Useful resources for IB teachers
By IB Blogosphere • Jun 26th, 2009 • Category: FeaturesThis week’s announcement about the IB’s partnership with Epals is a good indication of where things are likely to be heading over the next few years, as the IB seeks to strengthen its online service provision.
With lower ‘barriers to entry’ than ever, members of the IB community are undertaking a range of creative and unexpected applications for web technology - as exemplified by Richard Allaway’s Geographyalltheway.com. We asked some of the IB’s Twitter community what tools they are already using to deliver IB curriculum. Here are the most popular responses.
Broadcast communications
When you want to get involved in a conversation with your peers, without the ‘closed walls’ of a forum dictating who’s in the conversation, Twitter is the perfect medium. With its 140 character limit and babbling, uncoordinated style, it takes some getting used to, and isn’t the right choice for every conversation…but we still love it. Sweetcron offers lifecasting capabilities…the next-level of social media. Downloading and setting up Sweetcron is a great way for the ‘armchair techie’ to stretch their skills and make a real difference to the clarity of their online communications.
Video
For video, we’re using blip.tv here at the IB. Why? Well it has no in-video branding and it’s user-friendly. On the downside, it appears that the Great Firewall of China is blocking blip.tv, so we need to look to alternatives.
Web browsing assist
If you find you need more than bookmarks and your history folder to keep track of what’s hot on the web, you should definitely investigate one of these web 2.0 stalwarts. They’re a great way to find out about emerging trends as well as helping you keep track of all those great sites you happen across.
Blog publishing/CMS
The IB online team think Wordpress is fantastic, we’d happily use it for everything we do…but, there’s sometimes a need to do rapid development of niche products that aren’t best served by Wordpress. In those cases, you need to knuckle down with the more heavyweight developers at Joomla, Drupal and Expression Engine who are making open source a true competitor to the enterprise level products out there.
Close communications/Private networks
For many of the IB community, it’s these services that offer the most immediate and tangible benefits. You can create a Ning community in an hour, and you can start adding members immediately. It’s a fantastic service, which has certain limitations in scope, but by working with other free services like Wikispaces and Google docs, you can create your own fully-functioning learning environment from your desk!
Document sharing/collaboration
The ultime supplementary service, Google docs is part of a move towards cloud computing that isn’t going to go away. Virtualising your hard-drive by uploading everything to the web is a great way to understand exactly what’s around the corner…no more hard-drives, no more discs, just a cloud of data. We’ve spoken about the role of Google docs in learning before. Sites like Flickr, Photobucket and even Facebook have become popular as vanguards of the cloud computing movement, but now sites like Scribd are taking popularising the same kind of service for documents…and this holds huge potential advantage to teachers who want to store and work with documents online.
Overall, what’s really exciting is the way anyone can combine these freely available services to provide sophisticated online learning and collaboration environments. On their own, they’re great tools…but we haven’t even scraped the surface of what’s possible.
