This week we took a look at web cams, social bookmarking and online storage. I'll have to admit that using web cams for voice chat in school scares me a little if it is not properly monitored. The technology has quite a few ways that it could be abused. However, I've used webcams with my students in a couple of other ways: using it as a camera for taking pictures of lab setups, with white boards to produce quick flip books and as video recorders to produce video lab reports where the students talk about their labs instead of just writing out a conclusion.
Social Bookmarking was a neat thing to dive into. Digg and delicious are both great sites to wander for a while when you have some time to kill. I was most impressed about Diigo, though. The research applications of the web service are awesome. I have a feeling that I'll probably be using it at some point during the course of this program.
Online storage was the last thing that we looked at this week. I chose Drop Box as I had some familiarity with it in the past and many people had recommended it to me. In the classroom it provides me with a way to have students be able to access their files outside of school. Currently I have my students submit digital lab reports to a school controlled "classrooms" drive that is only accessible through the school's network. it would be great to implement a service like Drop Box so that students would not have to log into school in order to submit their work.
This reminded me of a post from Doug Johnson, you might want to take a look at it
ReplyDeletehttp://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/columnists/johnson/johnson004.shtml
New technologies need to be viewed as something we can empower students with. Not always find the problem they can cause - take a look and tell me what you think.