K Bechtel

Last night I attended a Tips and Tricks Tour on Tapped in.  The tour leader BJ walked all the participants through many of the rooms on the site.  After the tour I was able to navigate through the community easier and with more understanding of what the site can do.  I was also able to edit my own office space as well as learn how to get to other people’s offices.

I have thought about how I could use this space and first and foremost it would be an excellent source of professional development.  In fact after the tour I went back to several of the group rooms to look at the resources to see what things I could take away and use in my classroom.  Having so many educators and people that care about education (like future teachers) all together from around the world is really cool!

The leader of the tour also discussed teachers creating a group room for her students to enter and use for a chat.  The students would be given passwords and they could not enter any other room.  The chats would be sent to the teacher by email so he/she in turn could grade the students’ discussions or keep for future use.  This is cool, but I don’t know how I could use this with fifth graders.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

Finally, the calendar on TI shows upcoming events on the site.  Just like the tour, anyone attending an event will get a transcript of the event by email.  This saves you from having to take notes during the chat.  This is a nice feature and many of the events sounded relevant to my job and interests.

As our tour leader BJ said, “TI is one of the best kept secrets on the Internet!”