Google Apps as LMS and PLE

In the digital era of Education, Learning Management Systems are delineating themselves as good allies for the teaching practice, providing a canvas to place contents, PLE curating tools, a secure environment to work in, different collaboration modes, activity control systems and several ways of assessment.

But, what LMS would suit you best? That depends on your needs, your audience, your digital abilities, the LMS’s complexity and your budget. There are multiple options, as Moodle, Edmodo or Google Classroom, among many others.

This article is going to focus on the free edition of Google Apps. During the last years they have been put to an enhancement process, and, nowadays, they can be effectively used for educational purposes. To do so, they have to be synergistically constellated to create a consistent and coherent system. If you aren’t familiar with them (or don’t know how to use them), have a look at Google’s documentation: http://learn.googleapps.com/home

Go on reading the full article in EDTECHREVIEW.IN

PLE, personal learning environments

The Internet usually looks like a mare magnum for young students. So many things, so less time... They end up wasting their energy looking for resources, being absorbed in social sites or playing silly games. The solution? Make them curate their own PLE.

Personal Learning Environment, that’s what PLE stands for. And the process of building one is called curation. Everyone has ever done something like this, in fact bookmarking interesting websites for any kind of personal growth is to curate, and that especial folder you keep with several useful links for your work is a sort of a PLE.

Nowadays there are many tools to fabricate a PLE, but if you are going to choose one be sure that it is social media friendly, i.e, that you can share and find others’ works in the Net. I used to use Delicious, but I didn’t find it student-friendly enough, so I decided to change it for Symbaloo. This last one’s main advantage is its ease of use and its board-like interface.

As PLEs deal with many different things (presentations, social networking, documentaries and videos, research, production, publication, citation, collaboration, storage, project management, coding, augmented reality, virtual worlds, gamification, gamecodization...) you can also curate different boards according to the subject you are working about.

Let’s see an example. This is a board I use to teach the concept of PLE to my 13-year-old students. Everything is mixed but visually arranged. As it’s obvious there are hundreds of applications and this is but a mere mini collection.

There are some points to bear in mind about a PLE:

1. It’s dynamic. A link which used to be valuable can be unuseful all of the sudden. Keep some, discard others.
2. It’s flexible.
3. It has to be social: make it be known and know others’.
4. It’s not only about school: whatever you do you should have your own personalized one.
5. It’s curated: you have to invest time and effort to make it of good quality.
6. It’s a magnifying glass to focus on certain aspects of the Internet and avoiding wasting time.
7. It’s a productivity tool.