Many teachers are beginning to see the value of online web tools such as blogs, wikis, sites, moodle, social networks, google docs, etc...as tools to manage their class content and as places for students to collaborate and share their ideas but I am finding that many teachers aren't seeing the subtle distinction between these various applications. They may set up a blog when in fact they need a web site or they set up a wiki when what they really could use is a blog, or maybe what they really need is a robust course management tool like a moodle. How do you know which to use?
In general, here is a quick summary of how I see it:
- blogs - one to many communication with comments
- wikis- many to many communication; shared knowledge, everyone is contributor
- google sites- content management with flexibility and controlled by the teacher (students can have sites as well)
- moodle - course management system (much more complex than a google site and control is through an network admin)
- google apps - set of collaborative tools such as google docs, sites, calendars, we can set it up as educational edition where users are part of a domain, i.e. u32 google educational domain
I'll try to blog about these in more detail later.
