Caroline Tees from the British Council Singapore gave a great account of how she’s been using wikis for the past two years. She shared examples of her success in using wikis for:
individual writing
collaborative writing
peer correction
peer policing
exam practice
examples of good writing for our classes
show off your students’ work to their parents
correct and learn from common mistakes
The tool she’d used for this was 37 Signals’ Writeboard: which is a simple one-page wiki. It allows multiple authors and editors, version comparison and commenting, all the usual wiki stuff - but on one page: “just like a Word document”, Caroline explained.
Caroline took us step-by-step through the Writeboard set-up and then went on to show how easy it is to use. She added that this wiki tool was simpler to use than other online tools like blogs or more conventional wikis, (I reckon because each Writeboard is only a single page). Writeboard’s simplicity is its strength. Because of this, she explained, any teacher or student can get to grips with it quickly.
She gave some tips on what to watch out for when running a wiki writing activity:
students misbehaving
comments (Mother tongue, Singlish or target language?)
Billy Tan and Karen Yap from Innova Junior College showed us the results of some action research they’ve done into how they used the online social bookmarking tool Delicious with teachers and for students.
Billy Tan explained how he’d been testing out Delicious with his General Paper students to help them make connections between issues and motivate them to read more. He showed how students, who had set up their own Delicious accounts, had made connections between different issues within one article by assigning multiple tags to individual articles.
Their exit survey showed that 90% of students liked using it. They found that was an easy and effective way to manage and share online information - all you need is internet access, a browser and to remember your login and password.
Among teachers, their results showed that Delicious allowed colleagues to easily archive and share online resources. Karen Yap showed how tagging makes it easy for teachers to retrieve and organise online information. Their exit survey for these teachers showed that 100% agreed that Delicious is good for sharing, 75% of which strongly agreed.
I asked if they’d had any problems with people tagging this differently or mis-tagging. They said they had. To deal with this they recommended that users agree on how to name tags before setting up a Delicious project to avoid mis-tagging. They added that standardising account names is also a good idea.
Individual or Department Delicious accounts? Both speakers agreed that personal accounts were the best option.
Earlier today I was at a presentation by Nick Potts, from the British Council Singapore, on the lessons he’s learned from two years of using blogs with lower secondary students in Singapore. He gave an account of all the problems, lessons learned and he also shared strategies he’s worked out to overcome these challenges.
His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.
He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access - he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.
His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.
One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.
I’m listening to Mitch Resnick at the ICTLT conference talk about Scratch a free tool for software creation for kids, by developers at MIT.
As Mitch Resnick explained, the aim of this tool is to get kids really creating. He made the point that kids might be able to use digital tools, but this doesn’t really mean that they’re digital natives. He added that they will not be true digital natives unless they’re able to make the tools and manipulate these themselves in a process/cycle: Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, Imagine, and so on.
Some great examples. But one of the most impressive things about the Scratch site is that there’s a community of people who’ve made stuff using the software. The variety of uses is impressive, but the depth of communication and reflection fostered by the community is truly impressive. Gonna get my own kids using this.
Here’s video tutorial showing how easy it is to make a Scratch game/animation:
Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:
authors create and collaborate
instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
learners find and explore content
Well, that’s what the blurb says on their site. The material in their database appears to be mostly tertiary level.
[edit - Cheryl Lemke mentioned this in her keynote at ICTLT]
Voicethread is a neat online tool that allows you to set up or join group discussions around photos, presentations, documents or videos. Here’s their own description:
A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. About Voicethread
Seesmic is like instant messaging with video. Or twitter with video. Basically, you have asynchronous conversations with other people by leaving your video postings on the Seesmic site. It’s a form of micro-blogging.
I reckon this could be quite fun to use with students.
IMMEX is a suite of software applications that challenge a student’s problem solving skills and provide teachers with real time assessment tools. IMMEX stands for Interactive Multi-Media EXercises.
Here’s what IMMEX states about its goals:
Our goal is to develop and promote learning models, based on our vast collection of performance data. The use of IMMEX software has been scientifically shown to have significant positive effects on students’ understanding of science content as well as the process of scientific investigation. By integrating our multimedia simulations into a unique web-based learning platform for modeling strategic thinking and problem solving, we are able to help teachers in over 4,000 classes internationally.
Kaltura is an online tool that allows groups of people to make videos together in their web browsers.
You can post your Kaltura interactive video player (looks like a YouTube video - except it’s editable) on your blog, from where you can invite other people to add more video, sound or pictures. You record directly into the video player on your web page and new content is added to the end of the video. Very clever.
The thing that caught my attention was this bit about improving PBwiki’s wysiwyg editor:
“When we launched our Point-and-Click editor a year ago, we noticed a quick upsurge in our usage. The easier it is to edit, the more people use PBwiki.” link
So if your wiki’s text editor is easy to use, more people will use your wiki. Common sense, but good to see it stated.
