Social Networking 1: Lauren’s Network

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Lauren’s Current Network

Last weekend I took a break from working on this week’s blog post on social networking. I went to visit my niece, and when I arrived, my seven-year-old grandniece, Lauren, closely supervised by her mother, was on the computer. She was busy checking her email at Webkinz, a social-networking site aimed at kids. Coincidence? I think not. Somehow fate knew I needed a cute photo (including pink kitten ears) to illustrate this week’s post.

It’s also not a coincidence that Webkinz is featured in the article Scaffolding the New Social Literacies, by Stephen Abram. Here’s a description from the web site (hosted by the Ganz plush animal people), “Webkinz pets are lovable plush pets that each come with a unique Secret Code. With it, you enter Webkinz World where you care for your virtual pet, answer trivia, earn KinzCash, and play the best kids games on the net!”

I chatted with my grandniece about the site. She showed me the virtual room she has built for her various stuffed toys, and the games she likes best. As of yet, she isn’t chatting with other members, but that is available, although in a highly-structured, highly controlled way.

Abram also discusses Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/). The website says that “Club Penguin is a safe virtual world for kids to play, interact with friends and have fun letting their imaginations soar.”

Even though it costs $5.95 a month to join, Club Penguin is one of the top 10 social networking sites in the USA, so obviously children enjoy it, and parents are willing to pay for it.
Abrams point out that children using these highly commercial social networking sites, while carefully protected in a highly secure environment, are vulnerable to their pressure.

“What are these two sites doing? Isn’t it obvious? They’re using the Colombian drug lord strategy. These sites are, probably unintentionally, playground push-ers of social networking crack. They try for brand loyalty and return visits. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, they offer subscription models, or you need to buy something to enter. Peer pressure plays no small role in their word-of-mouth marketing.”

We as teacher librarians, Abrams says, have a teachable moment here. These two sites are highly ethical, but other networking sites work at collecting lots of data from their users. While we teach children about themselves and their place in the world, we can also teach them about online safety.

“At each stage we define what level of awareness they need to have while they’re on-line. What would we tell others about ourselves in our family? What information would you email grandma versus a stranger? Do you share more or different things when you’re out in your own neighborhood? What about strange neighborhoods? When do you tell people your whole name and address? What about when you’re interacting with the whole country or potentially the world, like on the web?”

Protecting or Overprotecting?

Other experts agree that schools need to help students use social networking sites appropriately. In her article ‘Safe’ social networking sites emerge, Laura Ascione discusses Whyville, “an online virtual world that immerses children in a video game-like experience where they must manage money, make sure they eat properly, and have the ability to communicate with others. More importantly, the site seeks to educate its users about online safety and how to behave in an online community.”

Another site for children, Imbee.com, a free social networking site centred on science, requires that users be registered by parents whose identity is verified by a credit card, or by a teacher as part of a class.

Ascione quotes Tim Donovan, vice president of marketing for the company that is launching Imbee. “Children and teenagers often don’t understand that what they post on the internet remains on the internet. We want kids to develop [an online] skill set under the guidance of their parents; we want parents to be accountable.”

While these sites are as safe as technology can make them, the article goes on to point out that it is essential that students be taught to be aware of online hazards such as identity theft and phishing scams, as well as online predators. I was appalled to read here that identity theft involving children under 18 doubled from 2004 to 2005. Schools need to take the initiative in teaching students how to network safely.

Lauren’s Future Networks

The School Library Journal article MySpace, Facebook Promote Literacy, by Debra Lau Whelan, dicusses a new report from Britain. Young People and Social Networking Services by the U.K.-based Internet safety organization Childnet International. The report says “there are potential “formal and informal” educational benefits for kids who use social networking services.” These include

  • improving technology and digital literacy skills,
  • developing “e-safety” skills
  • building collaboration skills
  • becoming a team player
  • broadening horizons
  • developing an understanding of how people live and think in all parts of the world.

The article concludes that social networking sites help students get real-world experience. “Being able to quickly adapt to new technologies, services, and environments is already regarded as a highly valuable skill by employers, and can facilitate both formal and informal learning.”

Googling Our Kids – Will Lauren Measure Up?

In Footprints in the Digital Age, Will Richardson muses on the impact of social networking on our children’s futures. “In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks.” He signed up his children, aged seven and nine, on Club Penguin to get them started with social networks.

Richardson points out that we as teachers are likely being Googled frequently even now, and are judged on our digital footprint.  “It’s a consequence of the new Web 2.0 world that these digital footprints-the online portfolios of who we are, what we do, and by association, what we know-are becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives.” How much more important will this become for our children in the Web 2.0 culture, where creating content is becoming commonplace and expected.

Richardson states, “One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.” Rather than just sharing information to be read, we should be teaching students to share information to engage an audience. Richardson cites the blog “Twenty-Five Days to Make a Difference” (http://twentyfivedays.wordpress.com), created by 10-year old Laura Stockman. Her sharing of her plan to do one good deed per day has engaged readers from around the world, and resulted in thousands of dollars raised in cash and kind for charity.

Of course, in order to help students learn to network effectively, we as teachers need to master the technology and the techniques of networking, and to have our students see us doing this.

Next weekend I’ll be heading back to spend some time online with Lauren.

 

It’s All About the Connections: VoiceThread

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This is a picture of my nephew, Henry, and my dog, Henry. Henry Hopscotch was our dog’s official name as a registered Shetland Sheepdog – we called him Nap, short for Napster. That’s right – Napster, one of THE original social networking sites.

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 8th 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. 

Reading in a Web 2.0 world? For learning, understanding or both?

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There have been times while doing my reading for my Web 2.0 course that I have felt completely buried, so my inquiry question is this. What research-based strategies can I add to what I already know about online reading to help my students (and myself) read, understand, and learn more effectively?

As I work on this course, I have found myself more than once identifying with my colleagues and students when they expressed dismay at how difficult it can be to do research on the Web. I thought I was pretty good, but I have found myself slowed down – considerably in September; less now – by the new-to-me Web 2.0 experience.

I’ve been working on the concept of reading online for more than seven years now. When I began looking at this idea in 2000, there was almost no help available in terms of research. I drew a blank searching the professional literature and the World Wide Web. While strategies for teaching students to search and to evaluate online material has been widely available, I could find nothing that dealt with how to help students comprehend what they found online. I had to create my own materials based on what I saw that my students needed.

