Getting Ready For Camp Wannabeateki

I've been struggling for several weeks now to organize the activities for Camp Wannabeateki. In the past, Camp has been taught from a static web page, and I never thought it had much pizzaz. After listening to a couple of podcasts lately, one by David Warlick about how a science high school in Philadelphia uses Web2 technology, and another one from Teachers Teaching Teachers, I realized what the problem is: There's so much happening in Web2 that every time I start to think about Camp, I find something new. Good Grief!

So, here's what I learned about today: Gabcast and VoiceThread. Gabcast is a service that allows you to record your phone calls. Okay, that sounds really creepy, when in fact, it's a tool that could be used for recording interviews, random musings, or a podcast about some really interesting place you're visiting. It's super easy to use: you call Gabcast, enter your channel number and your password and start talking. You can download the sound files into Audacity for editing, or publish on the fly. VoiceThread allows you to upload video, images or artwork, and then you can record your thoughts, a story, music, whatever sound you want to be a part of your VoiceThread story. As a sample, I added comments to this VoiceThread I found on the Classroom 2.0 Ning. You can use your Gabcast recording for your VoiceThread story! So easy and so amazing. I think the kids are going to be really excited about both of these great new tools.

I'm off to go find more new toys to play with!

A Word About The Title

My goal for this blog is to share ideas, resources and the occasional musing about education. There are plenty of other education/technology blogs out there, so why does the world need one more? Well, my hope is that when the folks at Northwest see what one of their own does with blogging, they will want to think about how they can use blogging and all the other Web 2.0 tools out there in their classrooms. Further, I hope that, once in a while when I go off the deep end and immerse myself in something new, some of my friends will be there with me! Hence, the title: many of the Northwest folks have already witnessed my willingness to jump in. Maybe I can get them to jump, too.

Or, as Sir Ken Robinson said, recently, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you never come up with anything original." To see the entirety of his comments about how education is killing the creativity of the human mind, click here.