possible Assignment Candidate’s for Blogging

• A flat assignment – an assignment that is boring. Something that students hate to learn and teachers hate to teach.
• Bored?
• Collaboration is an active model, but you don’t have enough time in the classroom
• Struggle to stay Relevant

How does Blogging Address these Issues?

• Extends the time students are actively involved in the class
• Expands the collaboration between students in the classroom

Other Cool things:

• This assignment can go outside of the classroom
• Can tap into the innate competitiveness in the classroom to kick up the energy
• Small groups can easily work together to create content
• Comments can be moderated (beneficial posted, others not)

Cons

• There is some time and labor on the setup
• There are some things to learn from it.

Response from Students

• They loved it already
• They are looking for something that sets them apart from their peers when they graduate. They liked that they could put on their resume that they have a web publication.
• Anywhere – they can do this assignment at home, in PJ’s, in kitchen.
• My work matters – people are using it and coming to it.

Response from Teacher

• Less time in class
• Achieve goals
• Final product that is awesome, and can be shared
• Students were very engaged
• Liked that students could be competitive and responsive

Game we Played

This was really a cool part of the class. They set up a mystery activity where we all logged in and posted our clues and then read the clues and tried to post a solution. It was great!

Thoughts about Blogging and Us at UNC

I have had the opportunity to help a professor in the past with a cinema course. He had students post video’s online that they found on YouTube and other sites that had to do with the genre they were studying. He also had a course requirement that they post a certain number of posts and comment a certain number of times. It was really productive and when they were done it was a great resource for others.

It would be great to take a look at a syllabus with a faculty member to see what kind of ideas we could generate about boring, but necessary, activities.

Any takers?

WARNING: This means that I will be posting a LOT more articles, that will predominantly be just pointing you to good resources I have found on the internet!  (Hey, that’s what I do now!)

For those that might want to also do so, I am using a really nice plugin called FeedWordPress.  I can then just put my RSS feed for my shared page in there and off we go.

Great idea though!  One we have been using in education for a while… peer feedback.  Of course a blog potentially offers a much more diverse, and larger number of reviewers. 

Roles:

• Collaborative Solutions
• Portal Solutions
• Content Management Solutions
• Search
• Forms Solutions
• Business Intelligence Solutions

This class was more of a workshop so I didn’t have much time to type out stuff as we went through it. Suffice it to say that there are a LOT of options, including easy creation of Blogs and Wiki’s. This product makes it really easy to create and customize all sorts of information with click and drag, or simple select.

Microsoft is going a long way toward creating easy configurable products with many, many customizations for users. I only wish more Educators could afford products like this…

That leads me to my next question, I now have around 200 people who read this blog… or are at least subscribed to it. Are any of you going to be at the conference? I am assuming most of you are fellow bloggers in my RSS reader… is there going to be a meet-up similar to the one in Atlanta over the summer (I couldn’t go… we just had a baby). I REALLY hope so. It would be great to meet some of you!

I get in on Tuesday midday and leave Friday morning. If no official meet-up is planned… anyone want to get together and discuss instructional technology? I always have something to say about education and one or all of the following: Google, mobile devices, haptic technology, social networking, and now a days even virtual worlds… And most of all I would love hearing from you!

Leave a comment here or contact me directly at jeffvand at gmail dot com. Hope to see some of you soon!!

Darren, I started blogging because I really felt like I had some ideas that would benefit the larger educational community and I felt like I was not really being heard in my current job.  I guess I really wanted to feel like I was making a difference, hoping somebody was there to hear what I was saying. 

I found all this and more.  What I really found was a community.

As I started to blog I soon realized there are TONS of people out there just like me.  Early adopters, people who just love technology and are willing to try just about anything in hopes of finding something that will make life easier.  Those who spend countless hours of their precious ‘free’ time figuring out new technology and tweaking it to work for real people.  I have only been blogging in the educational community for a little less than a year, but it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my work in instructional technology so far.