Activity 2 - Experiencing Educational Software

The use of educational software in the teaching-learning relationship (whether offline, online or mobile oriented software applications) can be of significant advantage to all involved if used and managed carefully.  There are many software packages dedicated to different fields of learning that are available to students, teachers and institutions.  I fondly remember the Microsoft Encarta digital multimedia encyclopedia of the 1990s which was filled with photographs, sound clips, videos, atlases and more.  It provided an exciting way to learn.  Today we have software packages like Rosetta Stone for learning languages, software to aid in mathematics and reading and so on.  Some of these are inexpensive while others, often geared towards educational institutions, are quite expensive.  Most of these packages were/are aimed at being limited to one computer system or a specific number of systems.

With the increasingly important role of the internet in all spheres of our lives, there is an ever increasing pool of online software that can be used by students and educators alike.  Internet oriented software platforms like Flash brought new leverage to software designers to produce storage-light software that can be easily run over the internet.  Added to this, the internet speeds available in many places today also support greater data transmission than was possible a decade ago.

Many foundations, universities and even regular teachers and students now create online applications and mobile applications that can be used to aid learners and teachers both in and out of the classroom.  Some software puts learning entirely in the hands of the students and the software takes on the role of the teacher - it explains the concepts, provides examples and even tests knowledge with quizzes.  Of course, it means that the software engineers needed to have knowledgeable individuals provide the content used.

This brings me to perhaps what is one of the major challenges or more so major concerns about the wealth of educational software available both off and online today, credibility.  Just how credible is much of the software available? The answer is often left up to the individual using it.  Therefore, it is imperative that educators adequately examine educational software that they will use with their students. Not all applications are created equally, some are excellent, some are horrendous, and some fall in between.  Even bad software can have some useful aspects, therefore, a teacher may still use certain features of a poor software package to specific purposes while dismissing the remaining features.

All in all, much reinforcement can be had from software packages to support learning.  In the classroom, its for support, not to replace the teacher, manage it well.

Module 5 Activity 1: Refection on the value of social bookmarking’

In the vast expanse of the World Wide Web, bookmarking has proven to be a very useful and efficient feature/practice, especially for very active netizens.  As the internet expands, there are increasing numbers of websites that cater to productivity in various fields of endeavour, provides many resource centres, and cater to inter-connectivity and collaboration between individuals and groups across the globe.  According to Internet Live Stats (http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/), there are just under one billion websites online today and it is expected that by the end of 2014, the one billion mark will be reached.

With so many websites available, users can be forced to either memorize the URL of the sites that are important to them, use a search engine to locate these sites each time they are needed, or write them down in some form.  The process of bookmarking uses the last method.  Users write down the website's address electronically. Most, if not all, web browsers have a bookmarking feature that many users make use of.  It allows them to save and organize addresses in the bookmarks folder for easy access when needed; with a single click on an item in this list, the browser will load the required website.  This process has a major limitation, it is browser specific!  Therefore, if you use different browsers (for instance Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) on the same computer, each browser will have its own bookmark folder containing only the bookmarks created when that browser was being used.  This results in bookmarked items being scattered between browsers and therefore not always immediately available to the user.

Social bookmarking takes the process of bookmarking to a new level of efficiency.  Instead of being browser specific, bookmarking sites like Diigo allow users to create an account with the site, add a small app to each of their browsers, and then use that app to save their bookmarks to that online site (ie Diigo).  Regardless of the browser used, the app stores the bookmarks in one place.  Users can then organize their bookmarks and access them all from that main site.  These sites also generally allow for group collaboration in the creation and usage of bookmarks, and moreover, allow users to share their bookmarks with others online simply by giving them the URL of the list of bookmarks they want to share.  This means that a large pool of internet resources can be shared, as bookmarked sites, with a single link.  This is tremendously valuable to individuals working in similar fields or who have the same interests and so on.  Interestingly, if bookmark lists are created to be publicly view-able, random users searching the internet can happen upon them and find these useful gems in one place rather than searching through the vast expanses of the WWW.

Module 1 Concludes

Module 1 has been very informative and really helped me grow in my teaching over this term.  Much of what was covered in terms of how people learn, how behaviour affects learning, how development affects learning, and cooperative learning, had direct effect on my teaching practices this term.  These things helped me to better plan classes by taking these various elements into consideration.  It all made for an interesting and rewarding teaching term.

It was however, a challenging and demanding module.  All in all, its one more successfully completed and new knowledge gained.