Monday, October 29, 2012

Activity 4 reflection



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

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