There are two quotes that sum up how easy it was for my students to successfully research using the Internet. Roger Ebert said, “Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.” And D. C. Denison said, “The Internet may be the world’s greatest library, but let’s face it – all the books are scattered on the floor.” 

I identified several areas where my junior high and high school students needed help. These included

  • Using appropriate search strategies,
  • Creating effective search strings,
  • Learning to navigate a wide variety of online resources,
  •  Critically evaluating online content,
  • Locating useful/relevant information within a site or on a specific page, and
  • Using information appropriately once they found it, including avoiding accidental plagiarism.

Fortunately, in the last few years, research in the field has increased dramatically.  Researchers have identified a number of problems, and offered some strategies for dealing with them.

Julie Coiro, Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a Director of The New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut does research focusing on online reading comprehension. Here are some problems she identifies:

  • There is little consistency in the multimedia formatting of information on the Internet.
  • The amount of information available on the Internet can be overwhelming.
  • “Reading online is a complex process that requires knowledge about how search engines work and how information is organized within Web sites – knowledge that many students lack. Internet texts also demand higher levels of inferential reasoning and comprehension monitoring strategies that help readers stay on task” (Coiro, 2005, p.30).

Here are some of the strategies she suggests teachers use:

  • Modelling search techniques and strategies for students
  • Teaching students how to preview web sites using a 7 step process

Two Australian researchers (Murray and McPherson, 2006) recommend scaffolding instruction for the reading-to-navigate and navigating-to-read tasks involved in researching on the web. They identified these successful teaching strategies:

  • teaching skimming and scanning,
  • analyzing web page components
  • Teaching students to read an informational print text (read the title, . . . read the headings, predict what will be under each heading . . .), and then using those skills on a web page

One researcher’s work resonates particularly with me as I continue to learn to navigate Web 2.0 sites, especially blogs. And Web 1.0 sites too. Elizabeth Schmar-Dobler identifies more issues with online texts for students:

  • Dense text [I HATE reading PDF versions of articles retrieved from the U of A library databases. So often the background images obscure the already dense text.]
  • Distracting features such as animated graphics, colour. [It took me a long time to STOP being distracted by ads when looking at lists and search results in Diigo].
  • Understanding expository text “requires familiarity with its concepts, vocabulary, and organizational format.” [Have you notice how hard it can be with some blogs to figure out how to find a previous article? Or how many don’t have the search feature enabled?]
  • Hyperlinks mean reader creates own path through the material – can get lost and confused. [I have this problem with figuring out when a new window is opened, or when a tab is opened – I can’t count the number of times I’ve unintentionally closed my whole web browser. I’m not sure if this is a Vista problem or a “me” problem. Likely it’s me!]

So what can I do with all this information I’ve collected? Here are some ideas.

  • Share this information with my teachers.
  • Share this information with my students.
  • Integrate Internet reading comprehension strategies into our current program.
  • Increase emphasis on inquiry-based learning practices, as these help improve learning skills. “Teachers who give students choices, challenging tasks, and collaborative learning structures increase students’ motivation to read and comprehend text.” (Perkins-Gough, p .92)
  • Provide a wide variety of online resources at different reading levels
  • Work collaboratively with staff and student experts to provide instruction in navigating sites, interacting with online material.
  • I did find one new and different software-based approach to making online reading easier. It is described in the article “Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading.” This describes a web-based software product that breaks down text into smaller chunks to enable easier reading, and cascades these chunks in large font down a page. The article claims that “Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls.” A trial is available for the program, called LiveInk, so I’ve been trying it out. Basically the user copies text to the clipboard and then pastes it into a window. I can certainly see this being very effective for some of my students, but I found that for me it slowed down my reading too much.

What have the experts said lately about reading online? Have things changed in a Web 2.0 environment? While students spend a lot of time reading online and creating content online, the jury is out on whether or not they can read effectively in terms of the way their teachers would like them to read. In his post Reading Online is Not Reading On Paper Will Richardson writes about how he is having difficulty reading novels or other books, he thinks because of the nature of the reading he does online. He points out that when he asks teachers what instruction is happening with this issue in the classroom, they reply, not much. He says, “What continues to concern me, though, is the paucity of conversation about any of this in our schools. This is hugely complex, and it requires a strategy and good pedagogy.”

Richardson discusses the article by Mark Bauerlein, Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind. Bauerlein details a number of the ways in which reading online differs from traditional reading, and concludes that reading online is a lesser literacy. Another article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? supports the view that online reading is a different type of reading than reading books, but is just as valuable.

I would certainly agree. I’ve been reading books well for years and years, but does that make me just as  good an online reader? No, it does not.

And new research deals with just this issue. I found online a proposed chapter for an upcoming book, Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices. In NEW LITERACIES OF ONLINE READING COMPREHENSION, Donald J. Leu, Julie Coiro, Jill Castek, Douglas K. Hartman, Laurie A. Henry, and David Reinking, discuss “Research on Instruction and Assessment in the New Literacies of Online Reading.” The first heading in their chapter is “The Internet is This Generation’s Defining Technology For Information, Reading Comprehension, and Learning.” The authors conclude, among many other things,, that reading offline and online are not the same, and should not be taught or assessed in the same way. They state that “a new and ambitious agenda of reading comprehension research is needed.” I’m looking forward to seeing that come to fruition, as perhaps there will be help for me as well as for my students!

Smart Mobs — The Wiki Is Us

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This is NOT a smart mob.

This IS a smart mob (albeit, not a nice one!) 

The Borg

And this is a brief interview with Howard Rheingold, who coined the term “smart mob” in his book of the same title. In this interview Rheingold discusses the importance of libraries in their role of aiding learners to be smart in a 21st century sense — able to find the information they need and able to determine that the information they find is reliable.


Internet Librarian 2008: Howard Rheingold from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

So exactly what is a smart mob? Wikipedia says, “A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination.”  

The illustration of the Borg above to me is the extreme illustration of this idea of collective intelligence, as in the TV series Star Trek: Next Generation the Borg was a group of people part-human, part-machine who knew one another’s thoughts and worked as a single unit. As a smart mob the Borg was incredibly efficient; social media was directly programmed  into its consciousness!

In terms of our current reality as teacher librarians, Rheingold wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review blog in which he gave a self-described ‘rant’ about the importance of teaching about social media. “Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum – it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit.”

