ARP Motivated to Start

I received an email from my principal that stated, "Congratulations and good work." He was referring to the email from our systems administrators who enthusiastically applauded my request to use Web 2.0 tools in my classes. Suddenly, I felt as if a gift was provided to me, something very valuable and important. Then I felt the weight of worry that I might really make a blundering mess of this project and set a precedence that these tools had been tried before. It's taken me a week to sit with this reality that I have the go-ahead!

Today, I feel more confident and ready to proceed. First on the agenda is to produce a parent permission for their child to create and use a Google mail account. From the permissions that I receive back, I will be able to implement a Round 1 of my ARP.

I'd like to learn from my peers about using music for reading, screen capturing for future student use, rapping with students, and producing video (just to name a few). I think my needs will be met as I complete one step at a time. So, I need to complete a parent permission form for my students to get signed and return in order for students to make Gmail accounts.

I'll start work, soon, on my flow diagram for the module.

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I produced this 1-minute video to show the benefits of collaboration using Google Documents.

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Original Blog by Dave Nelson, with my Comments below:

BP7_2009102_LearnHub Web 2.0 Tool

The third Web 2.0 tool I looked at was called LearnHub and is found at learnhub.com. This site is a social network focusing on education and learning. It provides a set of tools ?...that make learning online fun and engaging, and teaching online easy and effective? (learnhub, 2009).

I have looked over many things that are offered at LearnHub for Educators but I have not looked at all areas of LearnHub in the detail I would like to. It appears that there are Web 2.0 tools available for use at the secondary school level that could bring the Web 2.0 concept easily into the classroom. There are authoring tools available that allow teachers to create material. To do this there are tools including a lesson editor that allows teachers to share videos, pages including PDF files, and presentations.

There are also tools, many of which I have not looked at in as much detail as I would like to in the future, that will allow to create tests and also follow student?s progress and grades with a built in report generator.

One benefit that I am going to look at further is the course creation area. This area allows the teacher to combine all of their assets including tests, videos, and instruction pages, into an area that can be set up as a restricted course area. In doing this the teacher can control those that have access to the site.

Another area that I did not test yet is the live video, voice, whiteboard and document sharing that is available to the students. This could provide a great avenue of collaboration from not only the classroom but from those that have Internet access at home.

It also appears that one of the best things about learnhub is the price. At this point in time it is free to use. It looks like in the future they may charge for the service.

This may be a site that everyone may want to checkout.



References:

learnhub (2009), About learnhub. Retrieved October 11, 2009 http://learnhub.com/about.

Posted by Dave Nelson at 6:22 PM
1 comments:

dcowdenhmb said...
Dave: Learnhub looks like a great Web 2.0 tool. I particularly appreciate the quote "...make online learning fun and engaging..." I am glad you located this site and shared about it, because this could be just the tool I need for my class use.

Deb Cowden
October 11, 2009 8:56 PM

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