A catalogue of communication tools for engaging students in the SMS cultureWhat a choice confronted us to make up the catalogue of commucation tools! There are sharing tools people can use to share photos, or bookmarks, like Flickr, and Del.icio.us. There are online communities, like Facebook and MySpace. There are communication technologies like Twitter, and blogging. There are collaboration technologies like Web 2.0 and wikis that allows readers to create content on interactive websites or work online together on a project. There are all kinds of places, tools and services, and they are growing, changing and even disappearing to be replaced by similar ones.
How the project team selected tools for this catalogueIt was really important to us to make a few good choices rather than overwhelm trainers with a large list of tools they would never have the time to get around to learning or using.We also don’t want to leave readers with the impression that all trainers need to learn and use all the tools in this catalogue. Far from it. Useful in a teaching environment, easy to learn and free Some of you may be “Flashing 12s,” at the other end of the social media tech savvy range. (A gently humourous term for tech novices who have given up on programming their VCRs so the VCR is always flashing twelve o’clock.) If this catalogue helps you can add just one tool to your teaching techniques repertoire, learn it easily and use it comfortably with your classes, again this catalogue serves its purpose. So easy to learn and useful were top criteria. Besides these two, we also wanted to choose tools that were free to use, at least in the early stages while you experiment with them and decide if they add value to your particular teaching environment.
Our list of toolsHere’s our list of tools that met the criteria. You can click on any of them and go to a page that tells about the tool, how to learn to use it, and where it could be useful:
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