i feel somewhat slighted that i did not get to participate in the group session of Stickam on Feb. 26. prior obligations needed my attention and time. however, after watching the tutorial, i've decided to set up an extra credit assignment for my students where we will set up profiles in Stickam and use the forum as a way to review for one of our benchmark exams. i've already sent an email out to parents to let them know about this opportunity and request their permission. i have also welcomed parent interaction during the session so that parents will gain experience in this valuable communication tool, and will be able to dialogue with the children about content covered during our review session. i plan to screencast the session to show to other teachers so that they might be able to use the forum for future instruction and dialogue.
another idea i had that relates to Stickam would be to use it as a platform for teachers at school to plan their curriculum implementation outside school. with each year, districts have been facing further budget deficits and this could possibly be a way for teachers to interact and bring about concerns if common planning times are taken away in effort to cut costs.
Another thing that I didn't share in the instructions is that you can embed your stickam player into your own website so that, after students have created their account and sent the info to you, they don't have to visit the stickam website where they might run into inappropriate material. But you can give them a safe website to visit and check into your video chat whenever you decide to go "on the air." Very cool. Here's the URL to my stickam player:
ReplyDeletehttp://homepage.mac.com/edm613/pages/edm613stickam.html