Will Richardson

An interesting reflection from Will that this will be the The You Tube election. Check out YouTube for the newest news from the candidates!

So how will the tools (Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts) impact learning and how does it change what we do with students.
He showed some neat sites

• Clustr Maps- looks like a neat site to measure who and where people are that are reading your Blog!

• Fan Fiction Site- If you are passionate about a book or movie, you can write an alternate ending. The site has nothing to do with School, but students are using is as it is fun. If you love Harry Potter you can share information about Harry.

Some observations from Will:

• Texting on phones, myspace and IM. We don’t allow it at school. Not going to go away.
• Bebo- 23 million people now
• Myspace 162 million people on now
• 65 % or more of kids are social networking
• Doing a ton of learning in Myspace, Learn about music, popular culture.
• Every print encyclopedia is obsolete when Pluto was demoted!
• Text message 4665 Google will send you a text message back with the answer
• OpenCourseware- take courses online free,
  Video lectures and content for free
• Libya will probably the first country totally online as they are receiving the 100-dollar laptops.
• Wikipedia One of the most important sites on the Internet “Collaborative construction of knowledge as we know it”

Work with other people collaboratively on work. Collaboration on documents very popular among groups now. “Google docs and spreadsheet”

Secret Life of Bees- The author blogged back to Will’s class and wrote how impressed she was with their insights of her novel.

Melissa