Technology Infused Learning and Teaching

When I was first looking for a web-based RSS aggregator, I tried both PageFlakes and Netvibes (which to me is somewhat similar). However, once my list of RSS feeds grew too long, I ceased to use them and never gave either another thought. I’ll be the first to admit that I can be very one dimensional in my thinking, meaning that I will sometimes look at a tool and see it as having one purpose. I need to work on thinking out of the box more and exploring PageFlakes allowed me to do just that.

I would have never thought about creating a PageFlake that could be used by others as a resource. It’s a great idea and seems as though it would be far easier to use as a themed resource page than building a web page containing a variety of resources. I found it to be very easy to create and customize my own PageFlake. Always a good sign when a site is fairly user friendly, which is something I look for when promoting its use.

For classroom learning, a teacher could conceivably create a page for each unit containing a “theme” of resources pertaining to those standards. I would be very interested to see how teachers use PakeFlakes with their students. I’m also wondering if students could generate their own PageFlake as an assignment and how that might look. The “anything” flake was completely new to me and considering how flexible it is, I would think that students could get very creative with what they might choose to embed for an assignment.

As a professional learning resource, I could definitely see incorporating PageFlakes into a course, such as providing an RSS feeds for specifically tagged bookmarks from Del.icio.us or Diigo, an RSS feed for specific blogs that might relate to the course, task lists, a calendar, and more.

Personally, I can see spending a lot of time going through some searches on PageFlakes to see what gems I might uncover. I”ll have to spend some more time there once this course has been completed.

Photo credit: Poinsetta Flakes by CaptPiper

I LOVE Google Docs and have for quite some time. In my job, I need to be able to work on documents sometimes whenever I get the chance. That might mean that I have ten minutes at a school while I’m loading server-based software or I have five minutes in a media center while I’m waiting to meet a teacher. Those minutes can add up to productivity if I am able to log into Google Docs and make edits or additions to a document. Mobility and accessibility are two wonderful advantages.

Does Google Docs (Presentation and Spreadsheets) have disadvantages? Sure, all three are not Microsoft Office and certainly do not have all of the features, but the advantages more than make up for it. If I could change two things about Google Docs right now, that would be the ability to embed a Google Document into a wiki, blog, or web page and to have a chat. You can embed a spreadsheet and chat in Google Spreadsheets, but not a document, which to me is puzzling since they are both under the Google Docs umbrella.

As for how to use these? Currently we are updating our Media Specialist’s Handbook and I needed a way for all fourteen of them to be able to edit the document, but without creating 14 copies of the same thing leaving me to compile all of the edits. The solution? Google Docs. I took the entire document, split it into four and each media specialist chose a section to work on. They are making their edits and when they are finished, the others will be invited to view their changes, making any last edits before the final document is put together. This also allows them to work on it at their leisure in between the time we meet as a group.

For students who are tasked with a group project (the dreaded group project), Google Docs can allow them to work on a single document all at the same time, while providing accountability for the work they’ve contributed. The beauty of Google Docs allows the teacher to see who has contributed which parts, something that hasn’t been possible in the past using a normal paper/pencil or word processor options.

Not my idea, but I read about a great example for using Google Docs for collaborative story writing. Students were paired together between two different schools, four total, two at each school. Using two computers, one using Skype and the other using Google Docs, students were able to communicate and discuss their story while writing it live.

Google Spreadsheets is an incredible tool, especially the Forms function. The ability to create quickly publishable forms that are also embeddable presents some great opportunities. The following ideas were taken from Tom Barrett’s blog post 10 Google Forms for the Classroom.

1) Getting to know you – A teacher can gather all kinds of information about their students by having them fill in the form with information about their favorite things, clubs, and more.

2)Emotion Graph – Students indicate their feelings at certain points of a story. Data can then be used to create a graph indicating the class reaction.

3)Library Book Reviews – Collect children’s opinions about the books they read. It can be used as a resource for others to help them decide the books they would like to read.

In my job, I have used forms for course registrations and for end-of-course assessments. I found the latter to be quite useful as course participants, I felt, were more candid and provided me with more feedback than they would have using a traditional paper review.

I’ve dabbled in Google Presentations, but haven’t created anything that I’ve used. Personally, I found it limiting. However, I do like the fact that you can conduct a chat while showing the presentation, creating a back channel. I have participated in several of these presentations both live and streamed and have found that feature to be quite useful.

I’ve heard about LibraryThing for a while now and have seen the “bookshelves” on blogs, but have never truly taken the time to investigate the site for myself. So, thank you first of all for this “thing”, which gave me the opportunity to do just that.

First of all, and I hate to admit this, although I do enjoy reading very much, it’s an escapist sport for me. Which means what, you may ask? Basically, I don’t want to think when I read. I do plenty of thinking when I read online, which is a huge portion of my day. So, with that being said, when I do choose something to read (bound and printed), it’s fluff pure and simple.

