Current Events #2: "The Life Project"

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” ~Confucius

I found my Current Events post for Week 2 as I was reading Will Richardson’s chapter on RSS in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.

I was using Figure 5.1 on pg. 76 to add subscriptions to my Google Reader. When I subscribed to Dean Shareski’s blog (http://ideasandthoughts.org ), I discovered a recent post entitled “The Learning Project”.

I really enjoyed this post for the simplicity of its theme: you become a good teacher when you become a good learner. To summarize his blog, he describes a new learning project he is doing with student teachers in his course at the University of Regina and he outlines four steps:
a) learn a completely new skill
b) write about it
c) collect resources and
d) take a snapshot of where you are at with the skill at the beginning, and then compare it to a snapshot at the end.

Wow, I thought, this is exactly what we are doing with the inquiry project! He is an inspiring blogger and I look forward to following his adventure to learn to play guitar while we learn Web tools.

A Life's Journey with Technology

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
--Mark Twain

Exploring Web 2.0 has given me a chance to refresh my skills with Voicethread and reflect on my use of technology and how it's changed since the early 1980s when I was a kid.

Current Events #1: Explore the World Past and Present

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

- J.R. Tolkien

Get swept off of to explore the historical world with http://whatwasthere.com. Remember those photos from Grandpa in the shoebox? Now is the time to get them out.

The site allows users to connect their photographs with Google maps. The site looks very new, so it doesn't have many historical photos of Canada uploaded yet, but it's a promising project based on google maps.

Just in the past few days hundreds of photos have been uploaded. In France, there are photos of Germans entering Paris in 1940. I think it's excellent example of what can be produced through collaboration. Take a look and tell me what you think!