Thing #15

Wikis are a internet tools that to be honest scare me to death. I do not really understand what they are and how they work. But I do know that almost anyone can edit the materials on a wiki and that totally scares me. Although that scares me, it excites me at the same time. I see how a wiki can be highly useful in a 21st century classroom. You can create a page for your class and have all of the materials and assignments for the class accessible to the students at all times. All the students would have to do was post and edit their particular assignments. I enjoyed the sandbox wiki for the apsu23things. It gave me a very minor experience on how wikis work. It also opened my eyes to how simple and effective that this tool can be.

The thing that I found most interesting about wikis is the fact that you and another individual from across the globe can contribute and edit the same materials by using a wiki. By allowing multiple people to contribute to a project or on information you get variety, creativity, and a solid finished product. However, you are putting much trust in another individual whose credibility could be questionable. This is what I found interesting about wikis.

Thing #14

To begin with, I used the bubbl.us mind map website. After about five minutes of using this tool I found it to be highly useful for 21st century classroom. This tool could be used to brainstorm ideas for a paper, project, or just about anything else that you could imagine brainstorming about. I just used the trial and error method to learn how to use this tool and I have to say that it was highly simple. I brainstormed about my activities here at Austin Peay and had the whole storm done within ten minutes. This tool simple, useful, and most importantly effective. I choose this tool because I liked the name.

The second tool that I explored was Gliffy flowchart site and I feel in love with this tool. I was able to express the thoughts that I wanted to extremely quick and effectively. I showed my chart to a friend and they were able to follow the flow of my day by simply evaluating the chart. I wished that I had known that this was an available resource much sooner in my academic career because it would have proved to have been useful. I will definately make the most of this tool in the future. I choose this tool because it was the first tool that was listed on the assignment.

Thing #13

Zoho Writer amazed me. The more I explored the more I found that I liked. It is basically like a free online version of Microsoft Word. You can do all of the things that you can do on that software, and the best part of it is that it is completely free. I basically wasted all of my money buying Word. I enjoyed how anything that I composed on this site I could directly post onto a blog. I also enjoyed the fact that I could work on my projects both on and offline and the two would sync just like an iPod does with iTunes when connected. This is a truly awesome site that I foresee myself using.


https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/17OkUNuuVXKGoe6-wt0zcaT3Gmo-YCpvm8xGsyeYXCDI/edit?pli=1
Google Docs was highly confusing to me, which made it hard for me to understand. From what I learned, students can use this site to collaborate on projects together. They have access to presentations, word documents, drawing boards, and several other formats. The students can then share their creations with one another so that they can learn from each other. This is how I see that students can collaborate using this site.

I prefer Zoho more because of its simplicity. I also feel that it is easier to share my creations with Zoho as it has a way to directly put things directly onto my blog unlike Google. Zoho all the way.