Module 9

Bezier Ribbons from felixturner on Vimeo.

SCOOTLE 

At our school we have been fortunate to have had access to Scootle for some time. I have used some of its content with History and Geography classes - especially keen on the learning objects for their simple but engaging graphics, their suitable level of language and their interactivity, which appeals greatly to the students. The collection of photographs provides a useful adjunct to the archival collections from the National Library. Most of the resources which I found had not been given a rating at all, so I found this feature unhelpful. The Scootle user guide was interesting as I learned more about the learning paths which I had previously created and how I can edit and export them in PDF format, and so share them with others. And I can make use of tags so that my learning paths can be found more easily by others. The collaborative aspects of Scootle were entirely new to me and offer great possibilities for the classroom. This feature allows students to work together in the "live" workspace.
SECOND LIFE
This is a virtual 3D world where people can interact in a huge range of ways. Gamers are the most capable of operating within this site as it requires some expertise in manipulating avatars. Many of our students are quite adept at this and would enjoy using this site. Its use in education has so far been largely for offering distance education. I see potential here for a different type of delivery, where students can have virtual experiences of  different scenarios, but until I were more proficient with the technical aspects I would not use it in the classroom. 

TWITTER

Because this offers short, bite-sized updates of predominantly personal information, I cannot see a place for it in my working life. It could perhaps be of some relevance in contacting students to inform them of their progress in the course of some tasks.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

I like the explanation which maintains that social networking is not something new but rather it is something which we do as social beings - we gather in 
communities based on shared interests. It's just that now the new technologies have opened up new ways for us to interact in global electronic communities. 

Module 8

This image attracted me becasue it is rather hypnotic, pretty, and hints at the notion of interconnectedness, which is what social networking is about after all.

RSS Feeds

This was fairly straightforward to organise. It turned out that by creating a gmail account I had already subscribed to many more feeds than I can comfortably handle. I have some concerns about them: the rate at which they accumulate is frightening and I would be very interested to learn how to remove the older entries; graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds; and many sites do not yet support this new technology. I have tidied up and deleted a few subscriptions. [Subscribing to BBC news feeds is fraught with danger as it links to news services from around the globe, not just the BBC's service.] A colleague has alerted me to a facility within Explorer which directs feeds to the toolbar on the display page. This seems a very efficient way to access the feeds at my work desktop. My home computers use a different browser, Firefox,  and it too offers RSS feeds links on the opening screen. 

I would certainly recommend RSS feeds to our students.