… is still a fool.
If you read blog posts of me before (like this one), you know I am very sceptical about using tools. Of course there are some very creative and innovative ones, and I personally like to play around. But then I often feel like they ask faculty and students to adapt to them (the tools) instead of seamlessly integrating into their (faculty and students) work flow. And this is the beginning of the end. Moreover, as I wrote in the post linked above, many of them disappear as quickly as they appeared.
I am very convinced that the essential point when creating fun /interactive /innovative /engaging /collaborative /younameit (online) lessons is concentration on the content and the design, not the environment or tools.
The first questions should simply be “What shall my students learn?”. Is it some formal learning like basic physics? Is it a pure list of terms? Is it solving of some problem-based tasks? Is it applying what they learned before by adding their own tasks?
Of course the next question is “How shall they learn this”? By reading some text and studying some graphics? By self-generating content? By group work? By searching for online sources? By interviewing seniors? By discussing within a group of peers?
And then the time comes to first think about the “How to deliver this to the students”. And I strongly recommend to keep it simple! Use what you have– the Wiki in your LMS for example offers tons of possibilities, like generating a collection of case studies written by the students, gather additional resources found by the students, accumulate Q&As, curating a (self-made) video collection. Assignments include peer-reviews, group-compiled glossaries or text-based exams. And workshop modules provide space for group-written texts as peer-assignements. So be creative how to use the many options you already have in your LMS or other internal instrument like (micro)blogs or chat or document repository.
And if you still have this brilliant innovative idea you are not able to implement with what you have- there are more and more plugins for LMS that integrate third-party services. Just be careful that the service will not have shut down next year ;-).
Picture taken from http://www.schrockguide.net/uploads/3/9/2/2/392267/5395036_orig.png