Recently, numerous players in the Blended Learning environment have made strong statements in favour of using Facebook in the classroom as a teaching and learning tool. One speaker went as far as to say that Facebook, according to him, is the best Learning Management System (LMS) out there.
Meet online, have question and answer sessions, get input from your class as you go along. There are many possible applications of these simple to use tools.
You probably already know that we already have a pretty amazing collaboration tool at the NMMU. Blogs, forums, wikis, shared documents, online calendars to name some of the functionality. SharePoint 2010 is indeed very powerful. Both our student and staff portals as well as their mobile versions run on custom developed SharePoint 2010 sites.
I am sure you all know how difficult it is to keep track of all the information you find on your specific topic out there. We all have different ways of storing the links to our favourite bits of information. One could add them to one's Favourites but if your machine had to crash, boom, all gone. Maybe even more importantly; how can I group my information and share it in a nice looking format with my colleagues or students?
Last week I attended the ICT in Higher Education Africa conference in Jo’burg. Some interesting points were raised. We were also shown how some of the tools out there can be used in a classroom environment and even for remote learning.