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Many thanks to Steve Hargadon and Lucy Gray for organizing this event!  Oh, and if you haven’t yet checked out edmodo, you should.  More than 6000 users have contributed more than 28,000 posts via edmodo since its official launch in September of 2008!

Earlier this afternoon I found out (through my PLN via Twitter) that a new web app called Edmodo had just launched.  Edmodo is aimed squarely at the education community and seeks to provide a Twitter-like experience within a structured group environment.  So far, it looks promising.  It is easy enough to add groups and has basic functions that many educators will like such as “tweeting” specific tasks such as assignments, links, notes, alerts and events.  If you are in a school where laptops and/or computer workstations are common, this may be a wonderfully useful app.  I am going to test it out with one of my classes and see how it stands up.  I have been using Google Calendar to post individual daily plans and link to documents for my students to download, but this may be a simpler solution.  I am willing to give it a try.

One question though, I love the concept of the “locker” within Edmodo (check out the voicethread on their blog to see what I am talking about), but I am perplexed.  I am able to save assignments to the locker, but I cannot figure out how to move them and share saved assignments with my groups.  Any advice?  Throw it my way.  Tweet @cookp

I must say that the greatest tool that I have gained this summer is my human network.  Research was something that I had never attempted.  Not only was I intimidated (though I was excited to learn something new), but I was working with a group of researchers in the cutting edge nanotechnology sector of the Electrical Engineering department at Notre Dame.  I had no experience with engineering.  I came in as a chemistry and physics instructor who was unsure about the experience.  I soon realized that research at it’s core is fundamentally dependant upon the formation of a human learning collaborative.  Collaboration played a vital role in weekly group meetings.  Feedback and open constructive criticism serve as invaluable tools in research. If I didn’t know quite where to go next with my experiment, I relied on graducate students and my supervising professor to point me in the right direction.  No one expected me to have all of the answers…and no one presumed to have them all either.

The power of the learning network was also amplified through the many sessions of the Builiding Learning Communities conference.  Although many of the seminars that I attended dealt with specific tools or web-based products, the common thread between the tools and products discussed was that of building connections between other humans and facilitating the transfer of thoughts, opinions and advice in an efficient medium.  Whether you use twitter, blippr, pownce, jaiku, or the myriad of other web 2.0 tools out there, the strength of the tool lies in the connectivity of the humans using the tech.

I realized that signing up for twitter will get you no where, unless you make some initial connections.  Once you have established a base of people to connect with, be it three, five or more persons, you set the connectivity ball in motion.  With a bit of patience and a dedication to become familiar with using the tool, your network grows and expands as you are exposed to new people through your connections.

As an educator, this is tremendously powerful.  You become part of a collective intelligence.  No longer do you have to be an expert on everything.  You have a learning network to support you.  Need help with a lesson or just brainstorming?  Fire off a tweet.  Want a second opinion on the lab activity you are trying for the first time?  Post it to the classroom 2.0 group on ning.  The evolution of education is well on its way.  Where educators were once sequestered and secluded, ideas can flow seamlessly across borders.  Teachers can connect with professors as well as other classes hundreds of miles away.  Collaboration is fostered and can flourish.  Student work can be assessed by a multiple persons with different vantage points.

Howard Rheingold predicted much of what I have now experienced more than three years ago.  Check out his talk on TED:

Want someone to collaborate with?  I would be happy to join in on the discussion.

TwitterID: cookp

Calgoo Connect.  Having to manage work at school using a Dell laptop and being a strictly Mac household, some irritating incompatabilities arise.  I rely upon my Outlook mail/calendar at school to keep my sanity.  Although I am able to use a web-based client for outlook, it is not nearly as robust nor as versatile as I would like.  Prior to this summer, I think I had come to terms that I would just need to figure out work-arounds or just deal with the situation.

About a week ago, I was reading some tweets when someone mentioned using Calgoo.  I had no idea what it was, so I clicked on their tinyurl.  What I ended up using, which may be useful to others out there who live in two divergent computing worlds, was Calgoo Connect.  It is a simple to configure syncronization client that works with Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook and others.  The program runs in the background on your machines and quietly updates your calendars between one another whenever you schedule it to.  Using Google Calendars as a central hub (I am using Google Calendars for lesson planning this year), I don’t need to worry about remembering to add a task or detail to my calendar at work…it is already done once I enter it onto whichever calendar happens to be in front of me.  Oh, and did I mention it is free?!!