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.
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I agree with your thoughts concerning the use of a Ning, and think that it will be a nice addition to any classroom. The idea of your information being available to students 24 hours a day is cool, and the fact that it is free certainly makes it worthy challenger of Blackboard. At the same time, you and I are probably coming to this from totally different perspectives. You have used a tool that allows information to be obtained asynchronously, whereas the Ning will be my first attempt to provide information for students anytime day or night. I would be curious if you have found limitations with the Ning so far. We have Moodle available in our district, and I have been weighing the benefits of Moodle against Ning. So far, based solely on ease of use, I like the Ning.
ReplyDeleteI, too, love using Ning, and I'm already thinking of others I can create. I've done two so far and the one for my computer classes, in particular, I'm already revamping. I'm sure you'll find the students like it as well. My only minor issues have been with the formatting of certain design elements. My Rome Ning has a great pictures of St. Victoria from St. Peter's Basilica, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get that picture to the right. Right now it overlaps my title, which is annoying. It's minor issues like that, but nothing major. I also found all sorts of sources for designing your own Ning. That's be interesting as well. I wish there was an application out there, however, that would let my students create Nings. As it was I had to tell my students to go ahead and check the "I am at least 13" box just so they could access our classroom one.
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