Week 10: Today I Learn, Today I Question

 

This week we learn about using web 2.0 in classroom. Pn Ng introduce a cool tool for us, that’s Microsoft Mouse Mischief. Mouse Mischief can transform classroom teaching. By Mouse Mischief integrated into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, teachers can create interactive presentations, so that every classroom in which students are integrated into and enjoy the fun. 5-25 or so students via their mouse, while sharing the screen to answer multiple-choice questions and drawing. You can free download Mouse Mischief.

According to Microsoft, Mouse Mischief in the classroom using three powerful reasons:                 1. Enable students to actively participate in classroom teaching and to support collaborative  learning

With Mouse Mischief, you can integrate interactive technology into the curriculum to stimulate students' curiosity. Use different colors of the mouse pointer (such as robots, snow, more guitars and other shapes), students can be visually marked their answer on a shared screen to truly appreciate the joy of learning the true meaning. In group mode Mouse Mischief, will enable collaborative learning; in group mode, the group all members must cooperate and agree on the answer, and then can be selected.

2. Improve the overall classroom management and student participation

With Mouse Mischief, you will no longer need to wait for students raised their hands to answer questions; now, you can immediately see on the screen gives students the answer. With Mouse Mischief, all students, even those usually very quiet class students, are able to easily engage a regular basis, without fear of the answer wrong. This can help you better understand the progress of the whole class and knowledge to grasp the situation, thus immediately making course adjustments.

3. Familiar interface easy to use, and affordable

As the Mouse Mischief is integrated into a common technique in PowerPoint, so you do not need to spend time to learn new skills to use. In addition, you do not need to purchase expensive hardware to set up the classroom to show Mouse Mischief courses; many schools itself has a lot of mouse, and many shops are selling computer accessories mouse and USB hub for sale.

I can’t wait and quickly download in my laptop. Although I still don’t have chance to try, but after watching the demo video, I get some idea on how to design group activities in class using Mouse Mischief, I can imagine how students enjoy the games/competitions using their own wireless mouse  answer questions. This really will increase the involvement of students and engage them effectively. We normally be informed that technology is not designed for education, so we have to repurpose the technology, but this technology definitely designed for the use of educator. Hopes that there will be more technology like this.

 

As for Tubechop, it is a convenient tools allows us to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it. From the introduction found that it is really user friendly, find the video you want to chop. select & cut interesting part of the video, then share it with friends. This is a tools which must store in my computer as it is useful to shorten long speeches for wideos where smaller segments are of importance. With TubeChop I will be able to omit unnecessary information from videos.

 

Besides that, Dee introduce schoology in her presentation. Schoology.com is a social networking service and virtual learning environment for K-12 school and higher education institutions that allows users to create, manage, and share academic content. Also known as a learning management system (LMS) or course management system (CMS), the cloud-based platform provides tools needed to manage an online classroom.

Visually and functionally similar to Facebook, the service includes attendance records, online gradebook, tests and quizzes, and homework dropboxes. The social media features facilitate collaboration among a class, a group, or a school. Schoology can be integrated with existing school reporting and information systems and also provides the added security, filters and support that school districts require.

Schoology is offered to individuals, schools and districts free of charge. Revenue is generated by fees charged for premium add-ons such as customized branding, support packages, increased storage, single sign on (SSO), and data integration with existing student information systems (SIS).

Try to set up my own schoology space, found that although it is user friendly and very poweful, but to familiar to the new tools really takes times.

 

This week, every group take turn to show e-learning environment we create for our assignment 3. Most impress me is web-based environment created by Monica, Dee, Shakirah and Ezlin’s group. I know how tricky Wikispaces is for a beginner, but they really do a good job. I still remember I spend few months to develop my first wiki, but they only take few weeks time and manage to produce website better than I did before, may be this is the power of collaborative work. I also notice that there are bundles of online tools for ESL learners which are really useful in develop web-based environment to engage the students, as for Chinese language, we really difficult getting similar tools. I really envy them.