Evaluating sites for their
usefulness and effectiveness within a classroom can be a daunting task. Social,
Creative, and Curation sites in my line of teaching, as an Emotional Support
teacher, often requires more control from my end to avoid potential student
issues that can easily arise without monitoring. For that reason, I choose to
research further Edmodo, Prezi, and Symbaloo.
Edmodo was a new selection for me; I haven’t
had the opportunity to use this site until now.
As part of my research I created an account to explore the site. As I logged in for the first time I was
pleasantly surprised. I had many
similarities to Facebook, which I know all students have a great deal of
familiarity with using daily. The
navigation and accessibility of the various sub-links are very easy and user
friendly which is a must for me. I often
am turned away from sites that require in-depth knowledge just to
navigate. I was also very intrigued with
the ability to set up a “school” or “classroom” specific to communicate with
the students. I was also able to join a
network less than one of my local schools.
This was a fantastic way for us as teachers to collaborate, especially
when we can’t meet face to face. In Untangling the web it was described as
being a learning management system. Untangling
the web (Bellow & Dembo, 2013) This is something ideal for a social network
site used in the classroom. Overall I was very happy
with Edmodo, and I look forward to continuing to explore its capabilities.
The creativeness of Prezi
is something that I fell in love with about a year ago. I rather enjoy creating powerpoints for my
students to use, especially when we use a smart board. Prezi to me is like a power point on steroids
and combining its interactivity with the touch screen capabilities of a smart
board are fantastic. Using Prezi to
create student projects, as remediation activities, interactive lessons or even
independent practice can be so interactive with the twists, turns, zooming
in/out, it just screams interactive for my students.
Finally, Symbaloo is a great curation
site. I personally would utilize this as
a way to manage all the various sites that I need to access weekly as a teacher.
In the Untangling the web by Bellow
& Dembo they also noted how the one click away can make accessibility great
and provide you the ability to have hundreds of websites. Untangling
the web (Bellow & Dembo, 2013) However,
the usefulness for students is great as well.
In researching Symbaloo I immediately thought about having students use
this as part of research projects. In
using this site it would help students avoid “losing” the site where they got
the information from. It would also
allow them to quickly navigate back and forth between sites while writing
research papers. They could use it in conjunction
with creating a Prezi as well, just to name a few options.
References
Bellow, A. &
Dembo, S. (2013) Untangling
the Web: 20 Tools to Power Up Your Teaching. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Websites:
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