Hello Everyone,
I
can honestly say I am learning something from this course. My mind is like a
sponge when it comes to social networking. Because I know so little about it, I
think I have absorbed a great deal by investigating some of the websites mentioned
in the Richardson text. The websites mentioned in the text which I checked out
this week were:
Ning.com
TeacherTube.com
Diigo.com
Delicious.com
CommonCraft.com
Chinswing.com
Current TV (Not in
existence any more)
YackPack.com
(subscription required)
dotSUB.com ($18 dollars
per minute for translation, $6 a minute for captions)
Diigo.com
is a social bookmarking site. It is free to download and allows the user to
store sites and documents that deal with their area of interest. The user can
access the sites at any time to retrieve quotes or ideas (Richardson, W., 2010, p.92).
The user can also annotate and highlight information. He or she can tag each
site with a key word and either keep these tagged sites private of share them
with other users of the site who share the same interest. If you choose private
you can invite specific users of the site to join a group of your
creation. By typing in key words to the
Diigo.com search engine you can retrieve other articles and sites that others
have saved and view their annotations or comments. I have downloaded Diigo.com
but haven’t really had the opportunity to use it that much. I’ll give you more
of my feedback on it at a later date.
Ning.com
seems to be a site for interest based social networking as opposed to
friendship based social networking (Richardson, W., 2010, p.132). One of the things
that I like about Ning.com is that it can be public or it can be private
allowing only those who have been invited or who are on a class list to
participate (Richardson,
W., 2010, p.140). If I were to use a social networking site with
my apprentice students I think that I would make it a private site, at least
initially, so that I could more accurately monitor what they were posting to
the site. I recall years ago a student anonymously handed in some sketches in a
stack of homework assignments. The sketches were of people in the class, many
of a student whose last name was Sheppard in some compromising positions with a
number of sheep. Whoever drew these sketches had more artistic talent than
mechanical aptitude and although I should have been angry and I should have
tried to find out who drew them, I was too busy laughing. Also, no one knew,
other than the student who handed in the drawings and I. My fear is that on a
public social networking site my students would publish similar or other
inappropriate material which could offend some or be tantamount to bullying. My
students are not like students in most other programs. They are a little rough
around the edges.
Teacher
tube has the potential to be very cool. It is just like you tube but all the
videos are of educational content. There is a tremendous volume of high school
mathematics videos the majority of which are terribly boring. The camera is just fixed on a white board
while the lecturer talks and occasionally writes something on the board. In
most instances all you see are the teachers’ hands and the white board. When I
say that the sight has potential what I mean is that all of the videos are
created and posted by educators so if I don’t like the content I should create
my own videos and post them on there. It’s free.
Commoncraft.com
isn’t a social networking site but there are some great videos which explain
many computer related topics in layman’s terms. Yackpack.com, which allows
users to send voice recordings by email, is now a pay site apparently as is
dot.SUB, a site which translates voice and text into a variety of other
languages. It seems as though whenever a site becomes popular or useful, shortly
thereafter a subscription is required.
References
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs,
wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd
ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
