Vacation, Class, Collaboration

I've been back from NECC for a couple of days and back into the Mariners having gone to their last two games of the home stand the last couple of days.

I've been taking it easy this week before my graduate course starts next week for Plymouth State University. It's my first time teaching a graduate level course and I'm a little nerves. It's great to have a network though as I found out that Dean Shareski is teaching a course for the first time this summer as well, so we've been doing some planning and trying to come up with a way for our two classes to collaborate on a project. Dean's class is an undergraduate course and we thought it would be great to get these soon-to-be-teachers collaborating with experienced teachers from my graduate course. We're using a Google Doc to create the assessment which should be fun. Our goal is to show our students the collaborative nature of this new web, by creating a collaborate project. Of course Dean and I are collaborating setting it up, but it seems natural, to me at least, to be doing such a project and that's what I hope my students learn. That collaborating over long distances is easy once you know the tools exist and what each of the tools do.

The main assessment for the students will be a minimum 20 entry blog that they will set up the first week and continue to post on through out the course. Instead of a term paper or something along those lines I wanted them to A) Show them the power of these new tools and B) Give them something that is more than a term paper that gets stored in a filing cabinet. This "Paper" will be open, searchable, and accessible by them for years to come (that's my thought anyway).

So I've been working on that, and relaxing (that's what you are suppose to do on vacation right?).

I did order a Samson CO3U Microphone that I'm excited to use for this class as I record podcasts to introduce students to each week's assignments. I'm using two text for the course. Will Richardson's Blog, Wikis, Podcasts...  and George Siemens' Knowing Knowledge. Two great books that I think speak to both the theory behind these tools and the practical use of them in the classroom.

As soon as the students have their blogs set up I'll be sure to post them here just in case you want to follow along and help them understand the power of this new web. :)

[tags]psu[/tags]

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