Durrington, Berryhill, and Swafford (2006) stated that "to encourage high student interactivity in an online setting, the learning environment must be supportive, open, and respectful" (p. 191). In the digital world that we live in today technology is a highly integrated part of most people's everyday lives. In order to create the supportive environment that Durrington, Berryhill, and Swafford discussed technology is a critical element to include.
One project that I have been working on with a coworker is presenting free web 2.0 tools to the staff of the school that we teach at. The goal of the monthly trainings is to show a variety of web 2.0 tools from several different types of use. We have created a website that organizes all of the tools by category, gives a brief overview of the tool, provides a few suggestions of how the tool could be used, as well as any helpful resources. The trainings that we have provided have been well received by the staff, and they are beginning to be more comfortable with the technology, as well as utilizing it in their daily teaching.
Email has become one of the standard ways to communicate through the internet, but there are many other ways to communicate. Communication can occur either in real time, or through postings. Wikis and blogs allow people to make an initial posting, and then receive feedback from others. Skype allows people to communicate in real time through either video chatting or audio chatting. It also allows single people or groups of people to connect with each other.
The internet has expanded the potential for collaboration through shared documents such as Google Docs. People can also collaborate in wikis on a common topic. Blogs allow the orignal person to post thoughts on a topic, and then people to collaborate through the comments posted. There are also several graphic organizer websites that allow users to collaborate on ideas. The website used to create the embedded graphic organizer is one that allows users to collaborate on a common document.
Content is a quickly growing area of the internet. According to Did You Know there are 540,000 words in the English language, that is five times the number of words during Shakespeare's time. With this increase in words has also come the growth in the amount of content knowledge. The challenge in the digital world is being able to access all of the content available. Wikipedia is a good resource for an overview of a variety of content. There are many specialized organizations that create and share new content. Many of these organizations also publish journals that are available online. Another place that has a large amount of content is online forums. A forum is a place where people can post a question or problem and then others make comments back. This online forum format helps to create a lot of content in specific areas.
Hi, Sara. Good post. I especially liked the links you put in! I see you mentioned Skype as a communication tool. Good idea.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, Sara. I just found out that Gmail also has video chat and phone calls. You are right, the internet is changing and growing in leaps and bounds.
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