Collaborative online writing

Wikis are a very good resource to work collaborative writing, it provides a lot of advantages to the students and the teacher. In the wikis students can develop a writing and have other classmates to edit or correct what they have written. A peer correction would help students realizae their mistakes, accepts classmate's opinion, argue and defend their own point of view, and the best advantage of all is that with this continue process of editing the writing would be improving more each time someone checks it out. Besides it helps students to be critic (in a good way) a writing and realize the mistakes that they make sometimes. However as we are working with an online resource we need to be aware of the comments or editions students make on each wiki, and that they do not have any disturbing content that might distract or offend other people.

Using learning technologies for school links projects

In this module I really learned something that never thought we could do in our country, though it is normal for us to speak with people from other countries I never thought of working with another school abroad. Such interaction with other school or country could help approach the unit being studied in a more real way, we can focus on the mail objective without explaining too much of something they students might not need to focus on at the moment (depending on the program something focusing on vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc might be not really the main goal of our class). So I think this link project can help us have our students more motivated, make them actually produce the content of the object they are working on, be critical, acquire responsibility since they will be working with someone abroad, and have an interaction with a foreigner.

To carry this in my school I think the best technology to be used with links projects is facebook, email, and depending on the ability and interest of students use skype. And I would probably try it first with the older kids, that’s 6^th grade.

Cyber well-being

This was a very important topic we talked about, though we have seen how amazing the use of technology in the classroom can be, we need to pay close attention to some of the things that can wrong when using it, and by that I mean how dangerous or appropriate it can or can’t be for our students.  I have always looked at technology as an easier way to find information, resources, audios, discussion forum but never really pay much attention to those advertisements or pop windows that might be disturbing (probably because I am already an adult and know what to exclude or not). The idea that might be cyber-bullying makes me a bit nervous, and to be honest I had never heard about it. When working with any of the technologies we need to prepare our students in advance to be careful when looking for information, to know the source of the information, the author, of valid it is, its update, and be a bit critical when choosing a web site. To help with this, I think the best is to notify the parents about the activities that are being carried out so they might have a little control on them at home and also provide help to their children if they need it when they are working on this.