Online Experiences (811)

Many thoughts began to race through my mind when reading about online learning experiences for students.  I have recently become exposed to a couple of different venues to facilitate this kind of learning experience.  The first is a Learning Management System called WizIQ.  The second is an Education Blog site called Collaborize Classroom.  Both of these would help me to get students talking about writing.  They could assist in all areas of the writing process. 

The Learning Management System, WizIQ, could allow me to have a Teacher-Led online learning experience.  Here you can develop lecture-style lessons to present students with either new or review information.  It allows the creator to develop lessons and tests online.  For example, I can use WizIQ to create a lesson I would normally present in class with lecture, activities and quizzes and use this when I have a substitute.  It's like you are still there in the classroom.  This site can also provide extra online-tutoring to students.  You can allow students to have mic access allowing students to actively participate through audio.  WizIQ allows you to upload and embed mutli-media.  From a pedagogical stand-point, WizIQ hits many teaching strategies: lecture, interactive discussion with teacher and students, critical thinking, and collaboration.  Although I have not used this resource myself, I have a friend who uses it often.  He sees higher test scores (he preps the kids the night before through a review session) and student engagement.  The site itself is clean and easy-to-use for students. 

The Educational Blog, Collaborize Classroom, is an excellent tool to get kids discussing about class topics.  Just this week I set a question for my students about how they felt when using MicroSoft Word's commenting tool.  They used this to give revision feedback on an animal narrative they wrote.  Below is a screen shot of what this looked like to my students.



They are now able to give me immediate feedback by voting "yes" or "no" to how helpful they thought this was to their writing progress.  I also get justification with their answer.  They have to explain why this benefited them as a writer or why it did not.  It will help me guide future revisions to writing assignments.  This site offers great use of discussion and critical thinking.  It is also very learner-centered.  I do not involve myself in most conversations.  I pose questions and students must reflect on their learning as well as the learning of others in their class. 

I think one of the most difficutlt technologies to use with my students would be the Online Resource Validation.  This is an area in which I battle quite frequently with my students.  It is difficult for them to determine whether information is valid or not.  They do not see the difference in a government or organizations website compared to a personal website and the validity of the information.  Another difficult technologies to use for my students would be the use of an Electronic Portfolio.  Where our students can save information is on a shared-student drive.  Although students can save their work here, it is not protected or passcoded.  Other students can get into documents that have been saved and change or delete someone's work.  I had this happen last year to a young lady.  A couple of boys got into a vignette she had written and altered the information to be highly inappropriate.  When I accessed her document to grade, she had no clue what had happened to her work.  This is my biggest concern with using an Electronic Portfolio with my students.  I do think, however, with learning so many new tools, there may be an online solution to use instead of students having to save work to a shared-student drive.