We're back!  Welcome to the new folks! And of course, welcome to those that contiune to hang with me!  Tonight was a trail to see if I really could stay connected.  Hope to see everybody next week.

Chat:

My new house is the house of my dreams and the view is unbelievable.  The price you pay for peace and quiet is…. no connectivity.  I am begging DSL or cable to run a line, but for now I’m stuck with satellite TV (which is ok) and satellite Internet (which stinks).

Brewster Bartlett, a NH high school teacher, shared information about the Road Kill Project that he started. Sheila Adams, a WCA intern, joined us to talk about her involvement in this web based project.

Chat Log

A great chat with some new folks. Welcome to Criss Crissman and her class. We will continue the conversation Thursday 1/31/08 @ 7:00 est - come join us and play.

Thanks to all! 

Chat:  

Making Connections # 25 was all about classtools.net (something I learned about from Twitter) a cools site that allows you to create Flash games for the classroom.  We started the show with a bang and even made some new connections.  Welcome to Bill Gaskins and Shelia as first timers.  I am sorry to say about 13 minutes into the show something went very wrong with my audio recording.  But I hope what you hear gives you enough information to get you excited about the site. 

I believe the answer to virtual worlds in elementary school may be within the Edusim environment.  A protected world where educators along with their students can experiment and create learning environments. 

A great conversation with Sean Sharp of Floyd County Public Schools, Virginia. We discussed staff development, assessment tools, and student information systems. Sean’s energy, enthusiasm, and passion for technology are inspiring.

We had a great show sharing ideas about recent conferences and we “made new connections” with Kim and Bradley. We welcome the two of you into the EdTechTalk network.

Maria Knee joined us after accepting her Technology Using Educator Award at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference. Check out Maria’s live interview from the conference with out very own Jeff Lebow.

Tonight's show was a brainstorm of ideas to revamp our wiki. A wiki we began a year ago. In theory it is good, but the navigation is terrible. We talked through some ideas and I have started the re-design. Please let me know what you are thinking? Would it work in your classroom?

Thanks to Maggie Tsai for giving us another tour of Diigo. Diigo has lots of possibilities for the classroom, thanks for sharing!

• highlight text on webpages

• add sticky notes
• group web sites

Chat:

Rendy King and Freda Ballard share great materials they created for a workshop for teachers @ Meredith College. Learn how to set-up a math webquest for elementary students. Rendy and Freda have shared all their information below.

Even though we had a change in plans....we had great discussions about podcasting, moodle, and drupal.  Thanks to all for joining.  Leave a comment here in podomatic - to introduce yourself.

Maria Knee did an awesome job teaching us how to use Scratch, the new programming tool for students to create digital stories and animations. 

We even have a screencast!

Join us Tuesday night @ 7:00 Eastern Time as we hear from Maggie Tsai of Diigo.

Mindmeister was our tool of choice for the June 5^th show.  We had a great group playing together in our virtual playground.  Here is the link to our Making Connections Map.  Go ahead and sign-up for Mindmeister and we will send you an invite to join us. 

We had a great time experimenting with bubble.us.

It was very rewarding for teachers to have time to "play" with the new web 2.0 tools.  Thank you EdTedhTalk for giving us that space.

Chat: 

Tonight we learned the power of the new web 2.0 tool, Diigo.   Thanks to Maggie Tsai, co-founder of Diigo, we were able to have a personal guided tour.  Maggie explained how to customize the toolbar, highlight and clip, how to forward selected information to email addresses, and how to simultaneous bookmark to del.icio.us.  But the coolest feature of all was extracting information from a website and creating a whole new page.  That was awesome!  Thanks again Maggie!  We want you to come back soon so we can learn more.

We jumped in with both feet to Diigo.  Using Yugma we set up the Diigo toolbar, created a group for Making Connections, and added sticky notes to those pages.  We all agreed this tool has great possibilities in a classroom setting.  We did encounter a few challenges when trying to add sticky notes to certain pages and we want to learn to highlight in different colors.  Next week we will report back on how the kids react to using this site and the secret to changing highlight colors. 

Chat:

A few audio issues hampered our beginning, but we still managed to experiment with some great web tools and we “connected” a few more people.  This is a great group! 

Check out our top links and Chat

We made another connection!  Maria and Linda made an appointment to chat about a shared reading meeting via Skype. We had a good lesson on “sound” in second grade- using http://www.skrbl.com/.  But the most fun was creating our portraits on the easy to use Portrait Ilustrator Maker.

We had a great gathering!  Thanks to everyone who helped us create another “first” in Dare County.  Following is a list of links mentioned during our chat.  Thanks to our special guest Randy and Maddie for your expert information.