This is Part VII in the series “Stepping it Up: Learning About Blogs FOR your Students”

• Part I: Reading
• Part II A: Writing
• Part II B: Student Writing
• Part III: Commenting
• Part IV: Connecting
• Part V: Reciprocating
• Part VI: Consistency

Reading, responding, assessing and monitoring our students’ progress on their blog requires pedagogical commitment. It is a commitment to student learning and quality work, not a commitment to using a specific technology platform.

My guiding questions for QUALITY blogging are:

• How do teachers recognize different levels of quality?
• How can assessment for student blogging look like?

The blogging rubric, developed by Kim Cofino, mentioned in Part IIB-Student Writing becomes an invaluable tool to recognize quality, assess your students and plan to support each one at their own level. I have tweaked the original rubric somewhat. Another rubric I consulted and remixed from was University of Wisconsin, as well as Steve Peha’s list of six traits of quality writing from Teaching That Makes Sense. Here is the  link to Kim’s original rubric, so you can make edits to fit your own needs.

Part of blogging is commenting, which deserves its own rubric to address individual components that contribute to the overall quality of a comment.

Andrew Churches divides his Commenting Rubric (pdf) into two parts:

• Construction – this is how the comments is constructed, its flow, logic and language
• Understanding/Evaluations – this is a progression from simple to complex commenting; from simple statements to reflection and critique

See a commenting rubric below that you can use to help you recognize and support quality commenting. The rubric is based on Andrew Churches Bloom’ Taxonomy Commenting Rubric (pdf) from above as well as  Kim Cofino’s rubric and University of Wisconsin’s Blogging Rubric

Take a look at the two videos below, produced by two third grade classes. Mrs. Rogo’s 3d grade class from Florida and Mrs. Yollis’ class from California discussed and shared their ideas and thoughts about quality commenting.

Quality Commenting poster created for 3rd grade

It is hard to teach/coach students in quality blogging, if the teacher does not know what quality in blogging looks like.  As mentioned in Part I- of this series, blogging is about writing, but it starts with reading. Reading other blogs (many different ones) gives us an opportunity to see, become aware, evaluate and recognize all different levels of quality in blogs. Reading other blogs and comments helps us sharpen our own skills.

Andrew Chuches uses Bloom’s Taxonomy very successfully to assess the quality of student blogs. I especially liked his Blog Journalling Rubric (pdf)  where he adds fantastic examples, demonstrating different levels of quality.

I believe that seeing and learning to recognize quality samples of student work in various areas of the rubrics (writing, voice, presentation, citation, community, commenting) is beneficial to educators, new to blogging with their students.

Let’s take a look at several examples that demonstrate different levels of quality blogging.

In the example below, you will see 4th grade students consistently (and almost exclusively) use the words “fun”, “exciting” and “amazing” as they are commenting on a blogs post that documented an author’s visit via Skype into the classroom. Some comments are incomplete, leaving the reader hanging and wondering. Students needed to elaborate further in their comments to show understanding as well as connections.

Click for a larger image

After giving students feedback on their first comments, they went back to re-submit their comments. Take a look and compare these two before-and-after examples.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Here are a few more comments left by teachers, pre-service teachers  and other adults. These comments are well intended. They surely were left to make conversation, let the blog author know that their posts are being read, acknowledged and appreciated. How would they hold up against the commenting rubric?

• Do these comments contribute to the topic of the original blog post (Even without having seen the original blog post…) ?
• Is there evidence of understanding of topic of original blog post?
• Are links to relevant resources added?
• Is there a meaningful addition (information, point of view)?
• Is an idea or point of view well stated?
• Is there solid evidence of content knowledge or thinking present?

What about these comments below? Where would they fall in your opinion?

Linda Yollis, winner of the 2011 Edublog Awards in the categories of Best Classroom Blog & Most Influential Blog Post left the following comment on Langwitches:

Silvia, you’ve hit the nail on the head…quality reciprocation is the key to building an audience! All the blogging relationships I’ve built with teachers, classrooms, and students have come from reciprocal commenting.

Teachers often ask me how I have connected with so many classes around the world. The answer is through consistent quality commenting. When I started, I would visit lots of blogs and leave comments. I’d try to make a connection or add relevant information to a post, and I’d always end with a question. My hope was to engage the class in a conversation. If I would get a reply from the teacher/class, I would go back. If I got no response, I’d move on to other blogs and keep trying.

Many teachers/classes not only responded in their comment section, but they would visit my class blog and connect. A comment that shows you’ve read the post and are interested in what’s happening in the classroom is much more valuable than “Our class loves your blog, please visit ours!” Of course, composing thoughtful comments takes time, but the payoff is tremendous!

One of the first teachers I connected with was Kathleen Morris (@kathleen_morris). Through reciprocal quality commenting, we’ve built a relationship that spans four classes. Students regularly comment to each other, and two families from Kathleen’s Australian class visited our class when they vacationed in Los Angeles!

I teach third grade and when my students earn their own blogs, they are excited to get that first red ClustrMap dot and a comment or two. I teach dedicated lessons about how to comment
using our class blog, so by the time students have their own blogs, they have a good understanding of composing a quality comment.

