I really liked the format of today's class. As preparation for class, we each had to prepare a "how-to" handout for one of four technological tools: Evernote, Diigo, Dropbox, and Skype. We then spent most of class in small groups, teaching our peers about the tool we had studied and learning about the other three. I thought this was a great way to cover a large amount of information in a short amount of time.
The site I studied was diigo.com. Although I hadn't heard of it before this course, I think I will use it in the future. It's a great way to save bookmarks online so that you can access them anywhere, not just on your home computer. It also makes it easy to highlight and annotate online articles. Since so much of the material we read in this program is electronic, I think it will be really useful to have a way to store our highlighted material and notes online. One advantage of tools like this is that they make us less likely to print out online articles just so we can make notes on them. By doing it online, we conserve resources.
I really enjoyed my classmates' presentation of their tools, as well. Although I had already been a pretty regular Skype user, Colleen M. made me aware of some really interesting features I hadn't known about. One example was the "Skype in the Classroom" tool at education.skype.com. This feature provides a way for teachers to connect with experts in their field. Stephen, who researched Dropbox, gave us a great explanation of how we can share files and sync folders with our classmates using that program. Kathlyen explained Evernote, which is a really cool way to organize notes and save "clippings" like images and text from the web.
I thought that the small-group presentation format was really effective. It gave us a thorough overview of several different tools that will be helpful for us throughout the MAC program and, ultimately, in our teaching careers.
Glad to hear that it was a useful day for you. We thought you might enjoy having smaller groups and more custom content than big presentations in front of the class.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated the smaller groups as well. Additionally, it gave us an opportunity to try different applications and interact virtually using the new applications as well. I had never used Diigo before either, but I really did find it useful by the end of class - once I actually got the hang of it :) Also, I am excited to know about more online editing tools so I can read and interpret research articles without printing off so many pages!
ReplyDeleteI also really enjoyed the small groups as well. It gave us time to really learn the tools (set them up on our computers, etc.) and ask a lot of questions. I feel like I left class knowing how to use four new tools. I too had never used Diigo and I think it can be really useful. I also enjoyed learning about how to use Skype in the classroom. I had never thought of using Skype that way and it seems like it can be really useful. I'm excited to see how I can incorporate Skype into my classroom.
ReplyDeleteEvernote seemed pretty cool. I had downloaded it a while back and never even realized how useful it was. After class on Friday I actually called my aunt (who is a president of a company in Ohio) and told her to download evernote because I thought she would really get a lot of use out of it. I also really liked the small groups for part of the time, though I actually really liked it when we all came back together for half of the class. That rss feed that we set up is awesome.
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