For my webinar I watched Jeff Scheur's webinar on noredink.com. My first reaction was to the webinar site itself; I loved how interactive it was! The site had a hand raising tool that allowed people to give a show of hands at a moments notice, so Jeff could ask, "how many people_____" and get an instant response. It also had the ability to create quizzes, and post the results of those quizzes immediately. I thought this would be a great way to communicate with peers, because the user can get instant feedback on questions and get others opinions quickly and easily. This tool could also be used in class for taking polls or for guest speakers who wish to interact with students (assuming students all have computer access.
The first part of Jeff's presentation dealt with assigning codes for common grammatical errors on student papers. At first I found this rather pointless because, while it may save the teacher time, the students are never going to go look up their mistakes. He brought up the idea of allowing re-submissions with grammatical corrections for extra points to incentivize the students, but that would take even more of my time grading the papers, and make the entire time-saving exercise pointless. However, Jeff next connected the idea of coding with the website noredink.com. noredink.com is a website that allows students to choose things they like, such as common TV shows, movies, celebrities, and music types, and then it creates grammar quizzes using the selected items. This website allows students to type in the grammatical code given to them by the teacher and practice using that particular aspect of grammar, and because the site is personalized to their preferences, they may even enjoy doing it! I thought this was a fantastic idea, because a teacher can just put codes on the students paper, then give them extra credit points for the paper if they work on the corresponding grammatical quiz on noredink.com; this would improve student writing without the teacher being forced to read every paper twice. The website also allows teachers to log on and see how their students are doing, and can therefore be used to show learning in the classroom. All in all, this is a very cool tool, and one I will definitely look into using in my future classroom.
