Thumann Resources

21st Century ideas to help facilitate good teaching and learning.

Classroom 2.0 - Ten Reasons to Join in 2009

Posted by lthumann on January 1, 2009

When I introduce teachers to Web 2.0 in a professional development event, I urge them to join Classroom 2.0. When I read Peggy George’s request to submit a list of Top Ten new ideas, techniques, tools, books, conversations that made 2008 special for you for the “What We Learned in 2008.” show on January 2, 2009, it gave me the idea to create a list of reasons why teachers new to Web 2.0 or Social Networking should join.

Here’s the list - please let me know if you think I’ve missed anything important as I value your input.

  1. Ask a question get an answer if you are active in your PLN.
  2. Classroom 2.0 is THE best place for Web 2.0 Ed Tech Newbies to get started.cr2_japanese
  3. If you want to learn about Screencasting – check out the thread CR has on it – there are 48 posts with over 25 useful links to check out.
  4. You can search CR2.0 by area, by subject or by tool, which makes it a bit easier to find specific information when you don’t know what keyword to search with.
  5. With over 15,000 members, Classroom 2.0 has to be the best resources for information for classroom teachers – not just techies.
  6. There are over 300 subgroups within CR 2.0 including one for Second Life, the DEN, one for educators interested in brain research and one for music teachers . There is something for everyone.
  7. You can add the Classroom 2.0 badge to your website, blog, Facebook page, pretty much anywhere you’d like to let people know you are a member and where they can go to find out more information about you. CR2.0 provides the code for several different badges at http://www.classroom20.com/main/embeddable/list.
  8. Don’t speak English? Not a problem. CR2.0 is available in 11 languages including Portuguese, Hebrew and Japanese .
  9. Classroom 2.0 is not only a Ning . It’s so much more – including FREE Professional Development. There are the workshops and the weekly Elluminate sessions on Classroom 2.0 Live.
  10. Join the CR2.0 Wikispace and contribute, subscribe to updates and changes, or just bookmark this great resource.

I know there’s so much more, but I wanted to keep the list to ten. Your comments abd additions would further show the power of a PLN as I point educators to this list during the coming year.

mwsnap010122

Happy New Year! I hope to see you in the chat at the “What We Learned in 2008″ Classroom 2.0 event with Peggy George, Kim Caise and of course, Steve Hargadon tomorrow at 1pm EST.

Posted in 21st_Century_Learning, PLN, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Six Degrees of GCTs

Posted by lthumann on November 11, 2008

You may be familiar with the game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The challenge of the game is to connect every film actor to Kevin Bacon in six cast lists or less. The game was developed in 1994 by some students at Pennsylvania’s Albright College. Today, it exists in several formats including a board game and a web site generator.

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Generator

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Generator

It all started in 1967 when  Stanley Milgram, an American Sociologist decided to test what he termed the “small-world problem”. He randomly chose a few people in the mid-West and had them send packages to complete strangers in Massachusetts. Each package had an ultimate target destination, which Milgram estimated it would take hundreds of exchanges to reach, but the experiment proved him wrong.  The packages arrived to their pre-determined recipients in (on average) between five and seven exchanges. According to articles published on Milgrim’s experiment,  his findings inspired the phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Lots of others have jumped on this craze though.  There’s John Guare’s play, Six Degrees of Separation which premiered in 1990. There’s also the movie by the same title released in 1993.

In August 2008, Microsoft set out to test the theory of the 6 Degrees of Separation. Using data from their Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006 (equivalent to roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time):

  1. They looked at 180 billion different pairs of users in the database
  2. They found that the average length to connect two users was 6.6 hops
  3. 78 per cent of the pairs could be connected in seven steps or fewer

And then there’s the 6 Degrees of Wikipedia.

I choose to go from Google to Education and these were my results:

I would need only 2 clicks - - Google - - Ann Arbor, Michigan - - Education

6 Degrees of Wikipedia

6 Degrees of Wikipedia

6 Degrees of GCTs
There are now over 250 GCTs and we’re about to welcome 50 more. How are we all connected to each other? Before we used Social Bookmarking tools like Delicious and Diigo and Social Networking tools like Twitter, Plurk and Facebook would it have taken 6 hops to get to each other? Maybe. But I think we’ve got a really strong network of dedicated educators who need maybe two hops at the most to reach each other. I’m really proud to be part of such a strong community.

cert_teacher1

By the way, for those of you who were asking about the video I created for my application back in 2007, the old link is active, but it doesn’t come up in any search queries. I’ve re posted it here.

Posted in Google, PLN, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

What Do You Mean 30 Is Too Old for Facebook?

Posted by lthumann on September 28, 2008

What do you mean I’m too old for Facebook?

You have got to be kidding!

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was making the 70 mile commute down to Camden City, NJ to teach a workshop called Technology for Tots when some, shall we say, immature, inexperienced, basic lack of diplomacy, intern on the radio ranted on for ten minutes about how nobody over the age of 30 should be on Facebook.

I had to pull over at the rest stop.

At the time I was not yet on Facebook. Since that day I have been meaning to sign up. Pretty much every day I answer these questions because I truly value social networking as a means of developing as a professional and relieving the feelings of isolation.

Plus there’s the Nings I belong to and Classroom2.0 and don’t forget e-mail. I’m on SecondLife, occasionally I Skype or ooVoo with someone. I recently even joined Linkedin.

So, a new contact in my PLN, Beth Ritter-Guth, shared a link in Diigo today that caught my attention and reminded me of that comment regarding Facebook. The link was to an article posted on the ReadWriteWeb. I was hoping that this article, Study: Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks would have the statistics on the ages of Facebook users.

Social Network Sites

Gender and Age Analysis of Social Networking Users: Social Network Sites

And there it was - the proof I guess I was waiting for - that I was not too old to join Facebook. Once I added up the women, men and the unspecified, I was ready to join the over 580,000 over-the-age-of-34 (TAKE THAT RADIO INTERN) Facebook users.

I am now registered. I was happy to find so many people in my PLN already on Facebook. It makes me truly wonder what I’ve been missing.

I might need to try another radio station or stick to listening to my iPod in the car.

Posted in PLN | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »