I have used these in my own teaching to provide audio of learning materials for students with special needs. there is a lot out there for English teaching etc. i prefer to produce my own material my using Audacity to record material from learning manuals for basic certificate courses. Often use students who are ahead to produce the MP3’s as a revision of the material they are working on.
Had a look at second life and found that no juniors allowed and that teen secondlife wont allow adults so makes use for students in educational setting difficult. Can see how it would be a useful way of setting up online education courses with discussions and information for adult courses. have looked at other sites such as Virtual worlds but baulked at the cost when you want to get a class group involved. Would certainly be stimulating - engaging for students but need to find worlds that are free and of good quality.
Have had some trouble accessing site due to restrictions, however found Trailer and set up on site for 9 Meteorology. Have also set up separate blog ‘irvinescience’ which students are using to access work from home. they love the idea of accessing all there work in one place.
Have been using podcasts on out intranet for some time but found using itunes very good and Bloglines notifier on taskbar makes it easy to track updates.
Was an interesting process of setting up a set of favoutites accessible from any computer. Would be good for students shifting computers as most school systems don’t retain the favourites for each student. Could easily be a set of reference sites set up as initial research direction for a range of topics. Guide the students to the work rather than open searches which often waste a lot of time.
Wow! I checked out ewestwoods.wikispaces.com what a fantastic site. I had begun using my blog to feed information to one of my classes (Advance CFA Crew). Wikis are so much more adaptable to provide info and be able to administer tests.
In libraries they could be used to comment of stories and events of just get a group of students to be creative. Wow!
The Youth Crews operating in Secondary Colleges in CFA Region 2 have been offered the chance of being assessed, when they are deemed ready, for the CFA 0002 Qualification also known as ”Minimum Skills. This is a Nationally Recognized accreditation which students will be able to use as credit in further studies in VCAL.
Took ages to find a username not in use that I would remember. Uploading small group of favourites took ages. Looks good but I do much the same on my laptop. For me would be just another site to access to do stuff.
After comment can see how this could be useful for Science faculty to have preset favourites students can access on a class set of computers for various projects. Guide them to source rather than open google search.
Creating accounts was easy as was uploading and creating various documents in various formats. Still don’t see this taking over from MS applications in the future especially with the speed and convenience of applications loaded on a laptop compared with the time needed to log on access googledocs on this countries generally slow web access speeds.
Google maps is OK but I don’t like the lack of resolution. I have used other online maps of our local area which can be more detailed. Info posts on Google Earth are also good.
Google Book Search was good and quick. great you can use from home to locate instead of having to source specialist software.
Have had a look at several sites and can see how useful Myspace is to a library to be able to showcase selected or new books, do reviews, introduce students, provide links to various materials etc. I’m sure our library would be interested, however we have a block on Facebook and My Space as there are still issues in regards to security and content control with free access to these programs.
Library Interests, Library Blog entry via subscription, Homework help, research help. All very interesting and i’m sure useful.
None of the Libraries in the area around have Myspace pages.
