Educational Web Toolsaredesigned to promote collaborative and constructivist learning of the BSED students who were enrolled in Mindanao State University (MSU) . As a tool, this form of innovation enables the learners to blend classroom learnings with technology. Moreover, this initiative is purposely designed to address students' needs at the same time upgrade their technological skills making them as globally competitive individuals.
The Different Educational Web Tools Application
E-Bloggers11:
We are the Ed107 students of Mindanao State University-General Santos. This Blog is designed in Partial requirement in Ed107 (principles and Method of Teaching). With this blog, the authors are aspiring to learn about the different strategies which are very useful in our future careers.
The term Wiki is hawaiian for quick and was coined as a name for a particular type of web site. These web sites allow any visitor to easily contribute to and edit that web site using nothing more than their Internet browser (e.g. Internet Explorer). Wiki systems are particularly suited to collaborative group authoring of documents and websites. The most famous example of a Wiki is Wikipedia, a very extensive on-line encylopedia that allows anyone to add to and edit its entries (see the images below - click images to enlarge).
An example entry in Wikipedia
Click the edit this page tab to enter the edit mode of the wiki
Offering easy and open access to editing a website obviously opens the door to malicious and erroneous changes being made (termed vandalism). For this reason Wiki systems also offer a variety of approaches for dealing with these problems. In most cases the wiki editing community itself will rapidly deal with problematic edits, but Wikis also provide facilities for some users to act as administrators (called sysops) who oversee groups of pages and have the ability to block users from editing.
Typical Wiki functionality includes:
Browser based editing - all wiki page edits are achieved through an associated editing page with a text entry box.
Access control - the ability to edit pages can be open to all visitors, or can be restricted to those with a login or limited by IP address.
Wiki mark up - web formating (e.g. bold, links, headings, lists etc) can be achieved within wiki content using simple mark up designed to be easier to use than HTML code.
Tracking version history - the page content is saved as each edit is made resulting in a timeline of different page versions.
Version comparison - the differences between versions of the same page can be highlighted.
Page version rollback (revert) - the page content can be returned to that of a previous version undoing all subsequent edits.
Discussion pages - each web page on the wiki has an associated discussion page where contributors can discuss the direction of the editing process.
Automated page edit alerts - email and/or RSS alerts can be used to identify when specific pages have been updated.
Locking current page version - locking a page to prevent further edits.
Twitteris an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."
Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.
Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor's results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to. A video about Rankin's classroom experiment follows.
It's funny to hear this history professor admit that "there are some topics we discuss that need more information" than Twitter's 140 character limit allows. Some! Said like a true Twitter convert. It's also nice to hear a teacher talk about technology and say, "it's going to be messy but that doesn't mean bad." Welcome to the social web, where that's a great attitude.
Rankin wrote a few pages of thoughts about "The Twitter Experiment" on her school web page as well. "Most educators would agree that large classes set in the auditorium-style classrooms limit teaching options to lecture, lecture, and more lecture," she wrote. "And most educators would also agree that this is not the most effective way to teach. I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material."
Twitter truly is a paradigm shaking technology platform, but Rankin's use of it at the University of Texas also illustrates some of its shortcomings. Most importantly, Twitter search and archiving are notoriously short-lived. The service was really intended for fleeting tweets about casual activities, and it seems to have been architected that way. Short lines of poetry, ruminating about the history of the world, penned by young scholars standing in the doorway to the rest of their intellectual lives? Not so much. These students will be lucky if they can retrieve their earliest Tweets at the end of the term.
Asking students to discuss their classes in a very public forum has got to raise concerns for some people as well. Rankin says participation isn't required, but it's because of these kinds of concerns that private, education focused services like EdModo have a market. That closed communication comes at the expense of public knowledge sharing, but classroom innovators may not be able to have it both ways in the long term.
The tide certainly seems to be turning though, in favor of education augmented by these kinds of technologies. A March draft proposal for UK primary school education guidelines, for example, includes nationwide instruction in the use of tools like Wikipedia and Twitter.
Suggested Activities with the use of TWITTER
Most of the students in this generation are known to use the different applications like facebook, multiply and twitter. By this applications, they are able to stay connected with other people regardless on their distances.
From this application, we can have an activity that is concerned on the views of the future teachers on what strategy is effective, the non-UBD or the UBD(Understanding by Design) approaches.
Activity:
First, the teacher will instruct the students to create their twitter accounts.
Second, the teacher will give instructions on her own twitter account that the students will make sure they will get updated.
Then, she will post her questions regarding on what are their views on which approach they would prefer to use as a future teacher.
Lastly, the teacher will allow them to construct a debate on which side of approach they are in.
After the students will give their "tweets", the number of followers of the debat will be the basis of their different views.
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp in 2004 and later acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.[2] Yahoo has reported that Flickr has a total of 51 million registered member and 80 million unique visitors.[3] In August 2011, it reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources.[4] Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need of registering an account but an account must be made in order for the user to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.
Suggested Activities with the use of Flickr Application
In this activity, the teacher will be able to develop the skills of the students to create a good classroom management with use of pictures. With the Flickr application, they will be able to share different pictures of a well-managed classroom that they can use in their future careers as an effective teacher.
First, the teacher will allow the students to observe and gather some pictures of different classroom.
Second, the teacher will instruct them to post it to their emails. They must critique each pictures and allow them edit the pictures and their outputs will be judged.
The students were given opportunities to explore different managed classroom and at the same time, their creativity will be developed.
Classtool can be use in any website, blog or a wiki. You can edit and design your own template and can be saved as a stand-alone HTML file or as a Widget that can be embedded into a blog or wiki - as long as it is non-commercial. Please note, however, that downloaded HTML files still need to communicate with the ClassTools server and therefore require a computer to have an internet connection.
Below is an Example of Classtool.net Video of Teaching
