Forums, Blogs & Wikis
Forums
Forums are online discussion boards that allow people to interact and post in topics of interest. Each course within Moodle has a default discussion board, which your tutor may have set up as a way to record collaborative discussion and work.
Blogs
A blog is effectively an online journal, allowing you to create entries as often or as little as you like. The added benefit over some traditional methods is that rich content such as images, audio and video can all be embedded into blog posts.
Blogs are also good for both reflective and informative writing. Some people use them to keep people informed on updates i.e. upcoming sessions and links to other interesting material that may support students. They could be useful as reflective tools as thoughts and feelings could be recorded relating to studies. Blogs are also a good way to record supporting evidence found online which might otherwise be read and then forgotten about with no record of it being used.
Some popular websites to create free blogs are:
Micro-blogging
A fast-expanding type of service is micro-blogging, where users can simply post short updates typically around 100-140 characters in length. These provide a quick overview into what the person is doing at the time. Some types of services like this include:
Wikis
A 'wiki' is a piece of software, usually operating openly on the Internet, which allows users to create, edit and maintain pages. The biggest example, and one which you may well have used yourself, is Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopaedia which runs though a wiki.
Your tutor may have set up a wiki on Moodle as a place where work is created and recorded during group tasks.
Free, online wikis you might want to try include:
