Week 4 - The Journey is Becoming Interesting

Jane Hart - founder of C4LPT

This week was extremely interesting with introduction of over 2000 tools that can be used by teachers, students and business. Most of these tools were compiled on a website created by Jane Hart. Jane's site called - The Center for Learning and Perfomance Technologies (C4LPT). The Voki was one interesting tool that i discovered and look forward to sharing with my students. The rest of the week was spent discussing 10 biggest myths about synchronous online learning.

Key Points

The 2 main key points for this week for me were:-

1.) There are so many tools to make learning interesting that us teachers have no excuse to conduct boring classes!! The best policy is to select a few tools, play with them, be imaginative and think of new ways you can use these tools to meet some of your course objectives.

2.) Use the tools and become proficient so you can guide your students when they are introduced to these new tools. Be open to try out new ways to inject fresh life to dead course material. Challenge myths about e-learning...remember "where there is a will there is a way"

Resources

This is the site given by Shikha Raturi as mentioned in the introduction - The Center for Learning and Performance Technologies
http://c4lpt.co.uk/directory-of-learning-performance-tools/

 Another interesting website is Edudemic. It has some very interesting information and gives teachers a guide to the most popular technology resources available online. This also includes other resources such as must have apps and laptops/tablets to make this site, a one stop shop for all education related technology information
http://www.edudemic.com/guides/

Another repository of online tools and application is: -
http://www.go2web20.net/

This is a fantastic online magazine which a quarterly issue covering contemporary developments and trends in information technology, the effect of IT on education and its impact on higher education and the society at large.
http://www.educause.edu/ero/articles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Reflection

At the end of this week, I left extremely old......perhaps even older than an Egyptian mummy!!

This was mainly because there are so many tools that are available online which I did not even know about and the worst was that I had not even heard about them. I felt I was leading a very sheltered web life but at the same time I felt an incredible sense of relief that I had the courage and foresight to enroll in this course.

My search for online tools took me to a mind boggling number of tools on the web to enrich teaching and learning experiences. I thought Voki was quite interesting and extremely cool. Playing with Avatars' on Voki made me feel like a movie director where I can choose my cast, dress them up the way I like them, take them to different locations and have complete control over the script. I thought of a number of ways I could use this tool for my teaching and learning activities. For the online courses I can use it to introduce myself in a more personalized and engaging way and make a Voki for all the discussion questions. For my students in face to face classroom, they can create Voki for revision or patient counseling sessions.

The other task on for this week was the discussion surrounding, debunking some of the myths about synchronous online learning. Overall most of the myths had some element of truth in them but ultimately I felt that if the teacher is innovative and creative, there is just no holding back on the endless possibilities created by information technology.