922-Session 6 and 7

Well, the semester is going by quickly! This week's session is another double. Again, remember that there is a lot of information to digest, so don't stress over not being able to retain it all. Keep focusing on the big picture---your Deliverables. Deliverable #2 is due by July 1st.


Both sessions are now active and ready to be downloaded. Remember you can also find a back-up on Authorstream.com Just do a search for edc922.

There were many changes made to this session over the weekend to ensure having the most current information, but please let me know if any links or readings don't connect.

Additionally, I'd like you to watch the tutorial below, or if you are a real beginner you may watch this tutorial (it walks you through it at a slower pace). It is on 'Social Bookmarking.' Our EDC921 course focuses more upon these tools and their impact on education.

We are all familiar with the ability to save favorite websites in our "Favorites" folder, but what if you were working with a team of teachers collaboratively writine your Flexbook chapter? What if you and your team were collaboratively writing the entire textbook?

What if you could benefit from the greatest sites found by other teachers? What if you could access their favorites, as well as your own, from any Internet connected computer? Check out this tutorial and sign up for an account, (optional) and help us by 'tagging' all the great sites you find with an 'edc922' label. If you are apprehensive, visit Del.icio.us and do a search for 'edc920' and you'll find all the websites used in my other course. If we all do this as we find great sites that allow us to use their material free from copyright then slowly we'll build a great pool of resources that you will perpetually be able to access. As each semester passes and I work with more and more teachers, we will all add to this collective databank. Your edc922 connection will continue to reap benefits.

Most of you should be finishing your Deliverable #2 chapter soon. Please do not wait until the last minute.

One of the topics we'll be covering this week will be understanding copyright. Some of it is redundant based upon previous lessons, but bears repeating. I know---I know it sounds boring (and it can be incredibly tedious), but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.

You may recall that I mentioned that all of my weekly sessions are licensed under Creative Commons. To truly understand what that means you have to first wrap your head around the concept of a 'Shared Culture.' To help you gain more depth of knowledge you may beginto understand it begin here with a few videos that may help reinforce:

Once you've watched that you then need to understand how it's done:

Well, I don't want to overwhelm you too much with copyright information. Suffice it to say that this is all good news for education and even better news for creating your own digital texts.

One additional resource you can use with your own textbook development would be the FlatWorld Knowledge site. They are another organization that is creating free, quality textbooks, but they are geared towards higher education:




So let's get to this week's session.

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Now that you are done with Session 6, let's move on to Session 7.

I thought that it might be helpful to hear (first hand) about CK-12's mission, so I asked the President, Murugan Pal, if he could spare some time for us. We recently connected and I showed him how to set up a presentation similar to mine using Authorstream. He has finished and you'll find his presentation below.

I had originally scheduled this week's topic to be on "News Alert" services to support your research on your wiki chapter, but I think that Murugan's presentation, along with your workload from last week and Session 6, will be more than enough to keep you busy in place of Session 7. So we will skip Session 7 from the syllabus and go directly from the blog today.

Please view the presentation below:



Uploaded on authorSTREAM by ck12

Lastly, when you begin your wiki chapter you may put it in either a Google Document or a wiki service, like: wikispaces or pbwiki. If you find you have some extra time, some of you may find it simpler to begin embedding your multimedia, links, interactive tutorials, edu-games, audio/video material, podcasts, screencasts... (as described under the Final Project details on the syllabus) while you are writing. Just do a search for your topic and term. Like, "physical fitness" and video tutorial into a search engine and you'll get plenty of results.

Good luck and as always, please feel free to contact me with any questions.

DF