Welcome to 'Teaching and Learning with Technology or Technogogy'

[Vasi]

Welcome and thank you for stopping by!

To be effective in the 21st century not only as educators but as individuals we need to be able to master a range of functional and critical-thinking skills related to information, media, and technology. This community is about developing your personal online voice as educator and joining professional networks and communities. As educators we must first own these concepts and skills before we can give them to our students. The aim of the community is to establish a network of 'educators teaching educators' so we can ensure that none of us get left behind and that our students will be prepared to meet the future that awaits them.

Why be part of this community?

To Connect, Collect, Contribute, Communicate, Collaborate, Cooperate and Create as a Community using current and emerging technologies. As community of educators we can explore and help each other define what is relevant to us, identify the educational applications and opportunities technologies can offer to enable, empower, enhance and most of all transform learning for us and our students.

This community will aim to explore, test and experiment with existing and emerging technologies and try to identify the educational potential and opportunities they offer. While exploring the technologies we will develop and eventually master the information, media, and technology skills we need to be effective as educators and individuals today and tomorrow.

Your ideas, knowledge and personal experience and perspective are important to us!

As educators we have diverse perceptions and opinions about technology as we come from different contexts and perspectives, have a different network to draw upon, and are likely to contribute to the conversations in a different way bringing variety of experiences.

Join this group to contribute to the diversity and wealth off knowledge, skills and expertise and develop further your own.

[Vasi]

Welcome to our community Chris,

great to have someone from the northern hemisphere with a different view of the world on board :-)

You and Gary are so right. We all need time to explore and experiment with new technologies otherwise it is too tempting to "default to what is already learned" as you mention Chris. I'm thinking of negotiating one day a week play time ( learning time) so I can explore different technologies and different ways of doing what I do.

So what are you been playing with lately?

Vasi

[Chris Brient]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you Vasi for creating this group and for the invitation. I look forward to hearing about the technologies each of you are using and how they are working.

Gary, I am with you. I found it's necessary to schedule time each week just to learn a new technology or tool (although I am tempted to default to what is already learned....) Life long learning is the new norm and I think it makes for an interesting life.

Chris

[Bonnie Schroyen]

Hi all - this is great! I look forward to hearing the experiences of others. We are moving into 'flexible' delivery of our Bachelor of Nursing and all year one modules are delivered in this mode. As we make the transition from all classroom based sessions to 'flexible' delivery, teachers are thinking about the best use of our online environment - supported on the Moodle learning management system - and still keeping weekly face to face sessions. Using the interactive elements of the online system is a challenge as it is still easier to just post power point outlines on the system as student notes. We also have new teachers struggling to understand the way that 'flexible' delivery works and the technicalities of using the moodle system. Many challenges ahead. Bonnie

[Vasi]

Gary and Terry,
thank you for bringing some interesting conversation starters. To give the community the opportunity to comment and bring their views and experiences I'll start new discussion topics one for Second Life in adult education and the other Managing Implementation of ICT in education and the transition to new technologies.

I hope Gary and Terry are happy to co-facilitate with me ;0)

[Gary Wood]

Hi Vasi

Thanks for settting this up and inviting me into this space, I quite agree that we need to engage with technology in order to use it as a learning tool for our students and for ourselves.

While I appreciate the need to continually "keep up" with new and emerging technology, I often find myself struggling to use different cultural learning and communication tools, often preferring to stick with or go back to those that I feel confident using.

I would be interested in any comments by the community regarding the implementation of new ICT and any processes they have found that are useful or have been successful in managing the transition to new communication tools and technologies

Regards

Gary

[Terry Neal]

Given that this is about various technologies, let me promote a project with which I am involved, looking at use of Second Life in adult education. The project blog is at http://slenz.wordpress.com/ At the moment we are doing the nice safe literature review. In November, it will get interesting with design and development and piloting of leanring experiences.

[Peter]

Hi Vasi Nice to hear from you and thanks for the invite.

[Vasi]

I have started a discussion where we can explore Dim Dim and other virtual classroom technologies, share our experiences and ideas how to use them well. Feel free to share with the community your favourite virtual classroom tool and let us know in what way you see this technology making a difference and adding value to the learning experience. Please feel free to share your great and not so great experiences - sometimes we learn more from failure than success ;0)

[Vasi]

Kia ora Stephen,
we tested Dim Dim a few weeks ago unfortunately it was quite slow especially the whiteboard and screen sharing. I think the reason is the hosting in the US.
have a go and let us know what you think.
Vasi

[Stephen Bright]

Kia ora Vasi thanks for the invite to join this community. I guess like all online communities it will be a question of how active the community is - BTW at the moment I am trying to get a handle on Dim-Dim - do you know anything about this ?