It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. — Ursula K. LeGuin

So I’m almost finished the course, and it has been the most difficult course I’ve ever done. It’s also been the most exciting and immediately useful course I’ve done since I became a teacher librarian. I must hasten to add that the other TL-DL courses have also been excellent, but with those I had considerable experience in the field to help.

To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping  – Chinese Proverb

I laugh when I remember Jennifer Branch telling me that I should expect to spend 10-12 hours per week on the course. There were many weeks I spent three to four times that long. Thank goodness I was not still teaching, because there is no way I could have kept up. I’m looking forward to next week, when I can really start my retirement! No deadlines! Hurray!

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. — Marcel Proust

Too Close to Crashing

The main challenge of my journey through Web 2.0 was that EVERY WEEK I had to explore a new application, figure out how to use it myself, create a product with it, read how others were using it or evaluating its usefulness, and decide how it could be used by teachers and students in school. Then of course every second week I had, in my mind, yet another “paper” to do in terms of the discussion topic. The workload was quite horrendously intimidating, and at one point I thought I wouldn’t make it.

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. — Dante Alighieri

That dark point for me was the last week of September. I worked so hard on the video-sharing blog post (Stumbling Through Video Sharing, or The Week I Almost Lost My Mind) and did very poorly in terms of the mark. I almost quit the course, but Joanne did reassure me that I did in fact know what I was doing. As a side note, while it is fun to look at, I must admit that I STILL don’t altogether see the usefulness of YouTube in the classroom, especially since it is blocked in so may schools. I believe that TeacherTube is more educationally useful.

After this near meltdown I decided that I needed to limit the reading I did and focus more on choosing a few good articles or posts to share. Fortunately my new strategy of being severely selective in my reading worked, and this helped make the workload more manageable. I decided the next week after writing about RSS feeds that I could in fact do this Web 2.0 thing!

Earning Those Bonus Air Miles

The real plus of this journey through Web 2.0 was that EVERY WEEK I had to explore a new application, figure out how to use it myself, create a product with it, read how others were using it or evaluating its usefulness, and decide how it could be used by teachers and students in school. Then of course every second week I had yet another opportunity to explore Web 2.0 in terms of the discussion topic.

Wow! What an opportunity! I got to create a blog, and work on blogging over a whole term. I created a podcast, built a VoiceThread, crafted a wiki, uploaded photos to Flickr, learned how to embed videos and widgets, really mastered social bookmarking with Diigo, and much more. I got to read the writings of some of the leading lights in education and teacher librarianship.  And, best of all, I had great company on the journey.

Fellow Travellers

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

I have been fortunate indeed to be part of a wonderful class of gifted and dedicated educators. While I can’t possibly list all I’ve learned from them, I would like to mention each, in no particular order, ending with Joanne.

Joanie, what I have just realized is that your blog isn’t just about learning Web 2.0; it’s about how you live your life. I truly admire what you’ve achieved here. I loved your entry The Thrill of Victory. I enjoyed reading your blog each week with your strong voice, running quotes and analogies, and your passion for the craft of teaching. And thank you for reminding me to keep on top of my email!

Christine, I love your voice, your humour, and your enthusiasm. Your post What’s Next? Wikis for all of course! post makes me want to run right over to school and start making my teachers use wikis! Seriously, as always, Christine, you offer wonderful resources. Reading your blog is like getting great PD painlessly. Many thanks for your great ideas about time management too!

 Jill, I appreciate your philosophy of teaching and practice. You challenge me to think deeper, as in your post Sustaining Change in Technology Practices in School Your comments about sharing “the ownership of learning and change with all stakeholders – support staff, parents and students” resonates with me.

Rhonda, your blog is always practical and your comments supportive. You’ve given me many new resources to follow, including the Awakening Possibilties wiki and Anne Davies’ blog – EduBlog Insights. You are a podcaster extraordinaire as you show in Which Web 2.0 Tool? Thanks to you I’m going to try again to make Twitter work.

