I was honoured to be invited to give a presentation to the Polish Moodle Moot today but I couldn’t go to Poland so I did it virtually in Elluminate. What I did was to run through five habits in working with ICT in your teaching which I think are important to anyone considering including more ICT in their practice. I also thought the five habits approach may be useful to someone advising other teachers.
We had heard in an earlier presentation about how the UK’s Open University is the biggest institutional user of Moodle in the world and about what its technical department was doing to tailor Moodle to their needs. My talk was aimed more at the ICT enthusiast in a small to medium sized organisation who wants to add a little more functionality to their Moodle courses by making use of the many free tools now available.
The five habits as I called them can be summarised as follows:
- Favour the simple
- Communicate
- Register to share/collaborate
- Remix
- Take care
Favour the simple
There are many online tools now available which can be up and running with a few clicks. Whereas in the past you may have had to download, unpack and install a program, now you can do almost anything using one of the so-called Low Threshold Applications. Let’s imagine that someone recommended FotoFlexer and you haven’t got the link and you’ve even forgotten what it does. A quick Google search takes you to the website which looks like this.
Looking at the page it looks as though you can:
- watch a demo
- play with a sample picture
- login or
- upload an image
There is often nothing wrong with just trying things out so let’s upload an image, take a look at the menus available and try out the cartoon option in the effects tab.
There! A nice image which we may want to use in our materials. So let’s click save. Note that we did all that without even needing to register with the site.
Many people are interested in trying out blogging. Blogger.com is quite simple to use but still you do need to set up a Google account first before setting up a blog. So how about trying Posterous? All you need to get started is to send an email to post@posterous.com The title of your email becomes the title of the blog post, the message becomes the content and any file that you attached becomes embedded images, audio or video. Posterous send you an email back to let you know the address of your new blog and you could continue posting in this manner if you wanted. Again, we haven’t even registered.
So here is the email…
- From email to blog post
Communicate
This can be a hard habit to get into but the Internet has gone beyond the stage of being the largest library in the world. We learn through dialogue and all the most popular tools enable this dialogue, either directly through a tool such as Skype or indirectly through the comments section in any of the most popular online tools you care to mention. One thinks of comments in blogs but wikis also allow comments and tools such as YouTube and Flickr also have this facility. I was asked if blogs aren’t rather personal but I see blogs as an extremely flexible medium which can be as personal or formal as you wish. The example below shows a mystery guest exercise where I got a contact in Brazil to reveal a bit of information about herself and this motivated my adult students to find out more about her through the comments function.
This next example is from Aiden Yeh in Taiwan who got her students to post advertising videos they’d made on a wiki. Aiden then asked her contacts to visit and leave comments for her students on their blog. Getting external comments like this raises the seriousness with which the students approach the task and lifts their self-esteem when they get favourable comments. I also showed examples from a Flickr group and a YouTube video.
Register
The third habit a teacher will need to get into is to register with various websites. Registering enables the website to remember you and store your products, whether they are blog posts, images or videos. Registering may give you more control over comments and will keep you up to date with what is happening with the website. A reputable website will not usually ask you to do more than to give your email address and perhaps your name.
Remix
Once you have access to a wealth of online material you will probably start thinking of different ways to combine the different elements. This is remixing or mashing up. One of my favourite examples is Konrad Gogowlski’s idea for working with the Anne Frank book ‘Diary of a Young Girl’ when he asked his students to produce a playlist of the music which they thought would be appropriate to accompany the book. The tool he used, Mixwit, no longer exists but the idea could be repeated in Grooveshark or even using the YouTube playlist feature.
Something of more immediate use are the personal pages that you can now make for yourself through iGoogle, Netvibes or Pageflakes. I use these to gather the latest posts from news sites and blogs which interest me. They could be used as group project pages too.
Take Care
The final habit is about taking reasonable precautions to protect yourself and your students in several ways. There is the danger of attracting spam mail for example if you register with many sites so it may be an idea to have a separate email address which you use just for registrations or you could set up a Yahoo mail and make use of Yahoo’s disposable email feature which gives you 500 disposable email addresses which you can use and abandon with websites which you are not too sure about.
If you teach young learners or in specific cultures you may need to be careful about the ads which often surround the free tools. It is also a good idea to get to know the privacy options for the tools you want to use. Do you want a video publicly available for example or would it be better password protected? Every site has a different system so it’s worth finding out. I mentioned earlier that dialogue is good but many people will try to abuse this with spam comments so again it’s worth exploring whether you can moderate comments before they appear on the website. A cry I often hear is that using these tools is time-consuming. I would say that this may be so in the learning stage but that you should consider encouraging your learners to be responsible for as much of the process as possible. Don’t take everything on yourself. There lies madness! Finally your students will have to be careful about plagiarism and copyright. This will be a matter of training but also of using free plagiarism detector tools when the damage has been done. Personalised tasks will take the urge to plagiarise away in many cases.
The main message is that online tools have become much easier to use since the Internet began and if anything catches your interest then just try it!
By the way the links from my presentation are all here.