A friend of mine recently asked for a few ideas on using ‘synchronous communication tools’ for her personal professional development. (Ok, it’s a Uni assignment rather than a general inquiry)

Firstly she cooked up a nice lunch and poured out some wine. (Always a good start to any professional development session!!!) We signed up for Twitter as CINDY BURGE,  installed Twitterfox and threw it out to the Twitterverse to welcome her. Which they did. Thanks all!

Next we installed Second Life and I took her around the ISTE Island to check it out and do a few screen dumps. She had a little trouble sitting on the chair (not the wine) & I hooked her up with the ISTE website. We then headed off to the Discovery Educator’s Network Second Life blog for a bit of a look around. After that I mentioned Jokaydia as an excellent resource to explore on her own time.

Lastly we dropped all the screen dumps from our session into Comic Life as a creative way to demonstrate a little of her learning.

Now her challenge as a second year uni student is to build her personal learning network to a point where online tools become a natural part of her learning. AND… the same goes for ALL teachers who don’t laminate their lesson plans