Before too long, I will hear a student complain, “No one is commenting on my blog.” My response to them is, “Hmm…well…whose blog have you been commenting on? Where did you leave your last comment?” They look a little sheepish as the light bulb goes on. In life, you have to give to get. If you want people visiting and connecting with you, you have to get out there and model what you want!

Focusing on a few blogs is a good idea. It can be overwhelming to try and keep up with too many classes. Deputy Mitchell’s (@DeputyMitchell) Quadblogging idea is a great place to begin. http://quadblogging.net/

There are so many wonderful global projects springing up. It’s tempting to join too many. I have found that if I over-schedule my class, we are not able to participate fully and that doesn’t help anyone. Budgeting your time and choosing projects that fit your schedule makes blogging and global projects more meaningful and enjoyable.

Finally, I love your idea about mentoring student bloggers. Edublog’s Student Blogging Challenge is a wonderful place to volunteer your time. Following the Twitter hashtag #comments4kids is another way to support students.

As you can see, I am passionate about educational blogging! I thank you, Silvia, for guiding and encouraging teachers to blog. It’s the best project I’ve seen in my twenty-five years in the classroom!

Please don’t just notice the length of the comment compared to the others, but take a look at writing, voice, content and presentation. Ask yourself, if:

• this comment contributed further information on the blog’s topic (The role of reciprocation in blogging)?
• the comment’s author added further resources?
• the content was organized and easy to follow?
• the author’s voice came through?

We need to be reading AND consciously reflecting on the quality of a blog post or comment to become good at recognizing and guiding our students to quality work in blogging.

Below you will find samples of blog posts. While keeping the blogging rubric in mind, how would you evaluate them? Where does the blog author need to improve?

Spelling, grammar and punctuation would be something to work on for this student (proof reading and editing). The visual formatting of the body of text could also use improvement. I am not sure if the link included in the post was supposed to cite the author’s source of information or be the image credit. Once I followed the link, I discovered that the site (and therefore I have to assume the image as well)  is under copyright. Simply adding the link to the site where the image was found is not enough.

I liked the inviting title to the blog post. It made me curious to continue reading. The post author starts out describing a personal experience. I am left with wishing for more information. A link to Wikipedia, for example, explaining the condition, would have been inviting to learn more. A visual in the public domain (free to use), grabbed from Wikipedia would have also been a nice addition. I am left with many questions for this blog author. His writing left me unsatisfied. I don’t feel that he told a “whole” story.

The blog post above is from my favorite fourth grade blogger Miriam. She was a finalist in this year’s Edublog Awards. What I love about her writing, is that I can HEAR her voice so clearly (although I have never met her personally). In the above post, she takes her readers along a car ride as she observes the autumn trees changing colors. She takes images of the trees she sees and inserts them into her blog post in order support her writing. The post is not only a narrative, but Miriam weaves information into the post as well. Miriam closes her blog post with question directed at the reader, inviting them to continue a conversation or information exchange.

Take a look at the Edublog Awards nominees as well as the Student Blogging Challenge. There are literally hundreds of links to student and classroom blogs. With the blogging and commenting rubric in hand, evaluate a few (or many) of them:

• what do you like?
• what components do you consider “QUALITY”
• what could be improved?
• how would you coach that student?
• how would you transfer the learning opportunity to your own classroom?

Once you have unofficially “audited” several classroom and student blogs, it will give you a better idea and more confidence in recognizing and gauging quality in your own students’ blogging.

Please share:

• your own auditing methods and successes for quality blogging with students
• an audit of a student blog post you conducted (this could be a great next blog post to tackle!)

Transliteracy is defined on Wikipedia as

The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. The modern meaning of the term combines literacy with the prefix trans-, which means “across; through”, so a transliterate person is one who is literate across multiple media.

Ryan Nadel, in an interview on Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, defines transliteracy even further:

“The most fundamental notion of transliteracy is the ability to adapt. It’s creating a literacy and fluidity between mediums that’s not tied to space or modality.”

I agree with Ryan: Transliteracy is closely related to “fluency“:

• the ability to know when to use one media over another
• the ability to move effortlessly between media
• the ability to comprehend, build upon, and remix different kind of media
• the ability to relate, communicate and connect via multiple forms of media
• moving between media feels: intuitive, unconscious and smooth

Let me share a transliterate learning opportunity with you that I created (Art, iPads, QR codes, Language Arts and Digital Storytelling)  in collaboration with our Art teacher, Mrs. Gutterman and the 4th grade classroom teacher, Mrs. Teitelbaum?

During Art class, fourth graders adapted Vincent van Gogh’s chairs and placed things on and  around them that were important to them.

In Language Arts, students wrote a script, explaining their choices of what they drew and why it was important to them.

We all gathered in the library to record their script as an audio file on the iPad. We used the AudioMemos app (free) to record. Students then emailed the wav file to me.

1. I then converted the .wav files to mp3 files with Garageband, since I did not know if all mobile devices would play .wav files easily.
2. These files were then uploaded via FTP to our school’s server
3. I inserted the URL of each mp3 file into http://goo.gl
4. Clicked on “Details” to get to the generated QR code
5. Saved the QR codes as an image file

I inserted the images into a page and then printed the QR codes out for the Art teacher to attach them to the original art work.

