Using Bubbl.us to map a course

I am taking my third Sloan Consortium workshop, thanks to the University of Maryland's College Pass. The first two workshops were about second Life, and the third one is called "Getting Started: The First Step Toward Online Teaching." One of the "deliverables" (assignments) is a concept map of a course or part of a course. I already had an account with Bubble Us so I used that. I teach a Reading/Writing/Grammar course, and at first I tried to map out the reading part of the course, but that proved too daunting, so I did just the vocabulary part of reading. Although this is a f2f class, I tried to include online resources for each aspect of vocabulary study. Here is my concept map:



You can zoom in and out by using the scroll wheel of your mouse and click and drag to see different parts of the map. One thing I couldn't figure out is how to name the map something other than "New Sheet". I kept naming it, but the name on this map is still "New Sheet." Grrrr.

Sloan-C Second Life Workshops

In May, I signed up for "Getting Started in Second Life" with the Sloan Consortium; lucky for me, Sloan-C offerings are free to the University of Maryland community. I really enjoyed that workshop, which lasted about 8 days and which reviewed some basic skills for me and taught me some new things.

Now I am beginning "Introduction to Second Life for Educators," taught by Dr. Michael DeMers of New Mexico State University Las Cruces. Back in March, Dr. DeMers was interviewed by Scott Simon of NPR; the six-minute interview is here.

Striking a Balance

Thanks for coming to join the conversation, and welcome!

I'd like to spend the first part of the discussion letting people vent about the difficulties of including everything they want and need to do in their busy lives. Webheads don't complain much, so here's your chance! (20h00 gmt)

After we've all let off a little steam, I'd like to brainstorm some strategies for keeping our priorities straight. (20h20/25m gmt)

If you haven't yet completed the survey, please do it during or after the session! After may be better, as I'd like thoughtful responses. :-) I will share the preliminary results at the end of the session (20h45m gmt).

Nina

Learning the Ropes in Second Life

When I created my avatar, Nina Zaytsev, back in January, I visited SL a few times but rarely interacted with anyone there. I found I was even more reluctant to approach strangers in SL than in RL. Once, I attended a "coffee with Dennis Newsome" hosted by (oops--I can't remember). This was better! But I did not really get going until I took advantage of a Sloan Consortium workshop, "Getting Started in Second Life," in May. This was an excellent workshop facilitated by Bethany Bovard (Naiad Remblai), Katie Fife Shuster (Kella Fargis), and Joanna Tong (Jananajo Swindlehurst), who introduced us to some really useful video tuorials by torley.com in YouTube. There is SO much information in those tutorials! I started collecting them in a folder but I have barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn. We also had three in-world synchronous meetings: a "meet-and-greet", a basic skills practice session and an exciting tour where we visited the Magic Bakery and rode horses in Mexico! The next day, WiAOC2009 began, providing me with myriad opportunities to practice the skills I had learned in the workshop and to learn some new skills as well (and fail spectacularly at a few). I am going on learning!

BubbleShare: Share photos - Find great Clip Art Images.

A New Blog

This semester I am teaching the Reading/Writing/Grammar component of our Intensive English Program at the beginning level. There are only six students. One began the semester almost a total beginner (she already knew the alphabet, a few numbers and some random words). Another studied English grammar but somehow managed to avoid learning much vocabulary. The other four are more typical false beginners. I wanted to blog with them but felt having them create their own blogs was unrealistic. I ended up creating a blog for them: MEI Level One.

I've tried to make the blog a mix of text and audiovisual, to appeal to different learning styles and needs (four students are Asian, and two are Middle Eastern). Most of my posts concern the grammar we are studying in the class. I started out with a short post on parts of speech, because this wasn't in their textbook, but I felt they needed to know what nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions were. Then I discovered a treasure trove of grammar lessons on YouTube! I enter the topic I am looking for, e.g., present simple negative, in the YouTube search box, and then browse through the many offerings. An American teacher named Paul has over sixty short videos consisting of himself using a whiteboard and a marker to explain grammar points. Others use pictures and videos to make their point. I've found a few professional videos, like the GrammarRock prepositions video (too advanced for my guys but fun) and have used some of Mike Marzio's Real English! videos which feature the structure we are practicing. In addition, I've posted some songs (a couple of which were suggested by the students). Altogether there are 30 posts so far (we've just passed the midterm). I sometimes have the students explore the blog during our computer lab hours, and of course it is always available to them whenever they are on the Internet. I can't say if they use it much outside of class, but in the lab when I let them access it, I have never had problems with students surfing to other sites. I think they like it.

