I watched a really interesting program on television yesterday called "The Virtual Revolution: The Great Levelling?". It looked at how the web is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. Some of the things that I remember most from the documentary are:
1) The Ushahidi Platform http://www.ushahidi.com/ which is explained on their website as a tool that "allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualise it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response". This amazing tool started because of the ethnic violence in Kenya back in 2008. If I was an HSIE teacher I would definitely mention this to my students, a great example of democrady in action using Web 2.0 tools.
2) The fact that even though the web is democratic it is dominated by a very small number of programs and tools. For example, Facebook dominates the social networking "market", YouTube the video sharing market etc.
I was familiar with blogs but only as a follower. In this module, I really enjoyed learning how to create a blog using blogger and was quite surprised by how easy it was to publish posts which include links, photos and even videos. Actually I should not have been because it seems that most of the Web 2.0 tools are very user friendly.
I can see myself using blogs in the classroom. The ability for readers to leave their comments in an interactive format is a great feature to enhance learning.
I found a great website which provides specific examples and strategies for creating electronic, educational, experiential, and engaging scrapbooks!
I like the idea of electronic scrapbooking. As explained on it is the practice of combining photographs, written narratives, quotations and other textual content into a scrapbook style album. The E-scrapbooks would be very engaging for students and a great tool for reflecting on their ideas about science and also to share ideas with other students and/or the teacher. They would be a great way to track student learning, thinking and understanding. I also think that students who would know they have an audience other than just me the teacher would write more carefully as they really care about what their peers think about their work.
You could easily create a teacher's blog to share interesting information(in the form of posts with embedded websites, videos and photos) with the students in the class and have them comment on the information you have shared. Students could also be asked to create a learning journal which includes reflections and some of the interesting photos, websites, videos that they have found on a topic or an electronic reflection on what they have learned in class today. You could also create a class teacher-directed blog where students and teacher share their findings and ideas.
I would really like for the logbook that we ask our Year 8 and Year 10 students to produce during their scientific research project to become an electronic scrapbook. I think students would enjoy it more than writing in an exercise book. I have just marked the year 8 logbooks and a major issue was that very few students demonstrated their thinking processes. Another advantage would be that you could check that they are actually working on their project on a daily basis. You could comment on their project as they are doing it rather than having to collect their log books at a specific date. You could also refer students to other students' blogs to show them what is a "good" blog.
I have bookmarked an interesting website about blogs that I will read as this is a tool I want to know more about.
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