Old tools for the new term

Photo from flickr user Indiamos

Categories: Other

I have been spending a little time in the last week or two of the holidays thinking about what I could use with classes to make it easy to share work, submit and mark. The obvious place to start is Edmodo. I have been speaking to Mr Ross about Glow, which seems a natural solution to this, but until such times as we are fully up and running with this, and probably beyond, I'm going to keep using this brilliant web application. We trialled this with second year last term and without using to anywhere near it's full potential the benefits are obvious. All homeworks are in one place, all the marks recorded, space for meaningful comments, the option to keep examples of work public or private and the security of the platform all impressed me, and I felt that students responded well too- the quality of work submitted was very pleasing and feedback revolved around the ease of use for the class. I have created a group for every class that I'll be teaching now and I'll introduce this tomorrow.

The other thing that I have been playing around with is posterous, being very impressed with the way that John Johnston has used his posterous to share photos, audio, screenshots, video and more, all at the click of an e-mail. If I am teaching a lesson and something is going on which I think might be worth an audience, I can get this from my phone to the web as soon as the class ends. Posterous also allows cross-posting which means I will be able to blog here through this too, so students only really need one address to find everything. Also significantly declutters the process of blog posting- no need to worry about putting video into vimeo or finding an audio host and so on. Last year I used Posterous with a class, but don't think I really 'got' it until recently, and I am really looking forward to using it in a more constructive way.