Web 2.0
With regards to my thoughts on Web 2.0 I see that it has great potential from an educational standpoint to greatly assist the students in their everyday work, in projects and in preparing for assessments. I currently use the school portal as a resource for students to access assignments and dates in ‘Ayling Calendar’, to access ‘Class Resources’ for resources and practice assessments we cover in class, and to access ‘Class links’ for all of the relevant websites we visit and explore aswell as a link to the on-line textbooks. Discussion forums are also present for students to share thought processes and methods for solving problems set in class.
My main idea for the portal was to assist the students in their organization, to help those absent students get caught up on missed assignments in a more timely manner and most importantly to try to foster a collaborative approach in the students’ mindset by helping one another out when possible for homework and assessments.
The difficulty of course was and still is, getting the students into the habit of checking out the portal on a regular basis and seeing the value in doing so. This is also the difficulty I’m having in getting into the habit of using this blog site as a regular reflection forum.
Ideally, I’d also like the students to use features such as Skype and Facebook and I’m aware of high school teachers using these ‘tools’* effectively to work together on classwork and projects etc- but then of course this kind of collaboration becomes harder to monitor.
I’m therefore interested in setting up the ‘Ning’ accounts for Grade 6 classes for next year (as grade 5 have done this year and they are a better educational alternative to the portal and to Facebook) and my other main aim is to get into the habit of putting up multi media presentations to the portal (or Ning) that my students can access to assist them in understanding the Math concepts we cover also.
*as Kris points out in her comments here “my immediate goal is to learn the language of 2.o. The verbs and nouns that are being thrown around just aren’t making a huge amount of sense at this point in time.” I’m also unsure if ‘tools’ is the correct term to use!
Steve,
Nice post. I see Wetpaint itself as a web 2.0 homebase. A portal platform that you can facilitate your course on. Its just a thought but a transition from the school portal to wetpaint to facilitate a course might be useful to you and to solidifying all this vague 2.o jargon.
Just my 2 cents.
Matthew