I was torn this week with my choice of which web tool to utilize. I was originally going to pursue Moodle and I looked into it after the discussion in Wimba and by Jeannine email about how wonderful it is for her class. It seems like a great tool, but I thought with it being discussed in Wimba and her email that I would forge into other areas and see if I could find another tool that works well for my AR or course needs. I struck out into the lands of Web 2.0 lists and found one that I thought would be amazing in terms of additional website support for my class:
Wikispaces!
Wikispaces is a wonderful little place that lets you create extensive, but private, wiki pages for your respective class or institution. It uses a simple WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] editor in the creation of your pages and allows files and resources to be uploaded for use on your Wiki. I found it particularly interesting because it allows RSS notifications, which I think would be a great tool to keep your students aware of updates and changes as well as announcements of important information for the class. It also allows you to use various statistics of end user actions so you can track what parts of the pages are being used or underutilized by your students so you can better target the key information that you want to focus on. Finally, it has its own set of discussion forums for your pages, and being that I’m keen on establishing a sense of community for my online students I find this particularly appealing.
The one and only real downside to this is that the Free sign up does give you most of the features I mention with one unfortunate exception: No private pages. With my institution requiring any additional resources and websites to be secure for only our students, this puts me in the position of having to pay for the site to maintain it for the class. Sadly, my yearly budget for my class doesn’t have any extra room for me to squeak this en, although the prices are reasonable for individual use – when you get to the Education pricing it climes higher than I would be able to afford. Good stuff overall, but sadly priced out of range for me.
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| Home page for the Web 2.0 tool |
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| This is their private aspects - still personal use though. |
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| They provide a large number of tour videos that are very well done. |
Lionel,
ReplyDeleteI have heard of Wiki but never used it or really looked into it. I think it would be a great tool for students to use to show their learning and to collaborate. It is disappointing that you have to pay a fee to be able to secure pages for only your students to edit and view. You may want to look into Moodle. My district adopted this program for us last year and am still learning all of the features, but do know that you can set up a wiki page for your students to edit in it. I believe that it will stay private to only the group you assign it to. I haven't used it so I'm not sure how easy it is to use, edit, etc. Although, I will look into it as well when I find time!