Activity - Planning a 5 Week Course in Safe and Effective Use of the Digital World
|
Week |
Topic |
Resources |
Suitability (G/M/B) |
|
1 |
Keeping safe online Advising Vulnerable Adults and Children on how to ensure their safety in the digital world |
http://kids.getnetwise.org/ (Adriadne) Website dedicated on safeguarding children and included toolkits, how to report trouble and recommended child friendly sites http://www.getnetwise.org/ (Ad riadne) General advice for parents and keeping safe online for all http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/1007 (Jorum) Open University article on keeping safe using the internet including viruses and safeguarding children Keeping children and young people safe online |
G
G
M G |
|
2 |
Social Networking A guide on how to approach the use of social media and the potential implications of misuse in the future |
http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/1007 (Jorum) Keeping Safe Online including use of Social Media http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=280655 (Merlot) Video on why social media is so popular http://publicrelationsmatters.com/2008/09/15/assignment-one-week-of-twitter/ (Merlot) How to guide for Twitter The impact of social media on how we live |
G
M
G
B |
|
3 |
Developing Online Presentations How to guide on how to use online presentations such as Prezi |
Article including 10 presentations http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/resources/accessiblecontent (Jorum) Support on delivery accessible digital learning inc. presentations and toolkits |
M
G
|
|
4 |
Using Search Engines Advice on key words and ways to use search engines to find suitable content |
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=430462 (merlot) Prezi Presentation on Google Search Tricks http://www.oercommons.org/courses/web-search-strategies-in-plain-english (Adriadne) Best way to use search engines http://www.googleguide.com/ (merlot) Website on all things to do with use of google Foundation Skills to use search engines |
G
G
G
|
|
5 |
Blog Use How to set up and use a Blog |
Overview of benefit of blogs for teachers and learners and how to get started for free |
G |
Evaluation and Summary - I was able to find a good base of knowledge through the OERs available and would certainly have saved me time in the initial format of the course material content. There are also a good number of toolkits, videos and activities, so on further analysis I am confident that these initial findings will offer access to other resources to broaden and extend the learning process.
I found the most functional and effective sites for this subject content to be Adriadne and Merlot. After that Open Learn gave some useful results and resources. MIT and Rice Connexions gave no positive results and unless I am using it wrong I found Rice Connexions to be very poor and offering no content.
There would certainly be cost savings through the initial research and base information that fitted in well to the course brief week by week. I wonder though whether use of google or a search engine itself would have offered equivalent or even better search results. For example for Safeguarding the results were good but if you put in the same search criteria into google the results were very good and most were more aligned to the UK.
I would use a process of both general search using search engines and OER Repositories. With the Repositories there is some guide on the quality of the resource which is something you don’t have with general search engines. I also think the course content will make a huge difference. I can see that some of the repositories are far more scientific based and for those types of subjects they may be far more successful than on this trial.
References:
http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/finder/ariadne/
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/
Comments
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Hi Tom
Interesting point about using Google since there is a lot of material that is free to use outside of repositories but not necessarily aimed at educational uses.
Cheers
Alan