The first thought I had in response to the question posed to Kim by the teacher was to rephrase it: How can I connect my students to other students around the world in authentic, real-life dialogues without it becoming artificial due to some reliance on assessment?
It also brings to mind the concept of the global village – the Web is allowing for increasing ways to interact with ’strangers’ and learning from other cultures through virtual connections.
I found the metaphor of a toolbox intrigueing as it brings to mind what Alan November reiterated when he offered his lecture at ISM: Know what you don’t know. This has been my challenge – to discover what it is that I don’t know. How can I use the tools, if I don’t understand the problem first. So, technology is to me like looking into a car engine; I know the parts and most of the functions, but if something electronically were to go wrong I would not know what tool to use to fix the problem.
VOlP looks interesting, but I don’t fully understand its application.
Where does Googledocs fit in? I find it a very useful teaching tool as it allows me to make comments to students writing while they are writing, which means the students benefit from immediate feedback. I also used it as a peer editing tool – go green – without having to print off multiple copies as students go through the editing process.
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