Now anyone with a QR scanner on their Smartphone, iTouch or iPad walking by the art work, can scan and listen to the student artist’s audio reflection. The next step was to create a poster to catch the attention of the visitors and parents walking by and give a short explanation of what to do with the QR code

I was thrilled last school year when our First Graders created their own Read Along Audiobook for the iPad. My regret was that while it was created TO BE READ on the iPad, it was not CREATED on the iPad. I used a wordprocessor, then converted it with an online converter to then be able to import the ePub file to my iPad. Not a “fluent” solution.

A few days ago, I ran across Dan Amos on Twitter,  announcing his soon to be released app called Book Creator  (Released on September 15, 2011). When I contacted him to find out the possible educational uses of the app, he was so kind to extend a promo code for me to give a test run.

The app is super intuitive! I was working on a book for my 7 year old niece (who lives in Brazil) in no time. It took me about 30 minutes to put together a book for her, publish in iBooks and email the ePub file to my brother…to open it up on his iPad…. for my niece to read it.

The book cover and project file  in the Book Creator app (image above)

The book ready to be read on the iBooks shelf. (image above)

The interface is uncluttered and simple. The most important buttons in the upper right toolbar are for  images, text, formatting and exporting.

I easily imported images, that were in my iPad Photo Album. Images that were not originally on the device, were saved quickly from Facebook, a website or an email attachment.

The text was a snap to insert and to format. My niece has taught herself how to read in Spanish (her parents speak Spanish to her), while the official language at her school is Portuguese. She is also starting to learn German. The color coded boxes contain the text in Spanish and German for her.

I used Wikipedia to save the images of the map and flag into my photo album. I received rave reviews from my niece about the book. She absolutely loved it. We are currently writing a book together about her newest favorite music group :ABBA

This week another opportunity presented itself to test and use the app with students at school. Our school is hosting two children from Germany this school year. The sister is in first grade, the brother in 2nd grade. Both arrived a few weeks ago, without being able to speak one word of English. Their teachers, classmates, as well the rest of the school is quite curious and very eager to communicate with them.

The two siblings, six and seven years old, had never seen or touched an iPad before. They were immediately interested and eager to create a book. They came up with the title “Our School in Florida”. We talked about what kind of images they wanted in their book, then walked around to shoot them with the iPad. I showed them how to tap the image icon to insert their images onto a page and then resize them.

They dictated, in German, their comments for each image to me. I added a second textbox with the English translation for them.

Once completed, the book was sent to iBooks, ready to be synced with our classroom set of iPads and for the rest of their teachers and classmates to read. Both children were very excited and proud of their work. I was also able to see how many words in English they had already learned as they were describing the images to me and “helped” with the translation.

Book Creator  is an app that “finally” allows to anyone to create a book by staying completely within the iPad environment. It is an app that takes the concept of transformative teaching and learning to heart. I can envision many more uses for teachers and students.

• Students creating their own textbooks, collaborating as each student contributes a chapter/topic/theme. The iBook shelf hosts and organized the library of all self-created books.
• Students publish an essay or poetry anthology of their work.
• The Official Scribe could pull information together from curriculum reviewer and researcher  (from the roles outlined by the Digital Learning Farm) at the end of a chapter or unit to create an iBook and share with the rest of the class.
• Older students can create books with topics of interest for the younger students.
• Connect with the Art teacher to have students create the accompanying illustrations for any book (First graders are going to be creating a book about the life cycle of the butterfly. They will illustrate the illustration during Art)

Features I would like to see the app develop:

• Allowing copy/paste feature for text
• Other language support (When I showed the app to our Hebrew teachers, they were excited and immediately wanted to know if the Hebrew alphabet was supported, including the right to left writing)
• Ability to record audio into the book (Dan Amos already let me know that this feature is in the works for the next upgrade)
• Ability to record or embed video into the book.
• Collaboration possible between several (classroom set) of iPads. Ability to export and then insert pages created on another iPad, so students can create their own chapters or part of a larger book.
• Ability to export book to an online space to then get an embed code, so book can be embedded on a classroom blog. Parents who do not have an eBook reader are able to view the book as well. Similar to Mixbook.

The app gets two thumbs up from me. I also placed Book Creator  on the highest level of my iPad’s Bloom’s Taxonomy. It opens up the possibility of amplifying writing, reading and sharing and “leaving a legacy” wth meaningful work. The app is a great example of increased fluency on the iPad.

I already have talked with several teachers on different grade levels to collaborate in getting the iPads with the app in students’ hands and see what they will create.  Stay tuned…

Take a look at the video from the developer to learn more about its features.

Images like the following ones, visualize for me the urgency for all of us to become information literate to wade through the incredible, ever increasing, amount of information being created and shared with the world.

licesed under CC by will-lion

Lincensed under CC by verbeeldingskr8

We are with no doubt in the age of information overload and IN DIRE NEED of knowing how to filter in order to get to the information we need. Think about Clay Shirky’s quote below.

Clay Shirky

Information Overload

In comes the idea of becoming a Curator of Information.

“Curating” is defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as:

Select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).

Digital Curation, Curated Learning & Collective Curation?