Jes, I am so impressed by how you are using VoiceThread with your students and encouraging your colleagues to use it too. Thanks also for the great resources you’ve introduced to me, including the Langwitches blog. I wish you all success with your exciting  First Nations project, 

Kathleen,  I appreciate the introduction to the chapter by Hughes-Hassell and Harada, Violet H. (2007): Change agentry: an essential role for library media specialists,” in School Reform and the school library media specialist. Your post blog-no11 What’s next? On the horizon of the web 20 landscape gave me much food for thought about wikis and the school library.

Selena - Your blog too gave me so many good ideas and resources. It’s Time to Walk the Talk remined me of Will Richardson’s blog, A Web of Connections…Why the Read Write Web Changes Everything, and introduced me to 25 Tools every Learning Professional should have in their Toolbox – and all for FREE!. I would love to hear more about the class wiki you are going to do next semester for your Social Studies 11 students, “who can get bogged down with all of the vocabulary they have to learn in order to be able to write their provincial exam (in French no less).”

April, Your post What’s Next? Provides all the links and suggestions for tools one would need to start blogging with students – including analysis of an actual online assignment. Now I want to check out http://moodle.org/.

Heather, your post The ABC’s of Blogging in Education is one I want to share with my teachers. It is clever and intelligent and relevant. I also really appreciate the link to 50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers!

Darryl, yours is another blog I will return to for professional development. Your post In the wiki wiki wiki wiki wiki room…. with its links to your Literature Circles with the wiki and the The Learning Library Wiki is excellent, and I want to share Part II – Drum Roll Please…… with my staff when we look at blogging.

Joanne, thank you for all your work in setting up and running this course. You gave us challenging assignments supported by those excellent Trailfires. Thanks also for using Will Richardson’s inspirational book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom. I also appreciate your support and understanding when I really needed it.

Thanks to you all for your kindness and generosity as we shared this journey. I look forward to revisiting your blogs as they are wonderful professional learning tools for me.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. — Henri Frederic Amiel

Where to next?

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. —  Martin Buber

What have I learned? I believe I really do understand about Richardson’s Read/Reflect/Write/Participate/Web. I’ve learned that there are more experts out there in Web 2.0 than one person could ever find in a lifetime. Thank goodness I’ve also learned that it is not all up to me to find them – I’m developing a professional/personal learning network to help me.

I’ve learned that I CAN’T WAIT to get back into a school and start working with educators on Web 2.0 applications.

My next university course will be EDES 545, but unfortunately not next semester. What I am planning to do is continue exploring Web 2.0, and continue blogging about that journey. There are plenty of applications I haven’t tried (or mastered!) yet.

And, to answer my question — no, I’m not there yet!

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it. — Greg Anderson

As I was thinking about this week’s post on using RSS feeds and aggregators, I kept coming back to the same idea: information overload. Since I first investigated using RSS feeds early in October, and then began using Diigo, I have become more efficient in terms of finding and storing information. I still experience overload. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Or is it a necessary part of learning in the 21^st century?

Stephen Downes recently commented on a post by Teemu Arina that seems to support the idea of overload as “a good thing.”

“This is exactly why those people who use RSS readers to scan through thousands of feeds, read blog posts from various decentrally connected sources and who engage themselves into assembling multiple unrelated sources of information into one (probing connections between them) have much greater ability to sense and respond to changing conditions in increasingly complex environments than those who read only the major newspapers, watch only the major news networks and don’t put themselves into a difficult situation of being hammered with a lot of stuff at once.” [Emphasis is mine.]

In his post Arina goes on to say that although information overload makes you anxious, it gives you the opportunity to see patterns develop and form connections.

This idea brings me back to the importance of refining and personalizing the information I expose myself to. I am beginning to think that RSS feeds and aggregators are the essential tool of Web 2.0 and 21^st century learning, and 10 weeks ago I didn’t even know what they were! I think back to my 100+ colleagues, and the 2000+ studentsin my high school, and I wonder if any of them are using these even now.

