Chapter 3 of New Tools, New Schools really helped to put all of this information into perspective. Now I have a better (but not full) understanding of the functions of different tools and what can be done with them.
Blogs can be used by administrators to communicate with the faculty so it won't be a top down or bottom up distribution of power but rather a mutual process in decision making. Teachers can use blogs to communicate with students and their parents. Students can use them to improve their writing skills, learn from other students, form their opinions, and share their ideas with others.
With wikis, students can read, collaborate, peer edit, and make electronic portfolios. With both blogs and wikis, there is a danger that information and writing are inaccurate. There is also a danger that the content is subjective or trying to support a point of view. A good 21st century skill to have is the ability to evaluate content and question the accuracy of information and the purpose of the author.
The teachers at our school are being trained in Moodle next week and I plan to use it for my capstone project in training teachers to work with ELLs. I think this tool would be best because I read that you can include blogs and wikis in it, divide the content into modules, make quizzes, and have discussions. I also want to conduct a survey with the teachers as a pretest to determine the content of the training and a posttest to measure the results of the training. I learned that zohopolls would be a good tool to use for that. I also want to start using this stuff in the classroom!
I have seen a few administrators switch to using a blog or even twitter to communicate with staff, students and parents. One local high school is encouraging teachers to use twitter to communicate with students. If kids have ready access to that on their cell phones and it is also available on the school's webpage, it is a viable option. I find blogs a little easier to search historically. Twitter can be searched but it flies by. To me it seems much more like something you have to look at constantly like texting.
ReplyDeleteMoodle is a safe environment to start with as you can use many of these tools in an environment where you control who can interact. We'll look at it briefly a little later in the course, so I'll look to those of you using it to share your experiences.
Our school started using Moodle a few years ago. It has such great potential. And once you get students into the groove with it, they can log on and do what needs to be done with little teacher assistance.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking from experience, I have used the message board, which seems quite similar to a blog, for book group chats (AKA lit. circles). I was so cool to see them all working and being honest on them. And they were helping each other out with clarity.
It's not to say that this couldn't happen in face-to-face lit. circles, but they had more fun and became more engaged and brave when completed online.
I like mixing together the face-to-face and online. Geri, did you find that different students contributed in the different formats?
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