My Project plan for Collaborative learning involves a classroom management / student-parent-teacher communication / social media / and blog platform called Schoology. It’s also free.

I have done some initial piloting with Schoology and I find it a little more versatile than Edmodo. Since Facebook is blocked by our District firewall, using that would not be possible. However, I do believe in teacher stepping in a communication stream where the kids are active, than trying to lure them away with something different.

My Audience is my 3-fold: my regular computer class students, my yearbook class members, and my teachers. If I pull this off well, I will even try to get some of our parents in on the Schoology account so they can see what on. Schoology allows for the administrator to allow parents to see whatever accounts are linked. So typically an admin links parents posts to their kid’s and to the teacher. This way privacy is maintained.

Did anyone else hear that yesterday Missouri law bans some teacher-student contact on Facebook, other sites.

Where the heck is that going and is it really going to protect kids from “bad touching”? Missouri has always been on the cutting edge of education, right?

Getting back to my proposal, check out the video. I tried to embed this video by Edublogs just wont have that initially. So I uploaded the recorded screen-cast to my Vimeo account and I am hoping for the best. It takes 30 minutes to process.

Just in case your Youtube is filtered by a firewall, I added the Vimeo too.

I  have been using Firefox not too long after version 1.0 and the only plugins I have ever kept up with is the google toolbar, adobe reader, and flash. Maybe there are a few others that is so routine I tend to think it’s just part of my browser.

So I a giving this optimization & customization idea a spin. I just added FireShot to my Firefox Browser. I do lots of the alt + print screen keyboard pushing with the web development stuff and maybe it might make my life simpler.

Next I an installing Cooliris. The page says my browsing of images and video will much better. We’ll see.

Remember when Netscape was the coolest browser in the world. Anybody out there still installing it? I imagine that lots of you young folk in COMET have never even heard of it. How about a show of hands? I think I may even built my first HTML pages while using Netscape.  This is one of the reasons I give . along with the fate of MySpace, when people say that Google or Facebook will control all online media, I say, just give it a few more years.

Occationally when I have a web-based / browser problem and cant figure it out, I will use another browser. I first go to Safari, then Opera, and certainly IExplored.  I even have Chrome installed but I never use these things. I eventually just end up creating my own problems with software conflicts and changed in default settings I don’t really desire.  How many Browsers does one actually need. The same as the number of credit cards you have in your wallet.

I am only here temporarily, so don’t get too comfortable. This Edublog will contain the assignments for Collaborative Learning portion of EDTEC 700.