Diigo vs. Delicious (Bookmarking)

Before this assignment I had already had some experience with both of these Web 2.0 apps.  I prefer Diigo over Delicious due to its advanced features like the "highlighting" option.  Basically both of these sites allow you to bookmark your favorite websites and allow you to access them from any computer.  Personally even though I have accounts with both of these sites, I use my Yahoo homepage for my bookmarking.  I don't have near the features but it is easy to use and I love the simplicity in that I can access my mail and my favorite sites all from my homepage. 

Second Life

To be honest I am not completely sold on using Second Life for Secondary Education.  I do see its potential benefits, however I also see its potential for all kinds of poor behavior and missuse.  I guess you could of said that about the internet 15 years ago, and look where we are today.  I will stop being Debbie Downer.

I did some digging while in Second Life and found a neat learning environment created by Ohio University.  Not Ohio State University...  They have really cool educational kiosks set up over a range of topics where students can watch short videos, take quizzes over what they watched, and also play educational games while in Second Life.  I think they did a wonderful job.  Also another fascinating aspect of Second Life is the ability to take virtual field trips for free and really get your kids excited about seeing and exploring the world.  Using Second Life you can have your kids visit famous places, monuments, etc they will most likely never get to see in real life.  You can teach them all about the place, show them literally what it looks like, and at many of these places there is educational opportunities you can take at advantage of along the way. You can also virtually visit a host of universities which often have educational games, information about their university and other videos that will benefit your students.  You can lead all your students around the world from your desk!  How cool is that? 

 

Portable Devices

I must start out by saying I am one of the few Americans left who does not own a fancy portable device like an Android or Iphone.  I don't have a sleek tablet either, but my in-laws have it all so I got to mess around with theirs for this blogging assingment. 

Limitations of Portable Devices:  Although there isn't much these devices can't do, I found these limitations to be the most obvious when compared to a PC or laptop device.  In my research I used Apple's Ipad.  Here are my top five limitations:
1.  No Multitasking-you can't listen to music and browse the internet.
2.  No Flash-many websites and online games run via Flash and the Ipad is not compatible.
3. No USB ports available. 
4.  The Keyboard is nice, but I wouldn't want to type a paper on it. 
5. Only 64 G's of storage- they make ipods with 160G's but left the ipad with only 64?

Another debate worth looking into would be to buy an ipad or another small computer like the Asus here are the comparisons:

Physical Aspects:  The Ipad screen 9.7" and weighs 680 grams; the Asus screen is bigger at 10.1" and slightly lighter 675 grams.  As far as screen resolution the Asus wins with a resolution of 1280x720.

Speed:  Both devices come with a 1 GHz processor
Ram: Ipad 256 MB  Asus 1 GB
Storage: Ipad: 16-64 GBs   Asus: 32-64 GBs both comparable.

Operating System: Ipad: Iphone 3.2 OS  Asus: Windows embedded compact 7
Camera:  Ipad: none  Asus: 0.3MP web cam
Battery Life:  Ipad and Asus are both measured at 10 hours of life.

Price: Ipad: $499  Asus: $399

Unlike the ipad, I have never used or even seen an Asus Eee device.  Based on the specs alone I am definately interested in checking it out.  On paper, it looks to be an upgrade to the ipad that came out last year. 

Even though I have listed some key limitations the Ipad has, they do have some ways around most of these problems.  For example, Apple now has a docking station for the Ipad that comes with a keyboard that is traditional.  It also has an accessory piece that does allow you to connect your USB storage device up to it, or you could use the Dropbox app. to store documents and other forms of data digitally.  As the ipad evolves they are fixing these problems from the first generation. 

There are hundreds of ways to use a tablet device in the classroom like an Ipad, I will give you my favorite three. 
1. Subscribe to various periodical apps like the New York Times and have the students read and discuss articles on what they uncovered.
2.  Subscribe to ebooks and have the students read in small groups through a book and assign various projects that correspond with their reading.  They can create their projects using Google Docs on their Ipad.
3.  Have the students research free education apps and have them review and catogorize their favorites and make a library of apps for the school to use for a future reference.

That's all I have I hope you found this interesting, I know I did.


3.

Moodle vs. Blackboard

This was a great assignment being able to examine both products from a teachers perspective. In the end I would choose Moodle because it does the job (although with less bells and whistles) effectivley and more importantly its free. This project got me thinking about what other institutions are doing and I found this great research project from the University of North Carolina at Charolette on this exact topic. Here is the link.

