Merging Web 2.0 Tools with Moodle

Lately I have been doing a lot of research on blending web 2.0 technologies into course curriculum and focusing mostly from the side of students. It's so easy for students to use these innovative tools for assignments, collaborative projects, or for inquiry-based learning.

Naturally I thought about teachers using them too, but it wasn't until I read this blog post from "Golden Bytes" that it became clear how important it is for faculty use these productivity tools.

Golden Bytes tells us "in a nutshell" why he wanted to upload a PowerPoint for his 5-6th graders to view from Moodle and how he found that by using Google docs and Zoho he suddenly found a way to make his life much easier...

Guess you'll just have to read Golden Bytes to see how these tools can make your life simpler too....

Open Yale Courses

Yale University has joined the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and is now offering free courses through Open Yale Courses. These courses are free and open to anyone who would like to participate.

Seven departments (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) at Yale are among the first at the university to offer classes via the Open Yale Courses initiative.

The Open Yale site describes the program as follows:

"Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration."

The Open Yale Courses have been funded and supported through grants from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, as well as the Yale Center for Media and Instruction. Open Yale Courses have also integrated Creative Commons licensing into their course materials.

Additional Resources

• Open Yale Courses
  
• Didactics World > Bridging the Digital Content Divide
  
• Creative Commons > Education
  
• Education Guardian Weekly > Reading Poetry at Yale...
  
• Didactics World > Open Content Provision Through ccLearn

Podscope -Podcast Search Engine

Podcasts are great learning tools but sometimes finding podcasts to use in your curriculum can be can be an arduous task for educators. Not if you use Podscope.

Podscope is an audio-video podcast search engine that searches podcasts for "key" words.

If you're a Nursing Educator searching for podcasts about nutrition, thats easy with Podscope. If you're an elemenatary level teacher looking for book reviews you're in luck, you can find them easily with Podscope.

To seach Podscope all you need to do is enter 1 word or more for a word search. Then before you can blink Podcope searches podcasts for those spoken words and the search results with links to the actual podcasts appear.

Podscope makes it so easy to find podcasts for your teaching and for student learning. But be careful, you might find yourself listening to hours of super podcasts....just be forewarned...

2008 Webware 100 Winners

The 2008 Webware Top 100 Winners have been announced- go check them out.

Now you have plenty time to brainstorm ideas for projects to use these Webware Winners for your own productivity or creativity, or with your students.

Library of Congress- New Interactive Website

Take your students on a field trip to the Library of Congress .

"This Library of Congress Experience will offer “hands-on” interaction with rare cultural treasures in ways that inspire and engage"

While you're going why not invite another class to go along? Then come back to an Elluminate Live Vroom and have the classes share their Library of Congress Experience with each other virtually. Neither class has to be in the same school or on the same continent.

Virtual Field Trips and communication software like Elluminate are a great way to connect kids to experiences they could have never had before without leaving school. Now new technologies provide the means to open our classroom doors to a world of experiences.

Ecto for Social- Collaborative Learning

EctoLearning is a Personalized Learning Environment for organizing class content for students to access online.

"Ecto lets you create interactive learning items and entire courses using your own content including RSS, YouTube, and Wikis. Content is user-generated, user-rated, and shared in the vast open Ecto library."

Ecto also you to share content and connect with others globally.

And best of all, access to EctoLearning is free.

Community + Web 2.0 = Learning

In a recently published article in the April 2008 Sloan-C View Patricia McGee, Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at The University of Texas at San Antonio focuses on Community + Web 2.0 = Learning. Professor McGee poses, “The question really becomes: How can we facilitate the natural formation of community regardless of the technology available to us?

Here is my reply ….We, humans, are social, gregarious beings. We love to talk with others, seek information from others to solve problems, and learn new things that excite and motivate us to create, innovate and invent. We have evolved and progressed over time, but always find a way to meet that basic human need for social gathering. What also has evolved over time is how we gather together.

Remember when gathering around the water cooler was a means to connect socially with people in your office and learn inadvertently from coworkers? I do, but most of the ‘Net Generation doesn’t. They have grown up digitally with some type of technology at their fingertips. Today ‘s Digital Natives connect with others differently than the digital immigrants, preferring social networks like Second Life, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Connecting and meeting virtually now is common place to Digital Natives who text friends to find where or when to meet or go online to a friend’s MySpace page to see what the friend has been doing lately. Learning is social. People now gather information from others through online social networks, and inadvertently learn about many new things. Information that was once gathered around the water cooler is now gained through a cell phone, mobile device, or computer.

