Tegrity, Zoho, and more . . .

Last semester I started teaching online. Learning how to get the same content in the face-to-face classroom into the online classroom and still get the message across was a challenge, to be sure. I had the students do two presentations, and offered both of these to be done as group work. I also encouraged students to try Zoho. Zoho is a site that allows students to create Web 2.0 PowerPoint presentations as well as having a lot of other functions, but I thought Zoho might be ideal for people working remotely to put together their presentation online. It worked great for some, while others found it difficult to edit. I think that creating a wiki might be a more efficient way to go.

I also started teaching in a Tegrity enabled classroom last spring. Tegrity is a software program that will capture what is on the instructor computer or the document camera, as well as showing an image from a ceiling camera, which is normally focused on the instructor. Learning how to operate and produce quality Tegrity presentations is something I still need practice with, but these presentations are a great Web 2.0 tool. I found that students were ignoring these Tegrity recordings, so I stopped putting up the effort to create them for a while. Then I had a student who couldn't attend class because of her baby's health, so I started again. The other use the students found for these was review. When I gave a review session for the class before their midterm, the students did enjoy reviewing the class session to be sure they understood the major concepts. It was a great way to display visual pictures, notes, and have the animation of the classroom come through at the same time.

Another great success I had was learning the weekend that the Note Taking assignment was due in the online class that the link I had to the lecture was down. I was able to quickly take one of the Tegrity sessions from the ENG061 class and upload it into the online ENG140 class. Success! Most students could view this recording and were able to finish the assignment. The other great part of this technique is that students got to see me, their online instructor, teaching a class. I think it gave them a little better feel for who I am.

The final lesson I created with Tegrity last semester was a lecture on how the religious background and the sacrificial lamb story from The Kite Runner affected the people in the story as well as in our culture today. I was able to show the lecture notes online as well as have a small box with me lecturing in the corner. That was exciting. I sincerely want to pursue making more of these for the online students.

Another Web 2.0 activity I want to try is to take some of my PowerPoint presentations and put them up as photosharing documents to turn them into slideshows on the wiki. This is something I need to continue working on because I was not getting all layers of the slide. I was sometimes just getting the background. It would be really helpful to pull the PowerPoint presentations from the classroom up onto the Internet so we are not dependent upon Blackboard for everything. Sometimes Blackboard goes down, and then students could still access the content to do their homework.

Putting materials in the wiki is also a great way to keep students connected. Once the semester is over, all the content in Blackboard is off limits. Anything we have posted in the wiki is still viewable. Perhaps our students will be taking another class and will want to look back to see how we described, explained, performed something in our class. What a concept!

Photosharing in the Classroom

Photosharing in the Classroom
By Tina Luffman

As we continue to explore new ways to teach using the Web 2.0 tools available to teachers today, it is important to consider photosharing. This week I created a Flickr account and uploaded some scenery pictures. It didn?t take long for me to realize the importance of gathering photos with large enough resolution to look nicely when played in the slideshow view.

One thing I can see teachers using photosharing sites for is to search for pictures for a specific geographic region being discussed in the classroom. For example, if the class is reading a novel, the instructor could run a search for photos in Flickr that are tagged as being from that specific region. Last semester I decided to create a PowerPoint presentation with pictures I found online from the San Francisco Bay area as the novel we had been reading took place there.

Creating this presentation took a lot of time because I had to do a search on the Internet, and then I had to copy and paste each of the pictures into PowerPoint. Then I had to upload this PowerPoint into the Blackboard course for each class I was teaching. Using Flickr will make this process much more simple. I can go to Flickr, run a search for pictures, and then upload the ones I want. Students can be enabled through a ?group? setting to see these pictures and captions I place between them to get a feel for the Bay area. All I would need to do in Blackboard is to create an External Link to the Flickr page.

