Listening to learners

What are your opinion of the EE PC? Tell us what you think.

Social Networking

Has anyone had any experience of using social networking sites in education?

Sites which are blocked in school include Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

Or is the first step forward to use a blog such as Blogger?

Any ideas?

The Learners' Voice

This project has been giong on for a few months now and it would be good to get some feedback from or about the way students are using their PDAs.....Any comments/suggestions?

Why e-learning?

While surfing away looking for new ideas to try, I came across the following great exchange in the comments section of this blog post. It's a very good question and an equally good answer, so I thought it was worth putting it up here.

Question: OK, at the risk of having to endure a barrage of shrieks about how I don't get it, why is your idea of having the students tweeting [posting their thoughts using Twitter] any better than my incredibly radical idea, which I have used successfully for over 30 years, of allowing them to talk to each other?

I don't mean to sound as facetious as I do, but being a devil's advocate, isn't this a solution seeking a problem?

I think questions like this really need to be asked, because there is always the danger of the 'too many tools' problem outlined earlier in the same comments section. Anyway, carrying on...

Answer: Quite right. Talking to each other is an excellent idea. Still works. Always will. Except when it doesn't.

Have you ever asked your class a question only to be confronted with the unscalable "Wall Of Silence?" Have you ever tried to have everyone in your class participate n a class discussion only to be faced with the kids on the fringes that refuse to speak up? Have you ever had a kid in your class so painfully shy that talking to them, even in a one-to-one context, leads only to alienating them as opposed to helping them learn?

The advantage here would be to give the quieter students a voice that is equally as aloud as any of their classmates. Also, in math class, kids are frighteningly shy of making a mistake. The anonymity afforded here may give them the courage to express their confusions and correct their misunderstandings.

Making students thinking transparent helps all of them learn for at least two reasons:

(1) It levels the playing field. The outgoing and verbally expressive student is heard at the same volume as the more reserved classmate without being stifled themselves.

(2) Experts think differently than novices. By making students thoughts transparent to each other the novices see how the better students conceptualize their learning. Moreover, the teacher gains a very sharp picture of the novice's misunderstandings and can help them make corrections.

We don't do away with group work and having students talk to each other; we give them another modality to express themselves so that they can take an equal stance as a member of the classroom learning community.

Interesting! Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wikis

We have been investigating whether wikis could be useful for us, initially as a department but eventually spread across the whole school.

Wikis are best known in Wikipedia, and the concept involves lots of pages which anyone can edit, and which are all cross-linked to each other. They can work really well for presenting resources as well as managing collaboration between people who are not in face-to-face contact. Although we are all in a relatively small site, any teacher will tell you that you don't always get time to see your colleagues from day to day, and this is doubly true in a music department!

We're going to install Mediawiki in school and see what we can do with it. In the end, I wonder whether a wiki system could end up as the best means of doing what we are currently trying to do with Simply Click? An RCT-wide wiki system could end up as a huge resource, both for collecting knowledge and for collaborating across the whole of the authority, opening up new means of communication between teachers, as well as between us and the other areas of RCT.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are very much considered a Scary Thing by many people, or just something for people to have fun with (think of all the pupils with their Bebo and Myspace accounts). However, business has begun to wake up to the useful communication and collaboration possibilities opened up by having their own versions of these tools.

Having worked with Moodle and seen the capabilities of wikis and forums in particular, I think this could be a very important thing to investigate. Moodle even apparently has a peer-review system, which I have yet to try and use. Sad to say that Simply Click does not have any of these collaborative tools as yet, being mainly a tool for creating microsites, or for sending messages and assignments around the place.

Suw Charman is a social software consultant who has written an interesting post on her blog about online social networking in business, and I think a good amount of what she says is relevant to the education world. I wonder whether we will eventually have a pilot project related to this interesting area of blended learning?

PS - wireless internet access installed on Friday, PDAs are go!

Could these kick-start mobile learning?

I've been wondering recently whether the Asus eee (see here) could be a great device for mobile learning.

It's very small, surprisingly cheap (considerably less than the PDAs we were issued with for the latest project) and has apparently been almost impossible to get hold of since it was launched! They have caused quite a stir, and have been top of many geeky-types' 'must-have' list since they were announced.

While PDAs are ultra-portable, the tiny screen size and lack of keyboard could be a real headache for some mobile learning applications. Could this be the answer? Could Gareth Rees be buying one each for us for Christmas as we speak? (only joking, Gareth...)