EDUCATION :: Facilitating Collaborative Learning using Social Networks and Web 2.0 tools

This page explores a variety of web 2.0- based tools; websites, blogs, website builders, LMS, and RSS readers that can be used to make the lives of teachers easier and to help them create fun and relevant activities that urban students will love. It looks at ways web 2.0, and social media is changing the web and the classroom to offer both asynchronous and synchronous collaborative learning environments for teachers and students to utilize. Ultimately, this a quick primer for collaborative learning on the web, so let's first look at the reasons students need these types of tools, and teachers should consider adopting them.

Some specific benefits of the utilization of web-based applications for collaborative learning include:

• Saves time. Students can work either together or independently, either way contributing to the success of their group overall.
• Develops oral and written communication and social interaction skills.
• Allows for interactions with students outside their class, school, city, state and even country.
• Prepares young students for upper grades and the technology tools they will be encountering there.
• Allows for students who are unable to attend school to keep up with their peers.
• Share ideas.
• Increases student motivation.
• Encourages different perspectives views.
• Aids in metacognitive and evaluative thinking skill development.
• Develops higher level, critical-thinking skills thanks to use of problem-solving approaches.
• Encourages student responsibility for learning.
• Establishes a sense of learning community.
• Creates a more positive attitude about learning.
• Promotes innovation in teaching and classroom techniques.
• Enhances self management skills.
• Develops skill building and practice. Common skills which often require a great deal of practice can be developed through these tools, and made less tedious through these collaborative learning activities in and out of class.
• Develops social skills.

Teacher's Role
Students in Urban schools are "digital natives" with shorter attention spans, better multitasking ability, and they embrace new web-based technologies. Teachers should attempt to educate students using tools they have the greatest affinity for, in order to keep their interest. Instructors should make a greater effort to use collaborative tools in the classroom so that students can be better prepared for the modern workforce and to assure that they develop 21st Century school-to-work skills. Instructors play a vital role in facilitating online collaborative learning. Researchers indicate that strong instructor support, frequent instructor-student interaction, and superior organizational skills are critical elements of successful online collaborative learning (Ku, Lohr, & Cheng, 2004).

According to a Shank study, competencies of online instructors and those planning the use of online collaboration tools in the traditional classroom setting, are as follows:

• Administrative--The primary goal is to assure smooth operations and reduce instructor and learner overload.
• Design--The primary goal is to assure successful learning outcomes.
• Facilitation--The primary goal is to provide social benefits and enhanced learning.
• Evaluation--The primary goal is to assure that learners know how they will be evaluated and help learners meet objectives.
• Technical--The primary goal is to assure that barriers due to technical components are overcome.

Web 2.0 and Social Media Oriented Tools:
A variety of tools are available via the Internet to assist in the online collaboration efforts of your classes. Let's look at the definitions of each of them and then I'll highlight some of the best web-based tools that fit into each category.

Online Whiteboards:
Various web-based applications which allow students to chat, while writing, drawing, demonstrating, etc. in/on an electronic whiteboard. Often these applications let you save what has been written on the whiteboard as a picture file, and/or print them.

Popular Online Whiteboards:

• Google Docs http://docs.google.com/ (Free)
• WebEx http://www.webex.com/ (subscription based $)

Application in Education:
By using online whiteboards, students can brainstorm, create graphics together, and engage in peer-to-peer tutoring in skills and concepts.
Google Docs suite provides additional functionality that replicates the functionality of MS Word (and the MS Office suite of programs which includes online presentation creation and excel spreadsheets) with a chat window for group collaboration and the ability to save pages privately or as web pages. Docs that are created can often be saved as a MS Word file, PDF or image file and printed for review, captured and/or recorded (via screen capture) to show process.

Learning Management Systems Learning management system (LMS) or content management systems (CMS) are an online package to help educators create effective online learning communities. These sites allow teachers and professors to create online classes utilizing a variety of mediums easily and efficiently.

Popular Learning Management Systems:

Moodle.org http://moodle.org/ Moodle is an open source system which means it is free and open to use and develop further. Tech support is not as available as paid systems like Blackboard but it has a huge community of developers world wide that contribute to the knowledge base and they collaborate to help others in the community.
Blackboard.com http://www.blackboard.com/ Blackboard is the current leader in this industry. It is not free but it is easy to install and use if you or your district has the funds to invest.

