Teaching Tools
These tools can help good teachers become even better. They facilitate communication beyond the classroom setting and ease instructional routines.
Learning Management System
- UVLe (uvle.up.edu.ph) is an online course management system that helps teachers run courses from a single site. It's also a platform for sharing multimedia materials.[1] More UVLe's advantages || Why UVLe is a superior platform
Collaborative Writing
- GoogleDocs enables groups to collaborate online on documents (including docs, spreadsheets, presentation slides, forms). Strength: simultaneous (online) editing. Weakness: relatively simple formatting options. It should, however, be sufficient for most word processing requirements. (See also "GoogleDocs in Plain English" video)
- Dropbox is an alternative to GoogleDocs. Strength: you can use your favorite word processor. Weaknesses: serial operation; does not allow simultaneous editing without causing conflicts of versions; requires your own word processor (offline) compatible with the ones used by other collaborators.
- iskWiki! is a wiki partly for collaborative documentation of projects and for quickly publishing documents online. On the other hand, UVLe already has a wiki that students and teachers can use. By default, iskWiki is publicly accessible; UVLe's wiki is for class consumption only.
Online Chat
UVLe already has an online chat that can be archived for later retrieval.
- Campfire is an alternative web-chat that enables you to catch up with what you missed while you weren't logged in. Disadvantage: expensive, separate platform. UVLe already has group chat, which is free.
Shared Desktop
Shared desktop applications enable you to show people certain things remotely. Writing words about something is sometimes less effective than just showing it to people. (More info here, here)
Project Management
Project management applications can help track and manage complex projects.
RSS Reader
An RSS (Really Simply Syndication) Reader enables you to collect highly-specialized updates from various sources. An RSS feed can also be incorporated into UVLe, so the latest updates from your field can be shared with students.
Blogs
Journal writing can be an effective tool in teaching and learning.[2] In UVLe, this can be in a form of a blog that the student can publish at the UVLe site or something that the student can keep between himself and his teacher. The alternative is to have a totally public blog in places like Blogspot and Wordpress. However, blogging for a course in full view of an online public may not be appropriate for everyone.
See Also
Notes
- ↑ Videos can be embedded or incorporated into an UVLe page. Good sources of academic videos: Academic Earth, Ted Talks, Khan Academy, Video Lectures, DILC website (local contents).
- ↑ Smith, Mark (1999, 2006), 'Keeping a learning journal', the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/research/keeping_a_journal.htm.