GoogleDocs
Yes, GoogleDocs, again. Whether you want them to develop a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, you can use GoogleDocs for the space to be used. You can also create surveys and possibly quizzes if you want to engage your students further. What’s great about GoogleDocs is its collaborative nature and the ways you (or your students) can share files coupled with the document history where you can directly compare differences between older and newer versions.
Diigo
Diigo is a familiar tool on this blog and rightly so. It’s a social bookmarking site where an instructor could create a group for the class. Herein, they could add substantive links related to course topics along with descriptions and explanations of what the sites were. Another idea would be for the instructor to incorporate a large range of links and assign the students different links to go to within Diigo and annotate. Diigo allows for individuals or groups to annotate their bookmarks, thus allowing for an engaging dialogue among the students about a site’s content.
Wikis
Yet another great tool we enjoy on this blog, Wikis can be used in a variety of ways. Whether you’re sending students to create an entry on Wikipedia itself, or encouraging them to make a course notebook in wiki format, there’s some great ways instructors can make students creators and owners of the course content.
Glogster
Glogster is a free digital posterboard that allows the user to put up images, text, sound files, and videos all integrated into a collage. It’s a useful tool as a compliment to inclass presentations or as a means of online presentations.
Blogs
Blogs are great for assignments. There are many different ways of using a blog, but there are several that seem to do well.
- The instructor writes the blog entries (as kind of mini-lessons or making connections from content to the world at large) and the students must comment.
- Students create their own blogs and then comment on one another’s blog.
- One blog is created for the class and different students must post about related material over the course of the semester.
Screen-cast-o-matic
We’ve talked about this tool before as a teaching tool, but it could also be used as an assignment for students to create a narrated presentation utilizing course materials or research. It’s a quick tool to learn and faculty could assign students to develop different videos around course concepts. Faculty could also assign students to create a virtual tour of the internet to present their research. Audacity is a similar tool, though it’s only for audio recording, but faculty might assign similar projects.
So what other tools out there help you to free up the course? We’re always looking for new ideas and tools, so please let us know.
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