Hello and welcome back!
The Web 2.0 tool I discovered this week is called Quizlet. There are plenty of features to choose from, but the highlighted benefits would have be ease of use, portability and the ability to personalize the application. Quizlet is a web-based tool that offers a user-friendly platform to create flashcards for in and outside of the classroom. This mobile application is available for mobile devices such at the iPhone or iPod Touch, Android, Palm webOS, and Windows Phone. This is great news. This means the content I create in the classroom, potentially, can be accessed from anywhere, by anyone with a Smartphone. Awesome.
Another attractive feature for this tool is the budding possibility of increased student engagement through the highly social participant based set-up and the implications for users to also contribute to creating content. Since this tool (like many others) thrives on the user to get the most out of it, there are a number of ways this tool can be featured in the classroom. My interest particularly lies in second and foreign language learning, so adding tools like this seems like the perfect marriage of traditional language learning and modern delivery.
Speaking of language learning…it just so happens that the featured teacher for this tool was a French teacher from Oklahoma. Madam Thomas had been documenting her implementation of this tool in the classroom over a period of time and has reported exciting results. The students’ participation increased along with an overall improvement of understanding and applying gender, verb conjugation, articles and agreement, subject pronouns and demonstrated faster identification and representation of images. My personal favorite improvement from Madame Thomas’ class was that of increased confidence. This is a big part of being able to use a new language, so the social collaboration and support generated from using this tool is really exciting. I can’t wait to test drive it in the classroom!
Until next time, every good wish. Sabrina
No comments:
Post a Comment