People are already beginning to wonder what will be the next MySpace or Facebook tool that we, being 'social beings', embrace to connect with others? Whatever the tool, it will need to be easy-to-use, integrate with the devices that are already in the hands of the Digital Natives - something they are already familiar with- that will send them to the next dimension where they will continue to learn from others, but in a new way. The device itself will be the platform for new social networking software that allows for social interaction just like discussion forums, listservs, and email allowed us to exchange information, keep in touch, and learn en-route.

Technology's innovative tools provide a new means to do something people have always done- learn from others in a community of practice and from communities they choose to join. We are social creatures, gregarious in nature. It’s not really about the way in which we interact- online or face-to-face, but about meeting our need to be social. The technology serves as the tool that allows us to meet around the water cooler in IM, Facebook or Second Life and learn from others. It provides the opportunity for social learning.

Educators, on the other hand, need to be knowledgeable of these tools and use them in learning situations to reach the Digital Natives with their tools of choice. An educator’s job is to help student on their path to lifelong learning. Whether we use SMS texting, Twitter, Meebo, Second Life to connect students doesn’t matter, but providing an option for “the water cooler” is important for the students entering into a community of practice and for their continued learning within the community. Technology will continue to evolve and student’s ‘tech-a-tuitive-ness’ will rapidly increase in response. But the students’ need to be social and learn from others will persist. They will just do it through different mediums. Educators need to keep abreast of the new innovative communication and social networking tools and see how they can utilize them with their students. Learning doesn't take place in a vacuum, but through interactions with others.

Over the years ‘techies’ flocked to the James Bond 007 movies to see what new far-fetched technology gadgets Sean Connery would use. The gadgets helped him connect to others and allowed him to brave new worlds. The openness of the Web 2.0 provides the environment ripe for innovation of new technologies even more 'far-fetched' than Bonds. It’s just a matter of time till someone reaches over to try something, find it exciting, and then connects to others in their social network to share what they found. We will just have to wait.

But in the meantime, educators should utilize these new tools in the context of their curriculum and embed them into their course design through interactive learning activities that keep students engaged, connected, interacting, and learning socially.

Create Google Docs Forms

Try sending your field trip parent forms using Google Docs -Forms.

"Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won't need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page....

Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you'll get the spreadsheet automatically....Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet."

You can even make your life easier by adding the Google Docs Forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage for easy access.

Google Forms is a slightly different twist on an old task. It might help you be more efficient and organized than trying to keep track of all those paper forms.

Using Wikipedia to Re-envision the Term Paper

What about using Wikis & Wikipedia for student term papers?

A good idea discussed in Scholarship2.0 is a report on "Using Wikipedia to Reenvision the Term Paper" by Andreas Brockhau and Martha Groome from the University of Washington, Bothel - Why not have students add to Wikipedia pages on a specific topic for a term paper or have them make a major revision to a needy page already in Wikipedia?

Blogging's instant publication capability opened up the audience for student writing from just the Instructor to anyone on the Internet. Now having students create pages for their term papers in Wikipedia provides the perfect match for "peer review", publishing student's work, and provides the opportunity for students to add a major contribution on the global scale.

This assignment will turn the ordinary student term paper into an exciting project to be viewed by many others rather than just the instructor and the student's backpack.

Creating a Collaborative Syllabus Using Moodle

Having students guide their own learning by "Creating a Collaborative Syllabus" is an innovative way to get motivated students in your classes rather than having to "wake up the dead" in your classes each day.

Spend time planning with students in advance and get them excited about the learning to come. This also provides an opportunity for students to access prior knowledge about that they know and what they want to know, so you can determine what they need to know.

Collaboration, Social Learning, and Constructivist Pedagogy creates motivated students.

Podcasts and Classroom Use

Task pre-service student teachers to research integrating technology into classroom use and they will produce an overwhelming source of ideas!

To share their ideas for using Podcasts in the Classroom:
Teachers can use podcasting to share lecture information with students. Teachers can have students create podcasts to share information that they gathered. This type of assignment would have students use voice recordings, sound effects, and photos. This will definitely engage students if they are taught how to create one. Students and teachers can also use podcasting and add it to a website or blog. I think I'll do that with mine smile. Teachers and students who use podcasting learn content in a creative way. In addition, they are also learning new communication skills.

