Tapped In To U of M

I had the opportunity yesterday to use Tapped In for the first time. Two teachers from my staff development (Anne Smith and Barbara Stahlhut) and I had an opportunity to chat with graduate students from the University of Michigan. They’re enrolled in a graduate teacher certification program and are taking a class titled "Teaching with Technology." According to one of the instructors (Jeff Stanzler), the class attempts to "expose our students to different ways of thinking about schools and about pedagogy (along with some peeks at web 2.0 technologies, video editing, etc.)." They set up "virtual conferences" with a few folks, including us, to "learn about the creative ways in which you're thinking about both professional and community development, and could hear more about the role that technology has played in this endeavor."

If you’re interested, here’s the transcript of the session (pdf). I don’t think there’s anything particularly earth shaking in there, but I thought I’d link to it in case anyone wondered how a group chat might look. It was fun to do and I hope it was at least a little bit helpful for those graduate students. I’m still learning how to be comfortable in real-time online conversations; they definitely don’t feel natural to me yet. It’s still hard for me to translate what’s in my head into relatively short sentences in real-time, and to keep up with multiple questions at the same time. And I do still feel somewhat at a loss without the face-to-face contact to get a better feel for how the conversation is going. Definitely some skills there I need to work on, so thanks Jeff and Liz and grad students for the practice.