During the session, Kim and I will walk the participants through the basics of using Twitter. Participants will sign up for a Twitter account and the use of the Tweetdeck application will be featured to demonstrate different aspects of using Twitter. Participants may create a Twitter account and download Tweetdeck for use during and after the Elluminate session.

Tweetdeck is a fantastic application to manage Twitter feeds but it is not required to successfully use Twitter. Tweetdeck is an easy application for beginners and helps Twitter users become more adept at using Twitter on a larger scale and for this reason we will be using this application in our sessions.

If you are new to Elluminate, you may want to join the session a bit early to make sure that you do not have difficulty accessing the session. You can use your computer microphone to ask questions or use the chat window to participate in the discussion using text only. The ‘Twitter for Beginners’ session will be offered through the ‘Host Your Own Webinars‘ group at LearnCentral.You can register for the session at the LearnCentral event page or email us at info@elearncenter.ca. This session is free and open to the public. If you are unable to register or email us prior to the start of the session, please still join us.

The “Twitter for Beginners‘ webinar will be the first session of our new venture and offerings of our innovative ‘eLearning Center‘ training center. Each week, Kim and I get requests for us to create webinars on a variety of topics for beginners.Our sessions will be designed to offer support and resources to beginners just starting to use web 2.0 tools and technologies. All of our training sessions can be customized for groups of employees or faculty members.

Test your system
Link to Elluminate room: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid n=2008350&password=M.438D554F4A450D77B901E14104C303

Short URL to Elluminate room: http://tinyurl.com/cr20live

This Saturday January 17th ( see here for times) the show will be about using Google forms to make things easier for teachers.

Tom Barrett’s blog post is the reading for the session.

If you have never participated in an Elluminate session, please watch this 5 min demonstration. Requires Java

photo credit: valentin.d

One of the barriers to effective partnerships is little and poor communications. There is great potential for technology to facilitate communications and offer learning experiences for every one. But there are a lot of questions to be answered before structures can be put into place.

Who is in charge? What can be said ? What applications should be used?
Who will pay? what training is necessary? What security and protections are necessary? Who will take care of everything? I went through the process of addressing these questions, searching for answers, connecting with those people who were currently using good communication practices and finding solutions so I thought I would record my experiences and the solutions I found worked.

Who is in charge? What can be said?

If you start out with the approach that this is a joint effort, then the team is in charge. Some people equate being in charge as having the power to spread information regardless of the content. Although that certainly may seem to give an advantage or position of power, if communications do not respect the members of the team, the ensuing conversations will work against the team achieving the intended goal. In this case, making good things happen for children. All good efforts to use technology are wasted if the intent of sharing ideas and working together is to assume a platform that is intended on attacking and embarrassing individuals. I’ve seen parents and teachers assume the power position, misuse the communications to escalate and inflame communities and people suffer as a result. While working on the Student Learning a Parent Focus parent involvement program, I came across a Handbook produced by the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education and this section has good information about facilitating discussions.

What applications should be used? Who will pay? What training is necessary?

There are numerous free web based software applications available for parents and teachers to access. If you have a computer and access to the internet you can be up and running with a web page in a matter of minutes and the only fees are your internet service provider charges. The training part is covered here in some of the screencasts and the help and FAQ sections for the applications you are using.

The tools I am going to identify can be used freely and by most people so there is the freedom to do what you want when you want.
These 4 are my favourite free tools.
Blogger.com – can be used as your own website. Refer to this section
ustream Live broadcasting application with chat function.
wikispaces. use to create a shared web site
Skype Free Voice over protocol services. Free telephone calls on the internet. You can have a free conference call for up to 9 participants – computer to computer voice calls.

Some school Boards offer internet services for teachers to use to connect with their students. Some teachers are using the same services to communicate to parents. But the norm is that there is no time or money allocated to developing online communication resources and on top of that there is the fear factor I talk about in this post

Here is an example of a Blogger.com web page created by Matt Montagne a teacher at the University School of Milwuakee.
Two examples of teacher wiki’s for parents http://parentworkshop.wikispaces.com/ and http://mstechnology.wikispaces.com/Parent+Ed
A parent workshop presented on ustream

I am still in the process of making screen casts to explain how to set up and use a wiki as well as ustream. This a simple video to explain wikis

and here is a video about twitter.com

Strong leadership from people like Jeff Lebow, Pam Shoemaker, Derrall Garrison at Webcast Academy have made me an avid student. They have given me the tools to I needed to revisit the use of information communication technology to connect parents to the classroom. Presentations for Parent as Partners such as “From a Principal’s perspective”, an interview with Dan Trainor, Canadian Principal of the year 2007, was created as result.

Podcasts are becoming common place but the instructions for recording two way Skype calls simplified the process and made the SkypeOut interview easy to create. It gets better. Teachers now have the tools needed to broadcast live and take their students and classrooms to the global stage.

Alex Couros from the University of Regina has prepared an excellent tutorial on how to use Skype, Ustream and Camtwist to Broadcast live.

Its hot of the press and there is lots to do.

This is the website/blog
room33bedtimestories.blogspot.com used to publish the Grade 5 classroom podcasts

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The 3 Chikadees present their first Podcast – Xmas 2007

This podcast was made using Garageband and Photo Booth on a MacBookPro