During activity 4, we learnt some new technologies that can be
used in our daily teaching practice, such as Edmodo, Twitter, Flickr, Diigo and
Socrative .
Edmodo is similar to Canvas . It is a kind of social
learning platform for teachers, students, and parents. Teachers can use it to
post assignments, grades, quizzes and
whatever they what to pass on to their students. Students can use it to submit
their homework, view their grades, leave comments to the teachers, and discuss
with other students. Once we sign up a free account, we can then create groups
for our students, and then we get a code. We give it to the students. If they want to become a part of the group, they
just need to register for a free account with the group code. Here is the
beauty of Edmodo comes in. Whenever a
student joins a group, a parents code is generated. This allows their parents
to sign up for a free account and they can go in any time they want to see what
their child is doing. It is a very easy website that can be used to associate
the students, teachers and parents intimately.
Twitter is also a social networking website. We can use it
to connect what’s most important to us, such as following our friends, experts,
favorite actors, writers and so on. Once we follow someone, we can see all of
the tweets from the folks we are following as they come in. We can also use it
to post our own tweets, leave comments to other folks. It is a great website to
connect and learn with others who have the same interests with us. So as a
teacher, we can encourage our students to use twitter in the classroom. Encouraging
students to answer questions through tweets, it will help the shy students to
participate. Students can get answers not just from the teacher, but from all
their classmates, it will also help to save the teacher time.
Flickr is a photo sharing-community that contains millions
of photographs. Teachers can use flickr to help students understand and create
an animate class. Let’s say, I am giving a composition class. I can use flickr
to combine the writing assignment with individual pictures with multiple
pictures which will help to give the students a visual impression. Once we sign
up an account, we can download or upload any photos that interest us or we can
just share the photo to twitter. We can also use the google map to show the
place we took the photos. Pretty cool!
Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows users to
bookmark, highlight, share or take sticky note. We can use it to save websites
and not worrying about losing them while changing another computer. By saving
the bookmarks on the website, other people will be able to see your bookmark on
a particular topic, and of course we can see theirs. We can publish a bookmark
to our blog, twitter or something like that. We can also join a group or create
our own groups. If we use it the classroom, we can invite our students to join,
and bookmark some useful sites or take sticky notes there. So the students can
check their blog to explore the newest bookmarked sites you have set.
Socrative is a website that helps teachers to engage and
assess the class with educational activities on cellphones, kindles, ipads or
computers. It is a smart students’ response system that empowers teacher to
engage their classroom though a few of educational games. Teachers can set up a
room and a group of questions for their students. They can use it to measure
their students in real time.
We will feel the amazing power of those technologies with
education when we really try to use them in our classroom.
http://www.diigo.com/user/yunhe824
https://twitter.com/yunhe1987