Another idea for using photosharing in the classroom is to put a set of pictures into the Flickr page. Then I can have the students view these pictures and write an essay about one of them. These can be landscapes, people, action scenes, or whatever we choose. I can ask students to write a descriptive or illustrative paragraph of a scene, write a narrative about a person, and so on. There is not limit on the imagination for this activity.

Teaching sequence is another thing we can do with photosharing. As an instructor, I can set up a series of events and take pictures of them while working through the process. Then I can put the pictures into Flickr and ask students to order the photos and write a description of why they believe these photos happened in the order they created.

Group work is something I would like to try in photosharing. I would like to ask all students to gather some pictures of their own and load them into a group Flickr account. Then students could create an assignment using their shared photos. The challenge with an activity like this is knowing when it is reasonable to expect students in an English class to have technological ability and access to equipment for such a project. I do not feel It is reasonable to expect all of the students in my class to have access to a digital camera or the ability to scan photos at this point. It is reasonable to expect students to view, but not necessarily to create photosharing sites. Eventually these skills will be relatively universal especially for those who come to the campus for face-to-face classes.

Steve Hargadon -- Reflections on Classroom 2.0

In Steve Hargadon’s Ning site, he discusses six points to consider when creating Web 2.0 communities: http://www.stevehargadon.com/2009/01/some-things-ive-learned-about-building.html . Following are reflections I have made about two of his points and how these would be beneficial or not beneficial in a college classroom setting. First I would like to say that college courses are not “failure is free” settings.

Therefore, we don’t have to worry about our social networking site taking off or succeeding. Students will have assignments to do, and if they do them, they will get credit. If they don’t they don’t. Plain and simple, right???

Well, if the site is engaging, students will get into the social networking site and really delve in. That should be the instructor’s goal. How much of the “I’ve already done enough for my ‘A’” attitude would there be that might prevent students from totally engaging? (Sounds like a point for research.) I have even seen students who didn’t want to dive deep and really explore the lesson actually balk and drag their feet until it was almost too late in the semester to save themselves from certain failure.

Perhaps the problem with that particular class is the way the textbook author continued to drum it into students’ heads that they had to dive deep. Perhaps using a Web 2.0 process with interaction with other classmates would draw the diving deep out in an entertaining way where students would not even know they were being coerced into sharing their stuff and learning truths about what makes for a good student.

As for fulfilling some compelling need, I can envision a Web 2.0 wiki or Ning site where students get together to help each other meet the goals of the class. When students can successfully learn to do group work online, it will be great to see them creating a group Zoho presentation, (which my ENG140 students started doing last semester). It would also be great to create a social network with peers who attend workshops, and then post the items we create and share them one with another.

It seems like such a benefit to share what we have created so every teacher teaching the same curriculum across the country doesn’t have to start from scratch on every single assignment. Now that might be an idea that would fulfill a compelling need. How often have we come home from a conference full of great ideas only to be greeted with piles of mail and papers to grade, and then two months later we realize we have barely changed our teaching at all?

Social Network Possibilities

When I was working through the social networking lessons this week, I could actually see myself using Ning as a way to contact students. It seems like a good place to go for interaction. The chatting feature has two different tools, and while I didn't test it, I could see which other students from our class were in there at the time. The best part of Ning is the way students can see pictures of each other and have a greater sense of community. They actually gain the ability to communicate one with the other as well, just like in a face-to-face setting. This feature should actually create a richer learning environment than Blackboard, where students can talk to each other in the Discussions, but who don't have the same level of ability to approach each other directly. When creating a tool like this, it is important to remember to remind the students that nothing posted online is private. They need to take care to behave academically and to use common sense in their conversations and means of approaching one another.

For the time being, I will likely begin by adding the chat tool in Blackboard again. I had stopped using it because of the run-away nature of the conversations when I would create a live chat meeting with asynchronous students. In fact, the students ran away with the chat even when I was sitting in a room letting them play with this new technology. But this SNS week has reminded me that it's not all about my agenda. We need to allow the students to take the class where they need to go with it as long as we are meeting the learning outcomes for the course.

