Open Professional Development

I wanted to invite you to participate with Robin Ellis and me in a Professional Development class we will be teaching (Robin will be teaching from Pennsylvania while I teach from Utah). The class is called Social Software in the Classroom, with discussions centering on new online teaching tools and their educational value/use.

Additional details follow:

Class will be held once a week (for five weeks) beginning Wednesday, September 19.
Class will be held from 4:30-7:15 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. Click here to translate these times to your time zone.
If you don't have a Skype account, you will want to create one ahead of time (free), as Robin Ellis will be moderating a Skype chatroom throughout the class. To join in, send her a quick message through Skype: robin.ellis1
Our class wiki (with schedule and future participant portfolios) will be available here: http://socialsoftware07.wikispaces.com/
A quicktime audio/video stream will be available here: rtsp://163.248.25.133/socialsoftware07.sdp. Because we will be using Quicktime to stream, you will want to ensure that your Quicktime software is up to date ahead of time. Visit this site to get the latest version (free).
To join in on the action, please join the wiki we'll be using for the class.
For teachers not receiving in-service credit, perfect attendance is not required.
While this class is intended to help beginners learn more about the educational uses of Web 2.0 technologies, experienced users are equally welcome (and appreciated, as the sum of our knowledge is what truly makes these new technologies so appealing).

If you are a teacher, administrator, or technology specialist that would like to learn more about the many free, online tools that can be used to enhance your teaching, then consider yourself personally invited to join us. We'd love to have you and look forward to an exciting, open, and collaborative experience.

Tags: development, open, professional

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Permalink Reply by Alan Hodson on October 14, 2007 at 1:59pm

When am I ever going to catch up? This may be another cool site where folks may be interesred in looking into Open Source Software as a way to promote technology tools and help diminish the digital divide. Please consider visiting http://toss-elptx.blogspot.com/ or a more generic http://tossfoundation.org for information on FOSS and more practically, on information regarding which free applications replace proprietary programs. Many students and teachers can benefit from an open dialog about FOSS gems.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Craig on October 15, 2007 at 7:22pm

Hi Darren,

This looks like it will be a wonder class. Unfortunately, the timing isn't very good for folks on my side of the world (Korea). Would it be possible for you all to post archives of the sessions? I'd love to listen in/watch after the fact.

Dan

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Permalink Reply by Darren Draper on October 16, 2007 at 11:23am

Thanks Dan.

The archives you are looking for (at least what we have of them) are available on our class wiki: http://socialsoftware07.wikispaces.com/ .

DD

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Permalink Reply by Sharon Betts on October 16, 2007 at 5:34pm

Darren - how is this going? Love an update.

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Permalink Reply by Darren Draper on October 17, 2007 at 9:07am

The last session for this round will take place tonight (4:30 pm Mountain Daylight Time), but we plan on doing this again in the Winter (probably starting in January).

We'd love to have you to join us (if not now, then later).

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Permalink Reply by Joseph Thibault on October 25, 2007 at 11:32am

Darren,
If you're interested in using Moodle for a future interation of your course, please let me know. I admin several free (and open to all teachers) Moodle sites in the US. It's social software, but it could also help manage your course archives (and supports free asynchronous meetings, chat, discussion forums and a bunch more).
You're WIKI is great though, not sure if you'd want to change it up.
Nice work,
-Joe

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Permalink Reply by Darren Draper on October 25, 2007 at 1:22pm

Thanks for the offer Joe. Actually, we began the class with a Moodle (I maintain one for our District PD classes). We eventually decided to stick with the wiki to make the class more open. That was our goal:

Open Professional Development