Schoology
Schoology is a free, intuitive, and innovative learning management system (LMS) which works as a social network. This platform allows us to create, share and organize academic content as well as administrative tasks (i.e. grades or attendance). It provides a collaborative learning experience.
The instructors can create courses and invite their students to join the group, by providing them with a specific code automatically generated by the platform itself. Once the students join the course, they can access the resources or documents uploaded by the teacher.
There is a specific area to show any updates for assignments, tests, quizzes, and events from all the courses or groups. It is possible to find a mobile app for instructors and students, so tutors can manage their courses anytime and anywhere.
This app for mobile devices is a great advantage since we can set assignments or answer homework questions on our mobile device.
Instructions to access Schoology:
1- Type in www.schoology.com and click on the “Sign Up” (it is located on the upper right side of the homepage)
2- Select “Instructor” or “Student”,
3- Then, all the information required should be entered (name, e-mail and password) and click on “Register”
4- Finally, you must complete all the information such as country, city, and school or university.
How to create a course using Schoology?
1- Click on “Courses” which is located in the upper bar whose color is black; then, select the option “Create”, and choose a name, area and level.
2- The course code will automatically appear on the left side of the page; it has a green color. Students will be able to access using this code.
3- ”Start the tour” option will provide you with the opportunity to explore the site in more detail.
How to invite our students to join the course?
When creating a course, the instructor has to send to the students the code mentioned above, in a personal way or via e-mail; then, they will be able to access all the course content.
Which are the types of resources provided by Schoology?
Schoology gives us a great amount of educational resources, which are:
-Assignments: they enable the teacher to set up a task with the option of establishing a due date.
-Tests/Quizzes: teachers can create their own tests and choose the most suitable type of questions.
-Files/Links: you can upload files (512MB max) and links to your course.
-Discussions: instructors can design discussion forums for the students to give opinions about certain topics.
-Albums: you can upload pictures and organize them in albums.
How to include material in a course?
In order to include in our curse the resources mentioned above, we should follow the procedure described next:
1- Place the pointer of the mouse on the right side of the homepage.
2- Click on “Materials”, and all Schoology resources will appear.
3- Select the type of resource required fory our activity, and click on the upper left button.
4- Finally, fill in the gaps, and click on “Create”. (Picture)
Evaluation
In order to generate an evaluation in a Schoologycourse, we can make tests or quizzes in which different types of questions can be selected, i.e. Multiple Choice, True and False, Ordering, Fill in the Blank, Matching, Short Answer/Essay Question. Such activities can be added in a calendar, so students will remember their deadlines in a better way. Furthermore, this platform has a statistics application that shows us each student’s activity and the course in general. Finally, it allows us to check attendance and to give grades and notes in every homework received.
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Google Drive is a free service that allows us to store
and edit our files online; furthermore, you can share those files with other
users. In addition, Google Drive gives us the opportunity to store our website
in an easy and free way. What is great is that this server does not use
advertising. For instance, we can use it to make public our exercises created
from "Hot Potatoes".
Instructions to use Google Drive
as web hosting:
1- Login to your
Google account.
2- Click on
"Drive".
3- Create a new folder;
select the "Create" and then "Folder".
4- To change the
sharing options, you must click on a small tab located on the right side of
your folder; select "Share" and again "Share" and finally
"Change".
5- Select
"Public on the web" and "Save". You must copy your folder’s
link.
6- Now you need to
select the new folder and upload your files by clicking the "Upload"
button (located on the right side of the button "Create"). Remember
that your main file must be named "index.htm".
7- After doing the
process mentioned above, click on "Upload and save".
8- Finally, in a new
tab write: http://googledrive.com/host/paste the ID of
your link here /index.htm.
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Google Plus: Learning Communities
What is Google Plus?
Google Plus is a popular social networking service
that lets you create and organize your contacts into different "circles,
we can have certain circles for our friends, family, colleagues, students; moreover,
it also allows us to create “Learning communities”, which are explained in
further detail below. This social network offers interesting services that can
be implemented in the area of education. To access these services, we must have
a Google account. This service provides teachers and students great facilities
since it breaks the barrier of space and distance.
What are learning communities?