Romance is my preferred genre. Now, I do have a few authors who I enjoy reading, but beyond them, finding other books that I’d like to spend a few hours with and that I’ll enjoy can be difficult. Have you looked at the romance aisle in a bookstore lately? Too many choices. Given that, I thought the Suggester function of LibraryThing was great. I haven’t had a chance to check out any of the books that it suggested, but I did find myself spending FAR too much time using that great little feature.

The groups are something I plan on investigating further on my own. There are times, even though I’m primarily a “fluff” reader, that I’d like to see what others like me are interested in, but didn’t quite know where to turn.

The search feature was very robust. Having the ability to search for books in so many ways, especially since I don’t recall many of the names of authors who I have read, was wonderful. Since tags are used, I even attempted to search for themes that might be found in romance books and had success with that as well. I noted that they refer to using multiple tags in the search as a “tag mash.”

As far as the educational setting, I think the idea of participating in a book challenge would be fun, especially if students tied the book challenge to a blog where they reviewed the books they read and included LibraryThing Widget as well. As for other applications, I’m not sure, but I will enjoy reading the other blog posts on this topic to see what they thought.

Using web-based bookmarking services has been something that I’ve done for years. When I taught French, I would become very frustrated by needing links at school that I had found at home. Emailing them to myself would work, but I knew there had to be a more efficient method. I tried several services, all of which ended up going under (thankfully not taking my bookmarks with them), until I found Del.icio.us, now delicious.com.

I LOVE using social bookmarking services and have been a delicious user for longer than I can recall. Oddly enough my oldest saved bookmark dates back to June of 2007, but I know I started using this service long before then. My account on Del.icio.us is techintegrate.

When I first imported my bookmarks (many, many moons ago), I didn’t really understand tagging all that well. First, I did the anal thing and added tags to EVERY bookmark. At that time, I think I had about 300 – 500 bookmarks. I do NOT recommend anyone doing what I did. In fact, a co-worker came up with a far more reasonable approach. IF she visited one of the sites and then went to bookmark it, she knew if it was one of the uploaded sites that she had because the tag said “imported”. She then erased that tag and added in ones that were appropriate. Smart woman! Wish I had thought of that. Using this process, if after quite a few months she had not changed the “imported” tag to something more relevant, then she most likely wouldn’t need the site again and deleted it from her collection.

I found this image below a while back and thought it was a great visual way to illustrate the concept of tagging.

But tagging, I have come to believe, can become a HUGE headache if you are not both consistent in how you tag your sites AND if you do not use enough tags to later retrieve sites you need. In the beginning, I wasn’t very liberal with tagging sites. I may have only used two tags, feeling this would be sufficient. However, when attempting to find sites that I needed, those two words sometimes weren’t enough. I would know that there was a site that I had found and it was the one that I really needed, but due to my tagging practices, I wasn’t able to easily locate it.

Luckily, Delicious does provide you both with recommended tags and with a library of your own tags as you begin to type it in. This is a wonderful feature, because it helps with ensuring that your tagging is somewhat consistent. I say somewhat, because even though I try, I still need to go into my tags every now and again and do some merging, condensing, and cleaning. Case in point, having the tags “blog”, “blogs”, and “blogging”. I know there is a rhyme and reason to my madness, but until I investigate the sites tagged with those words, it remains a mystery.

Another important aspect of keeping your bookmarks organized is to use the bundle function. This is akin to using folders in your browser favorites, but has much more flexibility. I tend to go to my bundles to see which tags I placed under them, and then search from there when mining my own bookmarks.

Of course, the most beneficial aspect of social bookmarking, is the “social” aspect. The ability to see who else saved the same types of bookmarks that I did, and then be able to look through their bookmarks is like having your own private goldmine. I hate to admit how much time I’ve spent hopping from one person’s list to another, to another, all because of a bookmark that I saved. To know that I have access that kind of a resource, that collective intelligence, is huge, especially when I can read through their comments about the website itself, if they’ve added any.

Now, after I’ve said all of this about Del.icio.us, I need to admit that no longer directly save links to this service. I discovered Diigo in the Fall of 2007 and really liked it for the fact that you could highlight and place sticky notes on pages for future reference. I tried the site, but didn’t wish to cease using Del.icio.us because I knew that more people were bookmarking there, which is a huge resource. Diigo was supposed to cross-post to Del.icio.us, but I soon discovered that it was not working properly, so I abandoned it. That was until Diigo came through with a major upgrade in early 2008 that appealed to many educational users of Del.icio.us. The news of the new features made the rounds at Twitter and within a week, I had built up a considerable network there.

