Created Content

This week, I examined Prezi. I actually enjoyed it a great deal, and I'm sure I only scraped the surface of what can be done with it. I looked at three learning theories (behaviorism, constructivism, and cognitivism) in this Prezi with the thought that I could use it in one of my classes next semester. I didn't find the learning curve too steep, and enjoyed the fact that because Prezi is stored "up there in the clouds" I could add things from my home computer and work computer and not have to worry about carrying any material around on a flashdrive.

Here's the URL to my Prezi: http://prezi.com/wut9u6k8xxu3/learning-theories/

Synchronous Interaction

One of the topics we looked at this week was synchronous interaction. I found a website that lists a bunch of free tools for this purpose: http://topfreedownloads.brothersoft.com/chat-tools/index.html. I enjoy synchronous chats myself; they're part and parcel of the MMORPG, Lord of the Rings, that I enjoy playing. You are able to meet and chat with people from all over the world. I think that an online chat would also be useful in terms of asking questions in the university scene. One semester, I used Yahoo chat and gave all students my Yahoo name. Not many people took advantage of it, but those who did seemed to find it very useful. They were able to shoot a question at me and get an immediate response. This is something I need to think about trying again.

Wikis

In our tech course, we were asked to look at blogs or wikis, but as I'm pretty interested in ALL the things we talk about in class, I thought I'd go ahead and look for some interesting blogs. So, how is a wiki different from a blog? First, both are Web 2.0 tools, meaning that both are interactive, and both can be used by a person, or persons, to create pages about a particular topic. The difference, as far as I can tell, is really the interface. A blog is set up to be something more like a journal. It is ordered in terms of dates of entry, and contains personal thoughts as well as links to other information. A wiki, on the other hand, is not organized in terms of dates, but in terms of types of materials (think wikipedia). It is more like an organized webpage.

Anyway, if you have better ways to distinguish between the two, feel free to respond! :-)

To conclude today's post, here's a link to a bunch of education-related wikis. I've looked at a few and there's a TON of great information in them. Enjoy!  http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis

Blogs

A blog about blogs! Somewhat odd, I guess! But as a blog can be about anything, here I go! I've been searching for blogs that I could use in my teaching, and although there are a lot of teachers out there who blog about teaching, so far I've not found anything (well, I did find one) that wasn't too political or too "twee" (fads and gimicks). However, I did find an awesome blog about grammar. It's at http://www.grammarblog.co.uk/ and I've already wasted too much time reading through it (and checking out the pictures of grammatical errors - had a good giggle at some of those). Something like this would be great for use in an English Language Arts class... or even any class that required writing (which, I guess, would be most college classes). :-) Enjoy!