This was one of those weeks where you end up in unexpected places. And that I wasn't going the where I expected. I also found that someplace I'd been had more to offer than I realized.
Early this week, I saw a lot of interest in Edmodo. A few of my peers were highly enthused about the tool, a couple lauding it as superior to Blackboard. So I spent time there as a student and a teacher. I like the simplicity of the service, but I found it too basic. As much as I have complained about Blackboard as an instructor, I have never had trouble with it as a student. And while the interface can be cumbersome on both sides of this online classroom, the wealth of resources and tools it provides make it far superior to Edmodo. I can see it of great utility for secondary education, but college educators need more than it has to offer--at least in my humble opinion.
What surprised me was Fakebook. It seemed too simplistic and gimmicky to be useful to me as an instructor. However, after touring it for awhile I found a couple of ideas for class assignments percolating to the surface. My only disappointment is that you can only create single pages. I would like to be able to link pages together, so that you can really exploit interrelationships between public figures. This would make it very powerful and quite useful to me.
Google Maps is a tool with which I was already familiar, and I frequently use Google Earth, a companion product. What was surprised me was the fact that Google had made their Maps engine a collaborative tool. I knew that users could contribute content to Google Earth Community, but the shareable personal maps was new to me. This inspired new ideas for other assignments that leveraged this collaboration. It also had me take a look at other features from Google Maps Engine, the one I found most interesting was that it was capable of supporting app creation and mobility enabled content. This is yet another tool I really want to spend some time exploring.
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