Abstract:

The context of this paper is vocational teacher education. Teacher student groups represent diversity both in professional backgrounds, ICT skills and personal learning interests. Specifically in a mobile teacher project (2015–2017) there is an emphasis in finding and developing new practices to utilize both versatile social media solutions and other ICT applications in learning.

It has been noticed during the learning process that it would be pedagogically useful to efficiently observe how the students proceed in using various applications. This could benefit both teachers and students themselves. Simple lists of applications used do not serve this purpose in the best way. The goal is to create peer learning practices in order to utilize students´ growing skills to the benefit of all. In order to reach this, new practices are developed in order to make the studying process more transparent. This could help the participants in learning from each other and thus studying would obviously become more interesting for all.

Web-based learning typically involves many social media tools and other ICT applications. Since the number of pedagogically useful and interesting tools increases rapidly, the management of the set of tools being used gets more challenging. Each teacher and student tends to have ones own favourite applications and they utilize them in different ways. In addition, the applications themselves develop further. The information related to these applications is often cumbersome to find and interpret.

The paper describes the need and pedagogical benefits of systematizing the studying process mentioned above. As a practical solution it presents a simple and interesting programme for managing a large amount of various applications, network tools, utilized in web-based learning. With help of this programme a teacher, developer or student can visualize the set of tools he or she is gathering into ones own "toolbox". In a way, this also serves learning analytics purposes.

The paper presents a two-way approach clarifying the use of network tools. There are two basic - and opposite - ways to use the tool: one can quickly
1. find a collection of tools applicable for a certain purpose
2. find uses of a certain network tool (application).

With the programme it is easy to check and compare the properties of similar tools and make the choice for various situations. The user can gather his/her own collection on various network tools and save their basic properties. 

To put it briefly, the programme offers following features:
- in learning it is useful to be able to share ones own experiences with other students and with the teacher
- both the student and the teacher can visualize the set of applications that they are using
- the visual presentation makes it easy and more interesting to follow how the versatility of the network toolbox is being built
- the programme can include a short summary of each tool to make it easy to find
- the data can be updated by the user
- the definitions and descriptions of all tools can be created freely.

Keywords:

Web-based learning, mobile learning, learning analytics, peer learning, teacher education, ICT skills.