Learning communities are study groups for an unlimited
number of students who are willing to share information or opinions about
certain topics suggested by the teacher. These circles focus on collaborative
working, with active participation from the learners. When we create a learning
community from Google we can review and share content, documents, images, propose
some discussions and we can even create virtual classes using the famous "Google
Hangouts".
How can we create a learning
community?
1- Type in www.plus.google.com and access your
Account.
2- Click on "Communities" which is on the left
bar.
3- Click on “Create
a community."
4- Choose an option
"Public" or "Private" (a community of study is recommended
to be private).
5- Write the name’s
group and finally click on "Create a community."
Now you can start to edit and use your group. To
invite other users to your community, you must click on "Invite
people".
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Jing is a
program which allows you to record the image on your screen; this is done
through selecting any section of the screen by dragging a box over the desired
section, which could be used as a descriptive or tutorial video. Once this is done Jing allows you to either capture images or videos.
Once an image Jing has been captured, Jing gives you editing tools such as arrows to point
between items, addition of text, change colour, font and size, a highlighting tool, as well as "undo" and "redo" buttons. When
recording video it allows you to record anything that happens on the screen,
and if you have a microphone you can record sound over it as it is being
recorded. While recording you can either pause and continue later or stop when
finished.
Once you have finished with the image or video, Jing gives you the
option to either save it to your PC or upload it to screencast.com, from there
you can share the link so that other people can access the image or video.
Download here
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Box.net
Box.net is a remote storage service, which
has an easy to use interface. Here you can create folders to organise your
files, and you can even add tags in order to better categorise files and
folders. The service also works as a social network, meaning you can share all
your files with your friends on box.net.
Creating an account allows you to make your
files public in order to share them even with people who are not on box.net. If
you link a group of people to your account, such as a group of students, they
will receive an e-mail with the link to the document you want to share with
them. This is a very useful tool for us as future teachers.
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Delicious
Delicious is a page which allows you to save
all your bookmarks and access them from any computer. This page isn't as
interactive as some others, like Symbaloo, but can prove to be very useful due
to its organisation system. All information is organised according to tags,
which can be keywords or descriptors of the content of the page. This can be
very useful as it gives you the option to see all pages of similar content
together due to the tag they have. It also gives you the option to write a
short description of each page to remind you the reasons why they are useful.
Due to its function as a social network, it also gives the chance to view other
people’s profile and access the links that they find useful.
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Dropbox
Dropbox is a file
hosting service on ‘the cloud’. This basically means that it saves files in a
virtual space which can be accessed via an internet connection.
Once you install
the program onto your computer, it creates a new folder, here you can copy and
paste any file that you want to be uploaded to the cloud. Dropbox keeps all
copies of our files synchronised, that is to say, every change we make to our
documents, no matter how small, will be detected and updated instantly, while
also keeping the old version too just in case we need it.
If you install the
program on other computers, it will also make a copy of your files on that
computer and make sure to keep al copies updated and synchronised. This is
useful as it allows you, for example, to start a piece of work at university,
finish it at home and print the final product at the university the next day
without having to anything at all.
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Prezi is a page that allows you to create
didactic online presentations. It is a program very different to the
traditional PowerPoint in that is used a single canvas, instead of individual
slides. This is an infinite canvas which works as a visual map, to which you
can add text, images and videos. You then give it an order or a ‘path’ between
objects or frames created, the best part about this is that the path doesn’t
have to be lineal, like on other programs, which gives you the possibility of
creating much more interesting presentations.
These presentations can be accessed online,
but you can also download them and view them from any computer. This is a tool
that can be of great use to us as students and future teachers!
In the following link you will find an example of a short Prezi presentation.
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Symbaloo
Symbaloo is a page that allows to you save
all your links in one place, its graphic user interface makes it very easy and
fun to use. It is free to create an account which you can access from any
computer, giving you instant access to all your favourite websites. The way it
works is that it creates a new icon for each link you add, it also gives you
the option to group your links together and create something called a ‘webmix’,
these are simple submenus to help you organise links into categories. You can
also access all ‘webmixes’ created by other users, which is very useful as it
allows you to browse pages which others have already found and deemed helpful.
This is a very useful tool for us as
students and also as future teachers.
In the following link you will find an interesting "webmix" useful to help you improve your writing skills.
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