Distance Learning Tools:

At Kigluait Adventures we believe in Global Learning. Global Learning means having the opportunity to reach out, far and wide, across all the social and physical environments of our world, and share- knowledge, understanding, wisdom!

But how can that be? How can that really happen? Well it’s pretty simple! We live in a time where all the technology we need, to reach out and connect with anyone we want… is right there in front of us! And we live in a time where vast reservoirs of wealth exist for everyone to have access to these technologies!

So the real questions should be… How do we use our technologies to connect with people in positive, productive, healthy, safe ways? And… How do we share our wealth to provide universal technological access?

How to share wealth, bridge the digital divide, is a huge question! And one, we at Kigluait Adventures, are neither qualified to address nor have the resources to resolve… but we all have to do what we can do, so here are some links to folks who are taking on the challenge of this question:
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But at Kigluait we are qualified, and we do have resources, to address how to use the plethora of modern communication technologies available today for advancing how we connect with one another. We believe in a well-rounded approach to Distance Learning that involves using multiple forms of technology to provide many different options and opportunities for learning.

Below are the primary tools we utilize, how we use them, and what we feel their strengths and weaknesses are.

Videoconferencing: We believe that videoconferencing is a powerful tool to share and transfer information between learners and educators. It is our goal with our videoconferences(link to our programs) to introduce and excite students about the worlds we are going to learn through- in our case running dogs. Videoconferences are the hook to grab student’s attention!
Videoconferences should transfer information in two directions! That means that even though Kigluait is the main presenter of material, we should be learning as much about the students we are visiting with as they are about us! And we need to be using what we learn to adapt and modify our presentation to invest the students in their learning… make what we are teaching about concrete and relevant to their lives.
That is our goal with videoconferencing!
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link to video promotion
link to programs

Online Classroom: We use an online classroom as a safe, versatile, way to convey the bulk of our learning materials and resources. It’s a place where teachers can find activities to support the content that we introduced during our time together in the videoconference, as well as, thematically related classroom goals. Teachers also have access through the online classroom to collaborate with other teachers around the country working on similar projects as themselves. Students also have this same opportunity to work and share with other students around the country, via safe, monitored, discussion boards. Also in the online classroom students and teachers will have the chance to ask follow up question that time didn’t allow us to get to during the videoconference as well as play related games, puzzles, take fun surveys, etc…
Link to Moodle
Link to sample pages…

Blogs/Web 2.0: Blogs, as well as an ever-growing list and variety of Web 2.0 applications, provides us the opportunity to share our daily going-on’s here at Kigluait Adventures. And they also give you, and your students, a way to comment, ask questions, and share your own experiences in relation to the topics that we are posting about. Another great and exciting aspect of Blogs, and Web 2.0 in general, is that by providing you an informal look into what’s going on around Kigluait and our Kennel, they give you lots of information to help customize, and modify our “regular” programs to meet your classroom needs.

Wiki: While I would technically consider WIKI’s to be part of Web 2.0, I think it is worth mentioning separately here. We use our WIKI primarily as a tool for teachers to show off how they have adapted and altered our curriculums to meet their own personal classroom goals! Because while we are always striving to make our programs a flexible as possible to meet individual classroom needs, there is no better person than the teacher to really “Do It!” So we have set up this WIKI as a place to showcase your work and ideas. But while it is a great place to post and explain all the great teaching you are doing… it just as great of a place to go and get great ideas on what else you could do! So if your looking for ideas on how best to utilize and modify our programs, check out the WIKI to see what other teachers are doing and to see if there is already some ideas out there that would meet your needs with little or know tweaking!

Virtual Worlds:  This is really exciting to us! The possibilities we have seen in just beginning to explore Second Life, ISTE Island and the many other education related locations “in-world” are mind boggling…can you imagine? What could be done with a virtual kennel? …A real dogsled race on the Second Life Grid? …Or classes that transition from a live session in our kennel via videoconferencing, to a virtual hands-on session in Second Life, where students actually care for their own kennel based on the skills they learned during the videoconference, and then follow up with lessons, activities, resources from the online classroom? We are very excited about the possibilities! But we have a lot to learn first… from how to keep students safe in such a new environment to, technically, how to make it all work and how does a small group like us even afford the Second Life land to do it all on! We’ll figure it out though because this seems like such a critical component to the our overall goal of Global Learning.