I have started hearing and reading about the terms “Digital Curation”, “Curated Learning” and “Collective Curation” as well. Naturally it intrigued me. What does that mean? How can I bring it into the classroom? How can “curated learning” be connected to the idea of teachers and students creating their own textbooks?

Digital Curation is defined in Wikipedia as:

the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation is generally referred to the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, historians, and scholars.

In a fabulous article, Jeff Cobb, on his blog Mission to Learn asks Who Are Your Curators? (Thank you to Mike Amante for pointing me to the description of the ISTE panel discussion he will be participating in at the end of the month and all the included resources)

The idea behind curators and content curation is that there is such a flood of new content pouring through the Internet pipes these days that being aware of all of it and sorting it out in meaningful ways is simply not possible. Curators are people or organizations that do the hard work of sifting through the content within a particular topic area or “meme” and pulling out the things that seem to make most sense. This effort involves significantly more than finding and regurgitating links, though.

Cobb continues by pointing out two opportunities for the life long learner. The first one is to FIND great curators and the second one is to BE a great curator.

Curated Learning

How can this concept of “curation” of information be brought into the “classroom” (however you define the classrooms of the present/future and how it should/could look like)? If we can use Cobb’s suggestion and teach/coach our students to Number 1) find and connect to great curators and Number 2) be great curators for their own network, then we have moved closer to understanding Shirky’s warning about information overload and filter failure. “Quality” curation takes higher level thinking skills. It requires responsibility towards your network who rely on you to filter information on a specific topic. Curation requires the ability to organize, categorize, tag and know how to make the content available to others and to be able to format and disseminate it via various platforms.

How can we take advantage of  Collective Curation?

Here is a short video clip explaining the concept of Collective Curation

I think the following questions are worthwhile exploring for the learner in ourselves, but also for our students (elementary school and up). Facilitating the role of being a curator fits in perfectly with the role of “researcher”, Alan November suggests in his Digital Learning Farm model.

• What tools do I use to curate?
• How can I use my network to filter and find quality information?
• How can/do I contribute and become the filter for others?

Tools that Support and Facilitate Curation of Information:

• RSS Readers
  • Google Reader
    subscribe
    bundles
• We based Curation Tools
  • ScoopIt
    Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic!
    Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant streams
    Publish it to your favorite social media or to your blog
  • CuratedBy
    A growing collection of topics & interest edited, organized and curated by everyone. Follow the topics you are interested in or create and share your own topics with everyone else.
  • PaperLi
    Create your newspaper. Today. Turn Twitter and Facebook into online newspapers in just a few clicks.Treat your readers to fresh news daily.
  • Bundlr
    Bundlr is a new and free tool for online curation: clipping, aggregation and sharing web content easily.With Bundlr you can create bundles of any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets and links. Cover real-time breaking news from your sources. Wrap up an event with a collection of online feedback. Build a page where you pick the most relevant content on your area of expertise.
  • PearlTrees
    Pearltrees is the social curation community. It’s the place where you can organize, discover and share the stuff you like on the web.
  • LiveBinders
    Your 3-ring binder for the Web. Collect your resources. Organize them neatly and easily. Present them
• Social Bookmarking
  • Delicious
  • Diigo
• Blogs
  • categories
  • tags

Further Resources:

• Teachers as Curators of Learning (Edutopia)
• Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Age of Curation (Wired)
• Content Curating: Learning from Others

The more we podcast and have our students create video clips or other digital storytelling projects, the more we need to teach storyboarding as part of the process. Being able to pre-visualize how your story will unfold is becoming a vital skill to have for storytellers.

Storyboards are defined as:

Graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.

In the book by Roger Essley “Visual Tools for Differentiating Reading & Writing Instruction: Strategies to Help Students Make Abstract Ideas Concrete and Accessible”, he says

Storyboarding, or picture writing, is the origin of all written languages, used by ancient cultures before text evolved and as a natural bridge to text. The Chinese language was built using pictographs. Egyptians used storyboards, or hieroglyphics, first etched in stone and later written on papyrus, to organize a complex society and to rule the ancient world.

Pre-Writing is defined as

Pre-writing is the first stage of the writing process, typically followed by drafting, revision, editing and publishing. Elements of prewriting may include planning, research, outlining, diagramming, storyboarding or clustering.

I have experimented with several storyboarding tools, from the paper and pencil method to iPad apps. Students and I are both finding the creation of the storyboard extremely helpful as we are collaborating on creating podcasts and movies.

I created a Word Doc, that is easily edited with the title of the storytelling project and printed out to be distributed to students. (Download the Word Doc Template)

Storyboarding Template Created in Word

We have also asked students to directly use their writing journals to storyboard their ideas for a script. Students use their storyboard to write their script in sequence and to supervise and help as we edit the movie together.

Individual Storyboarding in Journal

Storyboarding in Journal

One of my favorite places to create a storyboard together with the students in on the SmartBoard. We use the Notebook software to draw the different scenes that will need to be filmed and which actors will be participating in each scene.

Collaborative Storyboarding on SmartBoard

The following storyboard  was also created with the SmartBoard Notebook. This time we used screenshots to illustrate the images we were imagining for the green screen background replacement.

Collaborative Storyboarding with Screenshots

We printed the storyboard out for all students to have and to use as they were going to write their parts of the script. It helped them understand their individual role in the collaborative whole of the story. Once we finished recording the script (which often happened to be film completely out of sequence) , I made it a point to involve students in the editing process.

