Nov

30

Skrbl

Filed Under Art, Collaboration | Leave a Comment

The newest and coolest tool that I’ve found is Skrbl.com. It is a website that works as an online whiteboard. It’s a simple version of a program like Microsoft Paint where you can make easy illustrations that other people can edit. With the free version (and, of course, with the paid version, too) you can make your particular whiteboard or drawing private so only you can work on it. If your pictures are worth keeping you can publish them as a webpage which you can link to from any other site.

If you’d like to test out this funky little site, they let you embed a scribble pad right in any other webpage.

The documentation for the site is pretty weak since the site is only in beta and still being developed. Yet you appear to be able to create and unlimited number of whiteboards, each with its own unique web address/URL, so you could have a theoretically unlimited number of students working together (which is a really mind boggling idea).

I’m not sure yet what to do with the site, but I’m going to give it a good try to figure something out. This is a promising Internet tool that I’m going to like.

Nov

28

Further outside the box

Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment

I was musing Monday about the need to think a bit outside the box. This video gives some hints as to why we might need to change the way we look at things, especially education. The world is becoming a different place.

Nov

26

Outside the box

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I saw this YouTube video at the Edubloggercon last week. It’s called “Government Employees” (sorry to anyone offended) and I found brilliantly funny.

It got me thinking. Sometimes we can get so stuck in the same old routine, we don’t know how to handle change. We need to learn to think outside the box.

Anyway, enjoy.

Nov

23

MB Edubloggercon

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Last night I went to the first ever MB Edubloggercon, held at the Academy Bar and Eatery here in Winnipeg. As far as is known, this was the first gathering of Manitoba educational bloggers (and others) in a face-to-face setting where people could just hang out and talk. About 60 of us were there in person, with as many as two dozen more “attending” via a webcast of some of the proceedings on UStream.com.

Despite not exactly being a social butterfly, I talked with several people who gave me some really cool ideas about using Web 2.0 tools in the class, and even got an e-mail address of a teacher who will be doing the same computer course as me next term. (The two of us are both a little confused as to what exactly we’ll do with the course, so a little conferring with each other should help.)

It is interesting to me that you had a room full of computer geeks used to dealing with other via e-mail, Skype, and other similar technologies. Yet here we were in person, relating to each in a “new” way; face-to-face. No matter how much we get used to dealing with each via digital technologies, there’s just no real substitute for personal contact.

The Edubloggercon, organized by ManACE, was a great evening that put faces to people that I’d normally only ever meet virtually.

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