Rayburn’s 23 Things Challenge is based on the work of Helene Blowers while she was Public Services Technology Director for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County; she is currently the director of digital strategy at Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library. We are allowed to use and modify it for our purposes under this Creative Commons license. Its purpose is to encourage staff to explore all of the tools and technologies of Web 2.0 for personal and professional uses, including those applications which are approved by NISD for use in the classroom. It can be used in a self-directed manner, but to receive CPE and Teacher’s Choice credit, teachers must attend sessions in person. It is not required to attend the previous session to attend consequent ones, so let’s all jump in and get started!Introduction
1. Read about the program and watch a couple of videos that will remind you of why you are participating.
2. Complete this tutorial on the 7 ½ habits of lifetime learners and discover how to nurture your own process. Blogging3. Set up your own blog and add your first post. 4. Send your blog information to Ms. Damon to begin your learning journey.Photos & Images 5. Explore Flickr and other image hosting sites. 6. Play around with some mashup and 3rd party sites. 7. Add an image to your blog, and create a post about anything technology related that you are interested in or that excites you.RSS & Newsreaders8. Learn about RSS feeds and newsreaders, and set up your own account. 9. Find some personal and professional blogs or news feeds to add to your account.
Fun Stuff! 10. Play with an online image generator and add one to your blog, possibly as an avatar. 11. Take a look at LibraryThing and add stuff from your classroom library or reading list. 12. Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.
Tagging & Folksonomies13. Start a Delicious account and begin the tagging experience. 14. Explore Technorati and discover how tagging works with blog posts. 15. Read some perspectives on Web 2.0’s social aspects and blog your thoughts.
Wikis 16. Learn about wikis and discover some ways to use them. 17. Start your own wiki and add your blog as a link.Online Productivity Tools 18. Take a look at some online collaborative productivity tools. 19. Explore sites on the Web 2.0 Best lists and blog about your findings.Podcasts, Video, & Audio 20. Discover YouTube and similar sites. 21. Search for useful podcasts. 22. Take a look at some e-books and learn how to download audiobooks.
23. Summarize your thoughts about the program on your blog and set some new learning goals.
What the heck is “Web 2.0″ anyway? You have to change your whole paradigm of the Internet. Web 2.0 is not a tangible thing; it refers to the changing nature of Internet content and delivery, from just a big collection of websites to a fully integrated, collaborative, user-generated and managed content platform. It is also sometimes called the “Read/Write Web.”
This video is a good introduction to the wonders of Web 2.0 and covers a lot of the tools we will play with in this series of workshops.
The Machine is Us/ing Us
This second video reminds us why technology is such an important tool for teachers, and who we are ultimately here for.
A Vision of K-12 Students Today
Remember that, like our students, we are coming to this challenge with different levels of experience and background knowledge. But like we encourage our students to become lifelong learners, so we seek knowledge throughout our lives. So take the time now to throw out all the old baggage. There is no ”I’m too (something)”, there is no expert, no “teacher”, no right and wrong answers. There are the 7 ½ habits of highly successful lifelong learners!
1. Begin with the end in mind.
2. Accept responsibility for your own learning.
3. View problems as challenges.
4. Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.
5. Create your own learning toolbox.
6. Use technology to your advantage.
7. Teach/mentor others.
7½. Play.Think about which habit will be the easiest for you, and which will be the hardest. You will use these observations to set up your personal blog in the next step.
Popular Applications
The first, and maybe easiest, Web 2.0 application is blogging. It is super easy to set up a blog! Blogger is a popular and easy free online hosting service; other popular ones are LiveJournal, Wordpress, and Yahoo!360. These free services require registration but are very easy to set up.
Student Applications
Now that there is a differentiated filter in NISD, teachers can in many cases bypass the student filter on most blog sites. If you want to use blogging with your students, you want a service where you can better control comments – you can’t have students randomly posting meaningless, or worse, inappropriate comments because they can be set to require approval before posting. NISD hosts teacher blogs at learningspace.nisd.net, which is a WordPress product. If you already have a blog on Edublogs, it is very easy to import your old blog into the Learning Space. Be sure to follow the directions for setting up your account completely, especially the part about how to construct your URL name. Also, be aware that the distict offers specific training on this blog product through ERO – Course code ATS10407, title “Blog Management”. You could even have more than one blog!
