This week we had the opportunity to review 3 different
categories of Web 2.0 sites: social, creative, and curation. This was a fun
learning experience for me because it forced me to dedicate time to exploring
sites and evaluating them based on the criteria that I had set forth in my
previous blog post. The sites I chose to explore were familiar only in that I’d
heard of them, but had never looked into using them personally. It was a fun
activity and below you will find my review of 3 different sites.
Social
I’m very familiar with Facebook and have gotten my feet wet
in Twitter so I decided to explore Edmodo
this week. With so much information at our fingertips and people constantly on
the go, many are using social media to keep up with the newest trends, tag
valuable information, and communicate with others who are appearing equally as
busy. I first had to discover what Edmodo was. “Using Edmodo teachers can
create a microblogging network for their classes. Edmodo allows teachers to
create a group specifically for their students and exclude those not invited to
the group. Edmodo provides teachers with a place to post assignment reminders,
build an event calendar, and post messages to the group” (Byrne, 2011). Student
learning through social media can be enhanced because of the relevancy to
students, the immediate feedback available by teachers and peers, and the
online presence that it allows students to establish. Most students enjoy the
opportunity to share from such a platform.
Personally, I can see Edmodo as a great tool for a teacher
to use personally to keep their education sites, blogs, resources, etc. all in
one place. I liked the fact that you can use Edmodo as your reader by using the
RSS feature. I also appreciated that you can save and store a variety of files
and media types without having to carry around a flash drive or be connected to
a specific network each time you want to access school information. There seem
to be many great benefits to using Edmodo with students. There are several blog
posts and discussion threads that share uses. I really appreciated that the possibilities
seemed endless. It was anything from having students save files to access later
to book discussions to designing projects and submitting them to sharing grades
with parents to sending students positive reinforcement messages to organizing
a calendar of assignments to communicating cross-culturally with other students
to watching videos to differentiated instruction to you name it! If you weren’t
sure how to use a resource, the Edmodo blog was VERY helpful, as was the
webinar you could attend live (or watch the pre-recorded version).
Students seem to find Edmodo easy to navigate whether on the
web or as an app on a mobile device. Parents seem to support it because it is
very secure. School districts are in favor of free services teachers are able
to utilize it. Teachers enjoy the opportunity to network and openly communicate
with other teachers as well as their students in a centralized location. With
all of the new curriculum, standards, evaluation systems, etc. that are coming
down the pike next year, I don’t think I’m ready to bring my 2nd
graders into the Edmodo community. I may explore around and network a bit more,
but we’ll see. With so many online opportunities, I need to make sure I’m going
for mile-deep rather than mile-wide resources.
Creative
I LOVE Glogster – maybe even a little too much – and VoiceThread
was a unit in one of my other Instructional Media courses so I decided to do
more investigation into the creative presentation mode of Prezi. I’ve seen several presentations with
Prezi, and attempted to create one of my own on the fly last year, but I’ve
never actually learned how to effectively use it. Creative media enhances
student learning in a large part because of its name – creative. It’s allowing
students to construct a project to demonstrate and apply their knowledge in a
relevant and visually appealing fashion. Prezi is no exception. Not only can
students create 3D zooming presentations, they can also collaborate
simultaneously on PCs, Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
Educators all over the world seem to be interacting with
Prezi. If you register with a school district e-mail, you receive a free edu
Prezi account. This is a nice service offered to teachers. Many teachers are
blogging about their Prezi usage with students from Pre-K through High School. Other
than creating presentations with text, a Prezi can also include embedded video
and other types of graphic media. Being a 2nd grade teacher, I spent
the majority of my time seeing how primary teachers were using Prezi. Many said
they make a quick Prezi to embed YouTube videos they would like to share with their
students. This eliminates all of the ads and shows the video on a clean white
screen, but it seems to be a step that is not needed to me. Other primary teachers
were presenting content to students in much the same way you would with a Power
Point. In one of the most interesting ways I saw a kindergarten teacher using
Prezi was to show short video clips for social sciences and ask a question as
soon as it was over. This was immediate assessment and feedback for her, and I
thought it was a great idea! Several other teachers were having their older
elementary students who were working on researching a topic use a Prezi as the
mode of delivering their project.