Application in Education:
Teachers can post discussion topics, questions, homework or resources in the forums, and answer questions or send messages online. Or they can set quizzes for test review. It can provide a secure place for email exchange. A CMS helps to establish a learning community online. For home-bound children, a CMS can provide the learning experience and collaborative opportunities missed in the classroom.

Survey Systems:
These tools allow the creation and administration of surveys completely online.

• User Voice http://uservoice.com/
• Survey Monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com/
• .

Applications in Education:
These tools are great for both teachers and students. Surveys can easily be turned into quizzes with multiple choice answering, and open-ended questioning. The survey can render your results for you, and even synthesize and analyze the results into a variety of formats including charts and graphs. User Voice is a great site because it not only tallies votes on topics but it allows users to suggest additions for the survey. This could be challenging, unless it is well thought out, for a simple survey use http://www.surveymonkey.com/

Online Image/Video Sharing:
These tools allow for the sharing of image and video files specifically and often allows commentary, dialogue and/or exchanges.

Application in Education:
Teachers and students can use these tools to discuss and analyze photos, videos, etc. They can upload pictures or video from their computer, camera, or from cell phone. It's a great place to store and organize photos and videos, however it is not entirely secure. The students can then actively engage with the image and think about and discuss specific aspects. Specifically in applications such as Flickr, students can organize pictures by tags or geocoded locations on a map. As a collaboration project, teachers can encourage students to upload pictures about a topic, for example a world heritage site, and invites users to contribute tags to the images. Applications such as Whrrl allow users to collaborate on photo "stories". It also allows a user to geocode images in order to map the location of the story. Commenting, on images is also possible allowing students to contribute data and other information on specific images. Another slide show creation program is Vuvox, which allows you to pull images from various photo sharing services to create a number of different kinds of slideshows that can be embedded into you or your students web pages. In other similar applications, such as VoiceThread, students can add voice and written commentary to the overall video, picture or document. The comments are sequenced, so that late-comers can follow the dialogue.

Video-conferencing, Chat, File sharing applications:

These are various applications which allow students from around the world to engage in synchronous conferencing through live video feeds, video replays, chatting, and/or voice.

Applications in Education:
Teachers can create online working spaces for student groups within their classrooms, across classrooms, grade levels, school, states, the nation, and even the world. Students can work collaboratively on group assignments, and keep active communications ongoing with e-pals.

Collaborative Multimedia Presentations

Application in Education:

Collaborative multimedia presentations enable small groups like teaching teams to work together to:

• present knowledge in different and (if you do it right) compelling ways
  

• engage active participation by the entire class instead of broadcasting to it like a passive audience

Voicethread

"Online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different
ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file,
or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. They
can even be exported to an Archival Movie for offline use on a DVD or
video-enabled MP3 player." Voicethread tutorials, Voicethread how-to wiki and interesting ways to use Voicethread in the classroom

Prezi - "The zooming editor"

"Create a map of your ideas, images, videos, then show overview, zoom to details, amaze, convince, take the day. And it is very simple to use."
See also this demo. And see these ways to use Prezi in the classroom. See also the power and point of using Prezi in the classroom.

Google Presentation Tool

Online slideshows with concurrent chat channel -- see these tips on using Google Docs in the classroom

Classroom Flash Jeopardy Game and Online Jeopardy Gamebuilding Site

Flash Jeopardy was designed by a teacher for use in the classroom as a SmartBoard review game. This site has all of the tools needed to create a Jeopardy
review game, download your game for free, and play jeopardy in your
classroom. You can also play Flash Jeopardy online. The online Jeopardy site also enables you to build custom Jeopardy games.

Flare

"Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual
encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare
features a modular design that lets developers create customized
visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the
demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum"

Sliderocket

Online slideshows

Slideshare

Shareable online slideshows

Vuvox

"Vuvox allows for the easy creation of interactive timeline-style presentations from photos, video and music. This is such a great, and
straightforward way to tell a story - create a timeline of pictures,
and add some music or other audio. In addition to being a great way to
support a lecture on a given topic, it can also be wonderful tool for
students to supplement a presentation, create an artisitic ’statement’,
or perhaps even replace a traditional paper report (sources could even
be cited in the presentation!)."

