How are we going to use web 2.0 to teach September 5, 2007

I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate Web 2.0 into teaching and so far haven’t had much luck in coming up with many ideas. The ideas i have come up with i will share with you. Whilst i was on prac i went completed a webquest with Year 7 Geography, they loved it although webquests are Web 1.0. A way this could be changed to web 2.0 is to place the webquest onto a wiki, or to get into groups of no more than 4 and they have to place all of their work onto a wiki. This enables the students to use their social networking skills and allows more collaboration between the group memebers and they can complete the work easier, without trying to communicate over email and just at school. It also allows me as a teacher to see who is doing the work, because you can tell who has posted the work, or contributing to the group wiki.

Another way to use Web 2.0 which i think is particularly important especially for senior students is to have a wiki and a different page or links to other pages. The best way to organise a wiki is content based so for senior students it should be orgainsed into core subjects and so on. This is can be really important when it comes to exams and assessments. Students can journal, or use the wiki for class discussion when it comes to them needing help for their assessments, they can help each other, or alternatively i can answer questions over the wiki. I can post the class work on the wiki, or it can be up to the students this can help the students who were away catch up on any missed work, and they can as a class write notes on each of the core topics and the electives. This can then be useful for exam study revision notes, or a basis for starting an assessment. This way it is equitable for everyone because they all have the same notes and they can social network and collaboration with one another can enhance their communication skills.  

These are 2 ways that i can think of when trying to use web 2.0 in the classroom. I will get back to you with more if i think of any.

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0 August 30, 2007

Many new teachers are seeking new products and technologies to help them to help them in their upcoming school year. With an increase in students networking in blogs such as MySpace. Teachers need to adapt their teaching styles to suit the students interests, which lies in technology and online collaboration. The future of this lies in Web 2.0, teachers using Web 2.0 as a way to collaborate online with students, teaching them some new skills and the students teaching the teachers new skills as well. The Web is constantly changing and we as teachers need to adapt, 6 months ago i was making Webquests for year 7, thinking that i was being really technologically advanced and know i came back to uni after my prac and find out that i’m not technologically advanced, but actually quite the opposite. Webquests are Web 1.0, whereas what i’m doing now is Web 2.0, and it really doesn’t seem much different.

Here is a really good site to look at

http://www.solutionwatch.com/512/back-to-school-with-the-class-of-web-20-part-1/

Delicious August 23, 2007

my del.icio.us

Wiki’s and Teaching August 23, 2007

Look at this website http://campustechnology.com/articles/40629/

 Use of wikis in the classroom has proved more elusive. While we never like to advocate the use of technology as an end of itself, our group saw great potential in the affordances of the wiki for teaching and learning. Students co-constructing meaning in a democratized digital space has a certain social constructivist (Bandura, 1976) elegance.

There are 6 different approaches that are being implemented around the University of Southern California campus and these are: Approach 1: Student Journaling
Instructors want students to journal for a number of reasons: to demonstrate writing proficiency, to expose understanding (and misunderstanding) of conceptual knowledge, to establish the habit of regular reflection, and to engage in meta-cognitive reflection, to name a few. The wiki allows students to journal for their own benefit, or for peer or instructor review.

Approach 2: Personal Portfolios
By enabling students to collect and organize digital assets such as course notes, images, Web resources, and PowerPoint slides, the wiki can help learners to make connections between and among those assets.

Approach 3: Collaborative Knowledge Base
In the more classic use of the wiki, groups can use the environment to create a shared knowledge base of information. This can be used to allow students to develop a project in small groups, to work on a small piece of a larger class project, or even to have students themselves create and maintain the course Web site.

Approach 4: Research Coordination and Collaboration
The wiki allows multiple collaborators who are separated by physical space to collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into a collective digital space. Researchers can also use the space to store draft files for their papers: MS Word, LaTEX, or even writing directly into the Web pages of the wiki. Additionally, funders and junior researchers can be given “read only” access to all or certain parts of the space.

Approach 5: Curricular and Cross-Disciplinary Coordination
As departments become increasingly creative in their efforts to accommodate more students in a distributed/blended learning environment, curricular coordination among faculty and T.A.s gets increasingly important. The wiki allows for departmental personnel, instructors, and teaching assistants to organize common course assets, such as syllabi, office hours, and assessments, without having an endless email chain or difficult to schedule face-to-face meetings.

Use Case 6: Conference and Colloquia Web Site/Coordination
Many departments, schools, and scholarly centers at the university have academic conferences and colloquia. By allowing presenters and attendees access to add and edit content, the conference wiki can serve as a resource before, during, and after the event itself. The wiki can also be used by conference administrators as a means of organizing the event.

These 6 approaches used by the campus are all about student collaboration and student reflection.

I believe a wiki is a very powerful tool and can be used anywhere within the classroom, they allow students to have creative freedom over their work and they can collaborate with others gaining further knowledge into a particular subject and they can share ideas and they can journal there thoughts and reflect on their experiences as a group and then  as an indivdiual.  

