Creating an Effective online Portfolio

Creating an Effective online Portfolio: 40+ Tips, Tools & Inspirations. http://t.co/KBim2le

— Steve Yuen (@scyuen) February 13, 2011

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10 Essential Online Tools for Teaching and Learning

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I have made numerous presentations on the free technology tools for teachers in the past MECA conferences and have always received very positive comments from the audience. Because of the great success I had in the past, I gave another presentation this year which was somewhat similar with what I presented in previous years. However, my presentation this year focuses on 10 selective essential online tools that I believe are powerful as well as valuable to teachers and students. Below is the presentation I recently delivered at the 2011 MECA Conference on February 8, 2001 in Jackson, Mississippi. Please feel free to make comments or recommend your free online tools. Thanks.

http://goo.gl/AFT1V

 

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Using Diigo in the Classroom

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Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows teachers and students to save websites into a public or private library, share them with others in your network, highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. The annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo or a special link forwarded to others.

Diigo provides rich tagging capability as well as folders for better information organization, and group annotation for better collaboration. Diigo allows students to search the full-text of a teacher’s collections, or just within a teacher’s highlights. Also, Diigo allows teachers to highlight critical features within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.  Furthermore, teachers can create a free teacher account through which they can create student accounts.  Diigo’s student accounts require no email address, can be kept private, and can also be grouped so that students can share resources they find with each other. Diigo is more than just a social bookmarking tool.  It is a powerful research tool and a knowledge sharing community for teachers and students.

The following presentation was recently delivered at the 2011 Mississippi Educational Computing Association (MECA) Conference in Jackson, Mississippi on February 8, 2011.  Please feel free to provide comments and suggestions.  Thanks.

 

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Web Tools Applied to Teaching

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I came across this guide offering 20 Web tools that can be used to empower teaching and learning.  It is a great resource for EFL/ESL teachers.

http://issuu.com/anamariacult/docs/webtoolsappliedtoteaching

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A Vision of 21st Century Teachers

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An inspiring video showing eighteen teachers’ view on the technology integration in the classrooms and 21st Century skills for students.

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Social Networking in E-Learning Courses: Building Sense of Community

While social networking shows great potentials for e-learning in general, little is yet known about how to integrate social networking focusing on building a sense of community, particularly in e-learning courses.  With this in mind, Dr. Harrision Yang and I conducted a case study almost two years ago to design, develop, and integrate social networking into two graduate courses for the purpose of building a sense of community, improving communications and interactions, and promoting student-centered collaboration.

The results of the study were written for a book chapter in our recent book, Collective Intelligence and E-learning 2.0:  Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking, published by IGI Global. Also, the study was presented at the 2009 AECT/SICET International Conference this week in Louisville, Kentucky.  To learn more about this study, please view the presentation shown below.  We welcome your comments and suggestions.

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Footnote

Footnote.com is a unique place where original historical documents are combined with social networking to create an interesting experience involving the stories of the past. The Footnote.com collections feature documents relating to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, WWII, U.S. Presidents, historical newspapers and naturalization documents.

Footnote.com is a great online repository for original documents by hosting millions of records and supports an online community of people that are passionate about a variety of topics relating to history. I think the service is particularly useful for teachers and students in social studies, history, U.S. government classes. Footnote allows students to access thousands of primary source documents and photos, and create online history reports. Students can post the URLs of their history reports online and allow others to leave comments on their reports. In addition, students can add annotations and comments to things they find on Footnote, create their own Story Pages and Spotlights, maintain a gallery of their favorite Footnote images, upload their own images to their gallery, as well as annotate and print any Free Titles or documents.

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