techinpedagogy

Short Description: Symbaloo is a social bookmarking tool through which teachers can share their favorite web resources. In addition to organizing homework, lesson plans, and administrative paperwork all in one place (among other features), Symbaloo allows teachers to create "webmixes" consisting of links and sources for particular subjects and/or topics. For students, it's a useful tool for gathering content for research and maintaining that content in one common area, rather than searching all over the Web. Examples of Uses: Teachers can use Symbaloo to organize websites and databases which are reliable and trustworthy for their students. Teachers can post links to sources of information which they deem credible and useful, thus saving time and energy for their students. Teachers can also review the websites that their students find and share to their own personalized learning spaces.

Hall offers a detailed theoretical and semiotic analysis of the processes by which messages are encoded into media by the creators and decoded by the consumers. He provides a vocabulary for naming the different phases of message production and reception, and a theoretical framework for understanding how they operate. While this text might be considered too dense for many high school students, the ideas themselves are not, and a shared familiarity with these ideas creates a firm foundation on which to build future discussions of how media operates and how to discern even the most deeply coded messages and biases.