Wow, there are so many great tools out there. I keep thinking that I’ve seen everything there is to see, but then someone comes up with another creative tool to help me in my classroom, or for private use. This week I tried Second Life, Time line tools (on Read, Write, Think) and SurveyMonkey.
Second Life:
Second Life seems like it would be a very neat tool to get kids excited about learning if they were in an off campus situation. I actually heard a speaker at a conference say he used his Second life to conduct virtual meetings. He said it was very interactive. In my experience, roaming around in the secondlife worlds was confusing and I would think that some kids might not appreciate the extra task of navigating in that world, but if the community of kids was made mainly of technologically savvy kids, I think it could be an interesting virtual classroom.
Time Line:
The timeline on Read, Write, Think was pretty simplistic, but sometimes that is just what I want. I thought I would use this tool to create timelines for application in the classroom for quick and simple activities. I thought it might be fun and useful to create a timeline of Odysseus’ travels while reading the Odyssey, or I could see my office partner, and history teacher, asking students to make timelines in this program for each unit she teaches.
Survey Monkey:
Survey Monkey was so easy to use. I don’t actually give my students that many surveys, but I do know that I have to pass out surveys in my classes for other classes all the time. I’d like that to stop. It is distracting and takes precious time away from my lessons. If my co-workers set up surveys and then put something in the announcements kids could log on from home and take their surveys. This would alleviate some of the nuisance to me and my fellow English teachers. I do see some problems with survey monkey. It would be possible to fill out the survey more than once, and there would also be a large number of students who don’t go to fill out the survey at all, but this is a problem with all surveys. Researchers always have a margin of error and a number of unreturned surveys. Perhaps this will help students learn about statistics and how to decipher survey results.
I believe in the pay version of Survey Monkey, you can have people sent the survey via email and only accept one submission from an account. I'm not sure if you can do that in the free version. You're right, it could be problematic otherwise.
ReplyDeleteSecond Life does have a rather high learning curve. If you want to actually create an environment, it is fairly time consuming, but that's what we have talented students for. There are a few examples out there of educational uses (http://secondlife.iste.wikispaces.net/SLTours). I've used it for meetings, but don't personally find it any better than just using Skype. I'm waiting to see more examples in education. UWW has bought an island and one of the art professors is building an environment right now for an art history class.