I-cubed: The Internet and Inexpensive Interactivities

My proposal to present at FETC was accepted this year. The session abstract reads:

Join the presenter for a whirlwind tour of free and inexpensive Internet tools to design interactivities for students and interactions with their families.

I think I'm going to try to get a few key concepts across in the time I have: web 2.0 and remix, a framework for classroom interactions, and "small pieces loosely joined." The tools will very much be of the web 2.0 variety. So far, the framework I have in mind looks like this:

• Student-teacher
• Student-content
• Student-student (Moore, 1989)
  
• Student-self (metacognition) (not sure of a citation on this - I'm not home now)
  
• Student-world
• School-home
• I'll probably skip student-interface (Hillman, Willis, & Gunawardena, 1994) for this presentation.
  

Of course, there's a similar list for teacher interactions, but that's beyond the scope of this talk. (Maybe next year.) I think I'll loosely classify the tools I show within that framework, i.e. game and puzzle makers are useful for student-content interactions and Cmap Tools useful for student-student and student-self interactions. Hopefully, this framework will make the laundry list of tools useful for lesson planning - a good goal for this conference audience.

Finally, if the items in the laundry list are the "small pieces," then web presence for a classroom brings in the "loosely joined" aspect. I plan to show a few low-threshold ways (i.e. Classwebs, NiceNet, and others) for teachers to set up a space to join these small pieces to suit their instructional purposes.