Dear friends,
Now when the eighth week is over I can say that it was a period that besides the online tools that were not very complicated like: Hot Potatoes, http://www.toolsforeducators.com, http://bogglesworldesl.com introduced also Course Management Systems (ANVILL) and other web resources (www.blogger.com, www.nicenet.org ) which were not CMS but could be used as platforms for managing the teaching/learning process. About four years ago I had experienced e-learning when I took part in a distance training based on another popular CMS called MOODLE. In my opinion these are valuable tools and I know that in Scandinavian countries they implement deeply e-learning but at least in Moldova we are not ready yet to base our courses integrally on CMS because not all the students have a computer and in many schools they don’t have multimedia labs offering free internet accesss. Instead, as our colleagues proved, this kind of tools can be efficient platforms for combining different sequences to build complex learning units.
From the list of the proposed online tools I would like to mention the Hot Potatoes software which can bring many benefits because you don’t need to know programming to easily make different types of exercises with this application and share them. Also I like that you can integrate pictures and sounds in it and receive instant feedback. A good thing is that it is very popular and there are many websites on which teachers upload ready made exercises,so you can save time just by dowloading them.
However I think that the teacher must be very creative to make these exercises interactive, to involve the students otherwise there will be too much focus on the forms and less communication.
So, as we have already said these are just tools and their efficiency depends on how the teachers know to use them.
Best wishes,
Ion
Dear Ion. I would like to start my comment with your last sentence: “…these are just tools and their efficiency depends on how the teachers know to use them.” I think you’ve said it all. The Internet is indeed full of tools and resources. And I have to say that every week is the opportunity to discover new ones. The big issue is now how to better ‚insert’ them in our daily practice. Beyond the teacher mastering the tools, there is the question of students too. The situation in Africa in general, and in Burkina Faso ( my country) in particular is quite the same as yours: not all students have computers. What is interesting is that the course we are following also revealed that we can do ‚small efficient” things with minimum tools: I’m thinking of the one computer, the video projector, etc.
ReplyDeleteI have used Hot Potatoes for a while, and I agree that it is quite simple to use.
See you soon, online!