I am taking a short break from blogging just to take a bit of a holiday but I didn't want to forget a few resources left to our ETAD802 class on our last Elluminate session. So I thought that I would use this blog post to put these up.
This is an excellent short video on Interactive Flip books from http://www.flipsnack.com/ Flip books allow you to turn a PDF document into an interactive flip book that you can embed and share on the web. As always on this blog, it is a free software. They look like such an easy way to make notes, presentations, or portfolios a bit more interactive and look professional. I can't wait to try them this semester just as a better way to display my notes online!
One more... This is an excellent short video on plagiarism called You Quote It, You Note It! with some great examples on quoting and paraphrasing from the Acadia University, Vaughan Memorial Library.
As I have been taking my 802 Foundations of Educational Technology I have become more aware of social media tools and how they can be used in the classroom. In particular I have been interested in using Wikis in the classroom. I have started a few wikis but never finished them and I have yet to use them in the classroom. After taking the 802 class I have been inspired to look further into using Wikis to enhance learning in my online classes. In the 802 class we have been using our class Wiki as a place to summarize our weekly discussions where each week a different group is in charge of posting the summary. There are also chapter summaries and resources that have been posted by the professor but the one thing that I use the most from the Wiki is for looking at other students work. I can click on the Wiki and see the students work from previous years as well as from this year. This helps me to know that I am on track and gives me inspiration for my work as well.
As I think about how I might use Wikis in my classroom I do need to be aware of which tools are going to save me time and which ones are going to be time consuming. It is not that I mind putting in the time for tasks that will enhance learning but I find that many times, especially in online learning, there are many tasks that just eat up time by having to click and open documents or student's work pages. I have already mentioned that in my previous posts that our school division uses Moodle to deliver their distance learning courses. This leads me to wonder what the role is for using Moodle, Blogs, and Wikis in the classroom. Are these tools redundant?
Moodle has a gradebook which is the main reason for using it. If students are collaborating on Wiki I will still have to enter in a grade in Moodle. I have to say that I have not done a lot of group work or collaboration in Moodle which seems to be the clear advantage to using Wikis, with their ability to allow students to share and collaborate so easily. It would be a great place to put unit and topic summaries that the students could build and work on together.
So I suppose the way to use Moodle, Wikis, and Blogs would be in combination. The Moodle server would be used as a more private and intimate setting for students to check their grades and to have more personal discussions in the discussion board where students can feel safe and know that their comments are not being made public for all to see. Whereas the Wiki would be a great place to collaborate and share work among the class, and the Blogs could be used for individual work and achievement.
Some things to consider when using Wikis in the classroom:
Make sure that you sign up for the free K-12 wiki space as it is add free and will give you a few more options in the privacy settings where you can set the Wiki up so that only members can view and edit pages.
Make sure that you have your privacy setting set up so that only the members of the site can edit and make changes. You wouldn't want anyone anywhere to be able to make changes on your site.
As always with social media, make sure the students are aware of how to be good digital citizens on the Wiki. Here is a sample of a Student/Parent Blog/Wiki Contract
I didn't want to post this Wiki review before I had fully finished a Wiki of my own, so here it is, my very first completed Wiki about the Importance of Hair from a First Nations Perspective. I originally developed this for my Cosmetology 20 students and for my ETAD 879 class but the Wiki is much more than that as it explains how residential schools devastated First Nations people by making them cut their hair. I hope you enjoy it!
Voicethread is one of the easiest tools that I have used so far. Voicethread is a tool where one can upload a picture or a video and then others can add comments through either a voice recording, a telephone recording, a webcam recording, or through text. The telephone recording was the most unique to me since it would allow students who don't have a microphone on their computer still participate in the conversation. The program just ask you to put in the phone number that you will be recording from and then the program phones that number and prompts you to leave you comment. The sound quality is still very clear and it was easy to listen, delete, or save. The other neat option is the Doodler where the people leaving comments can draw on the picture while leaving their comment, highlighting the important parts of the picture or slide during their comments.
Some uses for Voicethread:
Sharing poems, art work, and presentations. Students can then comment on others works as well.
Audio discussion where the teacher poses a question and then has the students respond.
Students could complete an exam orally. The teacher could pose questions on different slides and have the student leave a reply for each question.
This could be a great tool for those students who are shy and don't participate well in face to face discussions.
Import video and have a discussion about the content.
In my online psychology 20 class I have my students complete a learning styles inventory where I have the students determine which learning styles suit them the best. It is with the auditory learning styles that I seem to offer the least in my courses. The auditory learners are the ones who have the most trouble figuring out how they can choose auditory options that will help them with their learning.
