Scootle appears to be a great teaching resource. With the push towards incorporating a variety of new technologies in the classroom, Scootle offers a number of different interactive forms for many different key learning areas and even topics within those key learning areas.
I will certainly be building up my resources with the use of Scootle and I believe it is a good way of keeping all your resources as a teacher fresh and interesting for your students.
Social networking sites have certainly become a lot more popular in recent times and will continue to do so in the future. They are quite easy to join, generally free and when a particular site i.e. facebook takes off, it usually does so in a big way.
Generally, I would never associate social networking sites with the classroom/education, however having completed the vast majority of the course I now know that is not entirely the correct view to have. In my opinion, there are two types of social networking sites: Those that can be used for educational purposes and those which cannot be.
Those sites which can be used in the classroom include blogs and wikis, while those which should never be used in the classroom include myspace and facebook.
Myspace and facebook are for personal use and in my opinion are not worth the time people put into them. They also offer a way for cyber bullying to occur. Although these bullies can be caught, it is a lot tougher to catch them for a number of reasons.
Not only is bullying an issue, but as is privacy and the ethical use of such sites. Before allowing children/students to run riot on social networking sites, they should first be made well aware of how to use these sites correctly and the implications of not doing so.
Blogs and Wikis are two social networking sites that can be used effectively in the classroom and in a variety of ways as well. Obviously issues such as bullying and privacy etc are still of concern with these particular sites, however if used carefully in the classroom and clear guidelines are set out from the get go, they can be magnificent ICT tools to further a student's education.
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