As I look at the last 4 weeks of my blogging experience, I am amazed at how much I have grown to love this. I have never considered myself to be the type of person who keeps a journal, much less put something together for the entire world to see (if they so desired). But after experimenting with blogging, I see a whole new use for it and purpose for it. Before beginning my program at Full Sail, I was familiar with many of these Web 2.0 tools, but I never had a desire or a valid use to spend my time messing with them. Between work, family, and WoW, I didn’t have the time to delve into blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Through my program at Full Sail, I have been forced to immerse myself in these tools and have realized the great potential that each has IF USED PROPERLY!!!

Blogging is one of these tools that I personally see great potential for (along with Twitter). I have created a Twitter account for my class already (MFTCST – look me up and follow me) in, which I regularly send out technology, and industry related information. I will also be creating a blog for my program in which I will be able to offer another form of communication with my students. Updates about my program, general information about the industry, and other generous ramblings on my part can be used to enhance my program in yet another way and supply me with another tool in my handy-dandy teaching kit.

I find it amusing when I look back at my very first blog and read up to this one. I see that I have become more comfortable with the idea and purpose of blogging and I am now having more fun with it instead of treating each blog like a short research paper. I plan on keeping this blog updated, but the subject matter will change more to what I am doing in my program and my educational experiences. I have learned much in this past month and look forward to many more months of learning about Web 2.0 tools and using them in my class.

Second Life. These words have always conjured up feelings of boredom for me. I remember reading about Second Life years ago when it was first being introduced, and thinking to myself – well, it might not be too bad. I created a character, logged in, looked around, and promptly logged back into my Horde Rogue in World of Warcraft. I have never looked back – until I started my program at Full Sail University. The course directors at the school decided that all students should know about Second Life and be able to use it as another tool in our teaching kits. In our first month, I went through the process of creating another avatar and was really excited, because I wanted to see what this virtual environment really had to offer me. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a whole lot in there yet except for some basic exploration, and I was not impressed. I began to wonder, do my students even care about this program and environment? So, I asked them. Out of 36 students, ages 16-46, only 13 even knew what Second Life was. Out of those 13, only 1 student was really into it and enjoyed going into the world and creating things and playing in there. I was blown away by these results! I asked my students why they didn’t get in there and play and the answers were pretty much all the same: “it’s boring”, “there’s nothing to do”, “the barrier of entry is to high”, “too much of a learning curve”, “I don’t know what to do in there”, etc. My initial reaction to this enlightening of the teacher was “so why the heck are we wasting our time with this in my Master’s program?” Then things changed for me on Tuesday night.

Tuesday night, our class got together for our weekly Wimba session. We had a special guest who decided to take us into Second Life to show us what we would be doing in her class (imagine my excitement at this point). So, everyone got into Second Life, it took a while for everyone to find each other and get situated (I was almost in tears at this point and had thoughts of dropping the program before I was subjected to a whole month of this), but once everyone was together, something happened. We were shown that with items in Second Life, we could give presentations in there. I have heard of this being done obviously, but I am a visual person and “seeing is believing”. I was taken aback at the implications this could provide to educators and trainers. I began reflecting on the results of my informal survey and realized, that with enough proper training, once students were introduced to the world of Second Life and given the tools and guidance they would need to understand the world, they might change their views on it.

Now, I haven’t completely flipped my opinion on Second Life just over one night’s experiences, but my excitement, hope, and expectations have been raised and I am looking forward to delving into the world and seeing what it has to offer me.

Use the below links to find some information about using Second Life in education:

Second Life in Education

Second Life Education Wiki

implementing these tools

This week, I have been able to really see how to implement many of these tools that we have been introduced to in the Full Sail program.

I have created a Twitter account for my class. The purpose of the Twitter account will be to send out industry updates to help keep current and graduated students up to date with the technology trends.

Over the weekend, I was able to convince the SkillsUSA Florida board of directors to let me put a committee together to change our website. My goal is to get the site into the hands of the students and let them run it.

I am pretty excited about these tools and I hope that if utilized properly, they can make a difference in these areas!!!

Communities of practice abound in our society. They have always been around, but with the increase of Internet usage and tools, they have taken on a whole new meaning and significance in our world. The Air Force has their own COP and on their site they define a COP as “A Community of Practice is a group of people connected to each other by a need to solve common problems, develop skills, and share common practices. A Community of Practice typically shares a common responsibility or function. Community members collaborate to more effectively accomplish their mission.” Basically, a COP is a group of people with a common interest that get together to share ideas, collaborate, and assist each other. In our new flat world, online tools such as forums, online document sharing, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. all allow COP’s to come together in new innovative ways. I could easily create a website for IT instructors and implement forums for the teachers to come together and ask questions of each other and provide support. The wonderful thing about using tools like this is that we are no longer confined to our geographical areas. I could receive feedback from an instructor in California, or even overseas. The following table, taken from Etienne Wagner’s site, shows examples of some of the roles that COP’s can play:

Problem solving	"Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck."
Requests for information	"Where can I find the code to connect to the server?"
Seeking experience	"Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?"
Reusing assets	"I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client."
Coordination and synergy	"Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?"
Discussing developments	"What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?"
Documentation projects	"We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all."
Visits	"Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city."
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps	"Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?"

