Role in new learning:
A Wiki is a community website which can be edited and added to by any member – it is ideal for problem solving, collaboration and knowledge management. It can be used for constructing and maintaining knowledge bases. They are a dynamic resource which different groups can maintain and add to.
Limitations:
Wikis are unstructured and any content is editable by any member of the community. If there are version control issues or an organisation is geared up to maintain strict controls on practice, a Wiki may be too freeform and the overhead of maintenance may be too much.
Wikispaces:
Back in January, Wikispaces decided to offer their Plus Plan to K-12 teachers for free, in order to help teachers to use wiki technology.
Over 10,000 educational wikis have been created by students and teachers.
If you would like to register for a FREE wiki, please go HERE to register.
Intros
Record an exciting advert to open your show. Get the voice track laid down first, and then add some music from a podsafe music source. Finally, cut it all together and export the file for use in all your future podcasts.
Vox pops
Ask open-ended questions and then cut, don’t mix, the answers.
Interviews
Students need to learn how to ask as many good open-ended questions as possible. However, when it comes to cutting the final interview together, try to get them to cut together only four questions and answers. This isn’t just learning how to synthesise information in your own words, but learning how to synthesise information in others’ words.
Listen to other podcats
The best way to learn how to make better podcasts is to listen, listen, listen to others’ efforts. There are plenty of ideas of podcasts for teachers and students to listen to, but even a poor podcast can help show what you shouldn’t maybe do in your own.
Planning your attack
Knowing how much time to spend on each element of creating a podcast is not as easy as planning a lesson based around textbook, where the exercises don’t change in timescale from year to year. So, beforehand, have a plan of action for how much time you wan to spend on:
Vox pop is short for vox populi, Latin for voice of the people. It sounds simple enough, recording voices of passers-by, but there’s more to vox popping than meets the ear. Years of experience on the street have produced the following pearls of wisdom:
a vox pop consists of a montage of voices and opinions recorded on location (shopping center)
a vox pop is normally 20-40 seconds – any longer will sound very laboured
vox pops are cut together rather than carefully mixed
a vox pop should include a range of voices: young, old, male, female, multi-ethnic, sensible, outraged, funny
use as an introduction to an interview or discussion
normally the reporter’s voice does not appear in a vox, except perhaps to ask an additional question or reiterate the original question
If you don’t, maybe you should try podcasting or at least listen to some.
Podcasts not only provide knowledge but also experience: the experience of the podcasters. Usually podcasters are very experienced people with a lot of valuable examples and tips to speak about.
On the other hand, podcasts are easily consumable because you can load them on a portable device such as an mp3 player or a mobile phone and you can listen them wherever, whenever and however you like.
You could listen to podcasts at times such as when driving to work.
new ways of interacting with web-based applications
the use of the web as a platform for generating, re-purposing and consuming content
Why Web 2.0?
greater efficiency
changes in student population
better learning and teaching methods
allowing greater student independence and autonomy
greater collaboration
Problems
accessibility
visibility and privacy
data ownership
control over content
longevity of data
data preservation
staff and student training
The Future
The broadcast media increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technologies, with greater audience participation and audience created content
The increased bandwidth will encourage a move from the desktop to mobile devices and browsers
Content will be created, shared and consumed on mobile devices.
Computing that is always on, will change our everyday digital and media environments, mediating the world in new ways.
Web 2.0 Softwares
Individual systems are hosted on servers and accessed across the web via a browser, they may be interchangeably be called Web 2.0 systems, Web 2.0 services or Web 2.0 applications.
Blogs
A blog is a system that allows a single author (or a group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts)
Readers can add comment to posts.
In schools, students using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher.
Teachers can use a blog for course announcements, news and feedback to students.
Syndication technologies (RSS feeds) enable groups of learners and teachers to easily keep track of new posts.
Wikis
A wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a body of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
Wikis can be used in class projects, and are particularly suited to the production of collaboratively edited material.
Wikis can be used by teachers to supply scaffolding for writing activities – thus in a group project a teacher can supply page structure, hints as to desirable content, and then provide feedback on student generated content.
Students can provide feedback on each other’s writing.
Social Bookmarking
A social bookmarking service provides users the ability to record (bookmark) web pages, and tag those records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded.
A good examples is del.icio.us.
Over time users build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tags. Since items have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked and classified with one or more tags, social bookmarking services can sometimes be more effective than search engines for finding Internet resources.
Users can find other users who use the same tag and who are likely to be interested in the same topic(s).
In some social bookmarking systems, users with common interests can be added to an individual’s own network to enable easy monitoring of the other users’ tagging activity for interesting items.
In schools, teachers and learners can build up collections of resources.
Podcasting
Podcasting is a way in which a listener may conveniently keep up-to-date with recent audio or video content.
Podcasting is a combination of audio or video content, RSS, and a program that deals with RSS notifications of new content, and playback or download of that new content to a personal audio/video player.
Vidcasts are video versions of podcasts.
Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lessons, or, more commonly, to record lectures/lessons and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning.
Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of laboratory experiments.
Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.
Other Media Sharing
Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system, such as Flickr.
The ability to comment on and critique each other’s work.
Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment.
FlickrCC is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video, YouTube and TeacherTube.
Social Networking
Systems that allow people to network together for various purposes. Examples include Facebook and MySpace, Second Life (virtual world), and Elgg.
Social networking systems allow users to describe themselves and their interests, and they generally implement notions of friends and communities.
