# Ideas for e-tivities

Edited by Enda O Reilly, 2/18/2012 3:48 PM

Tags:

Suggestion 1

Perhaps this may give us some ideas for our Week 3 assignment

http://educational-blogging.wikispaces.com/

I came across this really cool use of facebook before

http://multimedialearning.com/abraham-lincoln-and-facebook-for-learning/

I think it would be an interesting way to show different angles/sides of argument/views/positions to use all the elements in facebook like profile, timeline. You could go anywhere with it. could be incorporated into some aspect of the eactivity.

Niamh.

Suggestion 2

From Angela

An activity created for either induction day or the week after induction

Suggest that the activity would be to help students become familiar with the technology that will be used on the course

It could also be around creating that safe environment that was discussed on the first week in the ice breaker thread.

I was thinking that this would be a generic topic that we all could use at some stage in the future if we were running a blended / online course

Not sure exactly how it could be done but in a quick chat with Deb, Mark and Niamh we mentioned a treasure hunt. This could be in the form of clues left by the instructor for the teams. Teams have to come back with the answer to get the next set of clues. The clues take the participants on a tour of the technology being used eg web courses.

Alternative is that the group is divided into 2 teams and they have to create a quiz for the other team based on information that is provided in the various areas on web courses.

Suggestion 3

Debbie also had a suggestion of an activity around peer assessment. The activity would be similar to the one run in the Learning theories module where we created a picture and each group was asked to give feedback on the picture. Aim would be to get students working together as a group to create something and then get them to provide feedback to the other groups

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suggestion for Peer Assessment

Students are assigned to an online team of 4-5 students for duration of course. They communicate with the instructor and amongst themselves using online chat rooms and threaded discussion messages to group folders. They work together in teams to address problems/assignments.

Tutors assign an assignment – text and video/audio, to each team. Students individually indentify 2-3 major points from the assignment. They then discuss each point as a team and submit the team’s top 3 points.

Peer Assessment by the class voting online to decide which top three from all submissions are the most important points.

Tutor then identifies which are in fact the top 3 points from the assignment.

The model to be used would be Communities of Practice. Each assignment would take between two and three weeks for completion.

What will students learn from Peer Assessment?

They will learn the social aspect of learning because students are part of a group. They will have individual and group accountability. They will learn the positive support of and for the group. They will learn by exploring online resources and evaluating the relevance of them and then constructing their own meaning. They will also learn critical analysis skills by evaluating all the submitted points to determine the top three.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suggestion 4

Mark had an idea based in the context of retraining people for another career

Suggestion 5

One possible idea to add to the above (Enda)

Another activity might be around supporting our own peers who don't have the level of skill and knowledge in elearning that we have gained over the past number of months (I hope). We did mention somewhere in our debate that it was seemless for a good teacher to move from f2f to online teaching. Our focus could be on our peers as learners using a VLE such as Blackboard for the first time. Could be something like what Angela mentioned early i.e. leaving learners questions, so that learners will have to search around the VLE to find the answers and maybe expand on this to include some element of group work.

Suggestion 6

Edel :

I am liking the facebook idea. Read an intresting article about the benfits and negatives of using facebook for e activities. I like the idea of a group or class having a facebook group page and having short disucssions after class or topic. Facebook doesn;t really have the capabilities like blackboard for a proper disucssion board. However it is accessable on all smart phones!! Or have a calender of events and allowing students to disucss thoughs/ideas about the task, assignment, field trip. Each event would have a page.. student and tutor can add comment, links etc. The video/artcile would support an upcomming lecture or past one. Students must support their opinions by acadmeic writting links.

Developing that idea a bit more using the communities of practice model or community building. A video or link to an artice could be posted followed by a controversial statement to encourage disucssion. Later in the day/week a quiz could be set up for the student to take, adding interaction and it could work as a self accessment or a poll on student opinion.

Mark:

Advts of Facebook:

Had a look at the link provided by Edel, Facebook seems to have some good attributes

Regarding Facebook groups, the functional unit analysed in our study, the platform initially

provides technological support for the following items:

–– The group’s profile, administered by the group creator/page owner.

–– The group’s wall for members.

–– The group’s discussion boards.

–– The group’s photos.

–– The group’s videos.

–– The group’s events.

Facebook’s strengths for collaborative working are as follows:

•• Simplicity and speed of creating and administering a work group. From his or her private profile, an

individual user creates a new work group and invites other participants to join.

•• Simplicity of use of native tools. Facebook’s basic functions (wall, discussion boards, photos, etc.)

are easy to use, accessible, intuitive and visually well-structured. A group can start interacting

immediately after it has been created.

•• Chat, messaging and image tagging. These functions, which are particular to Web 2.0

environments, are available on the social networking site. However, tagging is only available for

images, and the main objective is to tag people in photos. However, there is nothing stopping

us from using this function to document graphics, for example.

•• A high degree of external connectivity. Due to Facebook’s extraordinary expansion, the social

presence of brands, advertising and events has compelled many external content supply

services to implement Facebook connectivity. Indeed, it is possible to assert that this social

networking site is a Web 2.0 product and that its enormous uptake has forced many external

services to adapt to the new social philosophy or, in other words, to fit into the Web 2.0

environment.

•• Internal expansion capacity. Thanks to the development of the site’s own applications and to

independent programmers, both users and groups can expand its native capacities by using

NB Weakness

Facebook does not natively provide synchronous bidirectional audio and video. While users can
leave messages and video recordings, it is not possible to use this channel for bidirectional
real-time conversations

Using facebook for e actiities - 63-2200-1-PB.pdf

Suggestion 7: Theorists on Web 2.0 Niamh

The class is a distance learning post graduate introduction to learning theories class.

I propose a role-play activity, centered in facebook and a blog.

The roleplay activity is to become a group of dead (or alive) educational theorists all brought back to life to engage with each other on web 2.0.

The whole class and the tutor have profiles in one closed facebook group.

Within this network, The class is broken into 3 groups. behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism.

Each group member is an influential theorist within the respective school of thought. (Dewey, Skinner, Piaget etc) So, basically, there is a closed facebook group, and everyone is friends. One 3rd of them are Behaviourist characters. There would be (behaviourist) is brackets after the student who is representing Skinner. Everyone learns from each others facebook pages and links to their individual blog about lifes work and thoughts. The time line would be used on facebook to document events. ('Today I made a dog salivate. Woop woop!')

A closed facebook group would keep the facebook pages contained. This is created by the tutor, who ensures that each student has a character and a page set up.

Every student will be connected within the closed facebook group, and they will create personal timelines on their facebook profiles and also links to interests, and a delicious account and their blog. Every student comments and asks questions to the other students.

There are not 3 teams within the class. Each member just happens to be representing one of the 3 learning disciplines.

The purpose of the exercise is to learn from each other and at the end write a comparative reflection about the three schools of thought.

A model that would apply to this are the collaborative learning model.