Using Public Google Waves For Personal Learning
There’s always a shiny new toy– and with it the stampede to use.
Yes that was also me once too 🙁 Nowadays I’ve learnt very slow, steady saves time and my sanity.
So I’m incredibly proud of the fact that I’ve never watched ANY Google Wave videos, read ANY tutorials and avoided every invite until I stumbled across a reason for investigating.
My motivation was I discovered you can set up public waves that any one can join.
I decided this was a good way for me and other educators to learn how to use Wave, by working together with each other, while also seeing how Wave might be used for personal learning (and with student).
Joining a Public Wave
We’ve called our public wave eduwave.
Joining it is as easy as:
- Search for Eduwave by typing with:public Eduwave into search and then hit Enter.
- Now all you need to do is click Follow once you’ve found Eduwave to start following it.
- Feel free to add your own replies to the wave, test different features and send me a tweet (@suewaters) if you want me to log in and join you.
Off course I’m proud of the fact that my friends taught me quickly how to use Wave.
Creating a Public Wave
Big thanks to Rob Wall for quickly locating the information I needed to create the public wave.
All you need to do is:
- Add [email protected] to your contacts lists by clicking on Add new Contact, enter the email address [email protected] and then click Enter
- It should add Public to your Contact list
- Now hover your mouse over Public’s avatar and select new wave
Now anyone in Google Wave can search and add themselves to your public wave.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Please share your thoughts on Google Wave.
Your like(s), Dislike(s), What’s cool? Your tips… and links to any tutorials that I should have read 😎
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14 thoughts on “Using Public Google Waves For Personal Learning”
I’ve been using wave in my English classes. Collaborative note taking and text analyzing. It is a very visual record of class discussion. Having student take responsibility for the creation of the wave and the recording of discussion is helpful. They are digital citizens and we should tap into their abilities.
@Suzanne Rogers, How do you find using Wave compared to some of the other types of online tools you could use? Do you find it better suited than say Etherpad or Google Docs?
I do enjoy the freedom of having everything in one place. Social media and email and classwork. The students can ask specific even private questions all while working or looking over notes. I like that we can email screenshots to those not on the wave yet. So yes, with so little of wave harnessed so far, I do find it to be superior.
@Suzanne, yes hadn’t thought about the aspect of private messages. Really good point.
Can you tell me how many students are using the Wave at the same time and I assume they are within a f2f class when using it? If so, how is bandwidth while using?
Sue,
I currently have 80 plus students on the wave. I’m working on getting more teachers involved as well. I find adults to be reticent or poor users of new technology. They may be excited to see it for the first time, but quickly stop using it due to the learning curve. Starting with students and then pulling in the teachers through the students is working well.
I do teach in f2f classrooms. Our whole school is wire for internet. My classroom is lucky enough to have both hard wired and wireless connections. So we use the teacher computer and laptops in class as well as completing work on the wave at home. Tech problems do crop up. With wave though, I can help or I can watch how the students work collaboratively through the problems together.
We’ve been using wave a lot for project management, and for planning the courses/competencies we’re putting online. I just wrote a blog post about it actually!
I think wave is a pretty powerful tool for collaboration, and we’ve certainly adapted it heavily in our workplace- using it most days from de-bugging courses/programs, to planning, to to-do lists!
I love using the public waves as professional development as well- so easy, and global (but also local if that’s what your wave is specifically about…)
@Talia, thanks for telling me that you are using it for project management. That definitely is cool.
I’m adding the link to your post so others can check out how you are using it – Using Wave for project management
Hi Sue,
Thanks for posting this, I had been wondering how to do exactly the things you posted about. You’ve made things very clear now. At the moment I’m just learning about wave so am just using it for personal/professional development. Will probably take me a while before I figure out a way to use it in my senior science classes, but can see benefit for many other subjects.
Glad the post has helped. I have been using Wave for a range of tasks and are still getting used to it. It is great to check out everyone’s examples of how they are using it.
Sarah,
Your senior science classes could collaborate on lab reports on googlewave. You would be able to see who actually does the work and who doesn’t.
I hope to meet you face-to-face one day as well, and like her I appreciate all the support you have offered… coursework writing I’ve always seen you extend above and beyond what is needed or expected.
Quite simply, you deserve the accolades! Thanks for all that you do
I’m using Public Google Waves For my own personal learning and in my opinion it is so useful.