As you can see, COP’s can be an extremely beneficial tool and resource for anyone to use. Most fields of employment have organizations that can be joined for some benefits. A COP differs from these organizations in that they are usually informal and focus on a specific discipline whereas most professional organizations may cover a wide range of disciplines within an industry. As the ability to collaborate with others across the world continues to grow, the roles of COP’s will continue to grow and will become increasingly important to members of any industry.

Social media has changed the way our world gets information out to each other. Tools such as blogs, Twitter, videos, etc. have given us the ability to communicate our feelings, ideas, views, and issues with others immediately. Have you tried a product you didn’t like? Blog about it and let others know! Do you have a picture of some important event? Post it on Flickr and show the world what is going on around you. Businesses can create their own page on a social networking site, such as Facebook, and drive customers to there to get information and leave feedback. This is actually the basis for the advertising firm, Social Media: “Our vision is to make advertising on social networks as engaging and socially relevant as the applications themselves.” Many musical acts utilize Facebook and MySpace to interact with their fans. This gives their fans a chance to feel closer to the artist and is an effective way for the artist to get news out to their fans.

I found it extremely ironic that as I was researching for this topic, the majority of sites that had information on social media were themselves blogs!

As educators, how can we utilize this in our classrooms? We need to be able to implement these tools into our classes and our training. For example, I have setup a Twitter account and will be using it to send industry information and updates out to my students. Once a student graduates, they will still have the ability to receive these updates and keep in touch. A blog can also be setup to get additional information about curriculum materials, industry news, class news, etc can be created.

By utilizing social media tools, education and business alike can improve their services. We are a social people and want to interact with others. These social media tools give us that chance to provide our opinions and interact with those that we normally would not be able to.

The below link will take you to a information page on a series of online seminars that will be dealing with social media.

http://aace.org/globalu/seminars/socialmedia/

Our students today are being born with a smart phone in their hand, their own Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts, and knowing how to use it all. These digital natives will not learn by the old methods of teaching. Unfortunately, many teachers do not understand this and have continued trying to use the old methods of standing in front of the classroom lecturing to the students. These teachers still feel that Power Point is cutting edge and they don’t understand why their students are falling asleep during class. We are now living in a global world and we need to train our students to compete in this new world. Ken Kay, co-founder of the P-21 movement, states in an article in USA Today “notes that virtually all of the industrialized countries the USA is competing with ‘are pursuing both content and skills.’” So what do we, as educators, do about this?

These 21^st century skills need to be taught in the classroom. We need to be able to train our students on these skills so they will be ready when they enter the workforce. The problem though, is that many teachers don’t have the knowledge to teach to their students. Teachers need to continue their own training and learn to expand their own knowledge so that they can implement these skills and teach their students in their classrooms. Many teachers can be loathe to learn these new skills though.

A few years back, I had a retired educator in my class who wanted to learn how to repair computers and networking. Now, my entire curriculum is web based and I do NOT stand in front of the class and lecture for 6 hours a day to my students. They would fall asleep (I probably would also). This retired educator actually went to my administrator and tried to get me fired by making false accusations against me. It eventually came out that he thought I was a bad teacher because I didn’t use the traditional outdated teaching methods and he didn’t like the way my class was setup. I have seen this reluctant attitude from many teachers across the district and until they change or leave, we will continue to face the problems that we do now.

The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills is the leading advocacy group for infusing these skills into the classroom. Please check out their sites and see what they are up to. So far, ten states have partnered with them to implement 21^st century skills into the classes.

What exactly is media literacy? I did a Google search for this answer and found some official sounding definitions, but Dr. Peter DeBenedittis defined it best on his website. He says “Media literacy is the ability to "read" television and mass media.” Our students have grown up being inundated by messages through the media, but do they know how to read these messages? Our children need to know how to differentiate correct information from the wrong information. My six year old daughter loves to watch her “kid shows”, but it drives me crazy when during the commercials, she sees some product and immediately believes everything in the commercial. This marketing is the whole point of commercials obviously, but we can’t believe everything we see on TV. TV is not the only form of media that we have to deal with anymore. With the wide usage of the Internet by today’s students, students must be able to decide what is reliable and validated. Is Wikipedia always accurate? While it is a good place to go to get some preliminary information, it is not wholly reliable. The information contained on Wikipedia is entered by anybody. The people who write the articles are not necessarily experts on the subject matter. So what do we do about this?

One answer to this question is to teach our students media literacy in the classroom. According to the Center for Media Literacy, there are 10 main benefits to doing this. One of the first ones listed is that teaching Media Literacy “Meets the needs of students to be wise consumers of media, managers of information and responsible producers of their ideas using the powerful multimedia tools of a global media culture.” As I stated earlier, our children and students are being inundated with so many messages through the media (think about election years) and they need to be able to sift through this information. As our society grows more global and more reliant on technology, the media will grow along with us. If our students do not know how to read this information, they will be lost in the future.