As the storyboard area of iMovie was displayed on the projector, students were using their paper storyboard printout to help me drag and drop individual video clips in the correct order , add sounds,  transitions and text. The storyboard made it possible to pull all the individually written scripts and out-of-order filmed video clips into a coherent sequence.

I am just starting to experiment with storyboard apps on my iPad. I am sure similar apps exist for the Android market or other tablet computers.

Storyboards Premium allows you to create a background scene, insert actors and text.

StoryPages HD allows you to draw your own board and add text in a different pane. You can move different pages in order on the page grid and email the final board as a pdf file.

How about inviting the Art teacher at your school to teach a lesson on storyboarding techniques to your students?

For more examples of storyboarding, take a look at the following article and posts:

• R.Alfonso’s blog EETT & Making Movies
• What Are Storyboards?
  Storyboarding, or picture writing, is the origin of all written languages. Storyboards are widely used because we know pictures combined with text offer a rich synthesis of information that can entertain and inform. The pictures in picture writing can be simple cartoons, photographs, or sophisticated technical diagrams. This technique can be an invaluable tool when differentiating reading and writing instruction….
• Differentiated Instruction: Developing a Storyboarding Classroom
  Tips on how to use visual tools, such as storyboarding, to differentiate instruction in a reading program….

There is too much information available. No doubt… Everyone feels overwhelmed by this information overload. EVERYONE…One of my favorite images to visualize this feeling is the one of a fire hydrant with a quote by Mitchell Kapor

Image licensed under Creative Commons by Will Lion.

How can we expect teachers and their students to not feel overwhelmed too? How can we ask them to find, research, read, evaluate, analyze, cite, organize, categorize and make sense of all the information that they consumed.

What is social bookmarking?

According to Wikipedia

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”

Take a look at Common Craft’s video “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” to get started…

There are a few (free)  social bookmark services available to educators. Leading the list was Delicious. Yahoo announced a few days ago (December 2010) though that it will shut down the services or look for “new home” for it. I have started to save my bookmarks to Diigo with the option that automatically saves the bookmark to my Delicious account too. As with all free services, we must be flexible and have backups and alternatives for our content.

• Delicious
• Diigo
• Trunkly
• Licorize

This blog post is not about the alternatives to Delicious though. Part I attempts to point out the skills and  literacies involved and required when using social bookmarking tools to its full potential. I am looking at the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy as well as 21st century skills to see where social bookmarking fits in. Part II looks deeper at the skills involved when using social bookmarking, gives specific examples of how schools, teachers and students can use social bookmarking for learning and reiterates that it’s not about the tools we use but about the skills we try to instill in our students or as Andrew Churches on his Edorigami Wiki points out that

Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy isn’t about the tools or technologies rather it is about using these to facilitate learning. Outcomes on rubrics are measured by competence of use and most importantly the quality of the process or product. For example. Bookmarking a resource is of no value if the resource is inappropriate, invalid, out of date or inaccurate.

Churches puts Social Bookmarking in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy on the level of:

Remembering

Social Bookmarking  is an online version of local bookmarking or favourites, it is more advanced because you can draw on others bookmarks and tags. While higher order thinking skills like, collaborating and sharing, can and do make use of these skills, this is its simplest form – a simple list of sites saved to an online format rather than locally to the machine.

and Understanding

Categorising & Tagging – digital classification – organising and classify files, web sites and materials using folders, using Del.ico,us and other similar tools beyond simple bookmarking. This can be organising, structuring and attributing online data, meta-tagging web pages etc. Students need to be able understand the content of the pages to be able to tag it

Take a look at the Edorigami’s  Bookmarking Rubric and a Delicious Starter sheet.

Social bookmarking allows teachers and students to practice essential skills, such as communicating, collaborating, connecting and critical thinking.

Communicate:

• By saving bookmarks online (in the cloud), we allow others to see our bread crumbs where we have been and we share the road map how we arrived where we are.
• We are also able to access  (communicate with) our resources from any device with Internet access (home computer, school computer, mobile devices).
• We can add notes to explain our train of thought, further questions, or future direction our research could take and communicate like this with potential collaborators.
• Summarizing the site we are bookmarking allows others to quickly read if the site would warrant an extended visit.
• Adding highlights to the website shows others in a glance what we felt was the most important message.

Collaborate:

• Social bookmarking allows for group based research. With a little organization, groups can divide research areas and pull them together via pre-arranged tags.
• Folksonomy (“the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”) allows to take advantage of collaborating on a much larger scale. Other users, including possible experts in the field, share and add resources to your research by simply using a shared tag.

Connect:

• By publically sharing you bookmarks in the cloud (instead of in your browser and on your computer alone)  you automatically connect with anyone who finds your userpage or when your bookmarks (using a specific tag ) are added to their search results.
• By using tags in your own searches you connect automatically to others who chose to share and tag bookmarks with the same tags.
• Most social bookmarking services allow you to create or join groups or become members of a network that you select. This way you are connected to a specific group of users who share common interest in one way or another.
• Each user, tag or string of tags has its own RSS feed, which connects you instantly to any update and addition by any user using these tags.

