Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Web2.0 tools - Voice Thread and Colaab

Voice thread is a totally new website I learned from this class. People can present by images, video, audio, and text. People can comment basically by voice, text, and drawing. I thought this is a new website. However, I just find out this voice thread website has already been set up for a long time from Brenda’s Blog. Since the design is user friendly, for collaborating purpose, most educators use this website to attract their students, so voice thread has a sub-site, named ed.voicethread.com.

From my experience of using it, the Doodling feature is the most interesting function. User can control the timeline and comment on any spot in the timeline. If voice thread can let user comment on other people’s comments, that will be perfect. There are still some limitations. For examples, it is asynchronous. Although lots of people can be online at the same time, user cannot see their head icon or communicate directly.
User can not upload any materials to support, add or edit the original one.

Colaab is a website found from go2web20.net. User can set up one workplace under a free account, which could contain huge images, document, video, audio, and even drag website directly in there. It is synchronous. For the comment on video, Colaab support user to comment on any spot in the timeline also. User can response to each other during the video, and they can upload new materials if they were invited. There are still some limitations, however, user cannot comment by voice. They can only comment by text, drawing, and highlighting.

I didn't know how to attach files here. Just click on the title, it will leads you to the teacher page.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Project/Problem Based Learning

The P/T team is for solving problems and accomplishing tasks that is build on own previous work and other's work. Everybody can learn other's way of thinking, constructing, material secleting, and how to show their results. It is a group study, but also it is a self-scan study. With the assistant of information tools, unifying other's idea can help the students improve themselves during the process of study.

P/T team is a very clever idea in learning. I learned that, in study, the most efficient way is to teach. Based on this P/T team, students can unify others ideas, chose the ideas that they considered best, this process is similiar to how a teacher preparing for the class and valuate the work. In this way, student can learn efficiently and use the whole resourses maximumly.

I have to say that PBL is a new term to me. I had a class which impressed me deeply when I was in China, but I don't know whether it is a exact PBL lesson. In this class, our teacher want us to perform a play on the stage in front of all university students, and this play is our midterm test. We have six person in one group, and we need to choose a story that we want to perform, edit it, making new dialogues in English, preparing costume, preparing musics, rehearsal, and perform. I learned a lot of new things from this play. I learned how to make costumes, I learned how to creat new tapes, and I find that lots of new ideas come out when our group members are discussing. Everyone has some unique skills that others can learn from. However, the weakness is that, although we know some groups' performances are very good, we can not learn from them just by seeing the results. Also, we realized our English dialogue might have lots of inappropriate usages and mistakes. We could not find someone to guide us. Especially in how to perform, it racked our brains to arrange the whole play. We made lots of efforts on that play, and we got a good grade. Later, we performed it in our department role-play competition, and we won the prize. I told the story above is not in IT environment. The recent PBL course I learned is Dr. Elwood's course. Computing Applications in Education. I get to know some websites and software related to education, some of them I used before, and some of them I never heard of it before this course. The strengths are I can learn from my classmates and group members. Still, I saw some excellent classmate's jobs that I don't know how to do it, but at least I know there is another way to do the work. I like this course beacuse it let me see that there always somepoints that I can learn from others.

About me

Hi, this is Yuan. You can call me Helen. This is my first blog. I am in Ed Tech major, and this is my third semester in TAMUCC. I am very impressive about last Dr. Elwood's courses. I learned a lot of softwares and websites that is useful in class, and I am looking forward to learn more in this class.