Skip to main content
By








Today was the first day of Blackboard World 2009. Terry and I got to see Seth Godin, a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change. His whole presentation was based upon his book on "Tribes: We Need you to Lead Us." It was an interesting concept on marketing. He said people like belonging to a group or having a sense of belonging. He said the best way to market a product is to be a leader in the product. It made me think of A`o Makua and the particpants/ambassadors that have taken the courses time and time again. They like that sense of belonging to this unique group and enjoy all things common to the group. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ It was nice to see a new take on marketing products. The take home message was obviously be the catalyst for change in leading your institution into the 21st century.

One of the products that had many presentations during this conference was called "Soft Chalk" http://www.softchalk.com/. Soft Chalk is an authoring software that allows for easy authoring of content. Terry and I got to see a demo of the product and were pretty impressed with the ease of use. The sales person created a webpage in front of us during a period of about 10 minutes. The content was cut and pasted from MSword into their program (which had a similar look and feel of a word document). The great thing about this is that the interactive tools can be built within the program for assessments and linked to the LMS gradebook. As we think about support services it would be a great tool to share with CEI. It would empower them to create tools to teach their constituents. In addition as we talk about teacher tools, this product has won the CODie award for ease of use by teachers. To see a tour of the features go to soft chalk demo.

Another highlight of our day was with the product showcase in addition to the poster session. The product showcase allowed us to walk through the course with people that were interested in our work. One of the people who stopped by was interested in our approach with educating indigenous people. She works with Native Americans in Canada. It was a great way to introduce the cultural framework for how we approach designing of our A`o Makua courses. The poster session was also another opportunity to speak with people that were interested in our programs. We were congratulated by a lot of people including the reviewers. They made a point to come by and congratulate us for the hard work and accomplishments we have made. They were so impressed they even wanted to take the courses themselves. What was really impressive was what one reviewer said that every year "Kamehameha blows the competition out of the water, so we have no choice but to award you guys, because no one comes close." It was great for us to hear and also served as encouragement to keep producing courses of this caliber.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

By
This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note:  All icons link to the affiliated website.  Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list
Post a Comment
Read more

Geotagging

By
A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe
6 comments
Read more

OWAU 2/19: Go 2 Web 2.0

By Anonymous
While searching for an OWAU piece to share I came across this site with a list of tons of Web 2.0 applications http://www.go2web20.net/ . Some are familiar topics like social networking sites, blogs, share your life story online, share your photos, you get the idea. What I also found was that there were many applications for new ideas, well new to me anyway. I started by just clicking around & looking what was posted, until I realized that there are literally hundreds of applications listed on this site. The good thing is that you can search using tags. Since we’re focusing on marketing this year, I found a few applications that might be useful; of course there are still others on this site too. Add This http://www.addthis.com/ This site allows you to create a button & add it to your website. What does the button do? It makes it easier for people to share and promote your content. By clicking on the button the information goes back to a social networking site. This program als
6 comments
Read more