It is interesting that I came along several dialogues about
usage by minors. Technically, the Prezi website of terms and conditions says
usage by, “Minors
under the age of 13 (is) not permitted” ("Everything you
need," 2013). I read several blog posts about this topic as well as the
discussion boards on the Prezi website. It was interesting that a supposed
Prezi employee gave permission to one teacher to use it with her 4th-6th
grade students. Hmmmm…if the terms and conditions can be violated, why were
they created? Although you might call me old fashioned, I will probably not be
using Prezi myself or with my 2nd graders in the near future. It is
very “busy” and overwhelming to me. The zooming feature makes me dizzy –
especially if a variety of media is embedded. One of the most frustrating parts
of Prezi to me is that it didn’t seem as though you can create a template and
use that same formatting for each of your presentations. I do like that you can
import Power Points that you already have completed, but I feel like Prezi has
a much larger learning curve in learning how to navigate it. Good or bad, my
schedule isn’t currently permitting me that much time to change over presentations.
Curation
Being able to store and share websites, articles, ideas,
games, etc. is incredibly valuable for teachers. Curation of articles, resources,
etc. for teachers is valuable because it places many ideas right at our
fingertips. If we don’t have to spend as much time searching, we can focus more
on effective lesson planning, building of relationships, and
intervention/enrichment with our students. Using a curation site such as
Symbaloo, Tizmos, etc. for student access enhances student learning because it
provides them with age-appropriate, teacher-selected resources in one location.
Not only does it make for easier access (especially for primary students), it
also gives students specific guidance in where they are to be going online. One
curation website that I was not familiar with was Scoop.it.
“Scoop.it collates work from online
publications using an online magazine format” (Johnson, 2013). I thought it
would be similar to Pinterest so I was
excited to give it a try. Individuals register through social media accounts
(Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest) or by simply using an e-mail address. After
registering, you can create a Topic and use keywords for Scoop.it to give you
suggested articles.
After exploring the site itself, reading the help guide and
several other blog posts related to Scoop.it, I discovered that there are quite
a few teachers who use this resource. It seemed as though a large portion of
teachers who use it do so in a fashion similar to the former Google Reader.
They will gather educationally based articles from their favorite blogs,
websites, and online magazines and house them all in one location. You also
have the opportunity to write/publish your own posts on Scoop.it. When
finished, you are then able to tag whatever you’ve “scooped” so that others can
locate it to read and/or “re-scoop”. Teachers who have students using Scoop.it
are teaching them how to appropriately network and dialogue online, tag or use
keywords to find information easily, collaborate with others, and gain a deeper
understanding of the topic they are researching.
Scoop.it did not seem to be very user-friendly to me. The
information I read about it seemed to disagree, but I found myself overwhelmed
and confused when trying to use it and the help section of the website was very
long and wordy. Pinterest is very easy to navigate, and I think I was expecting
the same from Scoop.it, which also affected my perception of the site. I
personally do not like linking all of my social media as I use it for different
purposes so I chose to register via e-mail. The process was very simple, but
you had to activate the account by confirming through your e-mail. Depending on
the settings in your district, this could not work out with students. Another
tricky aspect about using this service with students is that the terms and
conditions state that no one under age 13 is permitted to use it and those
13-18 must have parent/guardian consent. The final aspect of Scoop.it that I
did not care for was that you can only create 5 topics. I like to sort my
information in very specific categories and felt that Scoop.it was for broad
usage.
Resources:
Byrne, R. (2011,
December 12). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
2011/12/15-things-teachers-students-can-do-with.html
Everything you
need to know when using prezi. (2013, May 154). Retrieved from http://prezi.com/terms-of-use/
Johnson, L. (2013,
February 18). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.teachthought.com/
technology/why-scoopit-is-becoming-an-indispensable-learning-tool/
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