Online Learning

Ideas on using wiki in the classroom.

Wiki is a very powerful resource to teach with technology. I would call it the “All in a box” technology. Wiki help not only the students but the teacher as well, because it allows you to have every aspect of your course well structured. Wiki brings a lot of collaboration into the table; your students can use it as a 1-stop shop, where they can share information with their classmates on what they have learned in the course.

Wikis have several advantages over other Web 2.0 technologies, one of them is that is free, very user-friendly, there is no need to download anything in your computer, and all you need to know is how to use MS Word, if you know how to use MS Word than you can easily setup a wiki site for your classroom. Our role as instructors is to engage and get our students motivated. Students love technology, so we can take advantage of that and use technology to teach.

One way of using wiki in the classroom would be to create a project and have a wiki as the main resource to share their ideas. Forming teams and making use of the “Discussion” tab would help you to track who has been collaborating with the project and who has not. Another way of using wiki in your classroom is to list resources and links of websites related to your field, you could assign a group of student to check some websites that they think they are relevant to the course have them write a report on why they choose them and a brief paragraph describing each source.

One way of using wiki in the classroom would be to create a project and have a wiki as the main resource to share their ideas. Forming teams and making use of the “Discussion” tab would help you to track who has been collaborating with the project and who has not. Another way of using wiki in your classroom is to list resources and links of websites related to your field, you could assign a group of student to check some websites that they think they are relevant to the course have them write a report on why they choose them and a brief paragraph describing each source.

Another way to use wiki in the classroom is to use the wiki as a FAQ page. You could even make it a class project and assign them to create an FAQ page related to your subject. Have them explore and answer the questions, because they will be sharing and learning from the same FAQs. You could also use your wiki as a Calendar to post exam dates, quizzes, holidays or any other school event.

Here some other ideas on Using wikis in the classroom.

Educational Blogs - week 3

These are some the blogs I'll be following...

http://huzzah.edublogs.org/

http://www.leekrausonline.com/

http://mrssmoke.onsugar.com/Educational-Blogs-You-Should-Investigating-2787268

Using blogs in your classroom

Weblog or also known as blogging, which is basically a conversation. It’s a human connection. It does not matter how you call it, but it does matter how you make use of it. Blogs are a very powerful tool when we talk about education and student learning, because blogs are very constructivist for learning. The benefits are endless and to begin with, in my opinion one of the most important aspect about weblogs is that the content is on the web or maybe you have now heard about the term “Cloud”, which basically is the same. Content on the web is searchable and accessible to everyone. Blogs in the classrooms connect students with other people around the world through chats or emails. Another benefit of using blogs on the classroom is that students enhance their writing not only with text but with pictures, audio and video, which will make more attractive for other students or experts in the field that can comment on the student’s blogs.

We need to be very careful about introducing Weblogs into our classroom, specially for elementary students, we do not expect elementary students to create blogs, but you can ask them to just find information about a certain topic, that way they start having a feeling about what research is about. Middle school students in the other hand, they might be already experts about topics they really like and all of this is the result of using blogs, but we want definitely to make use of blogs in our classroom on older students, for numerous reasons. Once there is a blog out there, they do not just read it, they analyze it, reflect on it and then they provide feedback, by that point they are already collaborating and sharing ideas with classmates and people outside of their classroom, who might have more expertise.

Blogs brings a lot of collaboration among students, because is not only about writing but also about initializing a conversation, some might agree some might disagree with the blog author, but the most important aspect here is that they are sharing their ideas more effectively. They share their opinion about the topic covered in class or about an assignment, they help each other by providing links to site related to the blog. They do not just write but they actually communicate with their classmates. Blogs will also help the student to become more organized, one of the features I really like about blogging is that it allows you to archive your blogs either by date or by categories, making them easy to access and always available for other users.

Some students tend to be shy in the classroom when is time to participate, blogs eliminates the shy on the students and gives them the opportunity to share and discuss in writing the ideas that in an actual classroom they would not be willing to speak. Blog gives them the opportunity to enhance their research skills as they actually analyze and study the “data” before actually posting.

Google Reader

Google Reader is an amazing tool to keep up to date on latest news. Not just for technology but any site that provides RSS subscriptions, such as the New York Times, Microsoft, BBC News, Weather feeds, among others. Google usually emphasis a lot on the “user-friendly” feature, that is one of their goals, to make it easy for the “standard-user” and I think they have done a pretty good job. Google technologies are very user-friendly and very reliable. That is why Google Reader is one of the most world wide used RSS aggregator out there. If you like blogs this tool definitely will make your life easier.

iGeneration Report

Just by reading the title “Teaching the iGeneration” I immediately knew what they were talking about. The famous “i” means the current generation of digital technologies popular with kids and young people ( the iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes and so on).

Now our “phones” or "cellular phones”, they are not just a regular phone, they are actually a mini-computer, where everything is possible, besides to use the phone to make calls, you can now, send SMS text messages, you can read your emails, browse the web, view files, pictures, listen to music, among other features.

I as IT manager need to keep up with all the latest technologies out there, and it amazing how technology grows exponentially. The main point here is not to teach with technology but to use technology to communicate or provide information in a more powerful and efficient way. Once we as instructors get more familiar with technology, we can use quality-time in the classrooms more productively.

The iGeneration is dipped in technology, let’s take the advantage of that hunger to explore technology and use it to bring student’s attention that we can get our students/end-users more involved in learning.

Take a look at the following video, it's call iPhone everything...

What does a Web 2.0 classroom look like? (week 1)

As a Computer Science major I have learned to appreciate technology and its usage, I worked 5 years as Technology supervisor for the College of Education, and I found out the importance of the usage of technology in a classroom, because it makes everyone’s life easier. Technology aids teachers and students in several ways, one of the is called Web 2.0, please see the following YouTube video to understand what Web 2.0 is.

Web 2.0 in a nutshell facilitates collaboration and information sharing through numerous web based resources, some of them but not limited as Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Podcasts, Google Docs, Social Networks such as Facebook or MySpace, and more.

Today, students at all levels must have a classroom “Web 2.0” enabled, with all the technology available to make information for the students more accessible and faster to reach. In the other hand, Web 2.0 also plays a very important role on the teacher side because with all these resources they have a new way to engage their students in a more meaningful way. As discussed in our class, people that were born after 1994 are called “digitally native” in the sense that they are more multimedia oriented, they are growing up with all these technology already available. So we as instructors (Digital Immigrants) we must be up to date with all of this technology. In order to inspire our student’s learning with we need to develop interactive and dynamic lesson plans.

What does it mean to create a technology-rich constructivist classroom?

Technology has a great potential for student learning. A top of the line technology classroom enhances student’s learning and we, as instructors have to encourage our students to focus on their field of study.

Unfortunately, as we were discussing in our last class, I saw a tremendous lack of technology support on school districts. Few have experiment with technology that has been out there for years. The outcome of having a high technology classroom is really helpful for our student’s success.

Let’s take a look at the following YouTube video where it shows us a project in Kansas of a Technology Rich classroom.

We can see how helpful is to integrate technology in a classroom environment. We have to go beyond just textbooks and make use of technology to help students to reach their goals and dreams as professionals.