Because student blog posts and comments are considered “student work”, a Web Publishing Permission Form signed by a parent is required for student participation. Although many of these permission forms went home with AUP forms at the beginning of the year, they were not systematically recorded, and so the teacher should collect these and track them him/herself. Be sure to have alternate assignments available in case permission is not granted.
Examples
How does one use a blog with students? Here are several examples, but I know you can find more!
A teacher in New Zealand posts assignments to his blog, including this writing exercise.
This class did a differentiated math lesson from a blog.
Here’s a sixth grade science class’s blog.
Another example of 7th and 8th grade language arts.
Here’s a link with some ideas for blogging; it’s also easy to Google “classroom blogs” or “classroom blogging ideas” or a similar search. Blogging is not terribly new; there is TONS out there for you to model on!
Assignment
1. Create a blog using any of the tools above. It can be for your personal/professional use or for your classroom. Make it as elaborate or simple as you wish.
2. Add a post about which of the 7 1/2 habits is easiest and hardest for you and why.
3. E-mail Ms.Damon the URL of your blog so it can be posted to the blogroll. Make sure you write down your username, password, and URL information somewhere it won’t be lost.
Popular Applications
Do you have a digital camera? Don’t all those pictures take a lot of space when you upload them to your hard drive? So upload them to someone’s server! And share! Tag! Print!
There are many, many free photo and image hosting sites out there, but some popular ones are Flickr, Picasa (a Google product that requires a download), Shutterfly, and Photobucket. You can look for pictures without setting up an account, but need an account to upload your own photos. These tools also often feature seamless integration into other applications. Click here to view the Library of Congress’ Flickr photos.Student Applications
Photo uploading etiquette dictates that you get permission from anyone in the photo, particularly parents or guardians of minors. This is infinitely more important in a school setting. If you are going to post pictures of your students, you must obtain written permission from the parents or guardians, and you man not post the full name of the student. NISD rules about posting pictures and/or student work are posted here. Also remember that if you did not take the picture yourself, you must get permission to use it, or should give credit through a works cited slide if the slideshow is created under the fair use exemption of copyright law or if license is granted by the copyright holder (for example, in a Creative Commons license).
Imagine what type of lessons you could put together with some images and slideshows (integrating the latest ideas and research on visual literacy). Imagine what your students could do with some of these images. Imagine what your students could do with images they took themselves! There are a lot of cool tools students and teachers can use to put pictures together to create a portfolio, slideshow, or story. PhotoStory is available on our campus computers, and if you don’t already have it at home, it is a FREE download. Here is the very first PhotoStory I did, of Rick Riordan’s visit to Rayburn last year. It’s this easy!
Other tools: PhotoShop (and an example from Tech Services’ John Hayes), Slide, and Animoto (billed as “the end of slideshows”). These tools allow you to edit and remix your pictures. I also discovered Scrapblog the other day – it looks interesting as well!
Really want to get integrated? Mashups allow users to take different online tools and “mash” their applications together. Flickr has several, including Mappr, which allows you to use images on a map, and Montagr, which makes photo montages.
Our old pal Wikipedia has tons of info on different mashups; those that relate to Flickr’s API as well as other apps. Flickr Tools has lots of apps as well.ExamplesSpell with FlickrTrading Card Maker would be a fun app for exploring characters in a novel. It comes from Big Huge Labs, which has TONS of cool apps for Flickr.
How would you use this with students? Could you use it to teach? How about having the kids use it to demonstrate learning? Here’s a great site on Digital Storytelling that might give you a few ideas.
Here’s a photostory assignment an elementary student did on types of clouds.Assignment
1. Find 3-4 images of your own or in any of the photo sharing sites.
2. Use a slideshow application to make a short slideshow of your photos or explore some mashups.
3. On your blog, post either some images, a slideshow, a mashup, or maybe just links to some really neat apps you found. Uploading large media files can be VERY SLOW, so have patience.
