Assignment One

For all my posts about Web 2.0 Tools click the link.

For all my posts about using Web 2.0 Tools in education, click that link!

WordPress in education

WordPress, being an easy to use blogging system would be great for educational purposes.

Students can all create a blog and post their work to the Internet for the teacher to check. It can be much easier to manage than having paper everywhere, and there are dates posted with the blogs automatically as to what time the student posted and updated the message which will prevent late assignments. This would also help in checking if a student copied another student’s answers.

Students can also comment on each other’s blogs. This really helps in online collaborative learning – students working together and helping one another. This is what makes WordPress and blogging a Web 2.0 tool.

Students can upload photos, videos and other files to add even more to their posts rather than just plain text. I think in terms of photo uploads, WordPress could be better than Flickr. (See my post about Flickr in Education).

del.icio.us in education

I think that del.icio.us is a great tool for education. It solves the problem of the days when teachers would write a long web address on the board with a whole lot of / , . – and a mix between lower case and capital letters. From my experience, in a class of 30, you would probably have about 5 students who would be on the website first go, another 10-15 would have it in another few goes, and there would be the last lot that take ages to find it.

Why puts students under that stress, and waste all of that time?

A teacher can quickly create an account on del.icio.us and give their account name to their students. They can create categories such as “Year8History” as a tag on each website for their Year 8 History class, and then students can just go to http://del.icio.us/[TeacherName]/Year8History for example. One URL to type in for the whole year! Or even just go to del.icio.us and type in the teacher’s name and access everything from there.

I think it is well structured, and certainly a great place to store bookmarks for students in one location. Of course, they can be accessed from anywhere and maybe students could create their own accounts and share their education related websites with their classmates.

pbwiki

Signing up to pbwiki was quick and easy, and using it is fairly easy too. I do not see too many downsides to pbwiki. You can restrict access to who can post by having a password to add/edit pages; however, if you want to change the password for security reasons, you would have to tell everyone about the change. I think having user accounts would be a better approach to this.

I agree with this review (http://frem.wordpress.com/2006/02/04/pbwiki-review/, Accessed Sat 18 Aug 2007 at 9.10am AEST) in that only 10mb of space is nothing. As it says, email services are offering 25mb, and I have seen plenty of free web hosting services that offer at least 10 times what pbwiki offers. For a wiki, 10mb is far too small – especially if you have a number of contributers (which you should, to really make it a wiki!), and everyone is adding a lot of information, it all begins to really add up. There are upgrade options, but they all cost.

I think the idea of wikis are great – as I have said above it is about people adding their research and everyone helping out. It offers more than a static website run by one person could every offer; however, the one downside is that to go through and verify all of the information would take forever. If you only have people that you trust working on the wiki, then this would not be a problem.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us is something I have been seeing around the Internet on many web pages for a while now. I just was not sure what it was, but I am glad I found it. The idea of creating public bookmarks is an excellent idea, or even just create them on del.icio.us so that you can access them anywhere and anytime.

It includes a toolbar for your web browser, which I have not installed (I am not a big fan of these ad-ons to programs like Internet Explorer). The sites are also available by just going to http://del.icio.us and if someone else provides you with their username, you can start viewing each other’s favourite websites.

I have created an account: http://del.icio.us/mashton2 although I will be adding more websites over time!

The addresses can be easily shared. Rather than copying every single one of your favourites into a blog, which will eventually be archived anyway, you can post the web address as I have done in the previous paragraph as part of your signature for example.

My experience of Facebook

After many months of my friends asking me to sign up to MySpace, I did recently. I enjoy using MySpace to communicate with friends online and post photos etc; but then Facebook’s popularity started rising. I thought I would sign up to Facebook as well, and have a look around and like MySpace, see what the ‘fuss’ is about!

 I think that Facebook has a nicer look than MySpace. No ads is a big plus, but also the layout and colours just seem nicer. Everyone’s profile looks pretty much the same on Facebook, and I am yet to find anyone posting heaps of videos on Facebook, like I have on MySpace (which is very slow loading).

I have found it harder to find friends on Facebook, but once you find a few, you find more of your friends on their friends list etc. The networking seems a bit better overall.

One thing that I do not like about Facebook is the primary way of finding friends. This involves giving your email address and email password to Facebook! It then searches through your address book and emails everyone with a friend request. I have not done this yet, and probably will not do it because I do not know exactly where my email password is going. I guess the way around it is to simply change your email password within minutes of giving it to Facebook, so that Facebook has temporary access.

