Elluminate Free Webinar's (and Edubloggerworld Kickoff)

So I'm looking around my Reader today reading up on what I have been missing out on over the past few days (mini holiday), and I come across Victoria Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog mentioning the EduBloggerWorld kickoff on Thursday. I see that she mentions that she is hosting a little Elluminate session on Thursday....I go over to Elluminate. Heard of it a billion times in my online courses, never participated, yet! I then did a quick search through the Events link to see if I could see her session.

No, BUT!!!!!!

There are 3 pretty neat and FREE sessions coming up by Lance Dublin.

Back-To-Basics: Developing An E-Learning Strategy And Architecture
Lance Dublin
2007-09-27
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

Back-To-Basics: Implementing E-Learning Successfully
Lance Dublin
2007-11-01
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

Back-To-Basics: Understanding And Applying Learning 2.0
Lance Dublin
2007-11-29
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

ToonDoo

I tried out ToonDoo today after seeing it on the EduBloggerWorld site. Kind of a neat little tool you can use to create little cartoon scenes for your blog, training sessions, or just for fun. I created this little one about my new LMS that's coming in about 5 minutes. There is lots of customization, but easy enough too with many drag and drop backgrounds, characters, items, etc.

Pay Attention - Transforming Teaching Through Technology

Scanning through the EduBloggerWorld site I came across and quoted recently Darren Draper who referred to a video Pay Attention. This video is presented on the T4-Jordan School District website Transforming Teaching Through Technology.

The video is definitely worth watching and has some great stats (US 2001-2004) about why students are so technologically savvy.

• Average college students have spent 10000 hours playing video games, 10000 hours using cell phones, 20000 watching TV
• Today's children and teens spend an average 2.7 hours at a computer a week
• 70% of 4-6 year olds have used a computer
• 65% of children under 2 will use a screen media for just over 2 hours

I don't work in an environment with children, but these ideas and statistics are things that we take very seriously. We are dealing with (as is much of North America) a nursing shortage. Our late career nurses are ending their careers, there are few mid-career nurses around, and our next great hope is a much younger generation. We realize within our department that our training methods must change greatly to appeal to this generation of people that know how to use all sorts of technology. More so they expect to have it readily available to them regardless of where they might be at any given time.

It's amazing to see that in our organization we have 6 computers (I know that's not very many) that staff can use on their free time (lunch, breaks). We try to encourage their use for educational advancement. We do have a lot of continuing students employed. But what we see day in and day out is Facebook on the computers. I sat down at one on Friday to work on our payroll. The girl beside me must have thought I was spying on what she was doing, and I guess I was since I can recall her actions. She opened another screen full of something medical and then minimized Facebook down to the corner so she could read a message that had been sent to her. I guess she doesn't know that, hey that's okay. We actually don't mind you using the program here, but on your free time.

Back to the video though, it did tweak my thoughts to a discussion we had in our department last week. We do orientation every month here for new hires. We get great compliments on how informative it is and how much they like the session. However, as a trainer standing at the front of the room watching the doodling and eyes rolling into the back of their heads, we have to wonder how engaging is it really.

We hope to revamp it before the end of the summer and instead of having a bunch of talking heads at the front of the room drone on about WHMIS, occupational health, infection control, fire safety (I'm getting bored just listing the topics) we want to change it into an entirely interactive day. We have considered inserting games, scavenger hunts where they must find the main points of topics we normally cover, their own presentations, etc. If we can find some budget money to make it more techno-interesting too I'll bet we'll get great reviews from our new staff.

I just joined EduBloggerWorld

I just found this via a post from Julie Lindsay. It's a fairly new social network set up through Ning by Darren Draper, Steve Hargadon and inspired by conversations with Vicki Davis.

Its intent is to be a place for connections and community geared towards education bloggers WORLDWIDE. It's also a step towards future virtual events. As Darren states "We think this is an important step in embracing the international culture of a flattening world and an excellent way to pay attention to the world around us."