Conference Infobytes
THE INFORMATION IN CONFERENCE INFOBYTES DESCRIBES A QUALITY RESOURCE OR IDENTIFIES AN ISSUEWITH SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS. DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THESE TOPICS DURING THE SESSIONS AT THE 2011 MACUL CONFERENCE.
PLNs: How Social Networking
can Benefit you Professionally By Melinda Waffle
with friends and family, but how can it be used professionally? Just as we are using these tools to break down the walls of the classroom for our students, connecting with colleagues no longer has to mean visiting the teacher down the hall, it can be chatting and sharing with other teachers around the globe.
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Social networking tools can be a great way to get directed to quality resources and lessons. Instead of building a brand-new lesson or unit from scratch, use your online PLN (Personal Learning Network) to begin with some already created, quality material.
Social networking tools can help save. Instead of performing blind time-consuming searches for learning activities and lesson plans, use your online PLN to get pointed in the right direction.
Social networking tools can help support life-long learning. Instead of attending periodic classes or professional development, use your online PLN to constantly be informed on current issues, trends and research in education.
In education, we oſten hear the fears and negatives about social networking. Come to this session to discuss how social networking can be used positively by educators in a professional manner.
Melinda Waffle is the Educational Technology Consultant at Calhoun Intermediate School District in Marshall, MI. Prior to her current role, she worked at Union City Community Schools as the Technology Coordinator; and as a mathematics, computers and health teacher. Additionally, she is the Assistant Director for the MACUL Special Interest Group Multimedia, a member of the RITS-REMC group, a coach for MI-Champions, and a member of the Discovery Education Network. You can read her blog at http://
wafflebytes.blogspot.com/, follow her on twitter @icmcwaffle, and access her Diigo bookmarks at http://
www.diigo.com/user/icmcwaffle.
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any people use social networking tools such as Twitter and FaceBook to personally connect and share information
Ease Collaboration with
Web 2.0 Tools By Tim Staal
W
ikipedia has a great definition of collaboration: Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.
Collaboration can be tough. As a teacher, media specialist, technology director, and member of many groups, I’ve long struggled with ways to make collaboration easy. I think I may speak for others when I say that the hard part of collaboration for me has always been making the work recursive. I’ve found that too often my attempts at collaboration have been one way, with one person doing most of the work. Some of the issues that make it difficult, include coordinating meeting times, working together on documents, sharing, organizing and archiving files, determining which version(s) are the latest, correct ones, etc.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, there are now easy to use technology tools that can help make collaboration easy. Both the MACUL and MAME boards now use some of the collaboration capabilities offered with the Google applications tools to work togeth- er by sharing calendars, folders, documents, etc. We can find times for meetings, ensure that every one receives relevant emails, track changes to ideas both in real time and later, know we have the correct infor- mation and archive important documents.
The MACUL conference will have many sessions with tips and tricks on how to make good use of collaborative tools such as those in the Google Apps for education. I hope you get a chance to attend one or two and take some time to think about how you can use these tools to better work together to accomplish all those things that need doing.
“Collaboration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p.. n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Collaboration>.
Tim Staal is the Executive Director of MAME, the Michigan Association for Media in Education, after having recently retired as Director of Media and Information Technology for Jenison Public Schools. Tim is also a past president of MACUL.
Conference 2011 | MACULJOURNAL
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