oettayn's Blog

My Task 2 Plan

oettayn — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:13:37 +0000

Here is the link to my assessment task 2 plan: http://members.optuszoo.com.au/~taynguyen79/level2/OET.htm

www.vyew.com hosts online classroom

oettayn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:21:38 +0000

Vyew is a browser-based conferencing and collaboration platform that provides instant visual communication. Vyew’s multimedia workspace enables shared viewing of presentations, files, photos and one’s desktop. Vyew also provides the following tools for education:

Hosting online classroom sessions for correspondence courses with real-time interactions
Whiteboarding
Annotating
Text chatting
Phone conferencing
Posting course syllabuses
Collaboration space for peers
Soliciting anonymous feedback
Allowing students to review past online sessions

Twitter.com offers microblogging.

oettayn — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:15:16 +0000

Twitter.com offers microblogging and posts are limited to 140 characters. Twitter is the most popular microblogging site. Users can send and receive messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, and by third party applications. Adapting Twitter as a micro blogging platform / social network in education can have it advantages when compared with full blogging. Twitter message takes less than a minute, and often just a few seconds. There is rarely any organization, preparation, investigation, analysis or other time-consuming activity. Twitter could be ideal for reminding students about homework, trips and such things, especially as they can enter their mobile phone number to be alerted when one of their ‘friends’ updates their account. The advantage is that you don’t need to know the phone numbers of students to get messages onto their device: they are the ones who authorize their mobile phone from the website and they subscribe to your Twitter feed. Twitters is very easy to sign-up and free to use. Twitter is fun to use and may, therefore, be effective in engaging students in discussions who do not need to write longer essays. Twitter can provide a platform for students working collaborative — across schools, countries, etc…Twitter is basically a potential alternative to email, instant messaging and discussion forums, as ways of communicating with students.

Zoho.com offers more than online word processing

oettayn — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:33:43 +0000

Zoho provides a wide range of online applications – including a word processor, a wiki creator and project management software. You can compare Zoho online applications with locally installed applications with a mobile phone and a land line telephone. With online applications, you can get access anywhere. Before the invention of the mobile phone, photographs had to be given to friends or sent to them via mail. With camera phones, users can simply click a button and the pictures are on their way. Zoho brings similar innovations to the areas they work in. Sure, you can word process in both Zoho Writer and Microsoft Word, but Zoho gives you the ability to track your revisions and collaborate with others. Try doing that in Microsoft Word. Zoho also provides the Microsoft Office plug-ins and the Desktopize software which helps to make Zoho a storage space for users’ Microsoft Office documents. Zoho also used Google Gears to make Zoho work offline in the Firefox browser.

Zoho Education future release offers automatic testing and grading, along with the ability to create assignments with deadlines. Students get instant messaging floating over the other tools; the ability to share their material and access other shared material; the ability to have private conversations and/or group discussions; and the ability to participate in forums that can be attached to any lesson, assignment, learning object or general topic. The calendar will read RSS feeds and other standard data formats, and will allow others to subscribe to it. Zoho Education also offers most of what Blackboard offers in an interface that is very simple.

Social software

oettayn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:21:13 +0000

Social software, also known as collaborative software, is a group of programs that allow users to interact and share data with other users. Most technologies are classified as social software such as blog, face-book and wiki. These web 2.0 technologies were never intended for the world of education. This post will only focus on defining social software within an educational context. Social software is not a learning resource until it has been actively engaged and executed. Social software in education has the following attributes:

delivers communication between groups
enable communication between individuals
provides resource gathering and sharing
delivers collaborative collecting and indexing of information
provides syndication to assist the personalisation of priorities
provides tools for knowledge aggregation and creation of new knowledge
allows multi-platform delivery of content

For more details on social software check out Evolution of social sofware

Web 2.0 Technology

oettayn — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:53:51 +0000

Web 2.0 technology aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users through web design. Web 2.0 does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.

Below are comparisons between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	–>	Google AdSense
Ofoto	–>	Flickr
Akamai	–>	BitTorrent
mp3.com	–>	Napster
Britannica Online	–>	Wikipedia
personal websites	–>	blogging
evite	–>	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	–>	search engine optimization
page views	–>	cost per click
screen scraping	–>	web services
publishing	–>	participation
content management systems	–>	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	–>	tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness	–>	syndication

Having analysed some of the current ICT treands in education, it has occurred to me that the next generation of educational tools are web-based web 2.0 technologies. This not only reduces the cost for required software but allows all students to have the same access to tools through the web. We can not assume all students will have the software to construct web pages or even to type up a document or spreadsheet on their computer at home. Classified as Web 2.0 tool, they reduce cost of purchasing additional software and allows everyone to have free access to the same software online. An example of an online office package is http://zoho.com/. This blog will mainly focus on the new emerging web 2.0 software and their implications with education.