It’s easy to get excited about the educational potential of new Web 2.0 tools. So many tools appear (and disappear) from month to month, and I often find myself promoting and supporting bleeding-edge tools for instructors who are still struggling to use some of the basic features of Blackboard. So in an effort to keep things simple and avoid putting the cart before the horse, I’ve been trying to focus on projects that offer more bang for my instructional-design buck.
For example, Sarah (one of our amazing grad-student workers) and I are currently helping several Spanish professors convert their paper-based exams into Blackboard quizzes with audio. This quarter, over a hundred students are taking their exams in computer labs on campus, saving instructors lots of grading time and giving the students more immediate feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. It has been great to see this project come together, and it feels like the kind of low-hanging fruit that all instructional designers should be working harder to pick before we attempt to coax a neo-Luddite, tenured professor into running an entire course through Twitter and Posterous.
Yet as much as I love keeping things simple, there are a few Web 2.0 tools I keep coming back to because they’re relatively easy to use and/or they offer features that faculty regularly request. Here’s a very short list of the tools that, at least for me, make the cut and are worth the extra effort.
While PowerPoint and Keynote remain the best tools for developing presentations, VoiceThread is the most reliable and user-friendly option if you need more than one-way communication. VoiceThread’s in-browser recording makes it easy for users to add narration presentations, and the option for viewers to add text, audio, and video comments is unmatched by other free tools.
VoiceThread’s only major downsides are that students are limited to a maximum of three VoiceThreads with free accounts and that images with fine details (like small text) will often be too blurry to read when uploaded and displayed in the VoiceThread interface.
I’ve done a lot of Web 2.0 tool training with non-tech-savvy instructors, and I’ve never had a training session go as smoothly as it does when I’m covering Viddler. Getting users from account creation to recording and embedding their first videos usually takes roughly fifteen minutes with a group of fifteen instructors. The in-browser webcam recording works like a dream. For a quick video intro or comment that needs to be added to an announcement or discussion-board post with minimal fuss, Viddler just works.
If you need a wiki for collaborative writing or Web-site building, PBworks is the place to go. They’re the industry leader, and they do what they do very well. Google docs works just fine for sharing simple documents like research papers and presentation outlines. But if you’re looking for a robust tool that makes it easy to create and edit a one- or one-hundred-page Web site, PBworks is the tool for the job. My only hesitation in recommending PBworks these days is their feature set continues to grow, and I’m concerned they’re starting to overwhelm novice users with an abundance of features.