In education, many of these programs can be useful tools for delivering information and allowing students to share their own ideas and thinking. These tools include presentation sharing, mobile tools, and community tools. Most of them have free versions that would meet the needs of most educators.
Presentation Sharing
One simple way that online instructors can provide an authentic classroom experience is through presentation sharing. Slideshare.net is an incredible resource that allows a user to make a video of a PowerPoint or Prezi slideshow. The tool is free and even allows the user to add audio. Sharing the presentation is easy to do with a URL or embed code.
Other presentation tools include Prezi and picsviewr. Prezi is a visually appealing alternative to PowerPoint, and can be engaging and more fun for the viewer. I have used Prezi in the past and even assigned Prezi as an option for a presentation, and while it does serve to make beautiful presentations, the process itself was quite time-consuming. When my students worked with Prezi, it seemed like they spent more time figuring out the program than they did focusing on learning the content for the assignment. It's really important that educators remember that our true focus is to get students to learn the information, and if they're spending an inordinate amount of time on the tool to share that information, it may not be the best use of time or energy.
Picsviewr can be a simple tool for students to create slideshows using photos or video. This tool could be useful in the English classroom when explaining historical context or propaganda techniques.
Mobile Tools
Because it is nearly impossible to pry cell phones out of the hands of today's teenagers, mobile tools can prove particularly useful for educators. Two tools that seemed to utilize mobile devices in a practical way were Phone IO and Poll Everywhere. With Phone IO, which functions as a sort of dropbox for digital media, a user can upload voice recordings generated using a phone and then drop the messages/podcasts into a dropbox. Other users (parents, teachers, fellow students) can then subscribe to that person's messages using iTunes podcasts. This tool could be especially useful for foreign language classes or music classes, which may rely heavily on having audio recordings to provide an authentic learning experience.
Poll Everywhere allows a user to send out mobile surveys to users. These can be multiple choice or open response questions. One way this tool could be useful in the online (or even traditional) classroom is that it could work as a formative assessment and allow the teacher to use the data collected to guide further instruction.
Community Tools
For online teachers and students, the growth of the internet community is incredibly useful as it encourages collaboration and an open exchange of ideas. With tools like Edmodo and Google Drive, stakeholders in a virtual school can harness the power of this community to engage students and cultivate collaboration. Edmodo is a program that uses some of the features of social media to allow communication between teachers, students, and parents. Teachers can organize students into classes or clubs, and can assign projects or create events of assignment deadlines and then add those dates to the students' calendars. Edmodo not only serves as a communication tool, but it can also work as a time management tool for students.
Google Drive is an incredible tool for collaborative classroom work. Using Google Drive, users can work remotely, collaboratively, and simultaneously. Essentially, multiple users can edit a document from separate places all at the same time. To prevent confusion, there is a chat bar that allows users to communicate with one another.
When used effectively, these tools can enrich the learning experience of the online student.
Source:
"Community Tools." Discovery Education Web2014 : Web 2.0 Tools. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://web2012.discoveryeducation.com/web20tools-community.cfm>.
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