He further says, “Whether digital media will be beneficial or destructive in the long run doesn’t depend on the technologies, but on the literacy of those who use them.” Rheingold has found that today’s students, although they may be “digital natives,” do not necessarily have the literacy skills they need. He says, “learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today’s institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide.” He is developing a software program that integrates forums, blogs, wikis, and other social media, allowing the “smart mob” to direct its own learning.

Discovering the term “smart mob” helped me see the true power of the wiki. In their article, “An Information Skills Workout: Wikis and Collaborative Writing,” Lamb and Johnson say that “Wikis are a specific type of social technology involving cooperation, interdependence, and synergy.” Instead of providing the content, we as teachers can work with our students (and our colleagues too) to collaboratively create the content. We allow our students to become the smart mob. Lamb and Johnson point out that wikis are best for creative, original works, not just regurgitating what is already out there. As teachers we must ask students, “How will your project contribute in some unique way to the body of information already on the Internet?”

In his article in Gifted Child Today, Working With Wikis, Del Siegle addresses some common concerns with using wikis, and especially with Wikipedia. These include inaccurate, out-dated, or biased information, as well as missing information. He points out that generally with Wikipedia these problems are usually quickly corrected. I especially like this quote: ‘Few would doubt that “all of us know more than any one of us.” Whether all of us can jointly produce documents of equal or higher validity than those produced with traditional publishing practices is a social experiment in which our students are embedded. Educators can help their gifted students understand this debate and use it as discussion fodder as they help students develop and use wikis.’ Of course, I believe that this smart mob mind construct is not limited to gifted children.

 While creating a wiki can seem quite a challenge, there is lots of help available. Shonda Brisco analyzes three different wiki applications in the article WHICH WIKI IS RIGHT FOR YOU? I tried out the three she suggested, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and WetPaint.

 Despite the fact that using any of these wiki applications is supposed to be incredibly easy, while using Wikispaces I managed to delete one page three times before I finally switched applications. I found Wetpaint easier for me than PBWiki, so I built my wiki at http://onlinereading.wetpaint.com/. It is titled Reading the Internet: Skills for the Information Age. I had intended to create something entirely new but decided instead to rework a professional development session I had done in partnership with Margo Johnston, a fellow teacher-librarian (and incidentally, my mentor) for staff and parents into a wiki. It is in fact a work in progress, and I really like some of the Wetpaint features, including the To-Do List. You can make a note as to what needs to be done to a page next. I have some more changes to make for our discussion on reading and web 2.0 on Wednesday.

At the moment this wiki is me, not us, as I don’t have a smart mob working on it. Any volunteers out there?

Virtual Libraries — The Human Touch

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The Quandary

This first problem I had this week when I began researching this topic was determining the difference between a “virtual” library and a “digital” library. Wikipedia offers a definition of digital library as “a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by computers.” It does not include a definition for virtual library (other than calling it an “older term”) The professional literature and popluar culture seem to be equally divided as I found references to both terms in the literature, as well as lots of results for both terms in Google searches.

After exchanging emails with Joanne, and doing some reflecting on the various sites I was seeing, I decided to go with this approach. I would ignore sites that are basically repositories of stored information, such as digitized material, (for example, the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library or Voice of the Shuttle), and concentrate on sites that offer a variety of resources and library services to their patrons.

The Traditional View

One of the first articles I read was virtual SCHOOL LIBRARIES–THE TIME IS NOW!, by Audrey Church. Written in 2005, the article identifies why school library web sites first became so important.Church says, “There is so much good information out there, and it is our job as library media specialists to point our students to it! There is so much bad information out there, and it is our job to teach students how to evaluate what they find. . . . If we are to help students become information-literate–critical assessors, evaluators, and users of information–we have to meet them on the Web and provide library service and instruction online, at the point of need.”

As I read this, I thought, “This is exactly why I built my first library web page 15 years ago. The problem is that I don’t know that my current site has progressed much beyond that view!”

What Am I Looking For?

At this point it was obvious to me that I need some specific characteristics to be looking for as I searched for high-quality sites, so I turned next to Joyce Valenza’s page, A WebQuest About  School Library Websites. Her Introduction, to me, is the perfect description of what a virtual school library web page should be. Of course Valenza’s own site at Springfield Township High School Virtual Library exemplifies her description.

“Your library Web page is your second front door. It meets your students where they live, play, and work! It creates signage for students and staff. The effective library Web page pulls together, in one unified interface, all of a library’s resources–print and electronic. It offers guidance while it fosters independent learning. It models careful selection. It offers valuable public service and can redefine “community.” It can even lead users back to print. A good library Web page, whether in traditional HTML, or blog, or wiki format, offers implicit instruction and projects an important image of the librarian as an information professional.”

Whew! Sounds easy, right?

Valenza acknowledges that creating such sites is not easy, and the librarians should look around the web, find what is there, and build on the work of others. The characteristics she suggests we should judge sites on include

  • content,
  • usability/design, and
  • special features, which are features that other sites don’t have. I decided to look for sites using Web 2.0 features for this last category.

Becoming Virtual

 In their 2008 article in Teacher Librarian, the virtual teacher-librarian: establishing and maintaining an effective web presence, Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson further refine the difference between a traditional library web site and a virtual one. “Much more than a static library web page, a web presence provides an ongoing, virtual connection with students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members.” They point out that a good web site will help the teacher librarian provide high quality resources both in and outside of school hours.

 Lamb and Johnson provide a list of steps to follow to achieve this “web presence.” These steps provide another list of criteria for identifying quality sites. These include

  • digital versions of various activities such as library orientations, tutorials, and FAQ pages;
  • 24/7 access to the library’s catalogue and online databases;
  • differentiated materials for students at different ability/grade levels;
  • activities to encourage student involvement in the site, such as blogs;
  • tools that help collaboration, such as wikis;
  • modeling innovative techniques, such as including your own videos; and
  • promoting the physical library by advertising its services or polling students.

 Building Community

In her article, The Real and the Virtual: Intersecting Communities at the Library , Kelly Czarnecki emphasizes the importance of the library in building community. “Building community: What a powerful phrase and a tremendous responsibility for a library. It is an even more powerful feeling to step back and see the community grow as a result of what you’re doing with library services to create new groups of people and new ways to share and discover information.”