Enhancing Lessons: Wednesday of Week 3

I never did get around to reflecting on Week 2; I guess it went by pretty quickly, and I was distracted by the startup of a new semester at the Maryland English Institute, where I teach. While I was otherwise engaged, our session grew to over 100 participants, with an active core of maybe 15-20 people who created their own blogs and posted regularly to our Yahoo Group. We had a heated discussion about the amount of detail one should include in a lesson plan, and on Saturday some of us met synchronously in a virtual classroom at Elluminate as well as in the Enhancing Lessons group room at Tapped In.

Week 3 focuses on the asynchronous voice tools Voice Thread and Chinswing, and Rita opened threads in both of these for all of us to contribute to:

Our Voice Thread

Our Chinswing discussion

P.S. On another note, I have returned to Second Life twice and have added some of the webheads as friends. I sat with Vance, in the guise of Webhead Link, in a couple of inner tubes on a lovely pond at Edunation II, surrounded by lovely flowering trees and singing birds (I like to log out leaving myself floating there, but when I log back in I find myself standing up in the pond with wet feet!). Vicki likes to take over my locomotion and has dumped me on roofs and into oceans, which she finds quite funny. I am wondering if it would be wise to create an avatar for her in the Teen section....

Finally! Second Life

After about 2 years of hesitating, hemming and hawing, I finally signed up for Second Life yesterday. One of the problems I had with it was that when you register you can choose any first name you like for your avatar, but you have to select a last name from a list, and I didn't like any of the last names offered, so I tried a couple of times but never got past that stage! (I was also concerned about using up too much computer memory and the apparently steep learning curve, and I wondered just what application this might have in teaching, since it would take a long time to teach students how to do it as well.)

Anyway, yesterday I was chatting with the webheads at Tapped In as usual, and several of them were simultaneously at SL. I just did it. I found a last name that appealed to me (Zaytsev, which comes from the Russian word for rabbit) and took the plunge. I chose an avatar, a woman in a pantsuit, and adjusted her (my?) appearance a little (made her/me a little fatter), although I couldn't change the hair from straight blonde to dark curly.... I was trying to make her more like me. (Maybe that isn't the point, though; maybe the point is to create somebody that doesn't look like me at all.) When I arrived at the "welcome area" I was met by a volunteer mentor who offered some help and answered some questions for me. Then I explored a little. I learned to walk, fly, hover, jump, shrug and a bunch more things. I found Education II, where the webheads have a headquarters, but it was deserted. And I was approached by an avatar who invited me to have sex (actually he said sez). Yuck! I immediately flew away. Later I encountered him again; he had shed his clothes somewhere. I told him I had not come to SL to be harassed by naked men, and left again. (I hadn't learned yet to say "eeuuww!")

This is one of the reasons why I would be hesitant to take a class to SL.

Here's a snapshot of me at Edunation:

Week One reflection

Yesterday, Sunday, marked the end of the first week of Enhancing Lessons with Web 2.0. Everything has gone very well! We have 100 people signed up but of course many of them are not active; either they are lurking, or they just signed up and changed their minds; it's hard to tell. Many people overestimate their ability to follow an EVO session and sign up for several. Unless you have nothing else to do in your life, this is inadvisable! Anyway, I have really enjoyed the interactions I have had so far with our participants on the Yahoo Group,at Tapped In, in our live session at Elluminate on Saturday, on our blog and on our wiki. Robert also created a page at Netvibes where all of these things come conveniently together. This is my first exposure to Netvibes and it seems worthy of investigation.

Today we begin Week 2, Blogs: A Home Base for Web 2.0 Lessons.

EVO2009: A New Adventure

EVO2009 begins on Monday, and this is my first time co-moderating an entire session (you may remember that in 2007, I co-moderated one week of Becoming a Webhead). Our session, Enhancing Lessons with Web 2.0, was conceived of by Robert Squires, whom I met for the first time in New York at TESOL in April. In addition to Robert and me, our team consists of Rita Zeinstejer, my dear friend from Rosario, Argentina; three other Argentine ladies, Mary Di Monaco, Analia Dobboletta, and Alicia Zuliani; and Maru del Campo from Mexico. We have been working for a few months to pull together a great session, and we have about sixty participants signed up from Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Iran, the U.S., Indonesia, Russia, the U.A.E., Spain, Chile, Portugal, Germany, Israel, Peru, Mexico and Romania (plus several who have not yet shared their locations with us). The focus of our session is how to incorporate web 2.0 tools into solid lesson plans aimed at achieving specific learning outcomes. I am a very bad lesson planner, so I am not an obvious choice for moderating the session, but I expect that I will learn a lot by doing it!