I like the idea that students can access information from the web and not have to only read. This could help with auditory learners, students who like to listen to music, and those students who love to use computers.
~Elena

A few examples of how podcasts can be a learning tool for learning are that podcasts make most educational needs accessible, such as lectures and speeches, audio-guides, case studies, audio-notes/feedbacks, music, news and course updates, etc..
~Clare

I looked at Brown University’s website—it was cool how they put up podcast about activities that took place and we can view them with a windows media player, itunes or download it into your iPod.
MY IDEA… This gave me that idea that in your class—you may use this to document special days/presentation in class or in the school and this can be a way to have parents view it at home or when internet access in nearby. It is a new way students may learn how to access information and/or have them create a podcast as a culminating project.

Some other ideas for podcast can be “How-to-do” podcasts- for example, grammar, writing a story or letter, read-aloud, storytelling, step by step completing a science project, making a blog or website, etc…
~Diane

When I was looking through some teacher blogs about podcasting I read about one teacher that uses podcasting for students to record their reading. This way progress can be tracked and teachers or specialists can listen to the podcast to see what areas need to be addressed.

I was thinking that it would be neat to have the students create portfolios that could be accessed by their parents at home. It would work just like engrade.com but lots of other things could be included. Students would also be able to access their recordings at home and work on improving their reading if they wanted to. Just like teacher portfolio or the paper portfolios in the classroom.

I was also thinking that a teacher could use podcasts as part of the weekly or daily routine. At the beginning of the year the teacher and students would/could listen to the same podcast together and learn how to take notes or listen for key words. Since Saipan has so many (mostly) ELL students I would start out with video webcasts so that students could see along with hear but quickly move into the listening only realm. The teacher could easily modify the lesson by providing some with worksheets to fill in as they listen while the higher level students would have a worksheet too but have to take better notes and fill in more information. Students would rather listen to a podcast from a specialist or celebrity than their teacher!

When I was looking through the social studies podcasts I got the idea that it would be fun to have the class do a year-long project about their community. It could be bundled together so that people could listen and learn about Saipan from the students’ perspective. I got the idea from listening to students in a social studies classroom question a guest speaker about his trip to Egypt.

I never realized all of the uses for podcasts in the classroom. Laurence mentioned a lot of great ideas that address multiple intelligence, thinking styles, and learning styles. One of the great things I learned from this assignment is that if done properly podcasts can reach students at their level and where they are at with their background knowledge. Wouldn't it be great to have time on Friday's for students to be able to put podcasts on their ipod to listen to over the weekend! They would not even realize they are learning! State of flow all on their own!

Maybe the new yahoo for teachers website will have podcasts bundled by levels and content so that a teacher could just put it on the computer for the students and not have to look at 50 different places before getting just 3 different leveled podcasts addressing the same content.
~Erin

Podcasts can be created from original material by students and teachers or existing audio files can be downloaded for classroom use. Creating a podcast allows students to share learning experiences. It provides them with a worldwide audience that makes learning meaningful and assessment authentic. Teachers can use the technology to provide extra and modified material to students to download and evaluate at a time that suit them. The flexibility that such time-shifting offers makes podcasting a valuable educational tool.

Podcasts are a great way for using student products to share learning, sharing school news with parents, faculty, community members, and other people, and for teachers to provide professional development with others. By providing students with an authentic audience, teachers increase motivation to write. Students improve fluency and listening skills. Podcasts give students a view of journalism in the making, tutorials, and encourages interactive collaboration with others that is creative, fun and FREE.

Here are some educational techniques we could use podcasts and incorporate them into our classroom and lessons/teachings.

* Talk and music shows
* Interviews with pupils and staff
* Story telling and audio books
* Tutorials and instructions
* Commentaries
* Sharing information with parents and the community
* Providing updates on forthcoming school events
* Sportscasts
~Laurence

Some sites they wanted to share with others looking to incorporate podcasts:

• Digg- Most Popular Podcasts: Education
• Guides and Tutorials.com - Podcasting in Education
• Podcasts & Blogging- Great Idea for a Podcast in an Online Class
• Poducate Me
• A Story for Bedtime Kiddiecast
• ChildrensBookRadio.com
• Podictionary.com
• Storynory
• Interesting Things for ESL Students
• podcastsinenglish.com
• NPR Podcast Directory
• Open Culture- Guide to Smart Media
• Digital Podcast
• Education Podcast Network
• China 232- A Fun Way to Learn English
• About.com:Podcasting
• Apple.com- Podcasting in Education
• Audacity