Last semester one of my students and I talked through some ways that knowing they were an auditory learner would help them with their online class. We came to the conclusion that I needed to create more auditory options. I have struggled with this since I am not an auditory learner myself. I would much rather read information than listen to a podcast about it. As such I have very little podcast material in my courses. Even though I am not an auditory learner I do learn well from conversations. This is where Voicethread comes in. What a great opportunity to include more audio materials and allow the students to engage in a conversation. Being able to say something outloud, at least for me, allows me to understand it or absorb the material on a different level. I would assume that it would be the same for my students.
If you do want students to be able to add slides to the initial Voicethread then you may want to create a classroom Voicethread account and then create multiple users for each student, otherwise you will have to invite each student to the Voicethread and then change their editing options so that they have the same permissions as the creator. You may also want to check off who can view and comment on the Voicethread, but as long as you don't have the link available for all to see in a google search then the privacy settings should be sufficient.
Here is a great Voicethread created by elementary students about bullying:
I realize that the title of my blog is online games/tools to enhance learning but the more I dive into tools and games to enhance learning the more I am drawn away from the games to enhance learning. Each game site that I have started reviewing has just left me feeling flat, like I was reviewing a filler for the classroom. The type of educational game sites that I was reviewing may have been o.k. for reviewing a concept you already knew but they didn't seem to hold a candle to what some of the social tools could do to really showcase a students learning and ability. As such I have moved away from looking at games to enhance learning at least the type of games I was looking at. If anyone has a great online game site that will do more than just quick factual recall then please add a comment and I will look into it.
For now I will look at the use of Blogs in the classroom, specifically with Blogger. I have only started using blogs in my masters courses and I am finding them to be a great tool as a replacement or enhancement to a discussion board. In my school we use Moodle to deliver our online courses. It is not that I dislike Moodle, but I find the layout to be very institutional and it takes a lot of time to click back and forth throughout each students assignments, there is a lot of wasted time clicking from one item to another. This is where I see blogs coming into play. If I have each student create their own blog and then post their assignments to their one blog, I would be avoiding having to click on multiple assignment tabs to mark and comment on students assignments. So this is purely from a selfish point of view, but I see Blogs as saving me time in marking student assignments.
Another benefit of using Blogs in the classroom is that the students could show others their work. Their learning wouldn't have to be such a private entity. I am concerned; however, about privacy issues: What if a 'creeper' happens to come upon my students blog and then leave inappropriate comments on their blog? Would a student share a personal reflection as deeply if they knew the post was public?
Which is where, as a first time user of blogs in the classroom, there would have to be a lot of information on how to use social media effectively:
Don't put your e-mail address on your blog to avoid creepers and spam.
Don't put full names or pieces of identity that might give information about yourself or others that would be available to the public.
For a class blog have the students set the privacy setting so that the blog is not available to anyone on the web. This would depend on your school's policy and what you were using the blog for. If a student was creating a blog to get out information to the public on a certain topic then perhaps the privacy could be set to public. Whereas if a student were posting personal reflections on a particular topic then having more privacy settings would be better.
Make sure that parents are aware of the social media that is being used.
Benefits of using Blogs in the classroom:
Having a class blog lead by the teacher will allow students and parents to keep up with homework and what is going on in the class.
Providing the students the opportunity to write and reflect on their thoughts will improve their writing skills.
Students can see improvement in their work through out the year.
Provides an opportunity to create a portfolio of their work.
Provides an opportunity for students to see each others work and comment to other students as well.
The students or teacher could invite family members to the students site to post comments for the students as a way to give positive reinforcement for their learning.
I have noticed from reading other teachers uses of Blogs that they are using them much like a discussion board. For my school I am not sure this is what I would use them for since discussion posts can be a bit more personal in nature and the LMS system that we use, Moodle, would provide a more intimate setting for discussions.
Some setting that may help teachers when using Blogger in the classrooom:
Under the comments tab:
Who can comment?
Teachers can change this so that only members of the blog can comment. This does limit the global learning that can occur through blogs but may be useful for privacy issues.
Comment moderation?
Clicking Always will allow the author of the blog to review and approve all comments before they are published. Reviewing and approving posts can be done through e-mail or directly from the Blogger post.
Under the Email and Mobile tab:
A teacher could add up to 10 e-mail addresses to people to let them know when new posts are created. This is limited to 10 so if you have a small class then you could send each student an e-mail each time you create a new post.
Under the Permissions tab:
You can add up to 100 Blog Authors. This would be handy for creating a class blog so that you could have each student be able to create a full post rather than just posting a comment.
The Blog Readers section will allow you to select anyone, only people you choose, or only blog authors. Choosing only blog authors will ensure a private blog just for use in the classroom and using the 'only people I choose' button would allow others, such as parents, to be able to view the blog site.