In his August 27, 2008 post, Don’t underestimate the importance of the aggregator, Doug Johnson comments on his epiphany regarding RSS feed aggregators. He, like most of us, began with collecting blogs. He says, “Given most educators’ time constraints, finding updated information from lots of blogs in a single fast and convenient location is essential if blogs are to actually be used as a PLN [personal learning network] resource on a regular basis.”

Johnson lists several other uses, including Google News searches, and “reputation monitoring.” He set up feeds to monitor Delicious and Technorati to see who has commented on or bookmarked his posts. Cool idea! Perhaps some day I’ll have made enough Footprints in the Digital Age (Will Richardson’s article) that I’ll need to do this!

One comment on this post resonated with me. Miguel Guhlin said, “Our teachers suffer the tyranny of visiting web sites with no time to do it, much less reflect on the content. With an RSS aggregator, they are free to visit once and the learning opportunities come to them. What a deal!”

Yes, and another great deal is that through a link to Johnson’s The top 10 things you should know about RSS feed aggregators I discovered his wiki, where he post resources from his workshops.

If I’m going to be hammered by information, I want it to be information I choose. In Bringing the World to My Doorstep: A Teacher’s Blog-Reading Habits – National Writing Project, Kevin Hodgson says he reads 500 blogs (!) every night, impossible without his RSS feed generator. Hsis article, well worth reading as a whole, discusses various blogs that have influenced his learning. He says, ‘The kind of “reading” of blogs that I did which led me to the Darfur project-sometimes called “hyper-reading” or “social media literacy”-is becoming more common among young learners, and it may be an emerging skill of the information age. It’s termed “hyper-reading” because reading a stream of online text often forces the viewer to move through hyperlinks. The reader may never return to the original document-it can be an unsettling experience for some of us who are used to sustained reading of one text.’

Hodgson references Chris Heuer, who in Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic and RSS – The 4 R’s suggests that RSS could be ‘the fourth “R” in our conception of literacy.’

Heuer says, “This is one of the key elements that make Social Media literacy different. I could describe it in many other ways, but within this context the important aspect for me is that understanding how RSS and by extension tags, work. It enables any individual to step into the conversational flow – to not only follow what other people are communicating, but ensuring what the individual has to communicate is heard by other people who care about the topic.”

So now I’m even more convinced that RSS feeds can help me effectively manage information overload. How might I use them with students? With colleagues?

Using RSS with Students

In Bandwidth Backup: Saving Students Time Online, Chris O’Neal suggests that when your students log in within the school, if their default school home page is the typical public-face-of the-school-for-the-community-and-parents one, change it to one “immediately useful to your students.” While I was unable to do this in my library last year due to administrative rules, the idea seems so obvious that I have already emailed my replacement teacher-librarian and our computer tech to suggest ways of doing this, and to volunteer lobbying aid on their behalf.

Joyve Valenza has given me some ideas on what might really be useful as a start page, and she of course includes RSS feeds. Dennis O’Connor posted an interview with her on The Keyword Blog: Joyce Valenza -21st Century Research Skills!

‘How can we help our students create their own meaningful information spaces to support their work as learners? I think we may need to guide them to widgetizing their personal desktops. This year we asked our seniors to use iGoogle as a tool to organize their senior projects. I see more tools like that emerging. Now students can open an interface and be presented with their favorite online dictionary, foreign language tools, mapping tool, thesaurus, calendar, to-do list, while they push research-relevant RSS feeds to them through a reader. They choose their theme. Their little game applets are there too. This was perhaps the “stickiest” activity they’ve done yet this school year. The spaces continue to grow more personally meaningful.’

This would work beautifully with various groups of students in my school. Our International Baccalaureate students write various essays on individual research topics, including extended essays, internal assessments, and a world literature paper. They could create an iGoogle page that could be adapted for each assignment, including shifting links from our various online databases and E-Books, as well as RSS feeds for Google alerts for searches on their individual topics, and much more.

