Online learning is being preferred over conventional classroom learning by a large number of students. Students find it more effective and interesting as learning online
allows them to discover things on their own and not just depend on their teachers to gain knowledge. A lot of learning in students’ lives has begun to happen online and it has its own implications. When a student chooses to learn with the tools and resources available online, he decides to take responsibility of his own learning. This requires him to stay more organized and self-directed to keep track of his tasks and learning progress. Vast amount of information is available online to learn from, we need to find a way to deal with it, gain knowledge from it, access it at our convenience and curate it. We need to deal with online materials, curricula, useful and interesting posts, videos and podcasts. Learning cannot be effective if we cannot keep track of it and in the process of online learning keeping track of learning highly matters. In addition to providing the learning tools and resources to support learning online, the Web also provides us with a number of tools using which we can keep track of our online learning and make it a success.
Here are some online available key tools for students to keep track of their online learning:
Degreed: Helps you to keep track of all your academic, professional and lifelong learning and get credit for everything you’ve learned. It makes daily online learning more interesting and engaging as you can track your daily progress against goals designed to make you smarter and expand your learning capacity. Degreed not only keeps track of your degrees or certificates but also records any books, articles, conferences, and videos you learn from. The site is equally handy for K-12 students as well, who with increasing online coursework are earning badges and certifications in all sorts of subjects, and this site helps them keep track of all that learning. Degreed has a feature for organizing and categorizing everything you put in to make it look great and easy to find and measure your progress. So, Degreed catalogs all your learning by tracking all the online learning material to keep a cumulative record of learning and lays emphasis on continued learning with points, learning goals and additional resources which make it fun and easy to keep on learning.
Diigo: Is an easy, versatile and powerful multi-tool for knowledge management to streamline the information workflow. It is a cloud-based information management system that helps you organize relevant facts you find online. You can keep track of your favorite websites and revisit them from any computer at any time. It provides you with a personal cloud-based Diigo library where you can keep all your highlights and share it with friends. It lets you highlight important text, write notes in margins, tag and share content online. You can build your personal library with links, pages, notes, pictures, etc., and organize any amounts of information which gets saved in the cloud so you can access it from any device. It also archives webpages for you, lets you work collaboratively in groups, share information as much as required and is a great way to improve your online productivity.
Evernote: Is a handy service that helps you remember and act upon ideas, projects and experiences. It helps you stay organized across all the different devices you use. You can take notes in the form of formatted text, a full website or parts of a page and also archive photos and memos. It gives you various options to structure your notes and ideas, such as putting them in different folders, adding tags, annotations, setting your own comments and more. Students can use it to gather, organize and share information with others during inquiry, research, or independent projects. They can use it as an e-portfolio for their work and keep on adding to it. It encourages life-long learning, as students are able to build, track and reflect on learning over time.
Delicious: Is an easy tool to save, organize and discover interesting links on Web. It helps you keep track of your learning by enabling you to organize the content you come across frequently for future use. You can bookmark resources using it, so that you have a compilation of your favorite articles, blogs and pages to access. To make sure you never lose your bookmarks, Delicious offers you an option to export and download them. You can also share your favorite bookmarks with friends, family, and others with its social bookmarking feature. The primary use of Delicious is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere and use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks.
Scoop.it: Is a Web-based platform for collecting and curating content. It allows users to comment on the materials they collect and share the additions to their collections through a wide range of other social media platforms. It can be used as a Web bookmarklet to easily and manually add content. When you come across the posts and articles which you particularly like, you can add them to your collection using Scoop.it’s bookmarklet feature. It makes it easy for users to compile news and stay current on specific topics by following what other users post. Essentially, you create a constantly updated online informational source on a subject. It is easy to use, encourages you to explore topics, and provides you with a chance to share their opinion and communicate with others.
Learning in an organized way and keeping track of learning are essential components of effective online learning. I hope these tools can help you keep track of your online learning so you can make the most out of it. Please add more tools you may know for the purpose. The Comment Box awaits you.
