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author: George Ligon IV I recently read an article about a study on college students use of Youtube to support academic learning. According to Alexa (2015), Youtube is the third most visited website in the world (as cited by Moghavvemi, Sulaiman, Jaafar, & Kasem, 2018). The study explored students' usage and their perceptions of Youtube's effectiveness as an academic learning tool. Out of 312 respondents 71% stated they used Youtube for academic learning purposes (Moghavvemi, Sulaiman, Jaafar, & Kasem, 2018). According to Moghavvemi et al. (2018), 76% of respondents stated they used Youtube to learn how to solve problems, 77% used it to answer questions, and 83% used it to watch videos that were suggested by friends. In addition to this, Moghavvemi et al. (2018), reported 70.5% of respondents believed they learned more from watching Youtube than reading a book. Thus, the findings supported previous studies which found using videos to teach was an effective tool to enhance academic performance (Moghavvemi, Sulaiman, Jaafar, & Kasem, 2018). References Moghavvemi, S., Sulaiman, A., Jaafar, N. I., & Kasem, N. (2018, March). Social media as a complementary learning tool for teaching and learning: the case of youtube. The international journal of management education. 16(1), 37-42. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1472811717303051

Great research article on Web 2.0 tools and student learning. From 2013 so fairly recent - Aditi Pai, Spelman College Jim Stenerson, Pace University Michael Gaines, University of Miami Introduction It is well documented over the years that technology has impacted education and changed the landscape of teaching and learning. For the most part information technology has been credited with making teaching and learning an active and engaging process for both the students and the faculty (Redecker et al 2009).

Merlot is a great spot that I will spend some time on this summer to buff up on my online teaching

Safe online community to talk about volleyball :) Everyone is welcome, from beginners to experts. This can be a great way to learn about volleyball or teach others about the sport! Check it out!

Collaborative document being created by group of academics who teach about augmented reality and who hope to integrate Pokemon Go.

Wow! This is nice!!!!

I found this great site with a "curation" of Web 2.0 Tools for Teaching. I thought it might useful in addition to the tools we're using in the class.

Just found this journal and it just might be of interest to some of you. Articles on CoP in higher ed, teaching with wikis ...

Thanks for sharing this journal! Just when I wanted to learn more about this topic :)

Shuang, check out the first issue -- I want to read every single article in that one (and downloaded them all). Think I'll start with the Engstrom one.

Interesting site that explores the future of teaching and Web 2.0. I think the creator of this site did a good job making it easy for educators who are not technologically savvy.

I like the idea of a "teacher tech smackdown" -- would love to have IS faculty do this, although we're probably too small in number to have it be meaningful.

How to Participate in a VoiceThread - Shared with a Creative Commons license This is a how-to guide explaining how to leave a comment in a Voicethread. VoiceThread is an online discussion tool that provides opportunities for community building and learning, centered around visual media.

This is a nice alternative to WebEx. It gives you a virtual classroom to work in where you can store documents of most types, present them in class, do all the things Web Ex does like web conferencing, whiteboard, etc. I am posting this in their virtual classroom where you can access the web collectively. I found this to explore Web 2.0 tools used for learning.

Alyn, Thank you for sharing all this valuable information. I'm taking notes. In my "free" time, I'm going to be figuring how to implement all these new technologies into my classroom. I'm feeling submerged by technology at this point, but like it!!!

Here is the description from Edmodo: "Edmodo provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. Our goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner." Is it another Blackboard? Or not? A feature for this tool is that you can choose to get mobile notifications of updates from the teacher.

I have a user profile on Edmodo, and I am now being asked to use it by my administration team at my school. It kind of reminds me of Facebook in a professional sense.

This looks really promising. I'm going to look into this more and perhaps use this as my portal for the produsage assignment. Thanks for sharing Shuang!

