Welcome to Learning 2.0 - 23 Things! This is your first official course "lesson," organized with an Introduction, Discovery Exercise and Learning Activity -- a format which will quickly become familiar to you. Reading carefully is, for better or worse, a pretty essential key to success in this course. You will also find lots of embedded HELP resources along the way within the Discovery Exercises and Learning Activities -- placed at the point of need.
Before you get started, it's important that you read over the site so that you understand exactly how the course works. The four pages everyone should read in their entirety are:
- Home - what the course is about
- About - general description of the course
- FAQs - most everything you might want to know
- The 23 Things - a list of course topics which will provide the links to each week's lesson as it is posted
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Discovery Exercise
Please note: you must complete the Learning Activity (below) after you complete the Discovery Exercise. This will be true of every course lesson.
PART 1: For this course, you are asked to use a GMail account (part of Google) to sign up for all of the services you explore. Using GMail will allow you to store all of your sign-up info in one location, keep your school email uncluttered, and protect your "digital footprint" if desired (you may use any username you like for your Google account, as long as it's school-appropriate). A Google account gives you access to all sorts of Google goodies, such as Google Reader and Google Docs, both of which we will explore in later weeks. Throughout the course, we will communicate through Gmail -- NOT YOUR SCHOOL EMAIL. So go and sign up for a Gmail account
Note: In order to avoid confusion, it is recommended that your Gmail account name be different from your Mesquite ISD e-mail account name. For example, if my name is Bob Johnson, my MISD e-mail account would be bjohnson. Instead of also using bjohnson as my Gmail account name, I might use bobjohnson, bobj, bojo or anything else I can come up with.
HELP Video: How to sign up for Gmail
PART 2: Get Firefox. Firefox is the Web browser of choice for this course, as many of the tools we will explore just seem to run more smoothly in Firefox. Firefox itself is a "Web 2.0" browser - open source (free to use and build upon), with lots of great features -- one of the best of which is "tabbed browsing," which means you can open up several web pages at once INSIDE one browser window, and switch between them using tabs -- as opposed to them piling up on your taskbar. Make sure you have Java and Flash installed for Firefox as well.
NOTE: Check under (All) Programs > Mozilla Firefox to see if you already have Firefox. If so, after you launch it, go to Help > About to check your Firefox version. If you are not running the latest version (currently, version 3.5.2), click here to get it..
HELP Video: Installing Firefox -- plus Java and Flash
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Learning Activity
PART 1:
Complete this form to send us your information for the course. We will send you an invitation (via Gmail) to view a Google spreadsheet which we will use throughout the course to track your progress. You MUST remember to check your new Gmail account. We will not email you through your school email accounts! Throughout the course, we will communicate through Gmail.
PART 2:
Send an email from your new Gmail account to misd23things (at) gmail (dot) com. In the email, include your full name and school name and any questions you have about the course. Confirm for us that you have Firefox (just humor us). We will use these emails to create a contact list for the course.
HELP: How to send a message with Gmail
Congratulations! You are now ready to begin your Learning 2.0 journey!
7 comments:
Please note that every link you have opens in Explorer rather thank Firefox, even though Firefox is the preferred browser. If folks are downloading in Explorer they are not getting the correct files. If I was a novice user, this would frustrate me.
If the Firefox updater hangs, just go to the help menu and choose Check for Updates. Proceed from that page and it will work.
I already had the district sign me up for a google doc account, will this mess that up?
P Gorden:
This is Shane Huff from the Instructional Technology Department, HS facilitator, I hate to interject, from the 23 facilitators, but I just wanted to recommend that you created a different profile for 23 things. If you use your MISD google doc account it does have the possibility to cause you issues. If you create a different identity (gmail account & username) just for 23 things you can use this as a "student" or "learning" account and leave your MISD Google docs account for your classroom.
Thanks, Shane. That is exactly right. The MISD Google account does not have access to all of the Google tools that we will explore in this class, so you definitely want to create a separate Google account that does not reference mesquiteisd.org in any way.
Is this available to people outside of the school?
This course is for Mesquite ISD personnel. Others are welcome to view the content and do the activities on their own, but the course facilitators will not monitor work done by others.
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