CALL Revolution

Well I slacked a little bit this week on participation with the EVO Webheads group, but wanted to make a few comments on the topic for this week. I attended a live Tapped In tour as part of the events of the week and I think Tapped In has a lot of promise. The tour in and of itself was a litle bit interesting as the group was quite large, with many forgetting the need to "listen" to the guide, interjecting at random. So just what is it? According to the site, "Tapped In is the online workplace of an international community of education professionals. K-12 teachers and librarians, professional development staff, teacher education faculty and students, and researchers engage in professional development programs and informal collaborative activities with colleagues." The site is like a virtual campus with unlimited expansion. For those of you familiar with MOO's it has a similar feel in many respect to these kinds of worlds.
I would recommend taking a look at the site yourself, but let me just mention a couple of things which I found particularly interesting about the platform. First, there are many events/sessions available every month in which anyone interested can participate. For example, some of the events listed for this month are: "religious educators forum," "E-portfolios," "webheads in action," "Math and Technology," "Learning from Lyrics," "WIZIq Technology Demo," and many many others.
It just seems like an amazing free space where you can come learn about things which will make you a great teacher-and it's free. What is so great here is that these are live sessions (through chat) where you can actually interact with the person or persons who are presenting the information and personally ask them questions on the topic, or bring up topics and issues yourself for discussion. As well a transcript of everything that goes on is emailed to you so you don't have to worry so much about remembering every single thing. If there is a session that you couldn't make they also archive the proceedings so you can go back and read what happened as well. Pretty cool. Tapped in is much more extensive then what I shared in here, for instance I have my own office- check out the site and let me know what you think!