Customizing home pages: increased productivity or "one more thing to do"? The concept of a customized homepage is exciting in theory. The site Are You Making Your Life Easier...?http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/05/15/are-you-making-your-life-easier-by-using-a-personalized-start-page/ is visually chaotic, and overloaded with choices lacking concrete models for applications. The best summary was on the Online Education Database: http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/top-25-web20-productivity-apps.
Online calendars are wonderful for people who enjoy planning and attending lots of meetings, and they have obvious applications for media specialists who need to maintain schedules for lab and equipment use. They would also be useful for math and science teachers who can assign bookwork and lab reports weeks in advance. They are somewhat less useful for languages, where the communicative outcomes of daily work are less tangible--at least at the lower levels of instruction. As a regular list-maker, I already have the habit of making lists, and model that habit to students in the classroom all the time. The issue is finding the time to update every day. Maybe when these tools evolve a little more and accounts do not get wiped away after two weeks of inactivity (per information posted on that site)?
The MPS network would not let me access a couple of the customizable homepage sites at school, but they certainly are an improvement over the matrix currently in place. They are a constructive tool for teachers to develop a personal "signature" that will attract students and other interested parties to view their practice and to make it more transparent.
Online calendars are wonderful for people who enjoy planning and attending lots of meetings, and they have obvious applications for media specialists who need to maintain schedules for lab and equipment use. They would also be useful for math and science teachers who can assign bookwork and lab reports weeks in advance. They are somewhat less useful for languages, where the communicative outcomes of daily work are less tangible--at least at the lower levels of instruction. As a regular list-maker, I already have the habit of making lists, and model that habit to students in the classroom all the time. The issue is finding the time to update every day. Maybe when these tools evolve a little more and accounts do not get wiped away after two weeks of inactivity (per information posted on that site)?
The MPS network would not let me access a couple of the customizable homepage sites at school, but they certainly are an improvement over the matrix currently in place. They are a constructive tool for teachers to develop a personal "signature" that will attract students and other interested parties to view their practice and to make it more transparent.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment