Reflection on Tapped-In
For my educational technology class we were required to use Tapped-In as a way to meet and communicate with professionals in the educational field who are savvy technology users. Pre-service teachers such as myself posted questions, comments, links, and ideas about all things teaching.
Using Tapped-In was an interesting experience. The pros are obvious: access to a pool of professionals at the top of the field and the cutting edge of educational technology. We were able to read each others responses and learn how other pre-service teachers felt about teaching issues and we were able to see how professionals interact and what they had to contribute. In terms of access, resources, and learning Tapped-In was an excellent tool. And the forum was private to prevent any naivety coming back to haunt us. Another perk was that when people responded to threads in folders the threads move to the top of the folder for easy finding.
Cons: interface. Tapped-In required several links to get to the discussion board and there were a massive amount of folders and links cluttering up the page. There was a real time chat feature which took up the bottom half of the screen and operated independently of the forum and links. To sign out of chat you had to scroll down through all the text at the top (which could be quite a bit of scrolling) and find the small “disable chat” button in the bottom left. Talk about unintuitive. This removes the chat box and gives you the entire screen. There is an option to essentially unhinge the chat box but all this does is create a new window and leave what amounts to a stain where it used to be and doesn’t increase usability (in fact it made things more difficult).
What does all of this mean? It means I was less inclined to use it. It was like finding needles in haystacks in terms of getting to threads and finding ones that were relevant to me. This is a great resource which is cumbersome and inhibitive and I would be interested to see if there are better options around.