In various posts on her blog, NeverEndingSearch, Joyce Valenza discusses using iGoogle (Creating 2.0-style textbooks?) to have students create their own and shared content, as well as using PageFlakes (PageFlakes as Current Events Pathfinders) to create start pages with common content. She shares samples at http://www.pageflakes.com/joyce_valenza/. Each page contains a variety of RSS feeds that pull content appropriate to the page, as well as links to associated library resources. Click on the tabs at the top of the page to see the five different pages. Joyve has shared.

In terms of the overload concept, Richard Byrne makes an excellent point in 34 ways to use RSS, the November 12, 2008, post on the amazing Free Technology for Teachers blog. He suggests that students track content through feeds in an RSS reader rather than going to the actual web sites, as there will be fewer distractions from advertising using a reader. Now that’s cutting back on the hammering!

Using RSS with Teachers

Much of what I can do with students I would also do with my colleagues. But there’s so much more. As I write, I keep thinking how I used to hammer my teachers with email. I was very proud that I was keeping them up-to-date with curriculum-related resources targeted to the units they were teaching. Last year I created a wiki of web resources for our science teachers and was emailing them when I added sites. How much easier for them and for me if I showed them how to save an RSS feed for the page. That way those who are interested will get the content they want and everyone’s’ inbox is lightened!

Another amazing wiki, WebTools4u2use, has a plethora of tips and suggestion for using RSS. I must admit I had never thought of subscribing to the hundreds of electronic journals with RSS feeds. Another suggestion is to add feeds from your public library to your library web site; to this blog I added a feed from the Coutts Education Library at my own University of Alberta (it’s in the left tool bar).

WebTools4u2use also links to Dr. Charles Best Secondary School Library in Coquitlam, BC, as an exemplar of the use of RSS feeds in education. I would use the library’s page NEWS FOR THE CLASSROOM in an in-service with my staff on using RSS with students. The page not only provides links to news feeds in 15 different subject areas, but the page itself (an every page on the web site) has its own feed. Talk about an impressive library web site!

What’s Next for Me

Robin T. Williams and David Loertscher have a new-to-me book: In Command! Kids and Teens Build and Manage Their Own Information Spaces, And…Learning to Manage Themselves in Those Spaces. From the LMC Source description: ‘This book and accompanying website takes a new approach in the battle to capture the attention and serve student needs. . . . It asks each child and teen to construct their own home page using iGoogle, and construct three sections of their own information space. The time has come to offer young people a gift of a lifetime – control over the voices clamouring for their attention and the tools they need to emerge as truly information literates.”

Sounds like someone else is working on personalizing our information overload. This looks like required reading to me. How about you?

My husband spent a lot of time on Napster in its early days, both downloading music and chatting with other members, and that’s how we met Nap’s original owners. We adopted Nap when they had to move to England. Henry the nephew came to visit and the two Henrys fell in love with each other. Already you begin to see connections, right?

“What does this have to do with VoiceThread?” you ask.

Everything. VoiceThread is all about connections. A VoiceThread is a “collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to leave comments.” Comments can be in the form of audio recording or typed. You build the VoiceThread online, with no software to install. You can create a very simple VoiceThread in about a minute, although it’s obvious that most creators have spent a lot longer time on theirs. The idea is that you can carry on a conversation centred on your content.

One day this week when I was exploring the site and thinking about how I might use this tool personally, I got a phone call from my sister, Henry’s mother. This year he started kindergarten, and is just on the cusp of learning to read independently. My sister told me that Henry loves being read to, and of course, I wish that they lived close enough that I could do some reading with him.

Hence my first VoiceThread: reading Henry one of the books I’m sending him for Christmas. It took me two days to complete, mainly because I was having difficulty with the pictures. I tried scanning the pages, but you really need to see the double page to view the whole picture. Finally my husband took pity on me, and shot them with our little digital camera.

Recording the audio took a couple of hours, as instructions are minimal and I couldn’t figure out at first how to get rid of the first recording and replace it with the second one. There are other tools I haven’t yet tried, such as the doodling tool you can use to highlight items.

Here is my reading of “The Golden Christmas Tree.”
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Connecting Students with the World

Of course educators have been quick to see the educational applications of VoiceThread. There are many outstanding examples of various uses.

