Classroom Tech, Part I: Delicious

Like most teachers, I enjoy my summer vacation. The weather is hot, dry, and sunny, I don’t have to go to school, and I have an abundance of time to spend just relaxing. Of course, like most other teachers, I like to waste much of this vacation sitting inside on the computer, planning for the next school year, preparing brilliant lessons and engaging projects for my students. It’s a compulsion, really. I don’t get paid for this time, and often my ideas don’t pan out come September, but I just can’t help it – something inside me wants to give my students the best that I have, and if I have 2+ months to come up with ideas, by golly I’m going to use it.

Since I know there are plenty of other teachers out there just like me, I thought I would begin a series of posts outlining how I plan on using technology during the coming school year. I’ll share some tools, resources, and ideas that I intend to use with students in the classroom, and hopefully you, the reader, will share some advice or thoughts of your own, either in the comments section, or on your own blog (just let me know if you do!). In the final post of the series, I’ll discuss some of the “best practices” related to teaching with technology, as well as some additional resources. But without further adieu, I’ll get to the first piece of technology I plan to use this year: Delicious.

By now, most people reading this blog know what Delicious is. For those that don’t, it’s a social bookmarking service – a website that lets you bookmark (save) web pages to either access later or to share with others. For a good explanation, watch CommonCraft’s “Social Bookmarking in Plain English.”

I’ve been using Delicious for a little over a year now (kind of a late bloomer on this one), and like most, I use it daily. I subscribe to a number of education and technology related sites in Google Reader and frequently find myself saving entries and/or links when I flip through Reader each morning (feel free to check out my Delicious to see what I mean).

It was only recently, however, that I began to realize how it may be useful in the classroom. Just a couple of ideas I’ve tossed around:

1. Create a tag for your class and start saving links that your students might find useful or interesting. Share a link to this tag with your students (and parents) on the class syllabus, class website, or even just a URL on the whiteboard. I’ve already started preparing this for the school year (you can see how it’s going here).
2. Have students create their own Delicious accounts. When they come across links that might be useful or interesting to the class, have them tag it with your class tag.
3. If students are doing individual research projects, they can create a project tag to organize their research.
4. If students are working on a group project, they can add the members of their group to their Delicious network. They can then use the “for:” tags to share links with other group members.
5. Teachers can monitor students’ progress in research by monitoring students’ Delicious pages. In addition to seeing how many pages have been saved, you might utilize the annotation portion to have students summarize and/or evaluate each page they save. This would be great as a rough draft of an annotated bibliography.

These are only a few possibilities that I’ve thought of. What other ways might you use Delicious in the secondary or elementary classrooms?

In the next post, I’ll be sharing my plans for iGoogle and other Google tools.

Democracy 2.0

There’s been a lot going on the last couple of weeks, and I heard that there was some sort of big voting thing last week (but I thought American Idol started in January…).

I came across this CNN article today that was impressive. It’s about Barack Obama’s new up-and-running website, change.gov. While that in and of itself is pretty cool, some of the other things outlined in the CNN article are nothing short of revolutionary. A quick recap:

• The article summarizes the enormous impact the web, specifically Web 2.0, had on Obama’s campaign and, in all likelihood, his election. From Facebook and MySpace to Twitter and text messages, Obama’s use of technology and the social web were revolutionary.
• This quote is unreal: “People who follow Obama online have become a community that the president-elect can tap into, said Andrew Raseij, founder of TechPresident.com, a Web site that tracked the online operations of the 2008 presidential campaigns. ‘He now has his own special interest. He has a group of people he can go to and ask them to participate in helping him pass his legislative agenda,’ Raseij said.”
  In other words, he has an online professional learning community (PLC). Sweet…
• The same guy predicts that this presidency will revolutionize how the president communicates with the public: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Barack Obama starts doing a weekly YouTube video and also fireside chats for the 21st century by allowing people to filter up questions to him that he might answer.”
  How cool would that be? To get updates on YouTube? To ask the president a question? Whoa nelly…
• But perhaps the most significant point of the article (in my humble opinion) is this: “The president-elect already has said he’ll have a five-day online comment period before signing any nonemergency legislation, so Americans can be part of the process.”

So the new president not only revolutionized how campaigns will be run, but is also aiming to revolutionize the way democracy itself is run. Is it safe to say that Web 2.0 – the interactive, read-write, social networking, at-your-fingertips web – is more than just a silly fad?

Regardless of what you think about the man himself (or his party), I think we cannot help but applaud this sort of forward-thinking that Obama and his crew have been doing. It strikes me as both unbelievable and awe-inspiring that you and I actually have input in the decisions that will be made during this presidency (apart from electing representatives to make those decisions, that is). Even if this ends up being nothing more than hot air, the concept seems valid – political offices could use Web 2.0 (and the millions of people using it) to inform key political decisions.

I just wonder if he’ll be taking those comments on Facebook…

ADDENDUM: I love the quote at the top of change.gov - it sounds a lot like what my high school football coach always told us: He would ask: “How do we leave this place?” We replied: “Better than we found it.”

