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Study Finds that Good Teaching can be Enhanced with New Technology

VocabularySpellingCity has a new summer word study program that allows children to sharpen academic skills as they play. These simple assignments are a daily workout for the brain, building literacy skills such as vocabulary, spelling, and writing.

Can a teacher use the same teaching techniques in a face-to-face and an online course? According to a study conducted by Park, Johnson, Vath, Kubitskey, & Fishman (2013) on Examining the Roles of the Facilitator in Online and Face-to-Face Professional Development Contexts (Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 21(2), 225-245), teachers need to cater to individual learners more online than face-to-face. In the face-to-face environments, students learn from each other and from the teacher. In the face-to-face class, the teacher is able to summarize the information for the students and get feedback from the students body language on how well they understood the information. In the online class, the teacher only knows whether the students understood or not from their writing. Teaching online requires that the teacher be very attentive and aware of the student's individual interests, needs, and level of understanding.

Summary This contribution presents and evaluates a new learning environment model based on Web 2.0 applications. We assume that the technological change introduced by Web 2.0 tools has also caused a cultural change in terms of dealing with types of communication, knowledge and learning. The answers given by eLearning scholars who intend to use the creative options offered by Web 2.0 in institutional learning are summarised in the first part of the paper. In this theoretical overview we introduce the concepts of eLearning 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments, along with their main aspects of autonomy, creativity and networking, and relate them to the didactics of constructivism and connectivism. The requirements and basic functional components for the development of our particular Web 2.0 learning environment are derived from these. The learning environment we present consists of several components (modules) that are well-known Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, weblogs, social bookmarking services and RSS feeds. The section describing the implementation of the environment in a use case at the Darmstadt University of Applied Science focuses on the specific didactic contribution the particular learning modules render towards the entire learning arrangement. The article explains the didactic potential of the wiki platform in more detail, since it serves as the integrating module (or learning centre) of the learning arrangement. Our learning environment was tested and evaluated during the "Social Software" seminar held in the information science study course at Darmstadt University of Applied Science in 2007/08. A questionnaire-based survey reveals interesting facts regarding the success of the practical implementation of the Web 2.0 arrangement with respect to the motivation and learning outcome of students. The survey was supplemented with some non-formalized feedback in a concluding discussion. With these results in mind this paper finally provides some remark

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