Bubbl.us

Online mindmapping with embed code

Embedr

"Embedr is a free service that lets anyone create a custom playlist of videos from the top video sites on the web. Now start building that playlist
of your favorite Jean Claude Van Damme movie clips that are spread throughout YouTube, MySpace, Vimeo, DailyMotion and more. » Learn More About Embedr"

Doink

Create and collaborate on custom animations

Mind42

Online collaborative mindmapping in your browser

Mindmeister

Online collaborative mindmapping in your browser

The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct them

Not a tool, but a lot of good how-to and why-to about mindmaps/concept maps

Exploratree

"Interactive thinking guides"

Embedit.in

lets you to upload any file or url address, and then create an embed code for it so it can be embedded in a blog or website.

Mashup Yackpack (voice), Meebo (chat), and Slideshare

Beth Kanter shows how to put these three free tools together into an interactive presentation

Text The Mob

"Project polls or message boards on a large screen, have everyone send their input via their cell phones and see results instantly!"

WeToku

online app that lets you interview someone via webcam, and records it for later viewing.

Strutta

site that lets you very easily create contests (for free) where people can enter videos, images, or text. Multiple winners can be judged by
popular vote or by the contest creators.

Jog the Web

Organize guided tours of the web, comment on pages.

Huddle

"combines online collaboration, online project management and document sharing using social networking principles"

Wifitti

"When you send a text message to Wiffiti, you txt a place instead of a person."

Flypaper

Multimedia Flash widgets for presentations

Doodle

Registration isn’t required, and it’s extremely easy to create a poll that can be embedded in a blog or website or be accessed via its url address.
Participants can leave comments, too. It appears to have been set-up
primarily to organize group events, but it can be used as a poll for
just about anything.

The 50 Tools

No kidding -- 50 more tools for web-based multimedia story-telling

Pecha-Kucha

More of a style/method than a technology, also a social activity spreading around the world: 20 Powerpoint/Keynote slides about a topic, with only
20 seconds devoted to each slide: Primer on Pech Kucha for Learning and Pecha-Kucha, an Overview

PowerPoint Karaoke

Each student has a week to bring in two slides that illustrate important concepts from the past week's readings and discussions. The slides are
pooled and randomly shuffled into groups of five. Class divides into
groups and they have ten minutes to come up with a credible five minute
or less presentation about the class material, using the slides.

Automatic Interviewer

Audio/visual recording software that allows users to record interviews or presentations for evaluation, practice, and archival. The interviewer
inputs a series of questions or prompts. Each interviewee can read the
question and record a response. Costs , but instructor will buy a
license if you want to use it.

Toondoo

Comic strip creator. Here's an example of a student project that used it.

Web Conferencing Software:

• Phone.io
  
• WizIQ
• Skype
• iVocalize
• elluminate
• Adobe Connect
• Flash meeting
• iVisit
• DimDim
• Epresence
• Twiddla
• Cover It Live
  

Wikis: Wikis are a type of website in which users, such as students, can easily add, remove, or edit the content.

Application in education:

• Teachers can engage students by using wikis to create a space for collaborative essays.
• Students can posts their reflections and share information.
• Students working collaboratively on research projects can use wiki spaces as a depot for note taking.
• Teachers can also create a compendium of concepts for the course to use as a study guide.
• Wikis can serve as teacher or classroom webpages, with the added benefit that students themselves can edit the content. For example, students can change the page that displays the weeks' spelling words.

Wiki Creation Tools:

• PB Wiki PB Wiki.com
• Wiki Spaces WikiSpaces.com
• Wiki dot WikiDot.com
• Drop.io
  

Blogs Blogs are interactive, online journals that are updated in a chronological order.

Application in Education:

• Teachers may write a blog for students in their classrooms with links to Internet sites which aide in learning and/or research tasks.
• Teachers may have students write blogs as learning activity to engage in writing reflections, story writing, research etc.
• Teachers can create blogs to post news and student work for parent viewing and for Parent communication.
• Students can self publish for peer review. Viewers can leave comments which aide the writer in his/her writing development. These are great for class homepages that offer communication tools parental outreach. Blogs are also great ways to allow students to publish work. The thing to remember is blogs are public (unless your use a tool that will allow your to create password protected blogs) If you desire a closed forum tools like Ning are better options.