Tess (2013) provides a great review of the literature on the role of social media in the higher education context. Tess (2013) suggests that as instructors look for ways to incorporate technology to mediate and enhance their instructions as well as promote active learning among students, they increasingly turn to different social media tools. The author argues that the current literature on the integration of social media in higher education are limited to self-reported data and content analyses. Therefore, he provides a summary of literature on the role of social media in the higher education classroom as well as discusses their limitations. Various studies (cited below) explored the role of social media and SNSs in different contexts of education -teaching learning process. These studies have demonstrated interesting and useful results. Tess (2013), in addition to keyword-specific searches, used a "snowball" method for finding the articles from the relevant articles cited in the literature reviewed. To narrow the range of the review, he chooses articles on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blog and LinkedIn. Tess (2013) provides a brief definition of each of these five SNSs. He also looks at the social impact of these popular SNS tools. The author looks at the factors motivating the educators to use social media in higher education classrooms, such as: the changing nature of the student, the changing knowledge consumption relationship, and the de-emphasis of institutionally provided learning and emergence of "user-driven" education (Selwyn, 2010). The author provides platform-specific affordances and drawbacks in terms of their application in the higher education space. Tess (2013) argues that although the infrastructure to support social media's presence exists in most universities today, instructors have been slow in adopting the tool as an educational one. Those who are adopting are still likely in the experimental stage. He admits that his literature rev

A Google a Day provides daily trivia, and can be a fun way to teach your students important online research skills.

Hi Fabrizio, I just tried the Google a Day and I like the concept very much. However, unless I was doing something wrong, I found it cumbersome to do the research and get back to the original question. In addition, when I tried to access Google Map, which was needed for answering today's question, it said it would not support it in the Google a Day window. So I opend GM up in another window. Did you experience something similiar? With that being said, I think the idea is great, especially since they give you tips and hints at how to find the answer. I think researching tips and exercises are very important, even for graduate students. You can never get enough practice in researching topics. Thanks for sharing this, I really liked it.

When I type a research on the search box it opens a pop-up window with the data, so I have two pages open, the A Google a Day one and the search one. I think it works pretty well on Chrome, I didn't have any problem, but I haven't tried it with other browsers. A Google a Day is fun and challenging; however, I don't think you can learn too much from your answers, they are too general. Maybe in the future there will be a way to customize it and create your own challenges, it would be really interesting to use with our students/learners.

"As well as learning from those who have made their name online, students will gain valuable insight into what it means to have a digital identity and how to market ideas to your target audience. Among the topics included in the programme are the psychology of memes, brand building and how to tell your story online....The teaching panel includes award winning teacher and expert in pop culture, Dr Eleanor O'Leary; Marketing Lecturer of the Year, Dorothy Keane; and brand planning professional Ciaran O'Loan."

Piazza is a free online gathering place where students can ask, answer, and explore 24/7, under the guidance of their instructors. Students as well as instructors can answer questions, fueling a healthy, collaborative discussion.

This is a great tool to enhance interaction in the online classroom. It allows the creation of avatars with the addition of voice so you can interact with your students in ways that capture attention, motivate interaction and helps explain concepts to key audiences from varying perspectives.

Wow, I really like this tool, seems like Voki could improve all kinds of classes, especially foreign language or reading classes for students that may get nervous speaking aloud. Is there a tool on the teacher's side though that prints out a report of the scores on the oral tests that the students spoke of? Just curious....thanks. (O:

Couldn't reply to Vanessa's Post, created new one....It makes sense that researchers are taking steps to understand the role of the educator when considering Web 2.0 tools. I don't think this is a simple task for an educator to incorporate these tools into their cirriculum. In addition, I think great thought is needed to make sure that the tools are not just being used for the sake of using them but that they add/enhance learning. While the article suggests that the burden has fallen on the teacher to make use of this, I think it would be wise for institutions to develop a support system that works with the educators. After all, the institution provides them with a chalk board, a classroom, an overhead projector, etc. Why not provide them with proper training and course design suggestions using Web 2.0 technology?