I’ve been investigating a few online services that seem like they’d be a good fit for the courses I teach. I’ve put Ning, Slideshare and Twitter to work this semester and am pleased with how they’re panning out. I know my students and I will figure out even better ways to use them in the semesters to come.
Part of my MCJ 1 class's Ning site.
Here are the online apps I’m considering using in the near future. I’d love to hear suggestions about how to incorporate these or other services in my teaching, or how to better take advantage of the ones I’m currently using. (BTW, everything must be free, and should be usable by students without requiring them to spend money or buy extra gear. We’re all a little cash-poor in the CSU these days.)
1. Posterous. I have had students create blogs through WordPress in the past to use as their final course portfolios. We completed the process together in class in about five minutes, and they could password-protect the blog if they preferred (a feature not available on Blogger, to my knowledge). However, Posterous will take even less than five minutes to set up. All the students have to do to set up a blog is send an e-mail to post at posterous.com, and they can password-protect the resulting blog if they wish. They can then e-mail future content to the blog or use the Web interface for more control. I’d also like to use Posterous for individual students’ or class-produced photo essays or other multimedia projects; it even works with video.
2. Etherpad. This site allows real-time editing of text onscreen by up to 16 users. I’ll have to pair or group my students to use this in class, since I have 18-20 in each section of writing and editing, but I think it’ll allow us to do some cool activities. The real-time updating is important; edits made in Google Docs are not immediate, but those made on Etherpad show up right away for all users. I’m really looking forward to playing around with this one.
3. PBworks free wiki hosting. Wikis aren’t exactly new, but I don’t think they’ve been used much in our department. I’d like for our writing, reporting and editing classes to be more aligned (in terms of the content taught sequentially), more interconnected (in terms of projects shared among our classes) and more engaged with the community around us. Writing news stories based on fictional “facts” from a workbook isn’t really much fun, nor does it feel particularly relevant to, well, the real world. I’m pondering how our classes could use a wiki to gather reporting on a significant local issue or group of people, then use the resources of each class to enhance it. This wiki would ideally be a repository of useful local knowledge once complete. I know folks at other schools have used similar strategies; if you know of a great example, I’d appreciate hearing about it.
4. (Something similar to) Gabcast. Gabcast – once free – allows you to use your phone to record podcasts by calling a toll-free number. I thought about using it not for podcasting, but rather for helping students pool interviews and reporting. We can’t buy them all digital voice recorders or video cameras, and I’d like for all the students to have the experience of listening to multiple sources talk and learning to quote them accurately, rather than relying on other students’ transcriptions. (This project would be for a class that doesn’t emphasize reporting per se. With this service, each student could interview one source and then contribute the recorded interview to the pool of information, which could be played back online.)
Sadly, Gabcast is now a paid service, at 10 cents a minute for recording. I’m looking for a free equivalent or some other option that would provide similar functionality. One option might be video or voice messaging from their phones to a password-protected Posterous site, perhaps, though those messages often incur additional charges.
Suggestions or thoughts about any of these, or other teaching ideas? Please leave them in the comments.
