Speculation
Here are some thoughts or suggestions I've heard about how various technologies might be used in class.
Powerpoint games
- Jeapordy
It's pretty easy to make a jeapordy game out of powerpoint using hyperlinks. Create hyperlinks in cells of a table that link to other slides, and provide a link on every slide back to the first table (with a matrix of answers and values). - There are lots of examples online - just google powerpoint and games.
- Fun way to reinforce points
- Good way to take a break
- Students can easily produce these themselves
What is it?
Twitter is just sending short text messages on a one to many basis - whenever you tweet, all your 'followers' get that message - like broadcast email. Also, you can 'follow' others and receive their 'tweets'. You can also search throughout all the tweets going on in the past and present for particular phrases or 'hashes' which are tags purposely used in tweets to identify particular threads that people want to be able to identify. Some programs allow you to scan tweets as they are made based on search terms - giving you a live report of ongoing tweets regarding your subject matter.
How can it be used for instruction?
- "Just in time" resource? Twitter is best thought of as a means to keeping immediate contact with people. So, if there is a situation where minutes and hours might matter in terms of getting simple messages to your students, twitter might help.
- You can send links via twitter to web content. You would use "tiny urls" - web services that allow you to use short hyperlinks for much longer ones - the web service does the translation.
- As students solve problems they can share with other students 'live'
- Twitter might be used to give a sense of a virtual community.
- Otherwise, email is far more robust and universal!
- Good way of distributing information convenient for users of Facebook.
- Probably not a good idea to use your own personal site - instead create a 'fan' site using you personal account.
- You can set up a 'fan' site - which is a site designed not to be a personal site but for 'official' purposes - a charity organization, for example. Whenever you post anything on that, your facebook 'fans' will get that info. Facebook users can also easily find information by going to your fan site in Facebook.
Wiki
- A Wiki is like an encyclopedia, where articles can be written, edited, re-written by internet users.
- One thought offered by Peter Campbell is that metacognition might be enhanced by using the comments and versioning features. This allows people to discuss and comment on what has been written on a wiki page.
- I use Wikispaces.com - which provides free accounts.
- Other sources are pbwiki.com; webpart.com
- I'm thinking of this as a means for students to create meaningful and useful material for other students. That gets them into the mode of explaining and communicating information, which I think is a great way to solidify knowledge and develop an understanding of the work needed to communicate well.