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Exploration
of Web 2.0 Tools
A
mere short sample, but with ideas
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School
of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Saturday,
April 2, 2016
Post
245
Web 2.0 tools and their systematic and
corresponding analysis to visualize where they can fit in our instructional
design is a must and a necessity for the 21st Century teaching
professional. While taking an online course on Exploring
Web 2.0 facilitated by Prof. Michael Krauss from the Lewis & Clark University in Portland, USA,
one gets to deepen the importance of the gamut of possibilities we have to
explore and then to use in one’s teaching. And though Prof. Krauss wanted his
course participants to express which of the many activities we had during the
second week of his training we like the most, it is very difficult to isolate
one and say, “This is better than the rest.”
In spite of knowing the existence of Voki.Com and having shallowly explored its
content, Prof. Krauss’s activity prompted me into deepening my comprehension of
the tool. Voki.Com is a webpage that allows
the user to create an avatar, which can easily be embedded into many different
Internet-based html-supported environments. Creating this kind of avatars, and
thinking ahead for my next term of in college, I was wondering how ELT students
coursing literature can use this to create some sort of storytelling with a
real narrator, whether is with one of the voices provided by the system or with
their own recordings. And this is just one idea that came to me.
Understanding the importance of
collaboration in today’s education blended/hybrid formats, Diigo.Com, Google
Sites, and Jumble Puzzle can be very
much handy. In college, learners are often looking for information when
developing projects, topic analyses, group work, and so on. The exchange of
websites they come across in their online searches can be much faster if all
partners do hold a Diigo account. In my case, what I
see now is to use Diigo to share links, articles,
videos, and the like by creating specific “groups” interested in a given topic,
literary genre, short story, etc. It is indeed a great tool.
Collaboration can be taken to a higher
level through a wiki format, like the one developed by Prof. Krauss in Google Sites. Depending on the topic to cover along
a course, having students collaborate on a single document, usually divided
into sections, is a great idea for learners. In this way, pieces of the summary
can be created by individual students or teams. Questions can be posted to
partners developing a given part of the document and they can get peer coaching
from them for better understanding. No doubt that this has great potential to
be used with digital natives in higher education.
Something that came to me by surprise is
Jumble Puzzles from Jumble.Com. Puzzles
are always fun, and fun can be taken into the classroom to try to find a
solution with one’s students. This site provides you with a daily Jumble Puzzle
and contains an archive of puzzles for us to explore. The advantage of this
site is that one can try to solve it first and then, with the answers tucked
under the arm, one can walk and play with words with one’s learners.
If everything is instructionally
planned carefully, I am sure that all of these Web 2.0 resources, free of
charge and ready to be used, can be of great help for one’s courses, whether
they are in high school or in higher education. I just look forward to having
some time to start constructing my new learning tasks around these Web 2.0
tools.
Saturday, April 02, 2016
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