This week I chose to dive into the Prezi program. I have been very interested in this program since I saw a presentation on it last year for one of my classes. The movement on the screen and the zooming in and out was so intriguing and it definitely held my attention.
Prezi is a presentation software program that would give Power Point a run for it's money. Prezi claims to create "Game changing presentations online." As with all of the other tools that I have evaluated, Prezi is a free online software program. There are other Prezi packages that offer more bells and whistles that you can pay for but the basic Prezi account is free.
I tried making my own Prezi presentation this afternoon on Self-efficacy for my Psychology 20 class. I didn't find Prezi as easy to work with as Power Point, mostly because it isn't linear, which is one of the benefits of the program but also something that makes it a bit less intuitive to work with.
I found myself struggling a bit with the zoom effects, not really sure how the end result would turn out until I constantly checked the 'show' feature. It took me roughly three hours to put together the presentation at the bottom of the page. I am sure for future presentations that it will take me considerably less time as my learning curve was high. I read (after I made the presentation) a good tip to put the rough sketch of your presentation together before putting it on Prezi so that you don't get lost in the program. A good idea that I will definitely follow next time, as the first round through was a 'make it up as you go' type of presentation. Perhaps I would also suggest for people who are not use to the software to copy a re-usable presentation and go from there, just to see what it is all about:, although you could wade through many low quality presentations in the re-usable section as well.
I do wonder if students will be as motivated as I was to learn the program. I had a fairly high self-efficacy in terms of being able to learn the software but I would suggest that many of my students wouldn't. When I try to get my students to learn Photostory instead of Power Point they whine and complain and many don't hand in the Photostory assignment because they don't want to learn the software. I would suggest that learning Prezi is much tougher than learning Photostory, so I am a little fearful of requiring my students to use Prezi simply because I teach all online learning classes and without someone right there in the class to help then with their questions they may get frustrated and quit.
Having said that I do think that I will use Prezi for a class presentation although I would not likely use it without adding sound to it. I would likely use Camtasia or something similar to talk the students through the presentation. Someone in a face to face class wouldn't likely need that option.
Benefits of Prezi:
Creates an exciting presentation interface that is not linear.
Allows one to embed media and pictures easily.
The Basic account is free.
One can send a link to the presentation so that people can view the presentation together.
Up to 10 people can edit the same Prezi together
Drawbacks of Prezi:
In order to add narration you would have to use a different program.
The viewer can get motion sickness from all of the moving on the screen if overused.
Takes a bit of time to learn how to use especially because it is not linear.
Easy to make a presentation that is overrun with clutter.
Is Prezi a tool for those bored with Power Point and will it soon hit the shelf as an overused tool as well?
Do you think you could use Twitter in your Saskatchewan classroom?
I decided to take some time to look at the educational effects of Twitter in the classroom. Twitter is not something that I am naturally drawn to but during my ETAD 802 class I have become increasingly aware of how many people use twitter. My need for belonging has kicked in and I am trying to belong in the world of Twitter in order to learn.
For anyone not familiar with Twitter, it is a social media website where people can send out messages in 140 characters or less. The messages are usually available for all the world to see although you could change your settings so that your tweets are only visible by the people who are following you. A tweet is the 140 character or less message that you send out and people can click to follow you or you can click to follow someone else so that their tweets automatically show up in your twitter home page. You can have twitter linked to Facebook or your cell phone so that you can easily tweet via texting.
My fist thoughts on twitter were of why would I want to know the intimate details of people's lives. If you are going to the store to get groceries why do I now want a text or a tweet to let me know? 'Going shopping, Reading a book, playing with my kids, eating at McDonald's' Really, do I really want to know and how is that going to help me as a learner?
Upon further reflection I can see how Twitter can be more than just a tool for letting people know that you just clipped your toenails. Sure, if that was all people on Twitter did was check up on the social status of others the tool would get pretty old pretty fast, unless of course you were wanting to check up on your teenage child:) In my limited twitter experience I can see that this is a social media that allows people to stay in touch. Not just in their personal lives but in their educational lives as well. People are constantly sending out tweets on good blogs or readings. Together with the personal aspect that it can provide it can get a person converted into a regular Twitterer (is that even a word? are they called tweeters?). There is a community that develops through twitter where authentic learning can take place.
At the bottom of the page you will find links for how to use Twitter in the classroom but my biggest issue with using Twitter in the classroom has to do with all of the online classes that I have taken throughout my ETAD program. I think this is the best masters program around, online or otherwise. We have the best professors and I always feel connected to the people and the content.
