Communication is vital in a global learning environment and Social Networking Technology is becoming every popular and important Global Learning Construct. Social networking technology can be just about anything that allows users to interact and share ideas; some examples are Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, and Delicious. There are many great tools out there but, particular, Twiducate is a great resource for the education field. Twiducate is very similar to Twitter but has an educational twist to it. When a teacher signs up for the free account, they are able to create student groups and send important, relevant messages to their students and parents. According to their website, users can post reminders on deadlines, share links/videos/pictures, keep parents informed, and provide feedback on student work. Although Twiducate seems very similar to Twitter, because teachers create the groups and decide who sees the messages, the tool is safer and more secure; which is vital when working with students.
Personal Learning Environments are great tools to keep students organized and allows them to separate personal from educational. One of the most basic and also (more importantly) free tools for creating a Personal Learning Environment is iGoogle. To use iGoogle, a user simply needs to create a free Google account and activate the iGoogle tool. Once the user has activated iGoogle, they can set up multiple tabs and environments for all aspects of their life. The user can then embed widgets in their environment to see Calendars, Docs, Reader, Gmail from Google to stay up to date on their communication. There are also widgets for Delcious (to keep track of those educational websites), Twitter (to stay up to date on who they follow), as well as many others. The best part of iGoogle is that once the environment is set up, the user can set it as their homepage so every time they access the internet, the first thing they see is their important information without having to go to 10 different websites to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
Thx for the comments re: twiducate. As of yesterday, multiple teachers can access the same 'class' by invitation making it incredibly easy for classrooms across the globe to collaborate with each other.
ReplyDeleteAlso, since teachers enter details for students, kids never enter an email address. This complies with COPPA. Children under 13 can still use the site!