Facebook is another site I enjoy using for personal interaction with my family and friends. I don't add students as friends as a policy of mine. However, I wonder what value it would be to create an instructor Facebook account. I could add all of my students into this network, and we could post questions, queries, and comments about the lessons and assignments. We could upload pictures and videos to share with each other. Facebook also has a chat capability, and I have used it to visit for an extended conversation, which has the potential to be much more satisfying for a student than sending emails back and forth.

Twitter sounds like a nice idea for getting to know my son and daughter-in-law who live out of state, but I'm not sure I want to use it with students. It seems like it would generate way too much information and would take up too much of my time. Anyone having success with this medium?

Social Networking Site (SNS)

Visit YC Edu 255


1. What was the target audience for this social networking site (SNS)? The target audience seems to be anyone interested in building a social network. It also caters to “artists, brands, and organizations to simplify and control their online presence with their own unique social network that beautifully integrates with other social media services while providing the most direct, unique and lucrative relationship with fans, consumers, and members.” http://about.ning.com/.
2. How long was the site in existence? Ning began in 2005 and is still actively growing today.
3. Why was it popular? “Millions of people everyday are coming together across Ning Networks to explore and express their interests, discover new passions, and meet new people around shared pursuits.” http://about.ning.com/. What was its demise? So far so good.
4. Is/was there another competitor in the same market that was more popular? Of the alternative SNS competitors, I would say that MySpace and Facebook are more popular. These tend to attract more teenagers and college students respectively. Ning is still a growing marketplace that has largely been untapped. I believe that MySpace attraction to bands and teenagers had made it a nearly instant phenomenon. Facebook became popularized with the initially exclusive college student availability. Once students make an account, they tend to stay with it. Older adults and high school students later gained access to Facebook, and at that point it seemed “academic” or “safe” to join this network over MySpace or others that were not as well known.
5. Would you ever consider creating an account and using it? Explain your reason using a personal experience as an example. Last summer my son and his wife got married in Chicago. I realized that they were posting their engagement and wedding pictures online in Facebook. That was my draw to get online. I felt that I would have a better chance to stay up with my son when I had access to Facebook. And now my other son in the military is also actively using this SNS as well.

Wiki Whys Guys

I got excited about the wiki tool this week and spent quite a bit of time working on the Critical Thinking pages, but I really can see where I will use this in my class. It is a great place to gather information in various forms such as text, video, links, and presentations to pull together the complex issues Critical Thinking brings to the forefront.

Last spring I was having trouble sensing whether my online students were actually digging deeply enough to really grasp these tools. When having them contribute to a class wiki, I feel I can draw out even more participation and actual Critical Thinking and learning.

I also liked Buckland's ideas concerning group work where the students score each other. Personally I would let students do so, and then I would give those who are not content the opportunity to improve their quality of work prior to receiving a final grade on these projects.

The other great part about group work on a wiki is that the instructor can see who participated, to what level each person participated, and who did not. I know the logon can always be faked if a person really wants to cheat, but I feel this tool is more than a step above what we have in face-to-face classroom settings or in Blackboard for monitoring group work at this time.

Educational Wikis

Wiki Teach lesson plans

Here is a great site where instructors can choose the subject and grade level before searching for Wiki lesson plans. When I searched for English grades 8 through graduate, I found thirteen lessons.

Edutech wiki lesson plans

This link has several links within to take you to various other wiki areas where you can search for lesson plans. The site was somewhat overwhelming for me because it seemed there were endless ways to find lessons, but also because of the advertisements.

Wiki Lesson Plans

This wiki was simplistic, but had few lessons. The site has a lot of potential for growth. Some of the lessons were ones I could see many different kinds of teachers being able to use such as Microsoft Paint and PhotoStory 3 lesson ideas.