Since today’s teens love to create content online, we should be encouraging them to create content online in our libraries too. “The kinds of interaction that result from teens being able to participate (through allowing access) in virtual communities and create content while at the library is a rich topic for research.” Czarnecki suggests strategies such as

  • setting up a Flickr account for your library (showing photos of teens involved in library programs),
  • sponsoring after-hours gaming programs,
  • using blogs and wikis, and
  • appealing to music-loving teens by having iTunes available after hours.

 Now I was ready to look at web sites. I decided to focus on these areas:

  1. Content – catalogue, databases, tutorials, pathfinders, currency, Ask-a-librarian
  2. Usability/design – navigation, clarity, links work, clean interface
  3. Web 2.0 features – blogs, wikis, other
  4. Student or patron involvement in the site

Looking at Sites

Site 1: Harry Ainlay High School Library

I started close to home, with an Edmonton high school page, created by stellar t-l, Rob Poole. There is wide range of content, including links to all databases, an online catalogue, FAQ’s, and much more. The site is attractive and professional looking, with dropdown menus providing easy navigation. A password-protected blog for the student book club is available. Other than some student photos, no student content is evident.

Site 2: Learning Resources – J. Percy Page

Although there is no online catalogue, Janet Jorgensen’s site has excellent content, offering extensive links to databases, E-books, some assignments, and web sites for every subject area taught at the school. The site is almost all text-based, with a clear, clean interface with no broken links. There is no Web 2.0 content. Book reviews have been posted by the Book Review Club.

Site 3: Walker Middleton School Library

This site uses a number of Web 2.0 applications used (blogs, Animoto videos, polls, collaboration wiki). The catalogue is online, but there are no other links to library resources such as databases, E-books, etc. It showcases media but almost all of the content has been created by staff, although the videos show students involved in special projects in the library. Navigation is confusing, as the left hand links don’t seem to be in any logical order. Students are encouraged to contribute book suggestions as blog comments, and there are several polls.

Site 4: Birch Lane Virtual Library

This elementary school site is a bare bones school library web site that looks rather unappealing. It has an online catalogue, and links to various web sites. A number of the links do not work. There is no student content, and no web 2.0 content.

Site 5: St. Andrew’s Episcopal Upper School Library

With an online catalogue, databases, research tools, links to many research projects, and the Ask- A-Librarian feature, this site is a superb resource for its students. Students can use instant messaging to chat with the librarian. Some research projects are posted as wikis, and students are encouraged to create wikis and blogs, although I see no student content on the site itself other than some photos of students.

Site 6: Smith Elementary Library  

This page is a strong contrast to the other elementary library site I reviewed. Content includes the online catalogue, and databases. The navigation is clear but the Books and Reading page is not working at this time. Research Projects are arranged on a page called a wiki, but actually consists of links to various other pages arranged in a wide variety of formats, none of them wikis. The strongest feature of this site is the student content on the home page, which includes podcasts, wikis, and blogs created by the students. I label this one a MUST SEE for that reason.

Site 7: Creekview High School Media Center Home Page 2007-08

My response to this site is WOW! There is lots of content here, including superb pathfinders and all kinds of research help, library FAQ, and the online catalogue. I found navigating the page a bit confusing, as there is so much on one page. This would benefit from a set of clear links at the bottom of thepage (what’s there is incomplete). This is still my vote for #1, however, because there is all kinds of student content as well as nifty web 2.0 applications, such as a PageFlakes page, various blogs, videos, and more.

Site 8: Edmonton Public Library

I love my public library site! In addition to the catalogue, we have access to many quality databases. The site offers services to various groups, including children, teens, teachers, and people new to Canada. The library has the Ask-A-Librarian service, which you can access from 9:00-3:30 weekdays, or via email. Staff have created pathfinders on commonly-researched topics, and teachers can request that one be created for their classes. RSS feeds are available for various topics, one of which is book reviews by library patrons. Navigation of the site has recently been improved, and the interface is clean and logical. I see no web 2.0 features except for a slide show of upcoming events.

The Biggest Challenge – Being Human

What have I learned from doing this research? The best school library sites are those with the strongest human component. The wonderful web 2.0 features work because caring adults make them work, and involve students in their creation. But there is another factor that I think we need to examine.

In her article, they might be gurus, Joyce Valenza identifies what for me will be the next big challenge in developing a true virtual school library. She says, “How can we be there for learners’ just-in-time, just-for-me learning experiences? I know that my own online presence scales my guidance and instruction and makes both available to students on weekends and evenings and even when they are sitting 5 feet away. Can we offer independence while we offer as-needed intervention? Can we be available to students beyond our walls and beyond our hours? Our students live online; they need their libraries online. They need their teacher-librarians online.”

While I believe Joyce is right, given limited resources, staff, and time, I wonder how we can make that work.

 

Using Diigo to get to Higher Ground

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As I researched this week’s discussion topic, How are you managing information overload, I found that  reducing information overload is a hot topic. One estimate in a New York Times story is that this problem and its resulting loss of employee efficiency will cost US companies 650 billion in 2008 alone.

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!

Podcasting for Remembrance Day: A Joyful Learning

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This week spent learning about podcasting was a challenging, stimulating, and joyful week for me. Joyful, you ask? Absolutely. I read Stephen Wolk’s article The Positive Classroom: Joy in School from the September 2008 issue of Educational Leadership. Wolk is talking about the dictionary definition of joy: ‘According to my Random House dictionary, joy means, “The emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something good or satisfying.”‘

Wolk discusses 11 kinds of joy; I’m borrowing some of them to share with you what I learned about the power of podcasting.

JOY 1: Find the Pleasure in Learning

Wolk talks about teaching as nurturing; we must help our students find their reasons to learn. I started out already knowing my reason to learn. I knew when I started to work on this topic that I wanted to create a podcast of Mona Gould`s poem, “This Was My Brother.”

Why this poem? It is one I always shared with my students when we worked on our Remembrance Day programs. It is Canadian, written by a Saskatchewan-born poet and broadcaster after she lost her brother in World War II. And finally, a more personal reason: I lost my brother last year and this poem reminds me of him; he was very proud of the time as a young person that he spent in the army reserves. This kept me motivated all week, even through the many challenges.

The creation of Remembrance Day programs motivated many of my students to learn. The most successful program we did was the year I had grade nine language arts students interview a relative about the personal cost to the family of war. Students recorded the interviews and we based the program around this content.