Critical Thinking:

• It is easy to bookmark any resource. Most social bookmarking services have browser specific buttons, that allow you to easily add the link to your bookmarking library. Once bookmarked, you are prompted to add tags. These tags allow you to categorize and organize your resources. Choosing appropriate tags are of vital importance to connect to resources tagged with the same keywords.
• Looking at a bookmark shared by other user lends itself to begin analyzing what kind of tags s(he) used to categorize the link. Did they see a connection to another category that you did not? Did they interpret the content of the link differently than you did? Can I use their tags to follow my research towards a new direction?
• How do we organize thousands and thousands of bookmarks? Some services allow for tag bundles to be created. Some allow your tags to be seen in a word cloud. How can we interpret the collaborative tagging of a single bookmark by potentially thousands of people around the world?

Continue taking a look at Social Bookmarking in your schools and with your students Part II

I am getting ready to post on my school’s 21st Century Learning Blog a message for parents about the school’s move from Edline, the portal that was used in previous years for parent communication, to individual classroom blog.

School is moving on to individual classroom blogs

The purpose of the post below is to:

• give parents an overview of what a blog is.
• explain that blogs are a “work in progress”, as teachers and students will collaboratively create articles and conversations.
• make clear that a blog does not replace a face to face parent-teacher conference or a phone call.
• remind parents that the platform doesn’t serve as a place to communicate academic problems of individual students or to let the teacher know that their student did not have time, had difficulties or forgot to complete a homework assignment.
• address how blogging supports essential skills and literacies
• point out how a blog, in time, can become the hub as the global communication center.

In short, I am trying to show parents, that a blog is MORE than a shiny new tool (toy?).

Please add YOUR thoughts about blogging and parent education of its use and value in the comment section. What did I leave out? What is not clear in my post?

Here is the post…

All teachers at our school are using a new online platform this school year to communicate with students and parents. We are using a blog platform that enables non-Web Designers to publish and edit content more easily.

The word “Blog” comes from “Web Log” which is an Online Journal. Wikipedia defines a blog as:

A blog (a blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.

A blog format distinguishes itself from a static website (like Edline was). It allows a two way communication between the teacher and her students, the students between each other and even for parents to leave comments that contribute to learning.

David Warlick, author of “Classroom Blogging- A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere” (p.15-16), says that blogs are important for educators to take notice, because of

the direct and conspicuous relationship between blogging and literacy. It is about writing and reading- communication. If we can tap into the sudden notoriety of blogging as a cool thing to do, given our students authentic assignments of finding, reading, and evaluating blog-based information within the context of curriculum and then make them bloggers, communicators with a broadening audience, then we may do a more effective job of teaching literacy, both in the traditional sense, and within the context of an emerging new definition of literacy in a a networked, digital information environment.

Creating a blog is a process for our classrooms, teachers and students. As they are learning the nuts and bolts of blog lingo and logistics, such as posts, pages, categories, tags and widgets, they are also learning to use this new media as a way to extend learning beyond the classroom walls. Teachers are scouting the web to find age appropriate and curriculum related links that will allow individual students to deepen their knowledge of a topic, practice or extend specific skills taught in the classroom. In addition to links that connect to outside resources, the blog becomes a journal of individual entries/conversations by teachers and students that are displayed in reverse chronological order.

The format of a blog naturally invites to reflective thinking. This may happen in the classroom as a whole group activity, when teachers use the site to go over past assignments, classroom happenings or questions that were posted. It may happen when students use the blog as a source to review content discussed in class that day, or when they had time to digest and share their ideas, questions or doubts when they are more comfortable (for some) and not in front of the entire class. The reflection can also happen as a conversation starter at home between parents and students to look back on what was discussed in school. As teachers and students are learning to embed images, audio, video and other media into their blogs, the dreaded parent/child interchange of “What did you do in school today?- Nothing!” will be something of the past. Parents will be able to share learning conversations and events from their child’s classroom and visit/re-visit with their child virtually from home.

A blog is more than a shiny new tool!

By blogging, students not only are “going on a website” to look up their assignments, but they are learning to read and write with hypertext, they are writing to an authentic worldwide audience, lessons about online safety and etiquette are organically woven into lessons. Reading and writing becomes a tool to authentically communicate with classmates, teachers as well as readers from around the world. Learning how to tag, categorize, link and find information is an increasingly important skill in the Information Age. Our students, from Kindergarten on, are being exposed to these skills by being part of building a learning community on their classroom blog.

Will Richardson, author of the book “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Tools for the Classroom“, identifies six traits that support blogging as a tool to improve students learning (p.27-28)

Weblogs truly are a constructivist approach for learning

Weblogs extend the walls of the classroom.

Blogs archive the work that teachers and students do, facilitating all sorts of reflection and metacognitive analysis.

A weblog is a democratic tool that supports different learning styles.

Weblogs can enhance the development of expertise in a particular in a particular subject.

Blogs can teach students the new literacies they will need to function in an ever expanding information society

A blog  is more than “just” a tool. It is more than a buzzword that you are hearing more and more in the mainstream media. A blog allows teachers to address critical skills and literacies while differentiating instruction in a digital medium that most of our students today are very comfortable with in using.

