Monday 4 October 2010

Online add-on to face-to-face course

I decided last year that this year I would try to keep a log of my teaching and my thoughts about my teaching and here it is.

I will actually start teaching tomorrow, but I've been thinking about my teaching for the last two weeks or so. That's OK as I have had an extremely long summer holiday and have had plenty of time to forget about my job.

One of the things that I've been debating on and off for the last six months is what to do about the online add-on I chose to use to supplement my face2face course. Last year I used www.edmodo.com and the year before www.Ning.com . I decided a long time back that I preferred Edmodo because it is designed for education so it has assignment setting and tracking, but last year I also started experimenting with using Facebook pages as well.

My Facebook pages started off as a way to try to re-use the materials I was providing for my own students through Edmodo and originally I simply fed through the RSS feeds from Edmodo into the Facebook pages. I also had RSS feeds coming into my Edmodo groups. As the year progressed I found that it was really better to feed the latter RSS feeds directly into Facebook using RSS Graffiti and that it was also better to post material twice: once to the Edmodo group and once to Facebook. In both applications the material looked better when posted directly.

So this year I have decided to have no RSS feeds coming into my Edmodo groups, but I will ask all my student to register for their Edmodo group and 'like' the corresponding Facebook page, where RSS feeds will provide most of the content. There will still be some duplication for them as I shall continue to post things myself to both.

Here are the three Facebook pages for the two levels I teach and Advanced, which I taught until very recently:

No comments:

Post a Comment