L2eL - Learning to e-Learn

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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