L2eL - Learning to e-Learn

An increasing number of schools are purchasing learning platforms for their students.  One of the key features of these learning platforms is the provision of a student online learning space.

An online learning space for most of these products appears to comprise of some online storage, a facility to add bookmarks and notes and a calendar.

Pageflages appears to offer a lot of the same functionality.

Experimenting with Pageflakes, I was able to add ‘flakes’ that contained my emails, add a to-do list and add notes.  Here’s a link to my example.

The all important online storage is available by adding a ‘flake’ that links to your Box.net free online storage account of 1Gb.  Files are limited to 10Mb max and 10Gb of traffic is permitted a month.  This compares favourably with many online storage spaces provided to students through learning platforms.

A calendar and a timetable can be added to the page, along with a message board.  RSS feeds and images from a Flickr account can be added.

There are an increasing number of ‘flakes’ available that allow you to further personalise your Pageflake.

Pages can be ’shared’ allowing other to view these.  Clearly emails and other ‘flakes’ would not want to be on shared pages, but calendar, notes and to-do lists might be helpful.  You can select who has access to your page and even provide them with access to edit your page.

Overall, this free tool offers a lot of the functionality of an online learning space.  The learner manages this space as opposed to a school on behalf of its students.  This is a significantly different way of working to schools managing learning spaces.

The key feature missing is a link to a virtual learning environment and the ability this provide for teachers to support the students learning by providing resources, tasks, tests and feedback.  A link to Wikipedia will have to do instead.

For the student who is looking for a more customizable space than the one provided through the school’s learning platform, Pageflakes make have an appeal.  The student can add a link to their school’s online space to access their work assigned from a VLE.

Filed by Paul at 9:12 am under e-portfolio, online storage, web tools
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I came across this free download through Computer Active magazine.  I was impressed by the usefulness of this tool and its ease of use.  I think Notefish would be useful for students to use when researching using the internet.  I found it helpful in collecting notes on Personalising Learning, collecting both text and images.  Notefish captures a link to the webpage that the notes are taken from.  I thought this was helpful for citing references and for collecting links in a similar way to deli.ci.ous.

Below is a short clip of me using Notefish.

Download

One issue I have with many students using the Internet for research is that they often copy lots of information and are not as selective as I would wish them to be.  I think this tool encourages them to select and organize information.

Students can select to share their notes with other students.  Creating a Notefish page would be an interesting homework task.  I can imagine it working well in a subject like geography.  Students could be asked to present the various faces of tourism in Kenya.  Information from the Oxfam website could be used to highlight issues of sustainable development.  The Kenyan National Tourist Board website could be used to show the positive features of tourism in the region.  Students can add their own notes to a section, commenting on the purposes of the information presented. 

This could be an interesting way of students creating revision resources for use by each other.   Assessment for learning strategies could be employed for students to reflect on which sites are good revision resources, how well they are organised and ways in which they could be improved.

Having just worked with a teacher and a class of students on presentations in History, I could see how Notefish would be useful during the preparation phase of the presentation to collect useful information and images.

Click on this text to open the shared Notefish page I made.

When sharing a page you are asked for how long you wish to share the page and asked if you wish to password protect access to the page.   This could be helpful in restricting access to just a class of students.  If all students using the tool for research in a class set the password to be the same it would help aid class access whilst maintaining the page as essentially private.

Notefish is downloadable from Notefish.com and I think its well worth a look.

As a free download there are adverts on the right of the Notefish page you create, and these adverts reflect the content of the note page.  This should ensure that nothing inappropriate appears in this section provided the topics of the notes are sound.  This might provide difficulties if used in PSHE or Science with particular topics.   It is a potential e-safety issue, and I would suggest experimenting with Notefish and a topic you wish to use it with before presenting a task to students.

 Have fun!

Filed by Paul at 5:30 pm under web tools
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Why am I blogging?

Well I thought it was about time I experienced what it is like to create and maintain an online presence.  Figures banded about seem to indicate that approaching 3/4s of teenagers have an online presence, many of them blogging. 

Working with schools and students, I felt it was difficult to talk convincingly about blogs, wikis, web2.0, social networking and current trends in the use of the internet without exploring it for myself.

What am I going to do with my blog?

I regularly find web tools, software, websites and other instruments that help learners get more out of online environments. 

I’m a bit like a magpie when it comes to technology and the web - anything new and shiny impresses me.

I thought I would  use my blog to record the things I find and my thoughts on using this tools to support learning.   I called the blog ‘Learning to e-Learn’ because I work with schools supporting e-learning.  The web is evolving and the ways we can use it as learners is changing.  I hoped that at some point I would be able to use this space to document some thoughts on e-learning.  I haven’t decided if the ‘e’ stands for enjoyable or electronic yet!

I hope to post about once a week - but I’m prepared to disappoint myself. 

Filed by Paul at 12:41 pm under Uncategorized
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