Assessment Reflection 2

The first technology I have explored this week is a wiki. I have created a standard wikispace previously for another assignment, so this time I discovered and played with a ‘wiki classroom’. I had not seen one of these before and was very interested to find out more. According to wiki the space is designed to manage all the activity, resources, conversations, and projects in the classroom and is essential for keeping students, and teachers, organized and working together. The site allows you to add members of the class and place them into groups for projects, record important events on the calendar or just design collaborative pages for the students and/or parents.

For me personally I did not find the classroom space very user friendly, I found it quite difficult to work my way around the different aspects of the site, such as projects and assessment. Although, this may be just because I am unfamiliar with it and need some more practise and experience with it, or possibly I need students as members to help the site run more smoothly.

I can see how a wiki classroom could be very useful; I particularly like the events calendar. It could be very effective for organising plans with the students. However, if I was intending to use wiki spaces for a specific task or project with the students I would just use a standard page to avoid confusion.

http://kristysexperimentalpage.wikispaces.com/

Strengths ·      Collaborative, everyone is able to contribute and feel as though their input is valued ·      Engaging	Weaknesses ·   Information can be deleted if more than one student is editing the site ·   Can become very messy ·   Time consuming to create
Opportunities ·      Students can collaborate all their ideas for a project ·      Students can access and contribute from home	Threats ·   Students deleting another students work or speaking negatively about another student ·   Having website hacked by outsider

The second technology that I explored this week was a Weebly. This was my first time creating a Weebly, I found it to be quite an easy site to navigate and design. The ‘drag and drop’ technique allowed me to simply select the element I wished to use, such as text, images, maps or videos and drag it to the position I desired on the page.  My biggest challenge was using my creativity to fill it up without having any specific topic.

Weebly is a static website which means there is little option for collaboration or input from the students. However in designing the site there is the option of adding a poll or voting section, as seen on the ‘living things’ page. This can be helpful in gauging students’ interest or knowledge but it does not allow the students to collaborate their ideas and thoughts.

I believe this site could be effectively used for engaging and teaching children about a specific topic, by uploading tools such as videos, images and simulations. Also a class site can be created, similar to the one I started to collate the class’s activity for them to revise or families to look at.  

http://managingelearningkw.weebly.com/index.html

Positives	Minuses	Interesting
· Engages a large range of learners · Can make learning more meaningful · Students can access information from home if they have a computer · Can be presented very professionally	·   Time consuming to create ·   Unable to access if internet is having trouble ·   Anyone is able to view the content – Cannot share any personal details ·   Not collaborative – only one author – Static	·    Videos and animations can be uploaded to the Weebly site ·    You can add many pages and sub pages to each site ·    Parents can also access site to see what their children are learning