Week 2 Part 2 - Box of Tricks

The resources listed in these sites are extremely valuable, but one problem I'm noticing already is the feeling of being drowned in information. The links work well for random serendipitous discovery, but if one is looking for a particular tool, with certain things that it needs to be able to do (online shared document tool with capacity for 30 students to work on the same information simultaneously, for example), then there is too much information to trawl through. This is the sort of situation where the human brain can out-compete a computer - if you ask someone knowledgeable in this area about the specific type of online tool you need, from memory they could be able to give you an answer straight away, rather than you having to look through long lists of tools, read the descriptions, and follow links to demonstrations.

With that caveat, I did find quite a number of useful tools on the Box of Tricks - Technology and Education site.

This is a very similar site to Cool Tools (see the last post for details), but organises the sites by alphabetical order rather than subject type.
In my search for a specific online collaborative tool (see above) I came across a number of sites that all partially meet my needs, but which may be useful for other classroom activities.

The first site is Stixy, a collaborative bulletin board. Students could work on projects together, adding images and text, editing collaboratively. Then groups could share their work with other groups in the class.


Wallwisher also looks like it could be fun to use in class. This is an online notice board with "sticky notes" that students can move around, and add to. It could be used for brainstorming ideas, putting elements of a story or poem together, composing a letter or essay, etc. I would need to experiment with it a bit to see how many users could use it at once, what the size limits are, how many people can move items at once, etc.


Etherpad-type applications are easily accessible. These are like Instant Messaging applications, and allow a number of users to type information simultaneously, and see what is happening in real time. TitanPad is the first:


And EtherPad Lite:


A sample conversation:


This could be useful for collaborative writing exercises, particularly ones where one student writes some text, then another student adds to the story/article/poem, etc.