Online Concept Mapping June 9, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: concept mapping
add a comment
Concept mapping is a powerful tool for helping students organize their understanding of a topic. Although concept maps can be built with low technology (pencil and paper), some of the advantages of new technologies can expand the benefits of concept mapping in the classroom. Online applications make it possible for students to save their maps and to access them and work on them wherever they have Intenet access. Some of the newer tools also allow collaborative editing, meaning that the maps can be shared with other students in the class and editing by anyone who has been given access to them.
There are a number of these tools and plenty of free ones. There tends to be a trade-off between ease of use and how robust the tool is. Jane Hart has the ultimate list of tech tools and you can look at over 30 mindmapping tools that she reviews, but I wanted to highlight a couple of great options.
bubbl.us
On the easy end is bubbl.us. There isn’t a lot of space for content, so this is more for topics and single word or phrase bubbles. But you can create subtopics just by clicking Enter and you can change the way something is linked to another topic just by dragging it onto the other bubble. It is easy to color-code items with a full color pallate and they can be arranged however you want with ease as well. Add email addresses for those with whom you want to share the map and, after they create a free account, they can also edit the work in progress. Limited space for information, and no way to tag the relationships between topics are the biggest drawbacks at this point for this tool.
Cmap
Cmap is a more robust tool that you download, for free, and install on your machine. It allows you a lot of choices for the shape and size of the boxes, you can label the relational connectors to get a better understanding of the structure of information (for example, something is labeled as “causing something else” or “is an example of”, etc.) The Cmap boxes handle as much text as you need to explain things more completely. Not having the maps available online in a collaborative editing environment is the biggest downside to this tool.
Get a Blog For Your Class April 10, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: blogs
add a comment
Blogs can be a very powerful tool in education for both teachers and students. Some teachers are using blogs in order to communicate more regularly and more effectively with their students and the parents as well. Although a class or teacher website can generally do more than just a blog, the two can work very effectively together to provide information and resources and capture feedbackfrom students and parents.
Students could also use blogs to stimulate thinking and improve their writing skills. Blogs provide a unique publication venue that is generally desirable and unavailable in the classroom.
Nebo School District has to weigh the value of blogs and other online tools with concerns for the safety of students who create and access them. For this reason, we reviewed a number of blogging options and decided to open Edublogs.org for student use at school. That means that although teachers may be able to access different blogging options, and students and parents could access them from home as well, only edublogs.org blogs will be available to students on school computers.
Virtual Classrooms with WIMBA and ConnectNow February 27, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: online classroom, virtual classroom, wimba
add a comment
Online virtual classrooms allow teachers to extend their learning environment across time and space barriers, making resources, including the teacher, available to students from their homes or other places. Although there are quite a few options for doing this, I wanted to highlight a couple of promising tools.
Wimba is an online classroom that is currently available to all teachers in Utah through UEN. Students can log in to your virtual classroom through your my.uen page. There they can interact with the teacher and other participants through audio, video, and chat. There is a content area where the teacher can share images or videos or use an interative whiteboard. Contact the Technology Curriculum Specialists if you would like a tour of Wimba and how you might use it to extend your own learning environment.
ConnectNow is similar to Wimba, except that it focuses more on the audio and video chatting. It is like a web-conferencing tool that is free through Adobe. It seemed to work very well, and is not limited to teachers or districts.
Another new option just hit the blogs this week. Moodle Rooms has teamed with Google to put together a great educational version of online classes. I will look into it more as it develops and keep people informed.
SimplyBox – Collaborative Research February 17, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: collaboration, simplybox
add a comment
SimplyBox is a free tool that allows you to take a screenshot of text or images on the web and save them into “boxes” or collections of related screenshots. These boxes can be organized and displayed with different views, and I can also share boxes or individual screenshots with colleagues.
As a teacher, I might add a box for a new project and then surf the web for a few resources that relate to that topic. Then I could share that box with students, having them look at the resources in the box (like giving them the URLS and directions on specifically which parts of that website to look at). All of the resources are right there, available at home or at school. Students can comment on the clipping, and they can visit the site from there if they need to.
I use SimplyBox with my Firefox browser, and there is a handy add-on toolbar to make it very easy to grab something from the screen and throw it in the appropriate box to be organized later.
Give it at try at Simplybox.com, then respond with creative ways that you are finding to use this tool.
Social Bookmarking January 23, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: diigo, social bookmarking
add a comment
When you are using the Internet to look for information or resources, often you find an excellent site and decide to save a bookmark in your browser so that you can find that site again. Social bookmarking is the sharing of these bookmarks between friends or groups of colleagues to which you might belong.
There are several social bookmarking tools out there. Del.icio.us is one of the oldest and most popular. Another one that I really like is Diigo.
Here’s what happens when I go online — I find a site I like. I highlight part of the text that I want to share with others. I bookmark the site using my Diigo toolbar. I select tags that describe the find to make it easier to find it later. I choose to share the site: I can enter email addresses or select the friends I want to share it with, or I select a group or two that I belong to and it is available to each member of the group when they log into their Diigo account.
The big bonus is that the next time I need to find information on a specific topic such as Early American History, I just look up my group of history teachers worldwide and see what they have found and what they thought was good enough to share with the group. It cuts down on my searching, on my evaluating, and puts the very best at my fingertips.