Diigo has many services that Del.icio.us does not, which for me makes it the superior tool. There is a discussion board where I can communicate with my “friends”, I can create lists of bookmarks that are easily shared with others, I can participate in groups on specific topics where members save links to a common pool, and the list goes on. Diigo, for me, has become such a valuable resource that I tend to search their first before going to Google. Many times I will search my own bookmarks by tags and if I don’t find what I need from my own collection, with a click of a link, I can then scan through all of the sites with those same tags saved by my friends. Granted, the tags other people use may not be the same ones that I would use, but I have still been able to find resources that I might not have otherwise.

No matter which service you like, participating in a social bookmarking is “no brainer”. I love to think about it in terms of having a collective intelligence at my fingertips. Professionally speaking, I rely on this service heavily. Instead of the hit or miss searching I can do on Google, I peruse what my network has saved first to see what gems I might find.

Other ways and examples of using this service might be:
1) Teachers in a school or across the district who teach the same subject and/or grade level can create a group in which to save bookmarks.

2) Decide upon a “common tag” that all teachers will use for researching and saving links for an upcoming project students will do. By agreeing on a unique “common tag” and tagging all links found with that tag, you can then search for that specific tag and create a link roll for the students. The link roll can then be embedded into class website, wiki, or blog for the students to use.

3) Students who are working on a common project can also (if they have accounts or using the teacher’s account) save using common tags.

4) Teachers can create lists of bookmarks by tags for students to use. These lists in Diigo have RSS feeds, which can be integrated into a wiki.

5) The highlighting and annotation (sticky note) feature, when shared in groups, can be most helpful to teachers when collecting resources. If a page is mostly text, highlighting and adding a sticky note can help others within the group find the pertinent information quickly, as well as any accompanying notes.

I’m sure there are more uses, but these are just a few. I’m addicted to Diigo, and am slowly but surely getting others in my district to use it as well. Even if they begin using it for purely personal reasons, like not having to email themselves bookmarks, it’s a first step. The benefits of the social aspects will follow. Here’s hoping it goes viral in a good way.

Image Source: cambodia4kidsorg

Let us pause as this writer screams to see that her Google Reader is still showing well over 1,000 unread post after having tackled many of them earlier this week.

Deep breath…

Okay, my intent had been to dig deep into the bowels of my reader to find one of my starred gems, however when I opened it to develop this post, one of the titles of a recent post jumped out at me: 50 Ways to Use a Projector in the Classroom. This post comes from the blog, Langwitches created by Silvia Tolisano, who I greatly admire. She is known, to me at least, for her practical blog posts, which I have always found informative.

This particular post is cuts right to the heart of the title and is a subject about which I have been thinking about recently. One of the issues that I have noticed in my district is that teachers have been using LCD projectors mostly as a replacement for their overhead projector – something she mentions in the post. She goes on to describe the process of how they adopted the LCD’s and how they have begun mounting them. I really liked hearing about this because it’s nice to hear about where other schools are in utilizing various types of technologies.

Silvia then speaks of offering professional development on uses for the LCD projector at one of their monthly workshops. I love the idea of monthly workshops and wish that I could implement this myself, but I would really need people in the schools that I could count on to redeliver this instruction. Yet another item to add to my list of things to do. But given the practicality of her suggestions, which she adapted from a discussion on Classroom 2.0, and her wiki, this will become a great resource for me to use in my district.

As for the second post that I’d like to share, I found this great post by Jennifer Jones of Injenuity. I only wish there had been time to read it before I did my presentation at GaETC. Had that been the case, I think I may have changed the approach I took just a bit. Why? Because in her post, titled “The Job of Personal Learning”, she approaches the building of a PLN by looking at it as a job. I knew that building a PLN was work, knew that it takes time, and knew that you have to dedicate yourself to your tools of choice and to fostering the connections. Even knowing all of this, I didn’t think of it as a job, probably because I eat this stuff up. I quickly realized the benefits of my network and I was hooked!

This part really rocked me, that rang true with me (the grace of 20/20 vision after the fact) was this,

When I look at it as a job, I can see why introducing it to groups en masse doesn’t lead to successful adoption.

Yes, I enjoyed a rather self-depreciating laugh. After all, that’s exactly what I attempted to do. But hey, so did David Warlick and Steve Dembo, too. At least I was in good company, right? Of course. My expectations were a smidgen too high though. Yes, I am a glass 1/2 full kind of girl, but I believe in the power of positive thought. Yes, I thought I might could possibly start a PLN wave. I think perhaps it was more like a pebble dropped into a large lake though.

Regardless, Jen’s quote above is all too true. After reflecting on it, I realized that I have had much more success with colleagues becoming involved in aspects of building a PLN because I have been able to intimately demonstrate the power of my PLN and I have been able to, in effect, mentor them. Those who I have been able to do that with have stuck with it.