The blog platform does not replace parent-teacher conferences, face to face conversations or private emails concerning individual students. The blog platform is a venue that allows school-home communication to extend and support existing communication venues. A blog, that in the beginning might be only a “replacement” for the “Friday Folder” and “Edline” with homework assignments or upcoming events shared, will evolve into a virtual place for collaborative work, shared ideas and conversation. Please have patience with us, as teachers are learning alongside their students to communicate in new forms. As we are moving ahead in the process of creating, maintaining and evolving with our classroom blogs, we will gradually invite more voices to become part of the classroom learning community.

Blogs will connect us to a global classroom. All our classroom blogs are public. Anyone in the world with the URL (Web Address) can visit and read our blogs. This is done intentionally to encourage global communication and collaboration. Currently, all blogs “only” allow comments from registered users (our students). Part of the process will be to open commenting up to the world, always with a degree of”protection” in the form of comment moderation by the teacher before a comment is made public on the blog. This open policy is vital in making connections with other classrooms and curriculum content-related voices from around the world. It provides our students with an authentic audience for their writing, ideas and points of view.

It was a post titled “Formats for Visual Thinking in the Classroom“  from Richard Byrne on Free Technology for Teachers, that prompted me to write this post.

Visual Learner

I am a visual learner, which means I prefer to learn through seeing.

On Wikipedia you can read about Visual Learning:

Visual learning is a teaching and learning style in which ideas, concepts, data and other information are associated with images and techniques. It is one of the three basic types of learning styles that also includes kinesthetic learning and auditory learning.

Visual learners also prosper when shown graphs, graphic organizers, such as webs, concept maps and idea maps, plots, and illustrations such as stack plots and Venn plots, are some of the techniques used in visual learning to enhance thinking and learning skills.

What I have learned too though, is that I learn best when I not only SEE visuals, but when I CREATE visuals. I purposefully dissected Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ book Curriculum21- Essential Education in a Changing World via visuals I created.

As I was reading the book (hard copy, not on my Kindle), I was using highlighters to not miss thoughts or quotes that I wanted to remember. It did not take long to realize that I was highlighting too much How was I going to get through this book and make sense of it, connect and wrap it around my thoughts which were floating around but had not been verbalized?

I know that I work best through concepts and ideas when I create diagrams or use mind mapping tools. I really like using the SmartArt Graphics in PowerPoint. The visuals below are a summary of what I “read out of the book”, the most important points in my mind and quotes.

I am resorting more and more to creating images, when I am trying to Wrap my Mind Around a Concept.  I don’t seem to be the only one learning by creating visuals. There has been an increase of Infographics all over the web. Recently, I also lead a workshop on upgrading presentation from “Death by PowerPoints” bullets and overwhelming text slides to replace them with visuals to get your point across.

I know that I want to bring, what I am figuring out about my own visual learning and my experience/background with digital images, web design and desktop publishing, somehow into the classroom and to students.

• One of the 21st Century Skills is “CREATING”
• The highest level on the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is “CREATING”
• Media literacy, is not only analyzing and evaluating media, but also “CREATING” media.

The above mentioned post “Formats for Visual Thinking in the Classroom“  from Richard Byrne gave me the final push to start concretizing an approach to integrate CREATING visuals for learning into the classroom.

I used iThoughtsHD on my iPad to brainstorm ideas, lesson topics, possible learning activities and tools that I would like to use for students to explore their own visual learning abilities.

Take a look at Laurence Musgrove‘ s SlideShare presentation. It is full of great examples of (hand drawn) student created visuals! Please share examples of visual learning of your own student or learning activities you are “envisioning”!

I have been enthralled watching the following TED Talk (Ideas worth Spreading)

How to Listen to Global Voices by Ethan Zuckerman:

Sure, the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves. Blogger and technologist Ethan Zuckerman wants to help share the stories of the whole wide world. He talks about clever strategies to open up your Twitter world and read the news in languages you don’t even know.

Take 20 minutes to listen to the following TED (Ideas Worth Spreading) video. Ethan Zuckerman is making a great point of the urgency to widen the orbit of information, communication and global world we are perceiving to be part of.

In an attempt to listen more closely, summarize and share the main points I took away from the talk, I am blogging, linking to examples and sharing my notes below (Am thinking that would be a great activity for students to do with any educational video. Am thinking summarizing skills, Information literacy, hyperlinked writing, media literacy…just thinking out loud

Quotes that immediately caught my attention:

“What happens on a Social Network is that you interact with the people you have chosen to interact with”

“We end up in filter bubbles…where we see the people we know and people who are similar to people we already know. We tend to not see that wider picture.”

Zuckerman makes the point that it is relatively easy to purchase bottled water from Fiji, but it is surprisingly hard to see a Fijian featured film, listen to Fijian music or to find news reports about what is going on politically in the country.

“We tend to look at the infrastructure of globalization, the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world.”

Zuckerman compares the two images below and makes the point that in the first image, a seemingly connected flat world is portrayed. It is very easy for us to hop on a plane and fly to any place in the world.

Connecting flight

A different reality emerges, when you look at the image below that shows hoe the global plane flights move. The world suddenly doesn’t seem to be close to being flat. There are almost no connections between South America and Africa. The majority of plane connections are within the United States.

