Reflective #2

Collaboration on the Web
This week activity on Wiki, I have found that it is beneficial to educators and students to work together on the same platform rather than the individual pages. I created http://englishteaching4thai.wikispaces.com/ to be the experiment project helping Thai teachers who teach English in sharing ideas for the language class. I would like this website to be the initial portal website to bring together the resources from the Internet. In addition, I have adapted it to be bilingual version because it will show the locality of the website; as it says 'think global, act local'. In the next phrase, I will try to invite English teacher colleagues in Thailand to join this Wiki and help to create the collaboration with each other.

Another advance tool that I found it helpful in education is GoogleReader. I was fascinating to see how the blogs I am following have be changing over the time. It organizes the pages in chronological pattern which indicates the development of the information. This also helps me how to manage what to read over the Internet. Every time I have found the relevant information for my research interest, I usually bookmark it on my computer browser. But whenever I work on different computer at the library, I cannot retrieve my favorites from home. In contrast, with Google Reader, my favorites are portable over the Internet access.

Networking in Delicious helps me to find relevant tags to my interest. I have found that there are many more people who share the same interest on their networks. I use the key words to define some of my research interest such as Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) , Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). The tags results make it convenient to me to pull the group of websites together.

MAPping Information
This activity helps me to realize the creditability of the information on the Internet. The domain of the web sites such as .edu, .com .net indicates the type of creators of the websites. This criteria suggests the creditability at the face value. I tried to work on All About Explorers on the webquest activity and found that the activity of helpful to teach information literacy for my future students, especially in reading activity. But to do the formal research, I would not suggest students to rely on the online information since it lack of creditability and the fluid nature of the information.

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