Submission on Nicenet

Nicenet is one of the web based learning instrument through which teachers can work with students, whether in distance mode or as a supplement to face-to-face teaching. Teachers can use nicenet to provide their students with reading materials and information, annotated links to selected and categorized websites, information about scheduled events such as assignments and excursions. Besides this students can also enter documents, submit homework, and add links to the web. It is freely available website based on communicative approach which focuses on providing opportunities for learning and communication among students and between students and teachers outside the classroom.

I would prefer to use Nicenet with the students of undergraduate level to enhance collaborative learning among them. By creating this classroom, students will also have an opportunity to interact with each other. Nicenet includes several useful features that can be utilized, one of them is conferencing. Nicenet provides opportunity to organize online conferences. The topic can be given to students for discussion on which they can communicate with each other.

The aim of using Nicenet is to develop collaborative skills among learners and provide useful links and materials to enhance their language competencies. The teacher can also give online assignments. Besides, students can be given opportunity to post various useful links and share with their colleagues.  This kind of e- learning will enable them to broaden their learning abilities.

Nicenet has various features which can be utilized in language learning classroom.

We can create online conferences using Nicenet.

Links can be shared to students.

Online assignments can be given.

Documents related to reading materials can be posted.

Students can reply or ask questions to teachers online.

In conclusion, we can say that Nicenet is a useful platform which can be used for language teaching and learning. 

Summary on Podcasting for ELT

Podcasting has derived its name from 'iPod' and 'broadcasting'. It’s an audio instrument which can be downloaded through internet on any portable mp3 player etc. podcasting is becoming popular in language teaching and learning. The teacher can record/download language input and can distribute to learners to listen to it as many time as they want. Learners themselves can produce podcasts on various topics they can create their own profile as well. 

Types of Podcasts

·    Authentic Podcasts

·    Teacher Podcasts

·    Student Podcasts

·    Educator Podcasts

Using Podcasts in Class and for Homework

Many podcasts have weblog as their homepage which shows links to audio files. From these links we can download/transfer podcasts to our mp3 player or can be recorded in CD-ROM. Besides this many podcasts have transcription as well for supporting learners’ understanding.

Producing Your Own Podcasts

Producing podcasts provides wider opportunity to young learners as they can produce their own radio show as a podcast on World Wide Web. It provides them the opportunity to have real audience for their show. Such kind of tasks can prove highly motivated.

Requirements to Produce Podcasts

- A means of recording audio in mp3 file format. Eg a PC with speakers and microphone

- Audio editing software. Eg Audacity program.

- A weblog

- An RSS feed to subscribe to podcasts.

- Space online to store the audio files.

In conclusion, we can say that podcasts can be highly useful for language teaching.

Report on Social Bookmarking and Delicious

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a Uniform Resource Identifier that stores important links/materials for our later retrieval in various storage formats. It is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit and share bookmarking. Bookmark management services have launched since 1996.

How It Is Useful

Social bookmarking system functions as online storage device where users can save links to webpages which they want to remember/ use them for later purposes or want to share with groups etc. It allows users to organize their bookmarks as per their convenience and share their links to others. They can make their links either publicly or private,only with specified group or people.The allowed people can view these bookmarks chronologically, by categories or tags or via a search engine.Users can also add descriptions to their links in the form of 'metadata'. It not only allows users to share bookmarks but also enables them to look what other people have found interesting enough to tag. In short social bookmarking sites are used as 'intelligent search engines'.

Delicious- A Social Bookmarking Sites

Delicious is one of the popular, free social bookmarking website, founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter. The following points are enough to justify its popularity.Delicious is used to:
-Search and browse your Delicious bookmarks
- Keep up to date on your Network and Links For You
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized using tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing bookmarks

In delicious users can group their links with similar topics together to form a 'stack' and can also include titles and descriptions for the stack page. Delicious also has a 'hotlist' on its home page which includes ''popular'' and ''recent'' pages that users can visit.
For the newcomers Delicious is a useful site as provides an option to import bookmarks from web browsers to its site so that new users can quickly get started with the site.

Educational Use of Delicious

Delicious, in teaching -learning can be proved helpful for both teachers and students as well.

-Having an account in delicious a teacher can bookmark important information related to particular topic/unit.

- The teacher can create students group and tag important content to them.

-It is easy to access any time and anywhere.

-Students can use delicious to share interesting content to their classmates.

It is a very useful tool to compile the similar kinds of data using tags etc.

-the teacher can tag and save bookmarks on her account and students can be asked to find her bookmarks and read them.

-Students can be asked to find information related to particular topic and bookmark the content. further they can be asked to read and comment.

In conclusion, we can say that social bookmarking not only useful for ordinary users but it is also helpful tool in the field of education.

Summary of Wiki Article

The November 3 2003 article ‘’what is a Wiki’’ by Nathan Matias, provides information about Wiki. He has mentioned that wikis have better functions than E-mail. Cunninghan and Bo Leuf designed wikiwikiweb the first wiki in 1995.Wikis is basically a website where anyone can submit and edit the web page. Each page on wiki has an Edit, Save and Link buttons. Besides this, it can save the plenty of old copies of our pages. We can also store all our websites content in an internal hypertext database. The process of creating new page on wikis is a simple. In wikis, we can organize pages according to our needs. We can also create communities on wikis. It is the purest form of hypertext available on the web. It is also simple to use wikis in a classroom..Wikis keep track of our all stuff. Wikis also simplify the site organization.  

The author has also talked about some other software which are used to organize and share the ideas among employees or students. The article also talks about some popular wikis. One of the famous wiki is Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone. Wiki is a database which can easily manage the data. It helps in connecting the students to teacher or businessman to customer or employee to boss. It is the simplest software to preserve the ideas and thoughts and to share them as well.

Wikis are great hypertext tools that let one person or a group of people manage content easily.They are used to create static Websites, manage online communities, connect businesses with their customers, and even write magazines and books. 

Report on Wiki in Plain English

The video, "Wiki in Plain English"  shows how wikis can be used for classroom learning through showing the four friends who use wiki to plan their camping trip.The video describes the whole function of wikis, they are used for. It presents the simple idea about how wikis can be used for class projects and assignments. It shows that using wiki can be more useful than Emails for group projects which requires co ordination. Using Emails is outdated and it may time consuming task with less co ordination. Instead wikis can be a better option. Wiki is a website that can be used for multiple purposes.Wiki pages can be edited. It can be utilized by using three key buttons- Edit, Save, and Link. The video describes the functions of each button. Using 'edit' button we can edit the page and make changes accordingly.But the changes require to be 'saved'. We can also add links by using 'link' option.thus the video describes the learning usage of wikis.

In my opinion wikis are useful for language learning as it gives opportunity to learners to learn language by reading the texts saved in it and by editing by replacing the sentence formation, words etc.It also provide opportunity for them to work online which widens their learning process. Working online is always better way of learning as it connect students with wider world. However, it will be a challenging task for the teachers to use such web tools in every phase of learning, yet it adds more effect in their learning.

Wikis can be used for various purposes. The teacher can design variety of activities for the students. An activity can be in the following way: the teacher posts various pictures related to one theme and in group students can be asked to create a story. one student will write the introduction and the other students will make changes, if necessary, and move the story further. At the end they can be asked to share their stories with each other and comment on other's work.

Introduction

Hey ELT buddies, I am Vandana Badoliya . I  belong from Kutch. I am studying in H M Patel Institute. I like doing new things and experimenting and I enjoy working with technologies....