I have chosen to research WiZiQ. This site is free to join and once you have created a page you can use it as a central place to link everything. I have found that some of the sites we use for FSO are blocked by my district settings, such as viddler. This site allows me to save video and documents in one location as well as link to outside places. I can then give my students an invitation to view the items. I think i can best use this site for students who are having absence issues. I have one student in particular who has chronic painful migraines and is under a neurologists care. She has missed many days and is very behind. I could video and edit the lessons I teach each day and upload them to the page, along with any assignments or even lab assignments we do. This way she can view the day's lesson and assignments and not be as far behind. I can also create a copy of any test i create on this site to share with the students. Again I plan to use these features mainly for absent students or is students need to review for a exams.
I can also use this site for part of my ARP. Since the data I plan to collect is student feedback, what better way for them give feedback than to see the lesson as an observer rather than a participant and comment on it.
Other interesting features of this site are the free public classes. people can sit in on classes provided by other members on any subject. You roll over "learn" and a menu appears as seen in the picture
From there you go to "Attend Online Classes" and you are brought to a page where you can search for a subject and see what classes are offered and when:
I think this site will really help me this year.
This is a very interesting site. It reminds me of Moodle.org the open source ware my district uses. I like the look of this format better. It is more streamlined, visually interesting and looks easier to use. Do students need an email to store work here? Thanks for sharing this site. I'd like to bring it to the attention of my district supervisors.
ReplyDeleteWow! What a great idea for helping students who are out of the classroom a lot! I think it is a great idea to video the day's lesson and make it available to your students. As you said in your blog, I think it would be very useful for students who are absent or for studying for tests. I think you could also use WiZiQ to show parents what a typical lesson looks like. You could also use the videos of yourself to create an archive of your lessons for the year. This could allow you to reflect on what worked and what didn't.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this tool! I think it will be very useful!
It's great that there are free alternatives (but not as robust) to LMS's like Blackboard. I think that teaching skills online is one of the best ways to actually teach in the future. Imagine if students would just need to watch a few videos until they picked the skills necessary to demonstrate them in a virtual classroom. In my department, we are actually thinking about dropping Blackboard and use a new LMS, but we need to host it in our own servers. Moodle is one of the contenders, and I wish this Web 2.0 tool was transportable and I think WIZIQ would complain if 26,000 students and faculty would just start to show up :)
ReplyDeleteI love your idea of video taping your lessons to have them available for students that miss your class. It shows that you care deeply for your students success. I love the WiZiQ site. I wonder if it will be a requirement for all teachers to have this site available to all students in the future! It is a great tool to use, and I enjoyed reading about how you use it in your classroom.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great tool. Been able to help students out of the classroom is amazing. A real teacher have to care for their students success. This tool is helpful too if you want to show the parents how is your class and if a student have any doubt about any topic in the class, they can go to see the video to see the class again. Great tool!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great site, like your district many sites are blocked by my district and I find myself saving to this or that so that I can show my students. Then I have students who say, how can I show this to my parents. This site would allow me to do just that! Awesome tool!
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