We created tableaux of actors in costume portraying one scene from the reminiscence as the appropriate audio played in the background. We also used some of the audio as soundtrack for the slide presentation we created from family photographs students brought to share. Every student in the class was involved either onstage or backstage as we honoured these memories. While the joy was sombre in nature, it was definitely there.

JOY 2: Give Students Choice

This project was joyful for me because I was able to choose what was meaningful. I was able to choose music as well as the poetry; I have always loved Ravel’s evocative “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” I was also able to choose a project that I was capable of doing. At one point I thought of reading a longer piece, but I decided once I started recording that I didn’t know enough about recording, editing, adding music, creating effects, and exporting to deal with a long reading and the resulting large file.

When working with my students I always gave them choices too. Those who were uncomfortable performing in front of an audience were able to choose other tasks. We had students editing tapes, organizing slides, running lights or sound, writing scripts, creating costumes, and more.

JOY 3: Let Students Create Things

In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson talks about the importance of audience for students. He says, “Podcasting is yet another way for them to be creating and contributing ideas for a larger conversation, and it’s a way of archiving that contribution for future audiences to use” (p. 113).

I did some searching on the web for schools that have used podcasting as a way of honouring Remembrance Day in Canada, and found only a couple of examples. Eel Ground School in Eel Ground, New Brunswick, a school with lots of interest in new media, has a podcasting club. Here is their podcast of a special ceremony on November 8, 2006, where the school honoured not only Canadian veterans but also soldiers visiting from Maine.

Vincent Massey Collegiate, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, also active in podcasting, has podcasts of their guest speakers for Remembrance Day (scroll down to find presentations by Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Bastable).

How I wish that I had had these tools to use earlier in my career. How wonderful it would be to have an archive of the incredible creativity, expertise, and sensitivity that my students showed in their contribution to the observance of Remembrance Day in our school.

JOY 4: Show Off Student Work

We invited family members to attend our Remembrance Day presentation, and of course they were always suitably impressed. How sad that we were unable to create a more lasting version of our work. If only we had had the resources we have now, this would have been a natural to videotape and then broadcast. The students could create individual podcasts of the interviews, web slide shows, and more.

I’m happy to show off my presentation. While technically imperfect, it captures for me the essence of where I am right now with this new skill. More importantly for me, it gave me something positive to do with the feeling of loss that I am still trying to integrate into my life.

This Was My Brother by Mona Gould

JOY 5: Take Time to Tinker

Ah, yes – the joy of tinkering! Thank goodness for the booklet Learning in Hand – Podcasting for Teachers & Students Booklet that classmate Christine Robinson shared with us. The step-by-step directions walked me through the technical niceties of downloading and using Audacity, import music, and do some basic editing, as well as how to save and export the file. I still really haven’t mastered trimming down a long piece of music to the right length, and properly fading out music, and I certainly need to find some more detailed instructions.

Of course I referred to all of these directions AFTER using Windows Sound Recorder, and spending a l-o-n-g time recording my poem only to discover the format isn’t supported by Audacity! I had to record it yet again. And again. And another five or six times.

At this point Irealized that the inexpensive microphone I bought really isn’t good enough for the job, so I’ll have to buy something better when I have had a chance to research them.

More tinkering was need when I went to put the podcast on my blog. I realized again why I am using Edublogs to host my blog, as it was so easy to upload the file there. Due to the problems I’ve had with Edublogs being down, I am backing up my blog on Blogspot, and adding a podcast there was not easy at all. The hosting sites suggested in the booklet didn’t work for me but I finally found Podbean, an audioblogging site, and was able to upload my podcast, create a post, find the embedded player, and copy the HTML to my Blogger site. I’m sure there is an easier way, but at least that roundabout method worked!

This is a reminder that using technology with students will require much tinkering time. I think perhaps there should be another type of joy listed here:

The Joy of Structure and Scaffolding

In her PowerPoint presentation, Podcasting in School Libraries, Kristin Fontichiaro, author of Podcasting at School and Active Learning Through Drama, Podcasting, and Puppetry, not only gives a superb list of reasons for using podcasting (learning styles, curricular fit, needs of 21st century students, sharing learning with the outside world), she also provides a number of ideas for providing students with the support they need to create successful podcasts, as well as the safety tips they need to keep them safe.

As with all project-based learning, students need to start with manageable podcasting projects that are supported with just-in-time instruction from the teacher.

Joy in school?

It’s up to the teacher to help the students – and herself – experience this. I agree with Wolk. He says, “So teachers must strive in whatever ways they can to own their teaching so that each morning they can enter their classrooms knowing there will be golden opportunities for them-as well as for their students-to experience the joy in school.”

And Joy for Me

This week I challenged myself. I learned, I created, I podcasted.  What’s next? I’m looking forward to volunteering to read for my very favourite web site, Librivox, which provides free audio recordings of books in the public domain. And I’m going to take great joy in buying a really good microphone!

This Week’s Road Trip – Social Bookmarking

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Ford Focus Commercial

Packing the Car

Why start with a car commercial, you ask? Ever had one of those “Ah hah!” moments of revelation when the layers of your brain finally slid into place, and you found yourself wondering how you could have been so stupid? Would you believe I had one of those moments while I watched this Ford Focus commercial on TV?

It is sad but true – or really neat depending on your perspective – but I finally “got” tagging when I saw this commercial. To me this is the ultimate demonstration of the pull technology that is the Web 2.0 culture: the car buyer pulls all of the options he wasn’t out of the tag cloud surrounding him.

This integration of the concept of tagging gave me the mental set I needed to try out social bookmarking this week. And I love it!

First Stop: Del.icio.us

I began by looking for video tutorials about social bookmarking. First of all I watched the Common Craft video, Social Bookmarking in Plain English, which uses del.icio.us  as its example site.  Lee Lefever’s simple three steps, signing up to a service, tagging sites, and “being social” by looking at other people’s bookmarks, gave me the confidence to explore further. After all, I had already used Backflip as a way of storing bookmarks on the Internet. Now I just needed to add the tagging component. I decided to start using del.icio.us.

After I added my personal bookmarks I decided to experiment with the social aspect. I searched for tags having to do with crochet, and by adding and deleting tags was able to collect bookmarks dealing with crocheted afghan patterns. Remembering my RSS lessons from last week, I decided to add a feed for this collection to Bloglines.

