Mr Reid’s Edublogs sandpit

At the bottom right of the sidebar you can see a ClustrMap - kids love to know who is viewing their hard work and endless discussions could arise from math, patterns, geography to time and space. Edublogs integrates the free website analysis tool called Google Analytics.

Below is a screenshot made with the fantabulos Skitch of just some of the graphical feedback the service provides:

TokBox is a flash and browser based video chat tool that can be embedded in your website for free. To get started, the teacher needs to register, although users you want to video chat with don’t have to be registered. No other downloading is necessary. As more notebooks come with inbuilt webcams these flash based video chat engines will be come more commonly used. I highly recommend these amazing notebooks that have had in-built webcams for a couple of years

Wouldn’t this be great for students in different schools talking to each other about an open-ended learning task posted in the blog? Or for inviting an ‘expert’ to talk about the textual content of a post. I like how this tool promises to facilitate live communication but in the context of the content of a blog post. If you see me online, want to discuss this tool’s possibilities - feel free to initiate a video chat.

Adding video from flash based websites can be a useful way for teachers of keeping the content and focus on the page in which it is embedded. Edublogs supports many URLs that can quickly added to provide interesting starting points for discussion in the blogs comments.

Via this wiki:

The video above was designed to show teachers how to connect their classrooms to the world of information. Visit http://theconnectedclassroom.wikispaces.com/ to participate in the conversation or add your ideas.

The director of Edublogs James Farmer details the process behind adding a web video to a post in the 3rd minute of this screencast.

Thomas L. Friedman, Journalist / Author, Book: “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century” [Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux]

Friedman lists ten “flatteners” that have leveled the global playing field:

• #1: Collapse of Berlin Wall-11/9: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)

• #2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by ‘early adopters and geeks’ to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to eighty-five-year olds. (8/9/1995)

• #3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration.”

• #4: Open sourcing: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon “the most disruptive force of all.”

• #5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components, with each component performed in most efficient, cost-effective way.

• #6: Offshoring: The manufacturing version of outsourcing.

• #7: Supply chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.

• #8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company’s employees perform services–beyond shipping–for another company. For example, UPS itself repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.

• #9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people”, writes Friedman.

• #10: “The Steroids”: Personal digital equipment like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over IP or VOIP.

In addition to Friedman’s ten flatteners he also offered the concept of the triple convergence which created a new, flatter, global playing field.