CEDO 535 Week 5

This week was a fun one to work with one main thing, the Ning. I started dabbling with the Ning last week trying to get accustomed to the feel of the program and the layouts that are provided. After playing around with the program, I am witnessing that the program has a lot of power that I am using already through blackboard. The only difference being blackboard is costing my school district $$$ and is far less collaborative than the Ning is.

At first I thought that the Ning was going to be a mounting challenge because I didn't think that I had great web application creation ability. Thankfully the Ning is laid out is a simple way that allows me to create different pages with ease, link between those pages, and upload files that I use on the Internet. I am seriously considering going away from my Blackboard page next year and utilize the powers of the Ning.

Additionally this week, I looked at a variety of different Web 2.0 applications that can help change the landscape of the classroom. After looking more into sites like Diigo, Delicious, Photobucket, and Flickr, I am starting to create more ideas on how students could utilize these tools to achieve in my classroom.

CEDO 535 Week 3

This week had some interesting concepts that I really like and have starting implementing into my class. The first if the screencasting, or videocasting that I refer to it as. I had dabbled around using Jing before this assignment for projects in other classes, but had never really looked at all the intricacies of the program. Jing works great for me because I teach two courses heavily dependant on student tutorials, Introduction to Engineering Design and Digital Imaging. I constantly have students missing class so it makes it hard for them to get the material covered in class, as well as exhausting for me to re-explain what we do in-class again. I devised a way to start using videocasting to record tutorials that I can post on our school file server. This will save me time because I don't have to re-explain and will allow students who miss or forget points covered to go back and review the tutorials. I hope to continue using this program in the future and will create a detailed of files and tutorials that I will be able to share with colleagues!!

How I will share those files is pretty simple, using the next idea that I looked at, a Ning. I liked working with the Ning because it was user friendly and allows me to control the different users that are members. I plan to set up a Ning for my Digital Imaging and Introduction to Engineering that will allow members to log into the Ning and see the video tutorials that I have created for the course. I also like the Ning concept because I will provide an area where students can respond to questions that they have or other tutorials that they would like me to post on the Ning. This setup will be much easier for paperwork trails and will allow me to better monitor the works completed by students because I can have them post comments, links to websites, or links to projects that they have completed.