Nicenet

What is Nicenet?

The full name of Nicenet is ‘Nicenet’s Internet Classroom assistant’. It is a virtual classroom where students can share their resources and participate in learning activities.

How it works?
Teachers will need to register and create a ‘Class Key’ for their students.

For students

1. To join a virtual classroom in Nicenet, students have to go to the website. http://www.nicenet.org/
2. Then click ‘Join A Class’ on the top right hand corner and enter the ‘Class Key’ given by their teacher. 
3. After filling in basic information to create an account, you may ‘Join the Class’.
4. After logging in, you will see the topic set by the teacher in ‘Conferencing’ section. There may be more than one topic and you can choose which you want to (or need to ) work on. 
5. Within that topic, you may create a new post to tell the others your thoughts by clicking ‘Post New Message to….’ and respond to a particular post by clicking ‘reply.

Benefits

1. Nicenet is a reliable website which is not only free, but also free of advertisements.
2. It is very straightforward and user-friendly.
3. There is no time limit in enrolling the class. PArticipants can be still in touch when the course finishes and all the contributions will be still available.
4. Class schedule is also available in the virtual classroom so students are clear about the time for joining discussion, handing in their work or even something happen outside Nicenet, such as the dates of their outings.
5. Students can perform tasks or join discussions in real time, without worrying the physical constraints. This means Nicenet can supplement face-to-face teaching and even support distance learning.

Limitations

1. Documents cannot be uploaded. You will have to type the content in the text box and post it to Nicenet. It is still inconvenient even though we can simply copy and paste our documents. Try to imagine you make some changes to the content and forget to press the ‘Edit Document’ button at the bottom, all the amendments will be gone! Also, this limits the form of files shared among students. They cannot share audio files or other media on their computers. The y can only share those available online by sending the links.
2. Teachers can’t clone the lesson materials or copy the whole classroom. This means they will need to repeat all the steps to set up another classroom in Nicenet when they are teaching two classes in the same grade, or when they teach the same grade again the next school year. 

Some ideas to use Nicenet
In my opinion, Nicenet itself cannot stand alone as a virtual classroom due to the drawbacks I mentioned above. It can be quite useful in supplementing a face-to-face classroom, though. Nicenet is often regarded as a Learning Management System, but I think we have other better options such as Moodle. I find Nicenet particularly useful, however, if we narrowed down the things we want to work on. For example, it is a nice tool for helping students pariticipate in writing tasks. They can share resources they find online and discuss their ideas on Nicenet.