“There are parts of the world that are very well connected. There is a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York … and parts of the Earth that are systematically cut off.”

Flight Routes

Zuckerman is interested in and asks the following question:

The world is getting more global and connected, more problems are global in scale, the economics are global in scale, but the media is less global by the day.

Percentage of Interntional News in US Media

The following image demonstrates the distorted view of the world we get from being “manipulated” by the choices of news coverage.

Cartogram:Distorted view of the world based on what American television newscasts looked at for a month.

Zuckerman points out that:

“The world on American news is basically reduced to the giant bloated US”

He then concludes that “new media” is not helping us that much either. The shows the example of geo-coded articles in Wikipedia. Turns out that there is a heavy bias towards North American and Western Europe authored articles.

When you look at the top media consumption in different countries you also find out that 90+ percent will come from a domestic news site.

Ethan Zuckerman then proclaims that

“We live in a state of imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the Internet, we think we are getting this wide view of the globe [...] but this a problem, because we live in a world with global problems that require global conversations to get to global solutions.

When it comes to finding information on the Internet most people seem to search with Search Engines or are relying on their Social Network to funnel information to them. The problem with this method, according to Zuckerman, is that you end up with the”knowledge of the flock” and it is hard to get other knowledge from other flocks from parts of the world where people have discussions as well.

In order to do make connections with other “flocks’, Zuckerman says that you need a guide. People who are planted firmly with both feet in two different flocks and can mediate, translate

He gives the example of Amira Al Hussani , the Middle Eastern editor for Global Voices. Her job is to figure out what would interest her readers about the Middle East. She is trying to get the reader

“out of their normal orbit and trying to get your attention about a story of someone [...] basically she is a D.J. She is a skilled human curator…

People have to choose to follow and read others, like Amira, who will widen their orbit (I really like that term and the visual it produces).

Another example Ethan shares is of Erik Hershman, the white African. Ethan considers Erik a “bridge figure” with feet in two or more cultures who is able to find a way to “communicate a story from one world to the other, both of which he has deep connections to”. Ethan is convinced that:

these Bridge Fgures are the future of how we try to make the world wider for using the web

From the Bridge Figures, Zuckerman moves on to Xenosphiles, which is defined by the FreeDictionary as:

A person attracted to that which is foreign, especially to foreign peoples, manners, or cultures.

Ethan gives the example of Dhani, a football player and his  (off season) TV show “Dhani tackles the Globe“.

Ethan Zuckerman closes his (amazing!!) TED talk with the Challenge

Make a personal decision that you want a wider world.

We have to figure out a way to rewire the systems that we have.

We have to fix our media, Internet, education, immigration policy.

We need to look at ways of creating serendipity of making translation persuasive.

We need to embrace and celebrate Bridge Figures and cultivate Xenophiles

Ethan Zuckerman's Challenge

What are YOU doing to make YOUR orbit of global communication wider?

I am seeing more and more “InfoGraphics” springing up everywhere. They are catching my visual eye immediately.

As a native German speaker, I love compound words and it comes naturally to me to want to take them apart in order to create meaning of the word: “Info” and “Graphic”- Information that is written or drawn…

A quick search for the the definition of “InfoGraphic” reveals on Wikipedia:

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge

In PC Magazine it reads:

An umbrella term for illustrations and charts that instruct people, which otherwise would be difficult or impossible with only text. Infographics are used worldwide in every discipline from road maps and street signs to the many technical drawings.

On Dave Gray’s Blog Communication Nation, he explains:

WHAT IS AN INFOGRAPHIC?

1. It’s a visual explanation that helps you more easily understand, find or do something.
2. It’s visual, and when necessary, integrates words and pictures in a fluid, dynamic way.
3. It stands alone and is completely self-explanatory.
4. It reveals information that was formerly hidden or submerged.
5. It makes possible faster, more consistent understanding.
6. It’s universally understandable.

What I am reading out of these definitions are the following words: Information, Knowledge, Visualization, and Communication! Those words are some of the puzzle pieces to 21st Century Skills and Literacies.

Immediately I am wondering:

• How can I create my own infographic?
• How can I use this to teach students?
• How can I teach students to make their OWN infographics?
• How can I use infographics in Professional Development?

I found the following infographic explaining the steps in creating an infographic. What seems to be important to remember is:

The Challenge with creating an infographic is not the Graphic Design, it’s getting the data to the point where it’s streamlined enough to see the visual metaphor.

Speaking about metaphors and visualization takes me back to Daniel Pink’s book “A whole New Mind”. I wrote about Pink’s quote MQ (Metaphor Quotient) is as important as the IQ a while back. Infographics might fit the bill when it comes to incorporating many of the qualities of teaching and learning in our time and age.

What do you think? Have you incorporated infographics in your lessons? Have you created your own infographics for your students or asked them to create their own?

I am off to think about creating my first infographic. Stay tuned for what I will come up with.

Mindflash Blog

Here are a few examples of infographics that caught my eye:

• Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
• College degrees- earning power
• Evolution of the Book
• 50 Great examples of infographics
• Infographics Showcase

Interested in creating your own infographic? Here are a few links to help you along:

• Wild Apricot Blog : Make Your Own Infographic
• Designing “The World of Programming” Tutorial