Where so far

As I said in a previous post I have been busy with family, but now they have gone it's back to the quest to explore technology. This has been an exciting time for me as it has made me explore and use many of my exisiting resources such as facebook and twitter more fully. I am now using twitpic to upload pictures to my twitter feeds which I have never done before and uisng hash tags. Also following many other teachers and teacher trainers, whose ideas have expanded my horizons even further. Interesting use of twitter was all the tweets from the PELC conference which I was unfortunately unable to attend. This gave me an idea of what was going on and links to many of the presentations. I followed all the tweets avidly and it gave me a sense of being there in the virtual world. For anyone who is not using twitter. I could certainly recommend it. If you are in education I would highly recommend you follow steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth as he has many innovative ideas and ways of using web 2.0 technology. In his blog he raised an interesting discussion about networking on twitter. This made me think about my own use of twitter, and how long it takes people to see the value. I would say it takes about 6 months for people to start using it regularly, and it has taken me a year to start to use it for other than social reasons. It is certainly a valuable tool, and one which I fully intend to use in my sessions.

Have also been looking at slideshare as a tool, but it is early stages for this as yet. My intial impression is that it is a useful tool, giving a sense of shared knowledge. I certainly intend to explore this more fully over the next week or so, and will report back on my impressions at a later date.

In a quest for greater mobility (my netbook is obviously not enough) I ahve downloaded quick office to my ipod touch. This allows me to look at and work on office documents whilst on the move. Again it is early days for this, but it looks to be a very useful tool. I like the idea of being able to use nothing but my ipod rather than carting my rather heavy laptop, or not quite so heavy netbook, around. Talking of IPOD's I would be interested on other people's views on the new IPad. It looks to me that they are having some intial difficulties in America, with many people reporting an unstable wifi. I guess we in the UK will have to wait as the European launch has been delayed as they have run out of IPads.

I am now off to download skype, nothing to do with work, I just think it is time for me to use this as many of my friends use it, particularly the ones in America. Also I will need to use it for projects I will be involved in for the future. Time to crack open the netbook, and back to technology.