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Don't "Friend" Your Students
Educators widely acknowledge the power of engaging students online in collaborative environments, and social networking sites like Facebook, mySpace and Twitter are increasingly the medium of choice for students to engage their peers. Teachers naturally want to take advantage of these same powerful tools and meet their students in environments that are familiar to them.
Unfortunately, commercial social networking tools are a poor choice for teacher-student interactions. On an individual level, use of public social networking tools blurs the line between personal and professional, potentially exposing private activities intended for friends and family to the classroom.
On an organizational level, matters are even more challenging. Posting class materials or photos on social networking sites is not only a potential violation of student privacy regulations, but such sites may also claim rights to your data, using that information for commercial purposes, or making it available to others on the network. A lack of transparency and accountability to a school or district has also led many organizations to ban the use of social networking sites.
The Web 2.0 Tools You Want - The Security You Need
ClassSpaces provides you and your students a private, password-protected environment where you can interact using a variety of Web 2.0 technologies.
Providing a single dashboard with access to user profiles, status updates, online discussion, document sharing, wikis, blogs, and more, ClassSpaces enables online community building in an environment specific to learning, and separate from the private lives of you and your students.
Teachers may sign up for ClassSpaces on a class-by-class basis, or organizations may subscribe on a school- or organization-wide basis, providing spaces for staff interaction in addition to use for traditional classroom teaching.
Connect & Engage
Profiles - Individual profiles for each community member bring identity into the classroom, allowing peers to connect and enabling personal expression within the context set by an instructor. Profiles may include not only common demographic information or relevant interests, but also a simple "status" update that is shared with the community.
Blogs - Teachers and Students may maintain individual blogs. Unlike other blogging services, however, only authorized community members may read or respond to ClassSpaces blogs, eliminating many of the concerns commonly associated with blogging.
Communities - The centerpiece for classroom discussion and collaboration on materials, communities provide secure online places for real engagement. Teachers and students use a dynamic "Feed" to share information, from questions and comments to shared links, video files, or other resources.
Wikis - Each community may work on any number of wikis, allowing classes to work collaboratively within project teams or to develop an idea progressively among larger groups.
Documents - Document storage, sharing, and group-editing is supported, including WebDAV integration for Office 2009 and OpenOffice products.
Mobility - Support for iPhone and Blackberry devices allows community members to engage from any location, whether in front of a traditional computer or not.
Tagging & Search - User-generated tags and a powerful, indexed search capability provide unique, fast access to information. Beyond traditional searches that find only documents, our powerful Social Search also identifies relevant communities and people who are content experts for your search terms. |
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For More Information
To learn more about ClassSpaces or to arrange for a demonstration, please [ fcp://@fc.aptiris.com,%239987068/ContactUs ]contact Aptiris.
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