This was my final presentation that I did at BLC08. I never ended up posting it and now I’ve just recently re-presented it for some student teachers at Simon Fraser University.

[Update: July 20th, '09 - new post with SlideShare available]

Afterwards, I had them contribute to a VoiceThread, just like I did with the TLITE presentations, and with my firsttwo presentations in Boston. Then I created a Diigo Classroom with them… (I should have spent more time on this final part!)

In my presentation, ‘The Ant’ is a metaphor for a networked learner. Ants work together and do so much more than they could as individuals or even as smaller groups. But, I’d call this the weakest part of the presentation… So how do I fix that? I let my network do it for me!

Here is what happened during the presentation

My (Twitter) Network in Action Part 1: The Shout-Out (Read from the bottom up.)


But that’s just a small sample of the power of a network. Sunday night Heather, a student in my session, sent me this e-mail:

Hey David

I have a quick question, i am going to do a wiki with my bio 11 students
with microbiology.  They have to go online and type in a virus and give a
whole bunch of information.  But how do i know which students did what?  I
did it with wetpaint.  And i have blocked all access just in case the
parents have issues with it.

I’ve never tried Wetpaint. I went to two different Wetpaint pages and didn’t have an answer for her so I went back to Twitter!

My Network in Action Part 2: Seeking Help (Again please read from the bottom up.)

A skitch image from Jen Injenuity Jones

It took just a few minutes to get help from someone in Thailand that I’ve never met face-to-face. We may not have met (f2f) before, but Jeff Utecht is in My Neighbourhood. I actually used the images from one of his posts for my Brave New World Wide Web Slide Show then Video.

Another Tweet by Jeff ended with “Let me know if you need any help”. Thanks Jeff, and thanks also to Jen Jones for inspiring this post! I used one of her blog posts in my presentation above.

And I’d like to say thank to Bob Cotter, Cheryl Oaks, Penny LindBalle, Steve Sokoloski, Maureen Tumenas, etalbert, Lesley Edwards, Mrs_Banjer, Derrall Garrison, Sue Waters, Amanda Salt, Elizabeth Lloyd, Silvia Tolisano, Ian Hecht, Neil Varner, James Gill, Kathy Cassidy, James McConville, Lorraine Orenchuk, Brian Crosby, and Dean Shareski for contributing to the networked ‘conversations’ above.

Ants are individually insignificant, but networked in a collaborative way, they literally move mountains! Networked teachers and educators like these I’ve mentioned are moving mountains too, and it is my hope that Student Teachers will see the value of becoming networked and having their students be networked too!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 4:03 am and is filed under Learning Conversations, Pro-D, School2.0, connecting online, metaphor, networks, pairadimes, presentation, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Comments so far


  1. EJ Wilson on January 13, 2009 7:09 am

    Hey David,

    Just wanted to thank you for cluing me into Diigo Classroom. I’ve been using Diigo for a while now with my students to help them track their online research for sourcing their material.

    Keep the ideas rolling!

    TW

  2. Jeff Utecht on January 18, 2009 8:24 pm

    Very cool to see this all unfold. It’s just another day of work in a networked environment.

  3. Great Tweets Month coming in March « The View From My Window on February 25, 2009 8:37 pm

    [...] what you value about twitter. • To see what others value about twitter. • To celebrate the power and wisdom of your Personal Learning Network. • To find interesting people to follow on Twitter. • To [...]

  4. Stephen Downes on July 25, 2009 6:24 am

    Hiya Dave – just saw your presentation on Slideshare – how did you embed the videos so they played in the Slideshare window?

  5. Dave Truss on July 25, 2009 12:49 pm

    Hi Stephen,

    This was the first time that I saw the video embed in Slideshare. It now has a Youtube embed tab when you edit your presentation. One nice feature is that this embed does not mess up your slide numbers, the video is sequenced between slides.

    New YouTube Tab on Slidshare

    I didn’t embed the Slideshare in this old post, find it in my new post, or on Slideshare.

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