Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Alec Couros

Today our class had the opportunity to listen to Alec Couros. Alec is a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina.





Alec spoke about the use of Personal Learning Networks (PLN's) to collaborate with people from all over the world. These networks allow teachers, students and parents to connect with people that they normally wouldn't have the opportunity to connect with. The most important aspect of this is the children having the opportunity to collaborate with other students and experts. Students are able to tap into the expertise of others in a way that makes the learning real and exciting. These things can be done through the use of Twitter, Youtube, Skype, Google Docs and many more.

Alec used a program called Elluminate to carry out his talk with us today. This is the first time I have seen Elluminate used and basically it is a program that allows a host to invite guests to join in on a discussion. The guest are able to message the host and other guest while the tutorial is taking place. This allows users to interact with each other and ask questions when needed. The host is also able to show tutorials and speak to them while others watch and interact. Overall I thought that this program would be good for teaching an online course.

Some other interesting sites and applications that Alec mentioned in his discussion that I would like to research further include Tweet Deck, Drop It To Me, Classroom 2.0 Ning, and Reddit.

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