As part of a graduate course this past fall on emerging educational technologies, Web 2.0 tools in terms of their potential to enhance learning by promoting creativity, collaboration, and sharing. Retrospectively categorized these media into three groups: sharing (e.g., communal bookmarking, photo/video sharing, social networking, writer’s workshops, fanfiction), thinking (blogs, podcasts, online discussion forums), and co-creating (Wikis, collaborative file creation, mashups/collective media creation, collaborative social change communities. Like all category systems, the number of groups is somewhat arbitrary; and, depending on how they are used, particular media can blur from one category into another (e.g., writers’ workshop/fanfiction can approach co-creation rather than sharing if authors routinely and extensively revise based on iterative feedback from other community members).

This grouping is useful both in distinguishing the utility of various tools and in suggesting a progression in which collaborative social change communities could use a suite of increasingly encompassing tools to accomplish ever more sophisticated goals.

Chris Dede et all (2009) Emerging Technologies for Learning Science: A Time of Rapid Advances, dash.harvard.edu

Engage students in authentic tasks that approximate real world situations.

As indicated earlier by Prof Krishnan, there are many platforms available for an inquiry approach to learning.  However, the platform chosen has to be appropriate for the context within which the teaching & learning interactions take place.  Questions such as whether the interactions are heavily or lightly scaffolded, or vary as the student pick up and apply the knowledge, need to be answered.  Also, look for a platform that can support your assessment practices, so as to provide timely feedback to the learners.  Hope the above help.

Google education maybe helpful. 

You might want to explore the Wordpress platform. If you need students to write regularly and share their writing with a class or the public, the blogging function of Wordpress could be a helpful way for them to explore a topic. This is a learning strategy that is used more frequently for Digital Humanities or Digital Scholarship projects, especially as an alternative to a more closed environment in a Learning Management System like Moodle or Blackboard.

Some examples of this with undergraduates are listed below with the corresponding links attached:

Travels Across the Plains: the Oregon Trail at the University of Richmond (United States)

Bethel at War 1914-2014

Good luck,

Kent Gerber

http://dsl.richmond.edu/oregontrail/

http://bethelatwar.org/

http://wordpress.com

Hello,

I really like to use the Moodle platform I would suggest it. But reading his introduction again, I changed my mind. Seemed to want a more agile, easy, quick thing that promotes interactions with access to several different tools, access to web search with integrated collaborative tools, all under the control of the teacher, etc. My suggestion then is Google tools for Education http://www.google.com/edu/

Regards,

S.

No single platform is suitable for everyone those are the questions we have to ask ourselves before choosing one. We have to know who we want to reach, how we can reach them, what do we want to achieve and how we will do it. Me myself i chose Facebook because it was a quick efficient way to deliver information and communicate with students on a platform that is running all the time on their smart phones, a platform they use and they visit everyday,  so  all the educational material was at their finger tips and collected in one place (a FB group)

I believe the primary focus should be on instructional/ pedagogic design, rather than technology. The tool or platform should be a secondary decision.  If you use problem-based learning, for example, you need to spend time devising an appropriate real-world problem and then make available the various resources that students need to solve that problem (via a VLE, for example).  As regards picking specific tools to use, it is often a case of personal preferences and availability; if it does what you need it to do (from a pedagogic perspective), then it is a good tool (even if it is not the latest/trendiest one). The attached tool-related charts might help you with your decision.

https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/shutel/files/2014/10/TeachingApproachesMenu_full_version07external.pdf

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?docid=1DV-W0hXTR2noslFZsDK8JLnK8bn_75evWnrMq-w#rows:id=1