Virtual Whiteboards

One of my colleagues got me interested in a fairly new web 2.0 technology: virtual whiteboards. Imagine sitting in a room full of people, all of whom have a marker. Together they all make changes to a plan or illustration, add comments, etc., and all on the big whiteboard at the front of the room. Now give that picture a web 2.0 spin – a site where any group of people can get together and mark up ideas, documents, and/or pictures with insightful comments, helpful pointers, or even just silly little mustaches. This is a virtual whiteboard. Virtual whiteboards combine the best element of wikis (collaboration) and the best element of chat rooms (real time conversations).

Of the several that I’ve tried, probably the best to date is called Twiddla. I found the link via the great people over at ReadWriteWeb. What’s so useful about Twiddla is that, unlike other Whiteboard sites, Twiddla allows you to surf the web within the site and collaboratively mark up websites. Similarly, you can upload images or documents (Word, Excel, and PDF files), insert mathematical formulas, even open your email, and use Twiddla’s features to mark up the medium of your choice.

I can see a lot of great uses for this technology in the classroom:

• Virtual study sessions for just about any subject area – English, Math, Social Studies, Science, Foreign language, health, you name it
• Group editing a classmate’s (or teacher’s) writing
• Getting feedback on the design of a class website or blog
• Visually demonstrating reading skills, like using context clues to understand vocabulary
• Visually demonstrating writing skills like paragraphing or editing
• Visually demonstrating research skills, such as identifying site authors or using topic headers in Wikipedia
• Playing tic-tac-toe

OK, so maybe the last one isn’t totally “educational,” but you get the idea. Twiddla has the potential to be an impressive classroom tool that I’m already finding ways to use in my classroom. Now if only I had a classroom full of laptops…

A br/ through?

Now that my blog is apparently famous (still not sure I buy that one), I’ve spent some time figuring out what it will take to make it more famous (it’s true what they say – fame is addicting).

I’ve discovered a couple of things in trying to make my blog more attractive, user-friendly, and search-engine-friendly.  The first one has some serious relevance to education – particularly to topics like collaboration and social interaction. One thing I noticed in actually paying attention to blog stats is that the more I am reading and commenting on other blogs, the more hits this blog seems to get. Hmmm…an interesting theory: the more I go out and interact with others, the more they come and interact with me. I wonder if students could learn something from this.

The other interesting thing I’ve learned is that, in order to have an engaging and efficient presence on the web, it’s become almost a necessity to understand a little bit of html code. One example is the AddThis buttons I just added to replace my “Meta” links. In order to put those onto the sidebar of my blog, I had to insert html code into a text widget. The same goes for images in the sidebar. Another example is trying to put a Voki on my class webpage: in order to do this, I had to look into the source code instead of the visual editor and paste the Voki code in the right place. For me, this wasn’t too difficult – I have a very basic understanding of what html looks like.

For others with less computing experience, however, this is a daunting and, often, terrifying ordeal. I helped a couple of teachers with the Voki thing and they had no clue what I was doing. I imagine the same is true of most students I teach. As the internet continues to evolve past Web 2.0, I am beginning to think that users are going to need to know some basic html code if they want to be contributors on the internet. In other words, it seems that html coding is going to be yet another 21st century skill.

I guess the question I have to ask is simple: are we preparing students to use this 21st century skill? Obviously if it really is something students will need to be able to do, and we say students need to learn those skills, we need to teach them somehow. Apart from a class on computer programming, anyone have any ideas on how to do this? Maybe have them format an essay in html?

EDIT:
I tried to make the title clever and have the “br/” in angle/pointed brackets (some nerd humor). Sadly, it gets blanked out of the title… So I have to leave those up to your imaginations…like I said – very basic understanding of html.

Tech Conference Day 3

I’m live-blogging while in the midst of the third and final day of our district’s tech conference.

Taught a second round of my class on Web 2.0 technologies this morning. Had a few more attendees. The clear favorite technologies of those who attended: Voki, SurveyGizmo, and XTimeline. The teachers, paraeducators, and classified staff in attendance found that these three tools had the most potential for improving what they were doing in their classrooms. Several teachers are looking forward to having students see Voki’s talking avatars on their class websites. Others wish they had SurveyGizmo a month ago to use for their end of the year surveys. And a number of the teachers (especially at the elementary/middle levels) were excited about the things you could do in Xtimeline with multimedia integration. Stuff like Twitter didn’t go over so well – nobody could figure out why people would want to know what I was doing all the time. I love the non-geeky responses to some of these technologies. Overall, I guess the class was a nice first foray into teaching professional development classes. I learned a lot about the tech-savviness in our district (and lack thereof), which will help me to better tailor my instruction in the future. However, what I was most impressed with was the people who didn’t know a whole lot of technology that were stepping out of their comfort zones and challenging themselves to learn something new and conquer their fear of the new technology. I have been very impressed with all of this.

Right now, I’m in a seminar on Wikis and Google Tools, which is pretty cool. It boggles the mind how much Google is able to do. No wonder people say that, within five years, Google will rule the world.

More to come later.