• The Mysteries of Harris Burdick Writing Project involved students from several different countries writing joint stories based on the evocative illustrations in Chris van Allsburg’s book. Because the program is available anytime, anywhere, the students could work asynchronously on their assignment.
• The 8^th Grade Art Students VoiceThread has four students each discussing his/her version of an assigned painting. There are many art-based VoiceThreads; what a superb way to gain a wider audience for student work.
• In advance of a technology meeting, Bill Ferriter created a VoiceThread titled Wondering About Web 2.0, and based on ideas about teaching with technology. He invited committee members to comment on the quotes. What a powerful way to prepare for a meeting, and to determine where people are at before you tell them where they need to go next!
• One riveting VoiceThread is Kenya Escape, created by an American woman who was trapped in Kenya immediately after the rigged presidential election that saw the corrupt regime of President Mwai Kibaki kept in power. Through her photographs and commentary, we see her first-hand experiences as well as her concerns for the plight of every day Kenyan citizens. What a powerful social studies lesson this could be.

Ed.VoiceThread is the educational side of the program. This introduction explains some of its features. The program is available free to K-12 educators, and offers a variety of features including enhanced privacy. I unfortunately could not try this out personally as I do not have a school email address.

Connecting Teachers With Teachers

In addition to the hundreds of student- and teacher-created presentations on the site, helpful resources abound. One is Colette Cassinelli’s Voicethread 4 Education wiki. Resources include

• samples submitted by teachers of VoiceThread projects made by their students,
• VoiceThreads used in professional development,
• tips on how to implement VoiceThread in your curriculum,
• Resources listed by grade level.

There is also the VoiceThread for Educators Ning started by Mark Carls, although it doesn’t yet have a lot of material. In addition, there is the Voicethread Group on Diigo, designed to bookmark “great examples of Voicethread in Education.”

Laila Weir’s  Edutopia article, VoiceThreads: Extending the Classroom with Interactive Multimedia Albums, highlights the work of Bill Ferriter, a sixth grade teacher. He uses VoiceThread extensively in his classroom, and is amazed at its power and effectiveness. Students comment willingly and frequently, writing much more on a VoiceThread than they would on paper. The shy or withdrawn student has the opportunity to share their ideas in a safe environment where they can think about their ideas before writing, as opposed to a regular class discussion.  Ferriter gives students instruction on how to comment effectively and thoughtfully, which he says is key to developing quality responses.

I was thrilled to discover Bill Ferriter’s wiki, Digitally Speaking. The VoiceThread page has a wealth of information. Topics covered include

• Planning VoiceThreads
• Teaching students how to comment effectively
• Assessing VoiceThread participation
• Teaching students to create and moderate threads
• Various handouts related to the above topics – and much more.

If you only have time to visit one resource, Bill Ferriter’s wiki should be it.

A Philosophical Connection

Another resource I found useful in terms of getting my head around what students learn by creating VoiceThreads is the article, Bloom’s Taxonomy Blooms Digitally. In it Andrew Churches updates the taxonomy, and Lorin Anderson’s 2001 version of it, to reflect digital learning. Students interacting with VoiceThreads will use a wide variety of lower- to higher-order thinking skills, ranging from finding a presentation, to navigating through it, to evaluating and making comments on it, to publishing their own creations.

Churches has additional material related to these ideas on his blog at Educational Origami, Bloom’s and ICT Tools. I think this is an amazing professional resource for all teachers interested in digital teaching and learning.

Connecting Henry, Henry, and Me

So what does VoiceThread mean to me? This has been a week where I did the kind of learning that makes me feel as if my brain is exploding. VoiceThread is the quintessential Web 2.0 tool; it is a deceptively simple idea – carry on a conversation about a photograph (enjoy one of the original VoiceThreads here) — with extraordinary possibilities.

I loved connecting with my nephew, Henry, through creating the VoiceThread for him. And I loved remembering happy times with our dog, Henry, because his kind, loving heart stopped beating this past summer. 

You can be sure that I’ll be recording VoiceThreads for all the various nieces and nephews I have scattered far and wide. I can hardly wait to make new connections with them with this fabulous tool. 