What I can't help but notice is that none of these teachers have used Twitter in their teaching. I know that my profs use Twitter and that they find it a valuable tool, so why have they not incorporated it into their online teaching? Is it that when you prescribe learning through a particular online tool that one limits the learning and authentic communities or collectives that form? Is it that it is one more tool in an overwhelming digital world and that you can't use everything all the time? I wonder if my profs were forced to use Twitter in class if it would squash the the dynamic ever changing excitement of the medium. Will I ever know?
In any case I have listed the benefits, drawbacks, and resources for using Twitter in the classroom.
Benefits of using Twitter in (or for) the classroom:
It can engage students in a way that is familiar to them through their cell phones or on Facebook.
Parents could keep up with what is going on in the classroom.
It can remind students on their cell phones about upcoming exams or assignments.
It can give shy students a place to have a voice.
So let's look at ways to use Twitter in the classroom:
Create a twitter specifically for a course and have your students and parents follow the class.
The teacher could post homework, highlight some cool and interesting videos that weren't shown in class.
Post questions to your students and see who can answer them. "How do you think that you can help alleviate the famine problem that countries like Somalia?"
Create a discussion outside of the classroom that will engage and motivate students.
Drawbacks to Twitter in the classroom:
Depending on the age of the child, I am not sure we have done a good enough job yet educating out students into proper usage of social media.
What about the students who do not have access or want access to social media? Could using Twitter actually exclude students rather than include students?
How many students in my school division actually use twitter now? My assumption is that I would use twitter to connect with student using a tool that they already know. If twitter is popular in some circles but it is not for my students, should I introduce Twitter to them or find a different avenue to reach them?
I suppose the question becomes, is Twitter a good tool to use in the classroom because it is popular already, or should one use Twitter because it is a good tool?
Websites that offer great idea for how to use Twitter in the classroom:
This is a great video showing 34 interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom including character introductions, twitter polls, and linking classes from other regions.
Below is a great video of how a university class used Twitter in the classroom by posting the students tweets live on an overhead through the class giving students an opportunity to participate in the discussion even if they are shy.
I have just read the book "A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change" by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown on the recommendation of Charles Paul Bazin Webster. I thought I would give it a read to see if it could connect the tools I have been looking at to learning in the classroom.
"The new culture of learning is based on three principles: (1) The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world. (2) New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural. (3) Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with those new media" (pg 50).
As it will be difficult to sum up the book and relate it to online tools and games, I will stick my relation to the book to using social tools, such as Blogs, in the classroom to increase learning.
As I was reading the book I was wondering how to use new media forms to increase peer-to-peer learning. Blogs would be a great example and the book talks about how blogs give students the opportunity to become part of a collective that is greater than themselves and they give students the opportunity to play with new ideas and refine them through beginning conversations around ideas that are important for the learner.
"Because a person's blog is subject to revision by others, the influence of the collective can powerfully and meaningfully shape the blogger's view of the world, just as the blogger at the same time can shape the collective" (pg 66).
This is my first blog that I have done for a class and I would have to say that I really like how the information and reflections on my blog have helped me in my learning process. I look forward to seeing others comments about some of the tools that are reviewed and I am constantly learning. I am looking forward to implementing blogs in my future classes. I will keep you updated about how that goes. I began reading the book to tie in the tools that have been reviewed in this blog with learning. After all, I truly believe that it is not about the technology. I realize that this blog may look as though online learning is all about the technology.I wanted to use the following quote from the book as perhaps a disclaimer for this blog to suggest that it really is not just about technology:
"We don't mean to suggest that every interaction with the new media creates a learning environment. Rather, we suggest that each collective has the potential to make learning fun and easy to allow people to follow their desires and passions in productive and fruitful ways" (pg 72).
Thomas and Seely sited a study comparing Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.The study found that they were equally accurate. That piece of knowledge should calm the parents or teachers who still view Wikipedia as an evil source of information. Score a thumbs up for Wikipedia.
Thomas and Seely also address how students learn through play and imagination. "As children encounter new places, people, and ideas, they use play and imagination to cope with the massive influx of information they receive" (pg 47).
I know that I haven’t done the book justice through this brief discussion.The book dives much deeper into playing, how gamers learn through experimentation, and how through knowing, making, and playing can change our culture of learning.So to try to do some justice to the book, I would invite anyone to please add comments about how you use online games in your classroom to enhance learning and to please add comments about your view points on this book.
Perhaps to add a bit of the content from the book that I have left out, I will leave you with some of my favorite quotes from the book:
In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it (pg 48).
In the new culture of learning, the classroom as a model is replaced by learning environments in which digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the processes that occur within those environments are integral to the results (pg 37-38).
For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur (pg 34).
In blogging authorship is transformed in a way that recognizes the participation of others as fundamental to the process.A blogger is not writing to an audience; he is facilitating the construction of an interpretive community (pg 66).
