I am following three cloud computing sites on Diigo. Quizlet is a free website where users can find or create flashcard sets for study purposes. A wide variety of flashcards are available on the site, and users can easily create and share their own sets of flashcards. Sophia offers a number of resources for students and teachers. Teachers can create tutorials, quizzes, and evaluations, organize them for use by their students, and monitor the progress of their students. The site also offers pathways to challenge gifted students, and provides support and certification for teachers interested in learning more about the concept of flipped classrooms. Student users can join or form study groups, and create and practice tutorials. On Classdojo, teachers can give feedback to students and their families on student behavior and engagement. Reports can be shared with parents and school staff, and teachers can easily record behavior, attendance and engagement with one click of the mouse.
The group that I follow on Diigo is the Apple Group, because I have been a fan of Apple products since I purchased my first Mac over five years ago. I also own a MacBook Pro and a 6th generation iPod nano, which is one of the coolest little devices ever developed.
Tags are keywords or terms assigned to a piece of information. The keywords are descriptive, allowing a user to find the information while browsing or searching the web. A tag cloud is a visual representation of text data, commonly called a word cloud. The choice of font type, size, character and colors make the tag cloud a visually appealing and attractive display of related terms and key words.
The readings for this week list a number of ideas for lessons using word clouds. The suggestions included detailing famous speeches, an analysis of current affairs, listing definitions of vocabulary words, and teaching about bullying. Using word clouds in the classroom are a simple way to engage students, who can easily create their own word clouds on sites like Wordle.
Social bookmarking allows users to add, annotate and share bookmarks of websites. Diigo, the website we explored this week, offers highlighting, screen image capture, and sticky notes for users to organize, arrange and store bookmarks in the user’s library for reference or sharing with others.
Social bookmarking can benefit teaching and learning by allowing users to share knowledge and information, and create a social network for interaction and discussion. Individuals can create their own online personal learning network, connecting with others who share similar interests, and make their network as private sharing it more openly. Personal learning networks permit the individual to tailor their network in ways that help them meet their own learning needs and goals.
Hi Marie,
ReplyDeleteGood to work with you this week. I would like to begin by commenting on the sites you posted in your blog. Quizlet looks very efficient in learning because I believe that flash cards really work in moving information from short term to long term memory. I experienced using flash cards while memorizing the English words 5 years ago. Repeating is not enough. Only repeating information in a particular time period also is crucial in memorizing something. During my English learning process 5 years ago, I bought a book in my language named Mega Memory. This book is taught me 300 new English words and their synonyms. So I have memorized totally 600 new English words. I never forget them now, even if I would like to forget them. This book is prepared by using the learning, memorizing and recalling theories of the information. There were flash card and a story for each of word. Moreover there were 2 different music CDs for while memorizing and for while practicing. There were 20 words for each day. In each day I had to memorize 20 words in first 10 minutes. Right after 10 minutes, there was a practice about these 20 words. In other days, before memorizing the new words, I had to the practice the all words I memorized until this day in practice part of this book. At the end of 15th day, book provides 300 new words and their synonyms memorized by you. After 15 days, that is 1 month later of the first day. I had to do first general practice of all words with flash cards. Until being sure about I know every word’s meaning and their stories, I had to do this first general practice again and again. After 5 months, which is the 6 months later of first day, I had to do second general practice with a cross puzzle, that was another book for second general practice. I had to solve 1 puzzle each of day that includes just 20 words as answers. After completing this puzzle book 15 days later, there was nothing to do to avoid forgetting them. I still remember all of them. I cannot forget them even if I would like to forget them because I have learned these words with some stories about these words’ pronunciation which means different things in my native language. And these stories are meaningful for me and they present strong emotions to me. However, I would prefer to use a cloud like Quizlet to memorize them because of its digital learning environment:)
I loved ClassDijo. It is amazing to create a network among people related to students’ success, who are parents, school staff, and teachers.
As for Sophia, it looks very well to use in gifted education as you said.
I understand the reason why you chose the Apple Group in Diigo. Apple products are lovely little things:)