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

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

Avatar Chat

By
Aloha all, Here's my o wau topic for this week. We all know the power of the Avatar and their popularity with our learners from our A`o Makua courses and I know we have discussed ways to incorporate them into our `Ike Hawai`i classes as well. Well, I can't take credit for finding this resource. Our resident Avatar expert a.k.a. Christy told me to check it out because Avatars can now chat. So please join me in finding out what other engaging and motivating feats these amazing characters can do to help us provide meaningful learning experiences for all our students. You can read about OddCast and their AvatarSpace or go to their Web site and test out some of these features. I'm hoping that this may provide us with a motivating way to get students, in both programs, to participate in some cooperative learning and sharing. Let me know what you think and if you feel this would be a valuable application to use. Mahalo - look forward to reading your responses! Kelly
5 comments
Read more

Zoho Creator

By
I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both...
6 comments
Read more