Dallas, TX Teacher Online Review Session

I had the good fortune to catch up with Kyle Stevens, a high school teacher from Dallas, TX and his econ review session online this past Sunday night. He Twittered out that he was getting prepared to use DimDim for his review and I dropped him a reply letting him know that I was interested in learning more about DimDim as a stable platform for conducting these types of synchronous learning opportunities. He eventually emailed the link to his session and invited me to join in.

I really enjoyed the experience of sitting in Kyle's economics review session and observing how he and his students used the space to conduct a review session. Kyle took questions from his students via a chat room and he used DimDim's shared whiteboard space to sketch out various econ concepts. I thought it was an outstanding technique to carry out such a review experience.

My buddy, Chuck Taft of Milwaukee, WI does a similar thing with US History exam reviews using ustream.TV. I have a feeling that as creative teachers like Kyle and Chuck continue to pioneer these types of electronic workspaces that we'll see more experiences like this taking place in our learning environments.

Click on the image below to get a sense of what the online learning environment that Kyle and his students used on Sunday. It is a free tool by DimDim, and as you can see it has a chat space along the right, a shared whiteboard in the middle, a participant list along the left, and a web cam video of Kyle in the lower left hand corner of the window (you can see Kyle holding up a Kansas Jayhawks basketball...I had a great time in his review session until he pulled this stunt ;-)