Teaching & Learning with Technology

http://www.ning.com/

In a nutshell, anyone can create a customized space online, make it public or private, and invite others to participate via threaded discussions, the sharing of multimedia, and posting of blog entries. Ning communities can be further embellished with all sorts of web widgets. Ning is a powerful tool because it makes it easy for educators to take charge of their professional development by interacting virtually with other like-minded souls. Get answers to questions within hours, share great resources, philosophize with online colleagues about curriculum and the state of education.

A community of educators using Ning to build social networks: http://education.ning.com/

http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers

Create simple web pages that your students and you can edit together! I used wikispaces to create my “New Faculty Wiki” – see the link on the right side of this page.

Students can post their work and then teachers and classmates can correct, improve, and discuss their work. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be rolled back if necessary.

The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report or essay, build a group study guide, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratvely author the structure and curriculum of a course.

For more ideas on how to use a wiki in your classroom: http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Wiki_in_a_K-12_classroom