learning to chitch.at
Now that i was starting to settle with my onffice at faculty central, another free educational social network site comes along to mess things up a bit. With a url almost as clever as del.icio.us, http://chitch.at, ChitChat has two video tutorials on youtube: the intro and the basic walkthrough1 to help with the basics. It is very easy to get started and once you create your classes and invite students to log in, you can upload content as classroom assignments and mark the responses.
One of the most interesting marking features is the ability to annotate the course work and save the notes as comments so the student can have immediate access to feedback when reading through the text (these notes are similar to ones available at flicker to annotate photos). I can see it is a fast evolving project and I look forward to test it with a classroom next semester. For example, I want to find out if chichat lets one annotate images like in flickr.
For now, chitchat has more of the colourful look of a blogger’s blog, while facultycentral gets closer to the white clean aesthetics of a wiki. Crucially, there is still nothing like the “online office” (i call it onfice) and the rubric studio made available at facultycentral, that allows you to develop rubrics for collaborative assessment, one of the best tools I found for student-centred assessment.
Leave a Reply