Facebook does not have the features of MySpace? As mentioned on this site (http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19122/page1/, Accessed Sat 18 Aug 2007 at 8.40am AEST), web developers can make their own applications to be added to Facebook. I like how the site describes it as “a social operating system”! The idea of allowing these applications to be added really adds to the community contribution, sharing and truly makes Facebook in the Web 2.0 list.

Flickr in Education

I think that Flickr could be a good resource for education; however, I think similar results could be obtained by using tools such as WordPress to post images. WordPress contains an upload tool, and allows for tags/descriptions to be added so that others can find the uploaded file(s). I read this article (http://studytools.psych.und.nodak.edu/wordpress/?p=639, Accessed Sat 18 Aug 2007 at 8.30am AEST) and it did put me off Flickr for educational purposes a bit. According to the article, inappropriate images are not banned. This is obviously a problem for the classroom, unfortunately.

I think that Flickr overall is quite good – there are plenty of images on there, and it looks to be very popular.

The idea is certainly there – a place for anyone to upload photos, not just a search engine crawling through web pages. This allows people to upload their own photos. For example, if they have gone on a holiday, they could upload scenic photos to share and this allows for a significantly greater range of photos than what Google or Yahoo! images can find together!

WordPress

I found WordPress easy to sign up to and fairly easy to use. I think that blogs are a good resource to use on the internet – they are things that everyone can contribute to and access easily. Extra components such as RSS feeds and the easy search features make blogging great for anyone to read. WordPress, like most blog software, allows the poster store posts in different categories (as I have done). This is helpful in my blog for example, if you just wish to find out what I think about Web 2.0 tools.

On one review of WordPress (http://chronotron.wordpress.com/2006/01/14/wordpress-full-review/, Accessed Fri 17 Aug 2007 at 3.40pm AEST) the author in a review of WordPress mentions that layout and design of the site is not that impressive. I agree the design is not great; however, I disagree in that this is not a major issue when it comes to blogs. I think the content and media posted in each blog is far more important than the surrounding colours and borders etc. I guess though that this is a subjective opinion – some people are into colourful pages with fancy fonts, but I prefer to just explore the content when it comes to blogs.

Using Facebook for online learning

How would you use Facebook to teach a class?

In the classroom, Facebook can be used to assist and lead learning. To begin with, a special class group could be set up by the teacher to allow all students to join the group and participate. For example, this group may be called “Year 9 IT at [School Name]”. The groups are very easy to join, and the students would be mostly familiar with the technology. If the students are not familiar with online resources such as Facebook, they are likely to pick it up very quickly being a younger generation, more used to interactive and Web 2.0 sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Google.

Key points for the online learning include:

• The online work must be creative
• The online work must be collaborative – work as a group (such as in a wiki)
• The online work must be different – not just plain text, but multiple medias such as YouTube and Pictures and implement other various Web 2.0 tools. Any implementation of Web 2.0 tools makes the website far more interactive and interesting to students.
• The online work must finally be structured. For example, on a wiki (like my group’s wiki http://edugroupies.pbwiki.com) the information can be separated into different pages.

A system of trust and confidence must be in place. This helps to allow all students to contribute to the online classroom. The administrator of the group (ie. The teacher) has the control to remove ‘friends’ who are not students in the class. This helps to respect the privacy of the students. The teacher can also monitor which students are contributing.

pbwiki

The pbwiki for the team I am involved in is here: http://edugroupies.pbwiki.com/

I have found pbwiki very easy to use and think that students would also find it easy to use. It provides an interactive way of keeping notes (in someways very similar to a blog); however, the wiki allows for many people to contribute, rather than having just one person do all the research, or web editing.

As a future IT teacher, wikis are a tool that I will use in the classroom to help learning, especially when it comes to group work.

I do not really like the idea of how pages become ‘locked’, but I understand why this is and this is a point that would have to be explained in the classroom. The easy way around it is of course just to type up all of the information in Microsoft Word (or similar program) and copy it in quickly and save.

I think that in a classroom sense, wikis can be fine – students know that their wikis will be monitored and that information they put in must be correct to ensure they score high marks. The downside I see to wikis is that anyone can post anything. This can be both intentional (someone just wanting to make information incorrect for ‘fun’) and accidental (someone not realising their information is incorrect). This is of course more of a public sense, and again, I think in the classroom scenario, wikis would be less likely to have that sort of problem.

I think students would enjoy building a wiki in any subject. The main advantages I see of using a wiki:

* It is interactive

* It is a team activity

* No web editing skills required

* It is free