Article

 A med­ical doc­tor from the pre­vi­ous cen­tury would not rec­og­nize the tech­nol­ogy in today's hos­pi­tal; a col­lege pro­fes­sor from that era would see vir­tu­ally no change in the tools of edu­ca­tion. But with the ram­pant tech­no­log­i­cal break; we would soon be wit­ness to tech­nol­ogy being lever­aged for opti­mal yield for ease of edu­ca­tion. A blended approach to learn­ing is needed to squeeze all the pos­si­bil­i­ties out of a tech­nol­ogy to real­ize the poten­tial. Blended learn­ing in this con­text looks at com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent learn­ing envi­ron­ments. It looks at com­bin­ing face-to-face instruc­tion with computer-mediated instruc­tion, thus enabling ubiq­ui­tous education.

Col­la­borize Class­room aims at bring­ing the teacher and stu­dent com­mu­nity in the realm of col­lab­o­ra­tive learn­ing. It sup­ports the lat­eral growth of edu­ca­tion by pro­mot­ing higher level of think­ing skills in a con­trolled envi­ron­ment. It is designed to sup­port the class­room teach­ers by pro­vid­ing them with an online forum that adds on the cur­ricu­lum. If you are won­der­ing about the usabil­ity of such a web based appli­ca­tion, this tool is indeed very sim­ple. It is some­times almost too sim­ple to be revolv­ing around sim­ple ques­tions, answers and result design. A plethora of ques­tions of var­i­ous types, includ­ing Yes/No, Mul­ti­ple Choice, Vote or Sug­gest, and Forum can be hosted by the stu­dents or teach­ers alike. Also the results can be bun­dled together and pub­lished over a page for mate­ri­al­is­tic judgment.

Indeed, such a appli­ca­tion can help a teacher to main­tain their class loads, assign­ments approval as well as an effec­tive stu­dent engage­ment. This web appli­ca­tion comes with loads of "teacher fea­tures"- attach­ments which allows for portable doc­u­ments, per­son­al­ized mes­sag­ing for stu­dent teacher inter­ac­tion, reports to view stu­dent par­tic­i­pa­tion, activ­i­ties of day to day are sent for email purview, watch lists to select key dis­cus­sions for fol­low up, sup­port tuto­ri­als for estab­lish­ing in the web­site, and search options.

As a teacher you would be able to clearly spec­ify the expec­ta­tions related to your space. You would reserve the right to remove any non-constructive or inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages in the forum. To top it, Col­la­borize is a secure site acces­si­ble only via pro­tected sign in known to you and your stu­dents. None of the class­room data leaks out of your secure area. Unlike many of the other appli­ca­tions, this is a straight­for­ward approach to teach. IT is acces­si­ble directly via your pri­vate URL. Its sim­plic­ity makes it easy to nav­i­gate and focuses mainly on mul­ti­tude issues of learn­ing. Col­la­borize effec­tively bridges the gap between har­ness­ing the true poten­tial of tech­nol­ogy in education