Blogging Tools:

• Edublogs http://edublogs.org/
• Typepad http://Typepad.com
• WordPress http://Wordpress.com
• Blogger http://blogger.com

Microblogging: With Twitter and Plurk, users are limited to maximum responses of 140 characters (including spaces and punctuation). Accounts can be setup without charge. Social networking consists of adding friends (which means you follow their updates/posts) and interacting with others. The key question in Twitter is "what are you doing". Conversation ranges from meaningless – "I just finished a cup of coffee" – to meaningful "My partner just had a baby". Twitter enables the creation of strong social networks by sharing the "small details of life" that are often only experienced by people in physical proximity. Blogs lack the immediacy and personal communication found on Twitter. In additions to posts being displayed on a public timeline (or, if you wish to only share with your network, privacy settings are available), direct messages (of 140 character length max) are possible.

Application in Learning:

• Ask learners to "follow" notable thinkers in a particular field
• Forming social networks with other learners
• Sharing resources
• Follow conferences within a field of study
• Track current events
• Participate in conversations with experts in a discipline
• Provide an alternative avenue for student-instructor interaction
• Provide class updates and reminders
• Hashtagging (placing # in front of a word so that any post that is tagged can be followed via a single thread) topics for debate, ideas, journal entries, or any topics of interest can be tagged.
• Creating "micro novels" asking students to write a fictional story in passages of 140 character at a time. (Students can hashtag each entry so that the novel can be followed via a single thread)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. RSS Aggregators are great ways to provide info for your classes on specific topics. These tool allow your to pull a variety of RSS feeds of similar info into a single web page for research purposes or they can be used as dynamic homepages that offer a constantly changing mix of data or widgets that you would like your class to use. Examples of this could be anything from weather reports, learning games, podcasts, videos to the local news. Pageflakes has a large educator community with Pagecasts (Pageflake pages on a single topic) made by a variety of educators for you to choose from.

RSS Aggregators:

• Google Reader google.com/reader
• Pageflakes http://pageflakes.com
• Netvibes http://netvibes.com

Here are some great places to find educational RSS feeds:
Reuters News http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss- News feeds covering science, politics and entertainment Scholastic.com - Educational feeds offering lesson plans, activities and teacher bloggers.

Social Networks and Online Collaborative Work Spaces: Various web-based applications which allow groups of students to work together on common documents in various formats either synchronously or asynchronously. Many applications include to-do lists, calendars, and storage space. (These spaces are not always secure, but for classroom activities they should be fine), Some applications include blogs and wikis for group work, as well.

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as, values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.

Professional Learning Communities (PLC) or Professional Learning Networks (PLN) are a type of social network made up of teachers, administrators and students. These are social networks devoted to learning and the sharing of resources.

All Things PLC- This site is dedicated to developing resources for these communities.

Social Network Creation Sites:

• Ning http://ning.com
• Wet Paint Wetpaint.com
• Backpack IT http://backpackit.com/
  
  

Social Video, Video Sharing and Hosting: A social video network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied together by searchable video of specific types. The video sharing space is populated with numerous providers - generally supported by advertisers. The leader in the online video sharing market is YouTube.

Social Video Sites:

• Teacher Tube http://Teachertube.com
• Scholar Spot http://www.scholarspot.com
• Yahoo Video
• Oovoo
• Blip TV
• OurMedia
• VideoEgg
• YouTube
• UStream -Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.

Video Search

• Google Video
• Blinkx
• AOL Video Search

Other Educational Video Sources:

• Yale online courses
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere
• Edutopia
• UC Berkely
• online philosophy lectures

Video Creation For many educators, the first stage of video use in courses will come not through creating recordings of their own lectures, but instead by linking to video resources offered by conferences, events, and institutions. Professional video is still prohibitive for wide spread adoption at a class recording level. Even educators who have no intention of recording and editing video will benefit from using video hosted by others online.

