App Inventory

About This Project

The Web offers a great opportunity in helping teachers to adopt student centred methodologies: the availability of hundreds of Web 2.0 applications and for mobile devices. These applications give users the opportunity to create and share digital artefacts, to support the collaboration and communication between workgroups and to aggregate, remix and share heterogeneous materials. When incorportated into daily teaching and learning activities (TLA), such applications can improve the collaborative, cognitive and creative work of the students, enhancing and redefining traditional educational practices.
Nevertheless, although these applications are generally easy to find and use, there is a lack of knowledge about their existence, their functions and their potential in an educational setting. AppInventory, is a project with the aim to develop a digital catalogue of applications: they are organized by applying an original taxonomy; the users can browse among them benefiting from a visual approach and semantic connections modelled using zz-structures.

During a first stage 112 Web 2.0 applications have been analysed and presented by short videos with the help of students of University of Udine. The videos are published in a dedicated playlist of the Sasweb lab.’s Youtube channel.

In the second stage, still ongoing, 170 new applications are considered and a Web platform is under development to offer users an organized and holistic view of the catalogue of applications. The platform is modeled around specific graphic organizers to improve data exploration and to semantically connect all available information of the applications.