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Welcome to my homepage! I am a k-12 special educator currently perusing a degree in instructional design from the University of Colorado at Denver.
If you are here because of my TIE conference presentation, Teaching with free tools on the Read/Write Web, here is a link to my online handout over at the H2O playlist. I have also created a support web page for the presentation. In this mini-session I plan to do a nuts and bolts demonstration on how to use free web tools to help your teaching and learning.
First we will do some do-it yourself professional development using RSS and Bloglines. Then we will save and share our favorite Internet bookmarks using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Next we will create a little online content for our students by making a podcast using Audicity and posting it to an Ourmedia account.
You will see many of the resources I use to find information on the Internet on display hear on my site. These free on-line software tools would fall in the category of social software. On your right in the yellow box you will see my on-line collection of Internet links I keep on a social bookmarking site called del.icio.us. The site uses tags creating a folksonomy, which allows me to organize the bookmarks and add them to this site by category. To learn more about social bookmarking please read this informative weblog post from the Public Broadcasting System’s web site called Teacher Source, Learning.now by Andy Carvin titled; Tag - You’re Delicious!
On the right in the maroon box you see some of the photos that I post to my Flikr account, which allows me to tag, organize and share my photos. Please feel free to use any of the images you like in any of your digital projects as long as you understand that a Creative Commons License covers them. I also use real simple syndication (rss) to follow over 100 various web logs (blogs) and scan their headlines in Bloglines. On my résumé page I have a list of trusted blogs I scan to keep current on events and issues that I follow. It is my personal electronic professional development.
My projects page will show you what I’m trying to teach while my social software shows what I’m trying to learn, I hope that this site will give some insight to how I learn. I use the Internet along with the social software to connect with other active learners keeping me informed and engaged. If I model this type of learning I hope it will encourage other educators to explore the powerful new tools.
