50 Ways to Tell a Story

OK, this is amazing. CogDogBlog as I know him (real name Alan Levine)lists 50 Web 2.0 tools you can use to tell a story, sites like BubbleShare, VoiceThread, and Google Presenter. Of course, you don't need 50, you only need one or two, but he created a story about his dog in all 50 tools. There should be some kind of award for that!

His wiki page for his presentations has a lot of good Web 2.0 info, and nicely organized.

Video of Adult Ed Teachers at CUE

Adult Educators at CUE

Computer Using Educators (CUE) was founded in 1978 to support teachers in using technology effectively in the classroom. It has grown significantly over the years, and now has thousands of members, making it one of the largest organizations of its type in the country. Although membership is open to all educational professionals, the focus has been on K12.

CUE holds its annual conference every year in Palm Springs. Several years ago, there were only a small handful of adult educators attending the conference, even though it provides an excellent opportunity for educational technology people to network and to learn what’s new in the world of technology, but over the last few years this handful has grown to about 20. This year at CUE, Suzanne Ludlum of Oakland Adult School offered a 3-hour workshop on digital storytelling using Windows MovieMaker. Barry Bakin of LAUSD Division of Adult and Community Education presented on Internet Projects Students and Teachers Love. Elliot Jordan, formerly of Burbank Adult School, demonstrated to teachers the many possibilities of open source software. Susan Gaer, a Google-certified Educator and ESL Instructor at Santa Ana College Adult Education, partnered with Barry Bakin to show teachers how to adapt any lesson to include technology and the Internet. She also demonstrated her collaborative online student projects, and volunteered in the Second Life Sandbox, showing people how to use Second Life, a virtual environment. Branka Marceta and Penny Pearson interviewed some of the participating adult educators about their experiences at CUE.

Other hot topics at the conference included Open Source software, Moodle for hosting class Web sites, blogging (educators have their own category, “edublogger”), Google tools such as Google Earth, social networking. The conference also offers skill building classes on programs such as Flash, PhotoShop, and Excel. On Saturday, many student groups demonstrate their projects at the Student Technology Showcase. This would be an excellent opportunity for adult education students to showcase their work and get some recognition.

Adult education in California would never be able to host such a large and diverse technology conference, with over 200 vendors in the exhibit area, so it’s encouraging to see more adult educators participating in this conference and contributing their enthusiasm, experience and knowledge.

Moving and Saving Files Online

Just heard about drop.io (pronounced drop-ee-oo), and then started seeing more references to it. It's a Web site where you can create a drop box for yourself with nothing more than a user ID and password. So, if you need to share files with a dispersed workgroup, or if you want to share photos, word docs, or other files between two classes that are collaborating on a project, this would be a really good service. You get 100MB for free, or can upgrade to 1 Gig for a nominal fee. It gives you a URL, and you can upload files in a number of ways, including voice, fax, and email. This would be a great service for a workgroup that needed to share some docs. It can be password protected or not, and it can expire in a month or whatever timeframe you set, if there is an end date to the project.

I actually just had a programmer create something like this for a statewide group that needs to do some work together and share some spreadsheets. Kinda a like a V-8. Darn, I coulda used Dropio!

CUE 2008

There were a number of things at the CUE conference that I wanted to blog, but between attending sessions, checking out vendors, and trying to keep up with my work email, I was fried by the end of each day. So much for my blogging ambition! I did check out a session on edublogging by Mark Wagner where I got a few good ideas about making connections through blogging. He posted his slides and all his links, if you want to see what he talked about.

A nice feature of the conference was having a Ning community where presenters uploaded their slides or links, and people could comment on presentations and discuss with each other and the presenter. Wave of the future. Ning and the whole issue of social networking had a much higher profile in the conference than it did a year ago, thanks in large part to Steve Hargadon, I'm guessing.

The best aspect to me was that there were 3 times as many adult educators there as there were two years ago. OK, the total was about 12, but that's still progress. There were several adult education workshops and hands-on sessions. It paid off lobbying to get Susan Gaer included in the Google Teacher Academy. I was disappointed to hear that the Google Teacher Academy is being turned over to CUE and will cost $50K for an organization to host. At that price, and in this budget climate, I wouldn't expect too many takers.

One thing I was surprised about - I didn't see much twittering of this conference. I searched Twitter using Terraminds and didn't find many using the tags of cue08 or cue2008.

AlphaPlus Blog

A fellow adult literacy program in Ontario, AlphaPlus, has a very useful blog with links to many resources for teachers and learners. They have recently added links about work, numeracy and writing, mostly specific to Ontario and Canada.

There is also a recent post on blogging in adult literacy that links to some articles about blogging in K12, and poses some research questions for adult educators.

Another interesting link there is to the Canadian Consortium of Technology Support Providers for Adult Basic Education. This fledgling group of organizations is looking at supporting technology for ABE in Canada. It's good to know what our neighbors are doing, and to take advantage of opportunities to share our work. The keynote speaker at their first meeting, I believe on Feb. 28, was David Rosen, providing an overview of technology in adult education, which they provide as a podcast from their home page. David gives a good brief overview of what technology in the classroom can mean beyond computers, including simulations (of which we have so very few in adult literacy), video projects, and interactive whiteboards.

I'm adding AlphaPlus to my blogroll.