Week 9

  • I am impressed by Ko and Rossen, Teaching online a practical guide. The more I read this book, the more pertinent I find it . The information on general and specific subjects is very well explained with a simple and easy approach.
  • I registered on  MERLOT and I like it very much. I checked some very useful information, namely the animation part. I now need to get hold of a Canadian instructor, who came up with some very good animations in foreign languages. But I , so far and for the time being, have used for 2 semesters the website goanimate.com for short 2 minute animations for 1 month free trial. Very basic for languages but still a lot of fun for beginners in foreign languages. My students like it very much.
  • I also registered on Diigo, and I joined  “mccpot“.
  • Bookmarked Terry Anderson and Jon Dron’s Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy using Diigo, and made a couple of  notes  onto the mccpot group.
  • I already tried Second Life in the past and I already made some comments about it in previous posts.
  • Second Life / Diigo: How could either be used for education? What are the pitfalls?: Yes, Second Life can be used for education but just like “Teaching online  a practical guide” says, it does require lots of planning and training on behalf of the teacher and the student also (mainly training for the latter). There is so much to do already with blogging, preparing an online class, corrections and so on. This is really a question of  training but planning as well and I mean by that hours to set aside in front of the computer just to be proficient at one thing. I am not sure yet how to use it for education purposes unless I can find a special subject to implement within Second Life: imagining an avatar student writing on a board and making a teacher avatar explaining how to find the answer to a set of questions ? Something like that….I just don’t know yet.
  • On that note, there was an interesting program several weeks ago on KPBS t.v. channel about Second Life showing someone who became a millionaire by using Second Life. This gentleman invented a fantasy game via Second Life for adults only. Very consuming: He basically spends about 12 hours a day on Second Life and he has clients all over the world. Just to let you: he is not teaching foreign languages, maths and other disciplines but selling you fantasy about something else….
  • Diigo: I posted a couple of comments and there is the advantage of seeing other people’comments. It is a plus, of course but I am not proficient at it yet. It does remind me a little bit of Evernote, which I use.
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