Monday, October 20, 2008

K12Online has started!

It is day one of the 2008 conference. I hope you took time to listen to the Pre-Conference Keynote. Here are the first day's events (notice our Maine presenters).

GETTING STARTED KEYNOTE
“How Can I Become Part of this ReadWriteWeb Revolution?” by Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes, and Bob Sprankle



PROVE IT KEYNOTE
“Asking Bigger Questions About Assessment” by Gardner Campbell

GETTING STARTED
“Free Tools for Universal Design for Learning in Literacy” by Jennifer Kraft



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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Sharon-
I came across your blog, and I like what your are doing to infuse technology into the classroom. We recently launched www.lifesnapz.com and believe that our service has a classroom application. Below is a summary of what we are trying to do and how we think it could be used by educators. I'd love to hear your thoughts about our site and my hypothesis. You can reach me at bob at lifesnapz dot com.
Best regards,
Bob Armour
CMO
www.lifesnapz.com

LifeSnapz.com Overview
• LifeSnapz.com is a free service that enables individuals to capture and explore life events and share them with trusted groups like families, friends and classmates.
• The company’s platform is uniquely built to chronicle events (what happened, where it happened, when and who was there) using photos, videos, text and tags.
• The events can be viewed and explored in a variety of ways- via timelines, maps and lists – and they can be instantly customized by clicking on tags for specific people, places or types of events.
• One person creates an event and many other group members can contribute to it or comment on it in a collaborative way, thereby creating rich recollections and multiple perspectives of events.
• There is a short video demo on our home page that explains our service and provides a peek into the site’s functionality: www.lifesnapz.com .

Education/Classroom Applications
• We believe that there is potential use case for educators and teachers to communicate and share classroom-level events and school functions with their student’s parents in a private setting.
• In individual classrooms, teachers could use LifeSnapz in lieu of current group communication methods (weekly take home sheets or group email blasts) and parents would have a place to see all that is going on or upcoming (in photos, text and video). This should save time and paper and minimize logistic failures. LifeSnapz is not meant to replace one-on-one communication that teachers have with parents.
• For a school, a principal could communicate with all parents and share the details of a school function- a play, a field trip, an assembly, etc – in pictures, video and text. Similar benefits of time savings, paper savings, and minimizing logistics failures should be realized.
• Because everything is archived, the events can be re-visited at any time in the future. This should provide benefits to the educators in automatically producing a “life record” of the class and school, and to the parents who could use it to see events that happened previously or to get info for upcoming events (permission slips, spelling words, homework assignments, etc.). This life record would continue on from year to year and class to class.
• Here is a link to a University of North Dakota professor’s blog that provides a good review of the site’s capabilities and mentions classroom use for LifeSnapz. http://learningaloud.com/blog/2008/09/29/lifesnapz/. We also are being used by parents of students to share photos and descriptions of their kids school sports.
• LifeSnapz is free.