Category: E-learning Toolkit

The issue of accessibility is very clear in my mind because of my role working with special needs students in school. I have had the opportunity to work with members of SET BC and take advantage of programs and tools that they provide for greater accessibility. In the case of my own Moodle site, there are a couple of things that I notice with respect to accessibility. The way Moodle is designed, a lot of clicking and scrolling is involved. My site requires much clicking between resources, activities and external sites, which for some, may be challenging. Also, the size of the text in Moodle is by default very small (for the activity and resource titles). I did provide alternate text for my images as prompted. When checking my site through the Markup Validation Service, four errors were returned, but I didn’t understand what they referred to.

When I hear the word “wiki”, I automatically think of referencing a Wikipedia article, although since starting the MET I have started to think of other options under the “wiki” umbrella. I have some experience using wikis either for reading or writing purposes – I did a collaborative design project in ETEC 510 last term entirely on Mediawiki, I used pbwiki to collaborate on a small project in ETEC 512 and I frequently use Wikipedia as a reference tool for anything from historical facts to movie trivia to sports statistics.

In reflecting on my past experience with wikis and connecting them to the teaching and learning process, I have found that they can be tremendous collaborative tools. When using pbwiki, I was working with a group that was less experienced with technology and the pbwiki interface allowed for “wysiwyg” content rather than html generated content. The final product was a good representation of working collaboratively in an environment that served as both the sandbox and the final product. My experience with Mediawiki was wonderful and a great lesson in the power of wikis. My design project group created an entire course in Mediawiki and the features of the interface allowed for us to feel like we were all in the same room throughout the process. The “recent changes” link allowed us to view the recent changes of other group members, which was very useful given the scope of our site. We were able to message each other and leave notes on the “discussion” pages as we went through. The process was very fluid – there was no need to compose formal emails to each other or list the changes we were making because Mediawiki is intuitive enough to allow for these things to happen through the natural process of using the interface. The use of html was a big tricky for me to get used to with some of the more complicated functions, but it seems that many wikis (like pbwiki) are available in “wysiwyg” mode so one won’t be scared off by html.

For the purpose of this toolkit activity, I checked out the educational wikis, which were much of what I expected. My interest was peaked by a suggestion in the toolkit assignment to look in the discussion page on Wikipedia. I thought of a nice controversial topic, the Holocaust, and decided to see if the discussion page was wrought with racist or politically motivated material or if it was truly indicative of a collaborative, scholarly discussion. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this discussion page consisted of dialogue between strangers about how to best represent information on the Holocaust and an academic discussion about references, points of contention and points of inclusion. I also looked up Adolf Hitler and found that the discussion tab had many posts about correct grammar and even members that would chime in at the mention of any words that could be seen as not neutral (ie. A member made an argument that using the word “atrocity” to describe Hitler’s action was not neutral enough). The Wikipedia guidelines are clearly posted and suggestions for what would make the article a “good article” are listed. I know that many people see Wikipedia as a “bad” resource but there are clearly a lot of check and balances in the large community that is genuinely interested in presenting factual information in an accessible manner. While not all articles are “example worthy”, I am confident that the growing Wikipedia community will soon fill in the gaps and that Wikipedia will become a credible source of information in the eyes of academics and educators.

This assignment was actually pretty fun because I usually view blogs as a means to procrastinate but in this case I was doing the assignment! Blogs seem to be growing exponentially and it seems that everyone “has a blog”…. Something they check consistently as part of a routine. For me, checking blogs has become something I do even before checking email. The option of RSS feeds make blogs even more accessible. On my Firefox toolbar, I have my favorites links, Delicious links and list of RSS feeds making these items “mindless” to access. I’ll admit it, my first exposure to blogs was not through anything news related or education related, it was through gossip blogs like perezhilton.com, laineygossip.com etc. I then branched out into blogs of friends from university or even people that were only acquaintances. I used to feel a bit creepy getting the inside scoop on the lives of others but hey, if you blog, it’s out there! I think that blogs are genuinely valuable tools that are here to stay. They are easy ways to connect people with common interests through dialogue that is often so honest, you feel as if you are having a conversation. I had a grade 5 student last year who has brain cancer and her mom blogs through caringbridge.com. I am still able to follow her though every round of chemo and every success and setback as if I never left her life. Furthermore, this blog started by a mom who just needed an outlet for her emotions, has received anonymous donations for her daughter and a paid job for mom writing for a publication for oncology parents.

I have only briefly experimented myself with blogging. Having a blog served a purpose when I was traveling in Europe and wanted to communicate with a number of people but didn’t want to send individual emails or blanket emails that felt rigid because they were trying to cover the interests of everyone from Granny to my 20 year old brother to my coworkers. I used travelpod.com and loved it for the ease of use and convenience of a “one shot deal”. I also liked that I wasn’t forcing my witty commentary on peoples’ email inboxes. For images, I actually uploaded to photobucket.com because it was the quickest and had a link on my blog to this site.

The sites suggested with “Top 100 Education Blogs” had some great blogs that I had never seen. I especially like how these blogs can provide an outlet for anything education related, be it rants about hot topics, resources, suggestions or just a running commentary. From an educational standpoint, I can see blogs used many ways for teaching and learning with elementary students. Much has been written about blogs as a replacement for journals and with the emergence of ePortfolios as significant assessment and employment tools, blogs will only become more prevalent and more useful.