There are a wide variety of educational experiments being carried out in Second Life. These vary from the mundane with a virtual world gloss to more adventurous experiments that take advantage of the virtual reality.
Collaborative Editing Tools
These allow users in different locations to collaboratively edit the same document at the same time. Examples are Google Docs (Word processor, Spreadsheets & Presentation) and Gliffy (diagrams online).
In schools, these can be used for collaborative work over the web, either edited simultaneously or simply to share work edited by different individuals at different times.
Students from different classes or schools can work on the same document.
Syndication using RSS feeds
In a world of newly added and updated shared content, it is useful to be able to easily keep up to date with new and changed content, particularly if one is interested in multiple sources of information on multiple web sites.
A feed reader (sometimes called an aggregator) can be used to centralise all the recent changes in the sources of interest, and a user can easily use the reader/aggregator to view recent additions and changes.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to list changes (these lists of changes are called feeds, giving rise to the name feed reader).
A feed reader displays changes in summary form, and allows the user to see/download the complete changes.
In a group project where a wiki is being developed collaboratively, RSS feeds can be used to keep all members of the group up to date with changes as they can be automatically notified of changes as they are made.
Similarly one can be automatically notified of new blog posts made by class members.
Social constructivism
Social constructivist approaches are particularly aided by Web 2.0 tools as mediating mechanisms between collaborating students and between students and teachers, particularly between students who might be sometimes be working in different places and at different times.
A group of students might construct an artefact in a wiki, but also be guided by a teacher who provides scaffolding in the same wiki. This scaffolding could take the form of wiki page structure and titles for pages to be filled in by the students, guidance as to areas to discuss in the wiki, the kind of content that is desired, and feedback on existing student produced content. Possible issues and problems
Much Web 2.0 based student work is about content sharing and repurposing. This is can easily be seen by students as part of a new teenage copy-and-paste culture that runs counter to traditional notions of plagiarism, and adjustments may need to be made, either to redefine plagiarism (unlikely to occur), or to help students transcend this culture.
There may be a skills and/or culture crisis as ‘old world’ teachers are forced to use unfamiliar tools and work and in unfamiliar ways and alien environments.
Not all students may be digitally connected with a computer and Internet connection at home. These students would be at a profound disadvantage in a new world of Web 2.0 enabled learning without specific care being taken to address their needs.
Conclusion
Web 2.0 will have profound implications for learners and teachers in formal, informal, work-based and lifelong education. Web 2.0 will affect how schools and universities go about the business of education, from learning, teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation and interfacing with industry.
However, it would be a mistake to consider Web 2.0 as the sole driver of these changes; instead Web 2.0 is just one part. Other drivers include, for example, pressures to greater efficiency, changes in student population, and ongoing emphasis on better learning and teaching methods.
Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is a technology with profound potentiality for inducing change in the education sector. In this, the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency.
Login by entering your login name and password used when registering.
Complete your profile if this is the first time you are using Moodle. You can upload a photo of yourself or an icon (avatar). Select update profile when finished.
Selecting Home will take you to the Moodle Home page where your courses will be listed
Once logged in, the Home page will list all courses that you are currently enrolled in. You may also see the latest news, if any.
To select a course simply click on it.
The middle column will contain an introduction to the course and details of the course. Here you will find the various course components such as Forums, Assignments, Links etc.
The left and right columns contain the event, time, people and function tools.O
On entering any course, you should first check the Latest News, to see if there are any important events and also check to see if there are any Upcoming Events are listed.
If you wish to hide all but the current lesson/week module, click on the box to the right of the content.
Click on the Assignment links to complete the assignments.
The Moodle calendar shows all Moodle Global, course, group and student events. Students can enter user events. Clicking on labels will toggle the visibility of that type of events.
Putting the mouse on any date will open up an event pop up for that date.
You can click on the date or on the month to get a complete listing. You can select the calendar preferences by clicking on the preferences button.
The Administrative block allows you to change passwords.
The People block allows you to see details of all participants in your course and also to edit your profile.
The Forum tool allows you to see all the forums for the course and allow you to subscribe and participate in the forum. You can click on a forum to read the threads there.
The assignment tool allows you to submit your assignment as a single file.
Moodle is a free online learning management system used by thousands of teacher worldwide. Try it out for yourself by installing in your notebook, desktop or in your school web server.
Moodle can be used in schools for:
Sharing Ideas and Resources
Collaboration between teachers
Collaboration between students
Supporting learning
Create a Learning Community
Talk about personal experiences using blogs and wikis
Online discussion using forums and chats
RSS feeds
Some ideas for using Moodle:
Simple public web site including news, calendar and resources. Could even have public classroom pages maintained by staff/student.
Simple intranet with “course sites” allowing resource sharing between groups of teachers etc
Use of the quiz tool multi-choice, short answer etc
Older students creating content for teachers & younger students
A simple publishing tool for audio files (podcasting), using forum or RSS feeds.
Use wiki’s to enable students to create simple web pages or a group sites/projects.
Link lists
Use forums to give students a sense of audience in their writing.
Glossary as a simple image gallery.
Parental access to work.
Glossaries where children can deliver/share book reviews.
Use a Wiki as a group preparation/recording tool for a day trip.
Online journals (blogs) for pupils to record achievements or concerns, for themselves and their teachers.
Scheduled chat sessions for discussion with students from other schools.
This is only a very small list of what you can do with Moodle. Find out for yourself by exploring Moodle today.
