Create a free Chat space at Chatzy Chatzy is a free private chat service which you can use to communicate with people you already know or people who visits your blog or website. With Chatzy you can create a chatroom and send out email invitations very quickly and easily.
No registration is required.
There are other places like this out there but Chatzy is quick and easy to set up and embeddable into blogs and wikis.
In 2009 one of the projects I am going to be participating in is to create a Decision Tree Activity for students to complete on cybersafety. The final product will be the Decision Tree but the main work will be in a wiki and will be a collaboration between students and teachers to find the issues relating to working / being in an online environment and what solutions that can be come up with.
On my journey into looking for relevant resources I found these create case scenarios attached to the Australian Government's NetAlert site.
The Australia Government has created two interactive environments; one for primary students called CyberQuoll and secondary students CyberNetrix both of these look interesting and student friendly and provide good information and linked resources for where to go if you need to follow up issues faced online. Though I worry about the literacy level as there is quiet a bit of reading needed to be done in the secondary one.
Wikispaces is where we will be hosting the colloboration part of this project
I really like Ning as a place to create your own community for your class.
I like the fact that you are all connected to the one front page and lots of media and files can be added for student use. I think this type of place is great for cybersafety and directing students to the places you want them to be at when using computers in class.
It's like having your own private facebook or myspace and would be a great place to place assessment tasks and links to online activity.
Ning is definately worth checking out and joining a group that you sparks your interest.
A side note though, I set up a Ning for my Biology class, invited the other biology teachers, put up some resources; thought the Ning looked groovy and thought it could be a valuable tool for teaching senior students and for them to have a meeting place and a common interest. After doing this and getting to school the following day I found that Ning doesn't work properly on my school network (first of all it was blocked on the network and I had to get it unblocked) and when it did finally load all the design elements are taken out it's design was lacking and looked terrible (something from 2000!).
There is another platform we are looking into (Elgg) but just initially after using it I have found it a little harder to use than Ning but it is a beginning. When I know more about it I will post about it. I haven't had time to go much further than sign up, set up a page and give my technical support a hard time :=)
But Ning would be great if only we could get proper internet use in schools. Please talk to all important people about what filtering does to Internet use in schools.
It also has the presentation on 25 Free Tools all educators should have from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT).
I also will update this page when I have more time to cover some other basics.
Most of the helpful videos I have found that are easy to understand are from the Common Craft Show team.
The wiki Web 2.0 Science was initially made only for the attendance at some workshops I conducted but is currently being converted into more of a general science powerpoint and web 2 resource for K-12 teachers.
I follow few people mainly because I haven't found everyone to follow but if you haven't checked out Jane's E learning Pick of the Day Blog then you haven't lived.
I find her blog useful and she is continuously showing me more and more useful applications to use in Education.
She also compiles the the 25 top tools list and has created some learning communities in Ning and does a whole lot more.
Dimdim This tool would be great for online classes, I like the ability to show a particular browser and everyone see the same information together. Great for watching Youtube / TeacherTube together and addresses cybersafety issues.
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