Kim’s Ventures in Educational Technology

Recently I was made aware of ShareTabs and wanted to share this unique resource with you. Ever since I discovered the website I have been a devout fan! ShareTabs.com is a great way to share a list of resources and is incredibly convenient. I could see it having great potential for use in the classroom. Instead of creating hotlists of resources and uploading the document to a shared server or online storage site, you can enter the sites and create a sharetab of the resources.

With ShareTabs you can create a very powerful list of resources. As shown on the ShareTabs site ,

ShareTabs – The easy way to share your links as tabs

Add a list of links to the form below and submit it to get a single link to them all, conveniently displayed in tabs. Great for sharing in Email, IM, Twitter, or SMS.

In my last post I shared with you that Peggy George were co-hosting a weekly broadcast on Saturdays called “Classroom 2.o LIVE!” show.  The topic for our first show was personal learning networks and the need for a PLN. If you missed the live show you can listen to and read the chat in the show archive. For reference during the show and for listeners to use as a tool to follow up after the show I created a sharetabs of our PLN resources. I used the name and topic of the show as the name for the URL: http://live.classroom20.com/show-archive.html. You can also click on the image to the left to view the ShareTabs page I created.

To create a ShareTab, enter the list of URLs for the resources you want to show on the preview page of the ShareTab. The ShareTabs website compiles all of the websites and shows a thumbnail of each website with its accompanying URL underneath the thumbnail. In addition to the thumbnail images, a tab at the top of the page is created for each URL. Arrows are located on the far left and right of the tabs so that you can access tabs that may not be currently visible.

If you were using ShareTabs with students you could create a URL that was easy for the students to remember to access resources that were bookmarked for a specific project or assignment. This is especially useful if you deal with time constraints, younger students or need to minimize the time used searching for resources. In my experience working with elementary students, it can be time consuming to have students search for a topic on Google and determine if the site is a valid resource or not. Using ShareTabs can eliminate that and maximize the time students spend working on the computer.

Starting Saturday, January 10, 2009, my career will take will venture into uncharted waters. As part of Classroom 2.0, founded by Steve Hargadon, I will be co-hosting a weekly show with Peggy George featuring issues, events and leaders of the educational technology field. This past summer I participated in the Webcast Academy with Jeff Lebow and Doug Symington. Jeff and Doug are expert webcasters and host live shows on EdTechTalk. Participating in the academy lit a fire within me to learn as much as possible about webcasting, streaming, online tools and software applications so I created a wiki to serve as a repository of information about webcasting (commonly referred to as videoconferencing) called the ‘Caise Files‘.

Through the academy, I expanded my personal learning network (PLN) and made some great contacts. Steve Hargadon and Dr. Peggy George are two of those contacts. I joined the Classroom 2.0 Ning and collaborated a great deal with Peggy George who has become a mentor, friend and fellow blogger. I am so honored to be asked to co-host with Peggy and appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this collaborative effort to further educational technology initiatives and learning about tech tools for all levels of users. All ed tech newbies are welcome and encouraged to join us each week!

A brief show introduction and invite is featured on the main page of the Classroom 2.0 Ning and is pasted below:

Friday, January 2nd, at 10:00am Pacific / 1:00pm Eastern (link to other time zones), Peggy George, Kim Caise, and I will host the live Classroom 2.0 year-end webcast meeting and show: “What We Learned in 2008.”

If you’ve never been to a “webmeeting,” they are a lot of fun and this is a good place to come and get your feet wet! We hope you will come and tell us all about the new ideas, techniques, tools, books, and conversations around educational technology that made 2008 special for you. (Send your 2008 top-ten lists to live@classroom20.com–we’ll post all of them, and even ask some of you to present them on air!) We’ll also virtually celebrate the growth of Classroom 2.0 this past year, our great hosts, the winning of the 2008 Edublog Award for “best use of a social networking service in education,” and more. We’ll also get your ideas for what 2009 should bring!

More information and a link to the live show. Hope you’ll join us! (And if you can’t, don’t worry, we’ll be recording it…)

This Friday after all or your new year celebrations are over and one, please join us as we review and celebrate the extensive list of things we learned in 2008 in a year-end live broadcast in Elluminate.  Bring your top 10 list and be sure to share your list in the Classroom 2.0 wiki. Happy new year and see you Friday!