My experiences of e-learning

Some of the ways that I think educational technology is used to greatest effect in educational settings.
I think that educational technologies are used widely in all educational institutions but from personal experience I know that some schools/ learning centres have a much more holistic approach than we have had at the school I teach in. We have some access to computers for students, although priority goes to Technology, ICT, Design, Mathematics ... and NCEA assessments, which means that there is not much opportunity for my classes to use computers at school apart from the odd period here and there. The lack of computer access means that my students and I have to be quite creative.
We have had an intranet (Knowledgenet) at school for the last few years which has been a great tool, but we have had many technical issues and only the really persistent and keen teachers have persevered with keeping it up and running.
I believe the greatest use of educational technologies is the ability for students to move beyond the classroom to create knowledge - this may be through research using the internet, posting new information into a wiki (such as wikipedia), creating personal blogs in which to reflect and publish their writing, podcasts ... There are so many fantastic tools out there for our students and ourselves to use to construct new knowledge, that it is very hard to keep up. In fact I've just asked one of my Y10 students to give me a tutorial on all the online tools she uses in her day to day life - she mentioned a tumbleblog to me today and I had no idea what she was talking about. I think it's pretty cool that students can teach us (and their peers) something really useful and they're the expert, not us.

An application of NET I think is particularly useful is the blog. This is probably because I set one up for my Y13 English class and it has been an easy and effective way to get them to explore topics more widely and deeply. They also have the opportunity to author the blog themselves, so if they find links etc that are valuable they can add them. Websites and all the online tools such as igoogle, google notebook, mindmeister ... are other tools that I personally find useful and I know that many of my students use them too.

Here is a list of the e-learning tools that I currently use personally and with my English classes and extra curricular groups:
www: EPIC, search engines, class blog, mindmeister, google tools - igoogle, google notebook, google earth ...
Microsoft Office: Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, Excel with macros
widgets
RSS
webquests
digital photography and video
asTTle
Quintura Search engine
Audio books (mp3)
Hot potatoes
...
I have found all of these technologies to be beneficial.

Applications of NET that I think are not so educationally useful - there are many technologies that I am not too sure about (time, which is precious and there is never enough of, is needed to learn about them) and therefore I may not see their relevance to education but other people may be staunch advocates. I have an open mind but I like to see evidence of their benefits before I invest time and effort in learning about them and using them with my students.
From my experience "Good" use of NET in education is widespread but, especially I think in Secondary Schools (?), not always within specific institutions. I have met many teachers at conferences, clusters, seminars and workshops who are using NETs to enhance student learning. However, in my own school there are very few people who are using educational technologies for more than just basic things such as publishing writing in Word, creating spreadsheets in Excel, photoshop ... but I guess we all have to start somewhere.