Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

I'm always looking for handy tools that students can use as follow up tasks to online research and Pro | Con Lists certainly looks like a good one.

The site enables students to collect together the advantages and disadvantages of a particular subject and create a list of each to see how they balance out.

Here's an example one on Solar Energy

As you can see, at the top of the page is the list of pros and cons,

and below it is the balance of the results.



When creating the list students can also add to or reduce the influence of some factors and balance emotional and rational factors of each too.

It sounds complicated, but these are very easy to produce. Just register and log in and go to 'Create a list'. Give the list a title, select the topic and add a description. You are then ready to start adding the pros and cons.

Each of the pros and cons added has a default weight of 3 in both the emotional and rational settings, but students can click on the numbers to increase or decrease the weight if they think the pro or con is more or less significant.

Once they have completed their lists they can publish them or share them through a range of social media platforms.

Visitors to the lists can then leave comments or agree or disagree with each of the individual pros and cons in the list, simply by clicking on them and voting.


To see how this works I've created a short Pro and Con list on the topic of Interactive Whiteboards. Feel free to comment and suggest more pros and cons.

• Pros and Cons of Interactive Whitebaords

I think Pro | Con Lists is a great way to follow up web based research activities and would work really well combined with something like Mashpedia.

• Students could go to the Mashpedia site and search for information on something like wind power, solar power or even different political parties or sporting teams, then use the information they find to create their list of pros and cons.
• Once the lists are created they could share them with other students and vote on whether they agree with the pros and cons.
• Students could also use the site to brainstorm pros and cons before they do research. This would get them thinking about the subject first and they could then look back at their own lists and see how they could change or modify them.
  

What I really like about the site is that it gets students thinking and evaluating the power of their arguments too.

It would be nice if the lists could be added to by visitors, but that doesn't seem to be possible, but I still think this is a really useful tool and one that can be used to create research based reading and listening tasks.

I hope you like it and find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• 35 more reading tasks
• Using Wise Quotes with EFL Students
• Get the News Through Images
• Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Education for the Global Economy

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia

I've just discovered Mashpedia and I have to say I really like it. It's a combination of a search engine and an encyclopedia. It's very simple to use, you just type in a search query and hit search.

The site will then generate a page of information links about your search topic. It collects information from multiple media and different sources from books, blogs , text images to video and even Twitter references.


Here's a couple of example pages I created, just click the titles to see the pages compile themselves.

• Learning technology
• Jimi Hendrix
• London Zoo
• Barcelona
• The European Union
• The Oud
  

This is a great tool for creating reading and research tasks for students, based around authentic materials. It creates genuine web based reading tasks that demand that students assess clues to text content from multiple sources before exploring the links, then read or watch for gist to check relevance before reading / listening more deeply for specific information.

The pages will always create similar though not identical content so don't create very specific reading and research tasks, make sure the tasks are general and more generic.

Here are some possible reading / research tasks you could use which would work for most topics:

• Get students to look at the information and use it to create a quiz on the topic. They find information that interests them and write questions to quiz the rest of the class.
• Set students to find 5 - 10 facts about a topic. You could stipulate some of these need to be negative aspects and some positive to make it more challenging.
• Get students to search the page and decide which of the sources it links to is the single most informative or interesting.
• Get students to research a topic and create a multimedia poster about it using text, images and video embedded. You could use something like Glogster for them to show their results.
• Get students to research a topic and create a short documentary or news report about it. If you have access to a video camera you could video their presentations.

Of course you still have to be careful with younger students as you can't control what comes in to the page, and also expect much less of lower level students and set them quite simple tasks, perhaps as simple as pulling out some images and describing them etc.

This is a great way to generate web based reading tasks from authentic materials that students can access in an authentic way. I hope you find Mashpedia and these suggestions useful.

Related links:

• 35 more reading tasks
• Using Wise Quotes with EFL Students
• Get the News Through Images
  
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
  
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Create Image Books

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Nik Peachey Read More..

The Digital Research Tools Wiki

The DIRT (Digital Research Tools) wiki is a fantastic resource that I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. This is how the site describes itself:

"This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for"


In fact this is a bit of an understatement, as the wiki is a fantastically rich source of information and links to a huge range of tools that will be of interest to almost any educator.

Here are just the first few categories:

• Analyze statistics
• Analyze texts
• Author an interactive work
• Blog
• Brainstorm/ generate ideas
• Build and share collections
• Collaborate
• Collect data
• Communicate with colleagues
• Compare resources
• Conduct linguistic research

Within a few moments of starting to search I had already fond this really nice tool for creating slide shows from Diigo bookmarks http://slides.diigo.com/



I think it could probably take me the rest of the year to search through and write about all the interesting things on the site.
Really fantastic resource. You can't fail to find something useful on DiRT.

Related links:

• Using wikis for teacher development
• Using wikis with EFL students
• Creating a Wiki
• Training Teachers to Use Blogger
• Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
  

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..