This 38 page research paper concludes that:
"The evidence gathered by this committee strongly favors a transition to Moodle on both pedagogical and financial grounds. Moodle provides better or comparable functionality with the benefit of increased relevance and control for what in the long run will be lower cost.”

After reading this paper I found there pedagogical results to be the most facsinating.  Here are the numbers from their final report which they evaluated over 2 semesters:

Fall 2008 Details: Moodle courses taught during this semester included those that were hybrid (60%)

and on-line (40%). The faculty and students involved rated Moodle very highly on key factors of

ease of use, flexibility, facilitation of teaching/learning goals, and correspondence to one’s

teaching/learning style. Tools and functions crucial for designing and implementing Moodle courses

(Assignments, Discussions, Learning Modules, Assessments, etc.) were rated as being preferable to

those available in BbV by both faculty and students. While there were a few cases in which a basic

function (web links, etc.) were rated by students as being “about the same as Blackboard,” there were

no cases in which a Moodle function or tool of any kind was rated by either faculty or students as

being “worse than Blackboard.” (See Appendix A, page 8, and Appendix B, page 10)

Spring 2009 Details: Data from this larger group of students and faculty confirmed the findings from

the Fall semester. Data were collected from 35 faculty and 313 students. On all tools and functions

evaluated, a large majority of faculty expressed a preference (either pro-Moodle or pro-BbV), and as

in the Fall, these preferences consistently favored Moodle by wide margins. Once again, ease of use

and learning, adaptability, and sufficiency of Moodle tools were important factors for these faculty.

When asked to indicate an overall preference, 81% of faculty surveyed preferred Moodle. (See

Appendix C, page 12, and Appendix D, page 26).
Pretty interesting stuff...if I taught High school, and had enough classroom computers, I think I would start my upperclassmen on using Moodle to prepare them for college. 

Video Projects

Couple of thoughts...
1. Camstudio is horrible, it was difficult to use, difficult to figure out, and impossible to turn in using the right format. I hated this project, I worked on it for hours and all it did was leave me extremely frustrated...

2. Camtasia is wonderful, it was easy to use, easy to figure out, and extremely easy to turn in using the right format. Kudos to the designers! I loved this project, it was simple and only took a couple hours to play with to understand its features and use it. I love you Camtasia!!

Here is my video created on Camtasia, I would give you my video using Camstudio but it wouldn't work anyway.

Wix Project

One of the coolest classroom assignments I have done this year was having my students create and design their own website about a topic we have studied so far using Wix.com.  The students have absolutely loved this project and really impressed me with their technology skills.  Designing a website takes learning to a whole new level, because the students must research, and find pictures, videos, charts, etc. that correspond directly with their topic. 
The classes I used this project for were World History and Geography, and I was really excited about the results.  We had topics ranging from the Black Death, to Martin Luther, to country-based websites in Geography like Greece, and Australia.  They did a fabulous job, and they learned a lot in the process.
I required them to create 4 Main pages and 2 sub pages off of each Main page.  All pages must pertain to their topic and I required each website to include one video and one chart backing up their website theme.  It was a real challenge at first teaching them the basics and how to setup an account and a web page, and do all the technical aspects but it was worth it in the long run.  Now students are asking their teachers if they can make websites for their classrooms. 

Animoto

Of all the Web 2.0 applications I have learned about this year, my favorite has been Animoto. I love making professional videos, but who has the time? Animoto is the solution. They have amazing templates to choose from, and uploading photos and videos is a cinch. They have a wonderful selection of music to choose from, or you can even upload your own.
My Mom has breast cancer, and had to have surgery yesterday. Just before she went into surgery I made her a video of her only grandchild, my son Isaac, on Animoto. It brought my mom to tears, and it impressed everyone in the waiting room so much that I had all my family and friends asking me how I created such an amazing video in under 10 minutes. I explained to them just how easy it was using Animoto.
I have learned more in this class in only 7 weeks, than many of my other master courses combined. This class is not easy, but it allows us to use, experiment, and discover many new technologies that we can actually use in the field of education that will benefit the students tremendously.  I would just like to thank our teacher, even though she really makes work hard, and always keeps us busy even while she is on vacation :)