I have already discussed the growth in the number of MOOCs available for people to engage with, especially courses that link to the work within the education field. I am currently working through some new courses that might be of Interest and they are
Web 2.0 Tools University of Houston USA
ICT in Primary Education Institute of Education London
Both of these can be found on the Coursera website and are aimed at teachers and librarians, as well as other interested parties.
The Web 2.0 course looks at a huge range of ‘Tools’ that you can put in your digital toolbox and divides the materials into a series of segments such as
- Collaboration,
- Communication,
- Creativity and
- Lifelong Learning.
- Whilst it dealt with some tools that I had come across before it also introduced me to many that I had never seen. It also gave me ideas about how they can be used in the classroom.
With this course one of the great finds was a tool called Jing, linked with Screencast.com. this is on my dashboard and enables me to highlight an image or piece of text and then copy and paste to a file. It has already proved invaluable as it is so easy to use.
The ICT in Primary Education is particularly good as it is from a UK based institution and more examples relate to our experience. Subject areas include
- 21st century school
- ICT making a difference
- Pedagogical changes through ICT
- Technology Opportunities
- Inspiring examples and implementation concerns
I am currently only part of the way in to this but it is proving very useful. What I am finding is that the more courses I do about modern technologies the more they start to overlap and I get to use a particular tool in different ways. One of the real discoveries was a package called ThingLink. This enables you to take a picture and then pinpoint areas of interest which can have information, links to websites, video or photos attached to them. Unfortunately I cannot have the software on this site as it is a third party software, however there is great potential for a whole range of topics.
Futurelearn is just finishing a course on
Cyber security Open University
and will soon start a course on
Childhood in the Digital age, also run by the Open University.
The former was really intended for adults and there was an emphasis on personal and business security. However the information is relevant to all of us and I think that elements would be extremely useful for teens as they start to use the web in a different way, e.g. online banking, in the workplace.
The forthcoming course look at the effects of technology on young people and asks what the benefit and dangers are. It also looks at the world of education and how much should the digital impact on the classroom. It should make for a fascinating follow on to the previous courses. I am looking forward to starting in a couple of weeks.