Friday, June 19, 2009

Using Bubbl.us to map a course

I am taking my third Sloan Consortium workshop, thanks to the University of Maryland's College Pass. The first two workshops were about second Life, and the third one is called "Getting Started: The First Step Toward Online Teaching." One of the "deliverables" (assignments) is a concept map of a course or part of a course. I already had an account with Bubble Us so I used that. I teach a Reading/Writing/Grammar course, and at first I tried to map out the reading part of the course, but that proved too daunting, so I did just the vocabulary part of reading. Although this is a f2f class, I tried to include online resources for each aspect of vocabulary study. Here is my concept map:










You can zoom in and out by using the scroll wheel of your mouse and click and drag to see different parts of the map. One thing I couldn't figure out is how to name the map something other than "New Sheet". I kept naming it, but the name on this map is still "New Sheet." Grrrr.

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Sloan-C Second Life Workshops

In May, I signed up for "Getting Started in Second Life" with the Sloan Consortium; lucky for me, Sloan-C offerings are free to the University of Maryland community. I really enjoyed that workshop, which lasted about 8 days and which reviewed some basic skills for me and taught me some new things.

Now I am beginning "Introduction to Second Life for Educators," taught by Dr. Michael DeMers of New Mexico State University Las Cruces. Back in March, Dr. DeMers was interviewed by Scott Simon of NPR; the six-minute interview is here.