Educators who want a short primer on "How to Shoot Great Video" should take a look at a series of video's on the subject that were created by student and teachers at the New York Film Academy.

While perhaps not fully under the umbrella of "video", the use of desktop capturing tools (like snaggit, camtasia) does allow an additional support function for detailing certain tasks or skills. These are commonly called screencasts. A free online program for screen capturing is the Jing Project

Other Web 2.0 tools:

Classroom Management/Organization- Backpack IT http://backpackit.com helps you create what it calls “pages” where you can keep to-do lists, and attach files and images for yourself or others to download. Backpack also has a calendar feature and gives you the ability to share pages or calendar events with others for collaboration. Sign up for a free account with limited features or one of a few different paid plans that range from $7 to $12 per month.

Mynote IT http://www.mynoteit.com/ is more than just a free online note-taking application. Sure, you can create an account, add your classes and use the note-taking feature to take and save notes on the site. But you can also upload notes you’ve taken in offline documents (such as Word or Notepad), keep track of upcoming assignments, access your notes via mobile phone, search the text of your notes and ask questions of the MynoteIT community through message boards.

Parent Communication- HIPCAL http://hipcal.com/" is a free online calendar and to-do list with some added features: it’ll send you e-mail or cell phone alerts about important events (great for parent communication), and you’ll be able to create group calendars to coordinate for school, work or other projects.

Search Tools- WolframAlpha WolframAlpha.com is the worlds first "computational knowledge engine". WolframAlpha is is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer. The site is extremely useful for locating scientific information, calculations, or any other piece of data that is available in the databases of the world. A brief explanation of the WolfRam Alpha search engine given by it's creator Stephen Wolfram.

Finding Dulcinea http://www.findingdulcina.com is an online search tool that is similar to Mahalo as it is indexed by humans instead of robots. Reach results are more relevant and accurate and safe-- perfect for student research.

Educator specific Dulcinea pages http://www.findingdulcinea.com

Podcasts: Podcast Alley Podcast Alley.com

The Education Podcast Network http://epnweb.org/

Google Maps and Literature Trips Online mapping is a valuable tool to help students contextualize information. Literature Trips are excellent way to provide an additional lens with which to explore books. In these activities students map all locations found in books using Google Earth. Students can then create presentations embedding Lit Trip tours in webpages, using these video tours to allow users to "fly" by each location for a satellite view of the regions covered in the book.

Literature Trips-Google Mapping Projects: http://www.googlelittrips.org/Google Lit Trips

Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds are areas online where students can interact with each other with avatars.

Application in Education
Virtual Worlds, such as Whyville, have much potential in Education by providing fun, highly motivating, places for collaboration. In these virtual worlds new snippets are constantly being added that provide additional functionality to the system. Use them as an alternative meeting space for your classes or as a venue to meet a guest speaker or another person of interest to your class. Many visualizations not possible in the classroom can be created in virtual worlds like, Teen Second Life, fairly easily and many other visualizations have already been created and can be used for free. Think of taking your class on a virtual field trip to explore the structure of a molecule or a circuit. This environment provides ample opportunity for social skills development and writing/reading skill development through a fun, non-intimidating manner.

Popular Virtual Worlds for Tweens (13 +):

• Teen Second Life http://teen.secondLife.com
• Habbo Habbo.com

Mind maps: Mind maps are diagrams used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items.

Application in Education: Teachers can utilize brainstorming approaches that can generate ideas without regard for a more formal, hierarchical organization system. Notetaking, organizing, connecting, summarizing, revising, and general clarifying of thoughts can be accomplished with this tool.

Mind-Mapping Programs:

• Mind Genius MindGenius.com
• The Brain TheBrain.com
• Smart Draw SmartDraw.com
• Mind Jet MindJet.com
• Spin Scape SpinScape.com

Definitions excerpted from Wikipedia and Learning Technology Centre

Visit EDUCATION page for a listing of the top Educator resources

If you, your school district or company is interested in a seminar or workshop on Collaborative Learning using Social Networks and Web 2.0 Tools contact David Grandison Jr. of Urban Universe Productions at the email address: David[at]Grandison.info





Feel free to contribute your own tools and ideas in the "comments" section of this blog post.