Next Stop: Diigo

I knew that I also wanted to explore Diigo, so I searched YouTube and TeacherTube and found Emily Barney’s video, “Social Bookmarking: Making the Web Work for You.” This gives a wonderfully clear explanation of how social bookmarking works, and then goes on to explain how to use Diigo.  

If I were working on showing teachers how to do social bookmarking, I would use all three of these videos as part of the training (but of course not all at once).

Pit Stops on the Journey

This past week I

  • Set up accounts for Diigo, del.icio.us, and Furl
  • Installed the toolbar for Furl but had to uninstall it as my computer kept hanging and crashing. I decided to just experiment with the other two applications
  • Imported bookmarks from both my computers to both those accounts
  • Exported the bookmarks from both accounts and imported these into the other
  • Set up Diigo account so that new bookmarks are also automatically added to del.icio.us
  • Added email contacts to Diigo
  • Searched for other del.icio.us users’ bookmarks on crochet afghan patterns by using tags
  • Created a RSS feed for Diigo for crochet afghan patterns
  • Found Will Richardson on Diigo and looked at some of his bookmarks
  • Found Joyce Valenza on Diigo and subscribed to a feed from the Teacher Librarian group she belongs to
  • Investigated educator accounts on Diigo – I can’t join as I don’t have a school email address at the moment
  • Created WebSlides of some of the sites on social bookmarking I collected (see right sidebar).

Deciding Which Route to Take

Each of the sites I investigated has its pros and cons.

Del.icio.us:

  • I found del.icio.us easier to use, as it has a simpler, cleaner interface and it seems more intuitive to me, and easier to navigate.
  • I love the fact that it is as free of ads.
  • The Help pages are easier to navigate than Diigo.

Diigo

  • All the ads in Diigo definitely slow down search results and navigating pages.
  • Diigo has more features; the highlighting and commenting features are really valuable.
  • I can easily add contacts from my email address book in which I can’t do on del.icio.us – very useful when you want to email colleagues your bookmarks.
  • This is the fully-featured site I’d want to teach students how to use, especially since you can create an educator account.

Some Bumps in the Road

1. Information Literacy – Critical Evaluation

In his “Social Bookmarking” chapter in the book, Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The NEW Worldwide Web, Terry Freedman identifies one critical concern. He says, “There are downsides, [to using social bookmarking] of course. The main one is the flip side of the coin, that is to say, if looking for information is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, what social bookmarking does is to increase the size of the haystack! That is not an argument for not using it, but it is an argument for making sure that students are taught good information-searching skills, including the ability to evaluate the plausibility and accuracy of the information they find.”

2. Issues with Tags  

Freedman also points out an inherent problem with tagging: ‘A good example is “e-learning”: it would be a good idea to use “elearning” too!”‘

Tagging requires the use of only use single words, so you have to join words in phrases, such as socialbookmarking or social_bookmarking. In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson states that “tags that are more than one word usually use an underline to separate the words” (p. 96).

Unfortunately that is not necessarily the case. There is no standardization except what individual users, groups, or communities decide on. One would need to work on this with students or teachers in order to standardize tags. When I was searching for crochet patterns in del.icio.us, for example, I discovered that I could use the tag “patterns” and get results containing the tag “pattern,” but not vice versa.

Spelling counts too. I found plenty of bookmarks with the word “socail” as one of the tags.

3. Issues with Filtered Sites and Downloading of Toolbars

Many school districts restrict the downloading of toolbars and buttons; in my high school students were unable to download anything on to the computers, including bookmarking sites. As part of an initiative for using these resources, teachers would have to work with their administration and technicians to overcome these issues.

4. Privacy Issues

As with all public web sites, the possibility exists that students will encounter some inappropriate content. The Diigo Educator Account provides some safeguards to students. Only teachers and classmates can communicate with students. Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors. Students can only communicate with their friends and teachers, and their profiles aren’t included in the People Search feature.

Reasons To make the Journey

Miguel Guhlin’s article “Diigo the Web for Education – From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo” gives an eloquent explanation of why social bookmarking tools are so important for our students. Guhlin says,”New web tools allow you to do MORE than just gather great resources; they allow you to explain why they are great, put virtual post-its on them, and then share that care package of great resource links with your comments with your audience of choice.”

Guhlin goes on to quote Dr. Judi Harris:

  • 1. We all begin on the Web by “telegathering” (surfing) and “telehunting” (searching. This we can do pretty well. What we don’t do very well yet is to take educationally sound steps beyond telegathering and telehunting).
  • 2. We need to help our students and ourselves “teleharvest” (sift through, cogitate, comprehend, etc.) the information that we find, and “telepackage” the knowledge that results from active interaction (application, synthesis, evaluation, etc.) with the information.
  • 3. Then, we need to “teleplant” (telepublish, telecollaborate, etc.) these telepackages by sharing them with others…who use them as information in their…
  • 4. …telegathering & telehunting, and the process cycles back around again.

Are you helping your students make the shift from surfing and searching as telegatherers to becoming teleplanters? [Emphasis is mine]

The End (Not) of My Journey

The mind boggles. I could tear down my whole library web page, the Web 1.0 page, the Read Web page, and start again. Shortly the grade 10 students in my former school will be starting their Shakespeare research project. I am itching to work with a class. Students can use Diigo to collect, highlight, annotate, and tag resources on their topics, which include the Shakespeare controversy, the Elizabethan theatre, the Great Chain of Being, William Shakespeare the man, Elizabeth I, the plague, the Spanish Armada, and more. Instead of the page for this project I created, students can contribute what they have found while their teacher and I provide guidance and support. We can teach evaluation and critical thinking skills, building this in as a stage in the project.

And our students become teleplanters.

Did I mention I LOVED working on social bookmarking this week?

RSS Feeds: Organizing Work and Life

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Which Web 2.0 tool could I learn use that would help organize more effectively my work and my life?

When I considered this week’s topic, getting (and staying) organized in an electronic, Web 2.0 environment, I thought about how much I like to be well organized.

I love organizational tools. I love coloured file folders, customizable dividers, and stacking clear plastic boxes.  I love Microsoft Outlook because the calendar reminders function keeps me on time for all my meetings and the rules and folders for mail keep my correspondence arranged by topic and the colour coding for incoming mail meant the fuchsia messages from my principal got instant attention. I loved using Backflip, because I could access my bookmarks from any computer (now I’ve switched to del.icio.us). I love my MSN homepage because on one page I’ve got email, important links, daily weather, news headlines, the comic strip For Better or Worse, and more.

