Tom Woodward

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A Digital Portfolio

Me

Who I am

I believe learning is and should be, fun. I'm passionate about good teaching. I believe engagement matters. I like students.

I believe today's technology gives teachers and students unique access to information, media and the tools to do amazing things with it.

I like learning and teaching in novel and fun ways. This is mainly because I slept through most of my school years out of sheer boredom. I’d like to save others from that fate.

I never planned to be a teacher. I never took an education class until after I started teaching.

I took over a 6th grade class after the first teacher quit about two weeks into the new school year. It was an alternative school so the students were, shall we say, spirited. I almost died the first two weeks. Luckily, I was in a 1:1 and the iBooks were a lifesaver. I could capture kids. I didn’t have to be a master classroom manager if they were excited and having fun with what we were doing. It was far easier to bring in their interests with the entire world at my fingertips. The two years I spent there really changed my perceptions of a lot of things.

PROJECT

The Revolution Will Be Syndicated

This presentation from November of 2008 was done in Second Life as part of the NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. I co-presented with Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington.

Session Description

The coming revolution will be syndicated through a web of feeds making ideas ever easier to find. Sharing will no longer be the exception, but the rule. Enduring these hard, transitional times takes not only a revolutionary mindset, but the resourcefulness of a survivalist, therefore the methods we will examine are not only mind altering, but they are also very cheap, flexible, and open.

This presentation will involve some performance art in an effort to “revolutionize” how we imagine web-based publishing in higher education. Come to this session ready to doff the chains of LMS slavery and join the brave new world of web-publishing in the Age of Syndication.

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