After seeing Ether pad being used as an example in one of our Wimba sessions I decided to use Etherpad in a project a colleague and I have developed. I have been working on an interdisciplinary project in which students must create and program a robot, through nonverbal communication. We were running into problems with the blog program our school uses. Basically, we were using the blog as a chat and found it just wasn’t working the way we needed it to. We also had a hard time grading student participation through these blogs. We were not using the blog in the correct manner and decided to use it for self-reflection instead, as it is intended.
We decided to use Etherpad as a means of student communication. This allows us to see how well student communicate through written language and who participates and who does not. I went in and created ten documents for my class and saved the link to each document on our project Ning. This allows students from each group to quickly open their own document at the beginning of each period to use to communicate during the period. Since we are requiring them to communicate through nonverbal means, this real time application is perfect for students to give each other immediate feedback.
It would be amazing to see what middle school students would do if they were all on eherpad at the same time. I really like your idea, so let me know how it turns out for you. I also appreciated your ideas on individual grading. I never thought of that before. When we first saw etherpad, I was also pretty amazed at it's live, collaborative capabilities. It is a pretty sweet 2.0 application. Thank you for sharing your idea on how to actually apply it and use it in your classroom.
ReplyDeleteFunny you say, it would be amazing to see what middle school students would do if they were all on Etherpad at the same time. Today I gave a presentation to a group of methods students and I showed them this application. One downfall I just ran into when playing with it during the presentation is that there are only so many colors given out, so if you have to many people in one document you cannot necessarily tell who is talking because several people are assigned the same color. I never knew that, amazing how you discover these things at the most inopportune times.
ReplyDeleteI really like your ideas on Etherpad. This is such a neat tool because it can be used in so many ways. Our middle school students typically share what they like about their lesson, give their fellow classmates a compliment or voice a concern at the end of the class period. Etherpad can be used to communicate all of their thoughts. I love it. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteEtherpad looks as if it could allow students to be very productive when working on assignments and reports. There are other programs like these that could do the same thing, but this offers a little more stability when I was playing with it.
ReplyDeleteYou have the ability to see who is online and making changes while you are on. I could see this being great for kids working on group reports.