Blogging and Teaching August 22, 2007

Here is a really good Blog for information about teaching and using blogs https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/avee/blogstoteach/ 

It has a variety of different links to information about ‘What a Blog is?’, ”How to use Blogs?’ etc… The why use Blogs is what i really paid attention to when reading this article. I believe that communication is the key for critical learning to occur and Blogs allow this to happen. Students can communiacate with one another like MySpace, Blogs allow students to be themselves, they can be creative and it is an outlet making the Blog feel like it is their own, giving them more pride in their work and hopefully they will do the work. This is a form of external motivation (the article talks about external motivation) because students will always want their Blog to be better than everyone else’s, so they will be externally motivated to complete their work and make it better in everyway possible than someone else’s.   

Our Group Wiki August 22, 2007

Wiki’s are a wonderful way of communicating with one another. They are similar to a blog, but not the same. The differences between a Wiki and a blog is that in a Blog you are the only one that can post to it, as i am doing now, and people can make comments on your Blog. Whereas with a Wiki you can have a group of people on 1 Wiki that can post at all different times, as long as they have the password and user name. As a requirement for this subject we have to create a Wiki, it is to be educational and have certain information on it. In saying that Wiki’s like Blog’s can have any kind of information presented on them, these can be very useful in the teaching world. Wiki’s can be used in the classroom, where you post links to some great information and the students have to find the information and post it to the Wiki, making it a site for just that topic. The Wiki can also be used later on in the year for revision for exams, or for a base of information for an upcoming assignment. This can be referred to throughout the year, and you won’t have to worry about students forgetting to bring in worksheets or books for a class, it can all be up on the screen in front of you.  In a  group work situation where students are always complaining that they are doing more work than the others, you can actually see how much work is being done, by who is posting the information. Also with it being online where everyone can access it, homework can be done without excuses and you can check how many people actually did their homework by accessing the Wiki. Here is a link to the Wiki we are doing for this subject http://soymocha.pbwiki.com/

Del.cioi.us August 22, 2007

Del.cioi.us, this a social bookmarks manager. You can add your bookmarks to the web, taking the storage from your computers hard drive to the internet, allowing others that you give your name and password to access to your favourite websites. This can be very useful especially if your computer hard drive crashes and wipes your memory, I know this all to well. But it is also useful if you want to access your favourites page from another computer, like while you’re at uni after you have done research at home the night before. This is a really good initiative and now that i have found out about it i will be surely posting some favourites on it for research and some fun activities. Here is a link to my bookmark page http://del.icio.us/soymocha

Joining Facebook August 22, 2007

Well today i joined Facebook in our lecture today, but i found out that if you type Faccebook, you don’t get a very nice site (if you get my drift). I did find that joining Facebook was very different to joining Flikr. Facebook was a lot harder to join than Flickr. Once i had joined Facebook, i found it very hard to log back in again, they didn’t accept my email address again, i’m not really sure what happened there but it could have been because everyone in our lecture was trying to join Facebook all at once, whereas with Flickr we had to do it at home. I think that Facebook is the new MySpace, it is a lot safer because of the security conditions which is better for everyone, but especially useful for school students. This could be very useful in a classroom activity, you could teach the students to social network, not that they really need much help doing that. It allows the students to be more creative, and it is not as boring. This could be used as a classroom in the virtual world, everyone can contribute, not just the noisy ones, the quiet ones as well. You can give them a topic to research, like all good ICT classes, it is up to the students to do the work. With Facebook you can see who adds to the page, which students are doing the work and who isn’t doing the work, and a big bonus is that you can keep out people who aren’t welcome (predators), which isn’t always possible in MySpace or other sharing sites. I think that this is a good blog and we should all read it http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/social-networking-in-schools-gets-a-boost-from-nsba/

Anyway here is a link to my facebook page, although it isn’t very educational, it is worth looking at just for a laugh. http://ndedu.facebook.com/home.php?

Blogger August 22, 2007

Last semester we had the pleasure of using Blogger to complete all of our assessments for another ICT class. After using Blogger and then changing to WordPress i have noticed a difference, it isn’t a significant difference, but i do prefer using WordPress as opposed to Blogger. WordPress allows you to import tables and more graphics than Blogger does, which as an Education student looking for new and exciting ways to teach secondary students this is a very big find and it makes me very excited. With WordPress there are many more templates for you to choose from where as when you sign up with Blogger there are only a few. I think as a teacher of high school students, they would prefer the extra choices available for their background, it makes it more their own space. With feelings like that they are more liklely to want to continue the work set and make it more creative and spend more time on the site and doing their work. Here is a link to my other blog so you can have a gander if you like http://karliesworld.blogspot.com/

Joining Flickr August 9, 2007

Well as my title says i just joined Flickr!!!
Anyway my experiences with Flickr have been really limited, i haven’t yet added any photos because i’m at work and i don’t have any photos on my work computer. So far my experiences have been really good, i found signing up really easy, the instructions were really easy to follow and they even gave me suggestions for my screen name and Yahoo ID, which was a really good thing. It wasn’t time consuming like signing up for things where you are constantly changing your ID or screen name to something that hasn’t already been used. Providing suggestions is really helpful.

I will get back to you when i have finally uploaded photos and then i will discuss my experiences more with you.