Wikis, blogs and playlists - DNLE Assignment 1

The tools that I decided to evaluate are wikis, blogs and playlists. I think these are most commonly used tools in education.

There are a few blogging sites: wordpress, blogger, edublogs, posterous, etc. All of these blogging sites offer free accounts as well as paid ones. Blogs are online diaries which can be used by educators and students to write their reflections upon what they have learnt or what they have taught and what could have been done differently. However, the use of blogs is not limited only to that. Posterous and Blogger are probably the easiest ones to set up but if one has trouble with it, there are a lot of video tutorials on Youtube which teachers and students can watch to overcome the problems in setting up the blog. As the tutorials are freely available online, I don't think there is a need for special training. As the content of blogs is user-created, educators should first check it for credibility and accuracy before referring their learners to it.

Positive aspects:

• easy to set up and use;


• there is a lot of support available on the Web in the form of video and written tutorials;


• they can be made public and private, which is a great fetaure in education;


• they can improve the blogger's writing skills.

Negative aspects which can be overcome and turned into positive ones:

• pages on blogs are static and all the posts go to the home page;


• posts and comments are not moderated before they are posted so there is always the risk that someone will post something inappropriate and only the administrator of the blog can delete the post, which means that offensive comments will be visible until the administrator sees them;


• the teacher will have to decide when to delete a comment as this may be viewed as abuse of freedom of speech by the learners.

As with blogging sites, there are quite a few sites that offer free wiki spaces for educators. These are pbworks, wikispaces, wetpaint, etc. The content in wikis is also created by users but in contrast to blogs, wikis are mainly used for collaborative writing. Wikis are not very difficult to use and there are online video tutorials available. However, it may be a good idea to conduct a short training course on how to create a wiki for educators so that they are comfortable with creating one.
In terms of pricing and school logo inclusion, schools can choose the wikimatrix site to choose the wiki that is most appropriate to their needs.

Positive aspects:

• great tools for collaborative writing;


• page history is available so teachers can reverse a page back to previous times;


• as many pages as needed can be created.

Negative aspects:

• pages can be deleted by mistake;


• when doing team writing, an individuals ideas are incorporated into one whole and success is down to the team not the individual, which may demotivate the individual who came up with most ideas;


• if a not hosted wiki is chosen, then a special training is required for the person who will be responsible for wiki hosting and maintenance.

I cannot find many sites that offer playlist creation services. The only one that I know of is MentorMob which allows users to create playlists of subject-related video and articles and to create quizzes related to the content. The playlists and embeddable and can be embedded into a blog or a wiki that schools or educators run for their learners (a mentormob playlist). The tools is free and the support from the team is great. They respond to email within one day and are very helpful. However, educators have to watch the videos and read the articles they add to the playlist to make sure that content is reliable and accurate.

Positive aspects:

• easy to create;


• can be embedded into a blog or wiki;


• learners can add content to it too.

Negative aspects:

• quizzes sometimes are not saved the first attempt and created questions are not saved so users have to write them again;


• playlists are collaborative and any user can add content to it which may not be reliable. However, this can be deleted;


• if a playlist is long, users may become demotivated and may not want to go through it.

In my opinion, every digital tool has advantages and disadvantages. If handled with thought, the tools can add value to education.

This work was chosen to be among the best for the first week. 

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