Learning from Classmates

I really enjoyed learning from my other two classmates about new ways to organizing your online life. I learned about two new two new online tools, dropbox and Xmarks. While dropbox was a new tool to me we have been using a similar tool M+ box for our MAC classes so the concept and the uses were not new to me. But Xmarks was an entirely new concept for me, I never thought about how crucial bookmarks could be.

I have about 7 bookmarks that I use on a fairly regular basis but I never really thought about how much these help and how much I could help students or colleagues by sharing book marks. I thought if we could share particular bookmarks with students and both edit this list it would be a good way to control research and help students manage and learn how to navigate the internet. I think that you could quite easily use this tool to scaffold your students research. Starting by having more control as a teacher and then as the year moves forward allow the students more and more opportunities to add or subtract resources from you Xmark folder. I have not yet explored Xmark but I could also see it as a good tool for connecting with other teacher in your department at school and sharing resources.

Dropbox seemed like a useful tool as well but very similar to google drive which I am more familiar with. I think it would take a little more convincing to get me to work with dropbox but it again would be a great way to share information with students and colleges.

Discussing new technologies was not the only way that I learned from my classmate thought. On Monday in class we played a modified 20 questions game and while I understand the other cohort has not played yet and I will not reveal too many details here (because I know my blog is not private) I will say that I learned a lot about the way my classmates think. I did not participate as much as I think I normally would and just observed what when on and how everyone developed their questions. It was very interesting to do this and I think that when I am a teacher I hope that I can design a way for me to sit back and watch my students develop questions like this and get a bit of an insight into their procedural knowledge.