But I know I can be much better organized using some of the Web 2.0 tools out there. My inquiry question for this week is this. Which Web 2.0 tool could I learn use that would help organize more effectively my work and my life?

As I began to research this, I knew that it would be tough to pick just one tool. I needed something with applications in several areas, and that would be useful not just as a teacher’s tool but as a personal tool. I thought about the amount of time I spend searching the Internet, and thought that perhaps I could find something that would make this more efficient and less time consuming. That would impact my personal AND professional life.

I skimmed through our text book again looking for ideas and was struck by the title of Chapter 5: “RSS: The New Killer Apps for Educators.” I had looked at this earlier, while setting up my Bloglines account at the beginning of the course. But now I saw all the different ways you can use RSS to get all kinds of content organized and brought to you. Richardson says, “RSS is a technology that will change your life if you let it” (p. 72). The most useful application for me personally that he suggested was the RSS feed for website searches using Googlealerts.com (p.80).

I decided to investigate using RSS applications as my Web 2.0 tool of choice.

Joanne’s Trailfire on RSS and Blog Aggregates provided some more excellent examples of the effective use of RSS applications. In the article NCTE Inbox Blog: RSS: Bringing What’s New to You I was struck by this succinct explanation.  “But what exactly does RSS do? In the simplest possible explanation, RSS gathers the new information from specific sites that interest you and brings this new information directly to you.” Then the author, Traci Gardner, provides some suggestions as to what RSS can do for you in addition to just keeping up with new blog postings.

Here are a couple of Gardner’s ideas:

1. Want to keep up with new results for a Google News search? Perform the search, then click on the RSS link (lower left of the page) to subscribe. When new results appear, you’ll see them in your aggregator.

2. At Amazon.com you can subscribe to RSS Feeds for Bestsellers, Hot New Releases, and Movers & Shakers.

In Terry Freedman’s book, Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The New World Wide Web, I found more good ideas about RSS in John Evans’ chapter “What Are RSS Feeds and Why Haven’t I Heard About It?(RSS Feeds from an Educator’s Perspective).”  Evans mentions the time-saving aspect of having selected content come to you, and he gives some educational applications too. For example, in social studies teachers and students can subscribe to feeds from around the world on a specific topic or event to compare content, bias, coverage, etc.  He suggests using RSS Compendium – RSS Feeds, which sorts feeds into categories such as Education, Film/Video, Government, etc.

I also read Quentin D’Souza’s Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators A Guide to RSS and More Version 2.0. He gives dozens of ideas for integrating RSS feeds into all kinds of projects and applications, including email, blogging, photo sharing, and video sharing. Need to be reminded about something? Go to ReminderFeed – Your RSS Reminder Service. Want to search while you are off line? Set up a search on MSN, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for it. Want to share a calendar with your family? Go to RSS Calendar, and you’ll get updates automatically in your aggregator! I have set up a calendar to share with my family to help us in planning our family reunion for next year.

It is clear to me that using RSS feeds more extensively will simplify my time online considerably. I’ve already seen how easy it is to keep up with new blog postings on Bloglines. I plan to set aside some time each day to learn how to use RSS more effectively, especially in doing Internet searches.

As a teacher librarian, how would I go about sharing this with my high school teachers? I would select a social studies topic dealing with a current issue, such as global warming, set up some feeds from around the world, and meet with one social studies teacher to share what I’ve collected. I would teach her how to set up a Bloglines account and appropriate feeds. Together we would plan a project where students would look at and use content from around the world using RSS aggregators. One we’ve done this with one class, we would collect feedback from the students, and modify the project.

I’m looking forward to my new learning curve.

Stumbling Through Video Sharing, or The Week I Almost Lost My Mind

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From Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » YouTube Statistics

This has been the toughest week of the course so far for me. I have spent way too many hours reading books and blogs and exploring video-sharing sites. In fact I’ve worked so many hours that today my husband said to me, “Sweetheart, how would you have time to do this course if you were still teaching?”

I felt so overwhelmed that I dug out my copy of Focus on Inquiry and looked at the description of the Processing phase of the inquiry process:

“Inquirers usually experience a sense of relief and elation when they have established a focus for their inquiry. Even so, choosing pertinent information from resources is often a difficult task; there may be too little information or too much information, or the information may be too superficial or too in-depth for the inquirers. Often the information that is found is confusing and contradictory, so students may feel overwhelmed” (Alberta Learning, 2004, p. 12).

Yes, that was me. Overwhelmed. While I understood from my reading that video sharing sites work for many teachers, my initial exploration of YouTube did not excite me. According to the YouTube statistics from Michael Wesch’s blog, Digital Ethnography, as of March 17th 2008, there were 78.3 Million videos on YouTube, and 150,000 videos are uploaded each day (Wesch, 2008b).

When I searched for videos that could be used to support curricula I found the site confusing, the search inefficient, and the videos generally of poor quality. In addition several searches yielded results with tags that were to say the least, inappropriate for a school context – even high school. There was also blatant and rampant copyright infringement.

 I looked for videos dealing with John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, as that is a project that I am presently reworking for an English teacher friend. What I found were many clips from commercial movies, and a variety of poorly done student re-creations of various parts of the story. Then I expanded my search to John Steinbeck and found The Dustbowl and the Great Depression.

This is the kind of project that I can see my students doing as they explore the life of migrant workers. It does likely infringe on copyrights, but we could avoid that by obtaining appropriate permissions and/or using non-copyrighted material.

In her blog posting, Have You Tried YouTube? Brenda Dyck talks about these constant trade-offs. She says, “Much to our chagrin, the very Web sites and online tools that provide incredible learning opportunities also provide the ever-present possibility for students to access and misuse inappropriate information and images. The enduring challenge for educators is how to access one without the other” (2007a).

Dyck goes on to discuss the fact that YouTube is blocked – and for many good reasons – in many schools. I know it is in mine, due not only to the inappropriate content, but also because of the fact that downloading video is a bandwidth issue. Dyck argues, ‘What better place than school to teach about and practice evaluating the value and ethical use of sites like YouTube? But just talking about it isn’t sufficient; students need the chance to develop their ability to evaluate Web content to determine “what is and isn’t appropriate, what is and isn’t academic, what is and isn’t true.” Anything less would lack authenticity'(2007a).

