This is a guest post by Ramanatha Sastry.D, Coordinator, Curriculum Research and Development Center at Podar institutions.
I would like to share my personal experiences on how to help the students with mixed abilities for using present day technologies.
Students have mixed abilities of learning. To keep up with the syllabus structures and time frames teachers are forced to move forward.
In my observations,
- Slow learners; who are participating in the learning process, many times are not able to grasp essentials, but are keeping up the pace (by marks, 40% to 70% marks holders)
- Fast learners; who are ready to learn the essentials taught in the classroom, they are able to grasp it, but when the questions are tweaked the performance declines. (by marks, 75% and above)
- Learners with gaps from the lower grades, struggling to understand or find tricks to move ahead.
To deal with all these in a classroom, many models are designed and practiced. Many online resources are available, to deal with all these categories of students.
By using them effectively,
- First group students will reinforce their learning and get opportunities to learn more if they find time and energy, so any gaps in learning won’t take place.
- Second group students can move further with essentials of knowledge to build upon further skill sets.
- Third group students fill the lower grade gaps as much as possible and to strengthen the present day understanding.
So I would like to suggest some tools here, which I have practiced and which have helped me with my students.
SymbalooEdu allows us to organize and share the best of the web with the students. It helps to create clickable icons from the useful websites so that in future, user can go directly to the required page just by clicking the icon and never searching for the page again. The advantage of using ‘symballo’ is that all the suggested (curated) web sources are available in a particular page and on multiple devices as it is stored on the cloud.
‘symballo’ people are calling the tab pages as ‘webmixes’. Every web mix contains some iconic empty symbols what they call it ‘tales’, of course it is their convenience…..
As a user one can click on the tail, to add a web link to it and give it some name. User can add as many of the tails we want ( infact more than you would want to) and the web mix can shared to different user.
Whenever, teacher wants, other links can be added or deleted. Students can copy this ‘teacher’s ‘web mix’ and keep in their ‘webmix’.
Here is a sample web mix I created http://edu.symbaloo.com/shared/AAAABqzRf7kAA42ACqSNhA==
Another tool which is useful is Scoop.it . It is a website which can add and save web pages as scoops with small description of the site. The scoops can be categorized according to the topic, and multiple topics can be created by a user. One can add scoops with or without links so users can also add their own reference points.
This is a great tool for the students and teachers to manage various sources in their teaching and learning processes.
And here’s another tool “Mural.ly ”, which created great hopes for me when I think of its use in education. It allows users to create sharable “Murals” and place any content from the web or computer onto it. You can map multimedia content in one big space. It allows you to collaborate with others, and also create presentations from your murals. Watch the video to see the scope of Mural.ly as an educational tool .
Mural.ly – A Place to Grow Idea together