Mary Brandel’s August 25, 2008, Computerworld article is titled “Information OVERLOAD: Is it time to go on a data diet?” In it the author quotes a number of company executives who have specific suggestions for dealing with this problem. “Some use technology to combat the information overload, while others suggest putting yourself on an information diet and taking control over how much you allow yourself to be exposed to” (p.22).

My favorite quote from the article is from Steve Borsch, CEO of Marketing Directions Inc, who says, “The river of content is turning into a flood, and my instinct is to get to higher ground”  (p. 22).  I recognize that feeling of drowning in data, and I’m looking for a way to leave that feeling behind.

Last week I wrote about how useful Delicious and Diigo are, and decided that I would continue to explore Diigo. My question is this: How can I use the various options in Diigo to manage my information more efficiently? I am hoping that this technology will help me reduce the amount of information I’m dealing with while maintaining better control over what I find.

Step 1: I’m Treading Water

As I have uploaded bookmarks from two computers and my Backflip page to Diigo, I chose first to refine the organization of those links. My first step was to explore the My Lists feature. You can sort bookmarks by tags and then it’s easy to group bookmarks together in a list, which you can then use in various ways. Since my older bookmarks had no tags, I ignored these and worked with only the new bookmarks, the ones I saved after I began using Diigo.

There are many options with Lists. You can put sections in the list to subdivide it. You can rearrange the bookmarks in any order you wish. You can send and share the list with friends or groups on Diigo. You can set up a group of colleagues; for example, all the grade 9 language arts teachers, and instantly share lists with them. 

Once you have created lists you can also go to WebSlides and instantly (in two clicks) create a slideshow of your bookmarks. These can be used as an HTML link, or embedded with a player as a widget into a blog post, so readers can flip through the sites you’ve bookmarked.  If you have annotated the bookmarks, or highlighted pages, viewers can see that too if you so choose. Here’s a tutorial on creating WebSlides shows.

Imagine the application of this to the classroom. You can have students (with Diigo accounts) collect sites, annotate them, highlight important sections, and then share them with their peers. You as teacher can present students with a selection of sites that they can use for research. And of course, this works with teachers too.

You can also send bookmarks directly to your blog from Diigo. This I have not yet tried, but so far I must say that the My Lists options have already proved very useful to me. I am working with a colleague on a presentation in January, and we will be sharing bookmarks via Diigo.

Step 2: My Feet Just Touch the Bottom

Creating lists and THEN editing bookmarks may seem backward to you. My initial intent was simply to have an online list of bookmarks; I didn’t have too much interest in highlighting and annotating. Now I am going back through the links and making changes. I saw the advantages when I was collecting bookmarks for the last assignment. Usually I would save the page, and either print it and highlight, or use Word to highlight it. I often used sticky notes to emphasize certain parts of the page. Using Diigo means that I can highlight, comment, and sticky note it as I read it the FIRST time and my highlights, comments and the site are all instantly saved on Diigo. Saves a HUGE amount of time!

Here’s a link to the Diigo video tutorial on highlighting and page comments, and another one on sticky notes. These are very short Flash tutorials.

Step 3: Waist Deep and Moving Up

As I mentioned earlier, many of the bookmarks I imported into Diigo were without tags. When you are looking at the list of your bookmarks you can edit them to add tags, highlights, comments, and sticky notes. You can also label bookmarks as private, so that if you have personal and professional bookmarks together (and I don’t need more than one bookmarking site to master), you can display only the links you want.

And, one of the best features of Diigo is that the pages are cached, so they NEVER disappear. If you can’t access the page live anymore, you can access the cached version with all of your comments intact.

Step 4: At the Shallow End

There is much about Diigo I have not explored, most especially the social aspect. In terms of my original goals, I have achieved much better control over my information. I have reduced the amount of duplication of material saved in various places. While I have used the Tags feature to see what other searchers have found on a topic, and have found one or two good sites that way, I haven’t really even begun to explore this option sufficiently. But how wonderful to feel that I am in control!