I agree with Dyck, but this has huge ramifications in terms of education not only of students but also of teachers and parents. In her follow-up article, she suggests using TeacherTube (2007b). I of course looked at TeacherTube and was relieved to find the educational quality and attention to privacy concerns and content lacking in YouTube, although my search on Steinbeck found only two videos. This site, as with other educational video-sharing sites I investigated, including SchoolTube, Studi 4 Networks, SchoolWax tv, and JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments – Biological Experiments And Protocols, and Edublogs.tv 3 steps for 21st century learning had far more material for math and science teachers than for literature or the arts.

But of course it’s not just about the resources students can use, which is the part I have been struggling with.

So I know I am slow, and what I am saying is painfully obvious to all of you, my young colleagues, but I finally get it – it’s the Read/WRITE Web. Maybe it should be the Read/Write/Converse Web. Michael Wesch’s presentation “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” made this so clear to me: video sharing is just as much about the sharing – and the conversation it creates — as it is the video. Think of the Numa Numa song, moving from person to person around the world (Wesch, 2008a).

In their report titled Pew Internet: Teens and social media, “The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004″ [underlining is mine] (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill,, & Smith, 2007, p.2).

Of course we want our students to have access to quality curriculum-related videos as part of their instruction, but we also need to facilitate our students’ creation of video. Students need to be involved with the process of creating product, as well as simply viewing it. And that finally helps me to see more clearly just how YouTube might fit, at least in my high school. Our Communication Technology students create a variety of products, ranging from portfolios of their photographs to computer animation projects to short music videos to a full television news broadcast (we have a professional quality TV studio) complete with news, sports, weather, and commercials.  

These products were shared only with teachers and classmates, and at Open House. Last year I suggested to the teacher that she have a noon hour showing of the best of the work. We booked our large central atrium and had a week of sharing that included displays of photographs and portfolios in the library as well as video showings for ever-increasing audiences of fascinated students, some of whom didn’t even know of the Comm Tech program’s existence.

If those students had their work shared on TeacherTube, what a resource that could grow to be. They can compare their work with that from thousands of other students around the world, and can learn from successes and the mistakes of their peers. Their teacher can hone her instructional techniques with dozens of exemplars, both from her own and from other teachers’ students. And as Will Richardson says, these videos can be aimed at “real people outside the classroom” (2008, p.121).

In Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0, Susan Ariew gives a great example of this. She discusses how her library used a student volunteer who was an avid YouTube user/creator to help library staff create videos for library instruction. The first video, Databases, was posted only on YouTube as it infringed on copyright and was not technically perfect. But the staff was hooked. They invested time and planning and money on higher-quality equipment, and their second video, “The Chronicles of Libraria,” was posted by the library and received national attention. The student volunteer spoke at a library conference, showing his presentation Youtube, Librarians, and Me. Now planning for further videos is an important aspect of library programming, so much so that the library sponsors a video contest to solicit more instructional videos created by students (2008, pp. 125-132).

I’ve been asked to do a presentation on Web 2.0 at my previous school, fortunately not until this course is over! I’m already planning the video-sharing section. I’m looking forward to reading your blogs to help me stumble a little less on my way.

References

Alberta Learning. (2004). Focus on inquiry: A teacher’s guide to implementing inquiry-based learning. Edmonton AB: Alberta Learning. Retrieved September 24, 2008, from Alberta Education Web site: http://www.education.gov.ab.ca/‌k_12/‌curriculum/‌bysubject/‌focusoninquiry.pdf

Ariew, S. (2008). Joining the YouTube conversation to teach information literacy. In P. Godwin & J. Parker, Information literacy meets Library 2.0 (pp. 125-132). London: Facet.

Accompanied by a bog at http://infolitlib20.blogspot.com/

Clark, J. A. (2007). YouTube university: Using XML, web services, and online video services to serve university and library video content. In L. B. Cohen (Ed.), Library 2.0 initiatives in academic libraries (pp. 156-167). Chicago: Association for College & Research Libraries.

The book is accompanied by a wiki found at http://www.acrl.ala.org/‌L2Initiatives/‌index.php?title=Main_Page

Dyck, B. (2007, May 1). Education World ® Technology Center: Brenda’s blog: Have you tried YouTube? (Part 1). Message posted to http://www.educationworld.com/‌a_tech/‌columnists/‌dyck/‌dyck015.shtml

Dyck, B. (2007, May 15). Education World ® Technology Center: Brenda’s blog: Using YouTube in the classroom. Message posted to http://www.education-world.com/‌a_tech/‌columnists/‌dyck/‌dyck016.shtml

Edublogs. (2008). Edublogs.tv 3 steps for 21st century learning. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://edublogs.tv/

Etraffic Press. (n.d.). SchoolWAX TV [Educational video sharing]. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://schoolwaxtv.com/

Godwin, P., & Parker, J. (Eds.). (n.d.). Information literacy meets library 2.0.

Accompanied by a blog at http://infolitlib20.blogspot.com/

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments – biological experiments and protocols on video. (2008). Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.jove.com/

Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Macgill,, A. R., & Smith, A. (2007, December 19). Pew Internet: Teens and social media. Retrieved September 25, 2008, from Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site: http://www.pewinternet.org/‌pdfs/‌PIP_Teens_Social_Media_Final.pdf

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd. ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

RuneHQVideos (Director). (2007). The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression [Motion picture]. YouTube. Retrieved September 24, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/‌watch?v=gplaqa2yRgg

SchoolTube. (2008). Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.schooltube.com/  

Contains approximately 6200 videos

Science videos search engine [Indexes videos from other sites]. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2008, from http://sciencehack.com/

Studio 4 Networks, Inc. (2008). Studio 4 Learning. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://studio4learning.tv/

TeacherTube – Teach the world: Teacher videos, lesson plan videos, student video lessons online. (2008). Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.teachertube.com/

Wesch, M. (Writer/‌Director). (2008). YouTube – An anthropological introduction to YouTube [Motion picture]. United States: YouTube. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/‌watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&feature=user

Wesch, M. (2008, March 18). Digital Ethnography blog archive: YouTube statistics. Message posted to http://mediatedcultures.net/‌ksudigg/‌?p=163