Bubbl.us – another great Web 2.0 tool

Bubbl.us (available from http://bubbl.us) is a great example of a Web 2.0 that caters for the visual and logical learning styles. It allows users to create mind maps online, free of charge and as a real bonus, be able to share them with friends on their friend list. This is exactly what Web 2.0 is about – it is a website not just about text, but imagery, also allowing users to contribute a large amount and share these with other people.

The other (more time consuming way of sharing mind maps) way is to create a mind map in software such as Inspiration – which is not free, and not every student has at home, and then to email the map to many people. Bubbl.us saves all of this time, and can do as much as software such as Inspiration.

(Thanks to http://kayc28.wordpress.com/ blog for finding this great software and sharing it with everyone!)

Do enough students have internet access at home?

One of the questions that is often raised when setting technology based lessons, is “do enough of the students have the internet at home” but also “what happens to those who do not have the internet at home?”

While the Internet and Web 2.0 are flying ahead, there is still the important consideration of those who still do not have internet access at home.

I was reading the ABS figures on this issue based around another essay I had to do and was interested by what they showed. (Any figures I quote below are from the link above!) It is amazing to see the growth of the Internet in Australia. From below 20% in 1998 to 60% in 2006. It is also interesting (and a bit disappointing) to see that education makes up less than 20% of internet usage. Another interesting figure is that cost is considered a low impact for people not having the internet. Cost only affected 19% of people for not connecting to the web, while more significant reasons included “having no use” or “no interest”.

Therefore, from these statistics, if I was to set a series of web based homework activities over a school year, and only 60% of my students had internet access, do you think the others would buy an internet connection at home?

My answer would probably be “yes”, though I am very interested to see what others think.

When you consider how cheap dial-up is, it is sufficient for research activities; however, there is the obvious strain on web 2.0 tools such as YouTube. When my broadband internet connection was slowed a few months ago for exceeding the data limit, I realised how tough dial-up was. But before buying broadband, I thought “dial-up is great… how could broadband be that much better???”

More than just a little orange icon…

I started seeing this icon around on websites many months ago and wondered what exactly what it was. I knew it had the name of RSS, but I was not too sure what it did. The introduction of Internet Explorer 7.0 as well as upgrades to other popular browsers such as Mozilla Firefox have opened the door to RSS.

RSS is a real time saver, and I have barely started using it!

For those who do not quite know about it, RSS is a subscription to a website that is updated regularly. Instead of checking 100 websites each day to see if there are updates or new posts, RSS will let you know in seconds which have been updated and what the updates are. This would be effective in the classroom because it means if every student in a class has a blog, a teacher would not have to spend hours going through checking every blog for updates.

I mentioned web browsers and RSS just above, but until everyone has a laptop and wireless access every where, the problem is that your RSS updates do not follow you. iGoogle has solved this problem by creating an area for you to store all your subscriptions, and as usual with Google, it is free! That means no matter where you are, if you have a computer and internet access, you’ll have all your favourite website updates sent straight to you!

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.

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!

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