Group items tagged

Social bookmarking websites enhance and improve the learning experience by encouraging group collaboration and making organizing and saving web resources faster and easier for students. Social bookmarking services offer greater scope for research, integration, and collaboration compared to the more traditional bookmarking applications such as browsers, which offer limited functionality. Among social bookmarking services, Diigo has features and functions that make it useful for the classroom, giving instructors tools for setting up groups of students, highlighting key information, and commenting.

Some cool applications of the tool at Wordle.net for creating word clouds.

Today's college students, often referred to as the "digital generation," use an impressive assortment of technological tools in a wide variety of ways. However, the findings reported here suggest that students prefer more traditional instructional technology for effective engagement and learning. Faculty members, however, prefer the use of course-learning technology offered by their universities or publishers. In addition to this potential mismatch between preferences of students and teachers, the research finds that there are vast differences in preferences and usage across disciplines, in particular, business and economics instructors and students having stronger technology preferences than instructors and students of the fine arts and life sciences.

For a web-based learning to be truly effective it must be interactive. This means that it is not just a reformatted canned lesson of printed worksheets placed on the web. The web-based activity is inquiry-based and incorporates the full features available on the web - interactivity between computer and student. The learning activity must engage student critical thinking skills by using the scientific inquiry process.