Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning / Digitally Interactive Learning
Blended learning contexts which combine face-to-face interaction with online, digital learning, can provide students with more flexible and in-depth opportunities to learn than traditional lectures. In this session we'll explore key ingredients for blended learning which teachers and students should utilize in our information-rich environment.
Good teaching is similar in many ways to good cooking. Recipes are helpful, but master cooks often modify those to meet different needs and situations. The same is true for teachers. If we extend this analogy of cooking to teaching and learning in a web 2.0 world, what are the best "ingredients" to use as we help both teachers and students learn to be more effective, safe, and powerful communicators in our flat world? In this working session we will focus on six key ingredients: del.icio.us social bookmarks, Flickr photo sharing, VoiceThread digital storytelling, collaborative writing tools, websites for phone recording as well as SMS polling, and videoconferencing. Cooking can be intimidating for novices, but richly rewarding. Let's learn to cook up some gourmet learning with some powerful (and free) web 2.0 tools!
"Social Bookmarks 101" - TechEdge Article: HTML or PDF
Most basic uses of the web: Locate and share information on websites
"Traditional" (if we can use that term to describe something just a few years old) methods for saving websites included saving bookmarks or favorites to a local computer's hard drive using a web browser. This was great but inherently limited, since those saved websites could ONLY be accessed on ONE COMPUTER with the ONE WEB BROWSER in which they were saved.
In contrast, social bookmarking involves the use of web-based services to save and share Internet bookmarks. Social bookmarks are MUCH MORE POWERFUL because they allow MULTIPLE COMPUTERS to access them, MULTIPLE PEOPLE to access them, and through tagging (adding metadata) lead to the organic creation of folksonomies of web links.
Collections of web links organized by their tags are sometimes called tag clouds. Examples include:
My favorite (and the tool I've invested in, with over 2800 saved and shared bookmarks to date) is del.icio.us. I like del.icio.us' ease of use, the large user base which makes social sharing / networking / discovery of similar links very powerful, and its support of RSS standards. My del.icio.us network is a dynamic list of links shared by others whose interests are close to mine. It's always easy to find great, new, web resources in my del.icio.us network! :-)
These all are all presentations or workshops I've presented and can present for your conference, school, district, or other educational organization. Please contact Wesley Fryer for more information
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