4. Write a blog post about your ideas for integrating images and visual literacy into your curriculum.
Popular Applications
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Remember in the early days of the web, when you wanted to check the latest updates to your favorite websites? You had to go to them, one site at a time, sometimes only to discover there was no new information and you had just wasted your time! Thanks to XML, widgets, newsreaders and other tools, all this info can now come to YOU, in whatever way YOU would like to organize it. Save time and sanity!You’ve seen the funny little orange RSS icon:
This is how your get the content you want syndicated to your reader or widget. Sometimes it’s even easier than that – you just add the URL!
I LOVE these guys’ videos that explain some of the best Web 2.0 content! This may help you understand why RSS and newsreaders are such valuable tools. People are always asking me how I keep up with so much info; a newsreader can save you a ton of time and bring so much current information, discussion, and news to you quickly.
Some web portals offer widgets that serve as newsreaders, like iGoogle and My Yahoo. There are also Bloglines, Pageflakes, Netvibes, and Google Reader (which is slightly different from iGoogle, but it all depends on what you are comfortable with). You can play around with several to see which one you like best.This is a fantastic online tutorial explaining readers and some popular apps.Professional Applications
You can keep up with news, friends, weather, podcasts, and more with RSS, so the professional advantage is clear. But how could you use this with your students? Let’s say you developed a class wiki and invited all students to contribute. Do you want to check it every day, searching for what has changed? Or do you want that sent directly to you? Here’s a good article about RSS for educators.Assignment
8. Choose a newsreader or aggregator and create a free account.
9. Add some of your co-worker’s blogs to your reader.
10. Find 2-3 professional feeds to subscribe to – either personal blogs or professional publications.
11. Check your newsreader at least every other day for new content.
Popular Applications
There is so much just plain COOL and FREE stuff out there on the “Interwebs”, it’s hard to limit our playtime to just one or two things! But of course, you know my first choice is LibraryThing. You can enter, catalog, blog about, lend, and compare your books to thousands of others. LibraryThing now has more book entries (almost 32 million) than the Library of Congress (about 21 million) - THIS is a prime example of user-created content overcoming the “ivory tower” content of established institutions.
Cataloging books is for sissies! I wanna catalog my DVD or vinyl collection! GuruLib can do that (and books too)!
Another option is to “roll your own” search engine at Rollyo.
YouTube nothin’! Have you seen Hulu? Or the Internet Archive? FREE movies and TV. Really.
Ever heard of an avatar? It’s your online “persona” – mine is the redheaded green M&M librarian I created at the top of this page. Voki is a great site for generating your own avatar.
Popular Applications
When Web 2.0ers talk about tagging, there is no spray paint involved. Tagging is how users classify materials for their own retrieval. Instead of just putting something in a list or a folder, possibly to be lost forever, you can add more access points for yourself and use language and categories YOU choose, rather than ones that are chosen for you. So it follows that a folksonomy is a user-generated, sometimes collaborative, catagorization system.
Many applications we have already explored make extensive use of tagging, including Flickr, LibraryThing, and blogs. You can tag your pictures (Christmas, baby, school), or your books (first edition, chick lit, autographed), or your blog posts (announcements, assignments, literary response) in ways that traditional systems would not allow you to do. In addition, you can use several tags instead of just putting your item in a single category.
When you run across an interesting website, how do you save it? If you currently bookmark it or save it to your favorites folder, you are operating on a Web 1.0 level. Go 2.0! Social bookmarking allows you to
1. save your favorite websites, blog posts, etc. to someone else’s server, so you can retrieve it from any Internet connected computer (instead of, “Oh, I had the best Renaissance website saved on my home computer!), and
2. Categorize them with multiple tags, so instead of trying to remember which folder you saved it to, you have multiple access points for retrieval.
One of the most popular social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us. If you run across a website that has technology integration lesson ideas, is applicable to both social studies and science, and includes interactive games, you can tag it with all of these things so you can find it later, instead of saving it in one folder that you later can’t remember. (Did I put it in the technology folder? Science?) Plus, you can check what lots of other people are saving and tagging, and share your links with colleauges, departments, and teams.
Delicious requires a download, which means you cannot set up your account here on campus due to NISD rules. The site itself is blocked by the NISD filter, but can be accessed with your authentication code, thus allowing you to use the site here at school.
Another great example of how to use tagging is Technorati. Technorati is a collection of blog posts that have been communally tagged and shared by the Web 2.0 community. It’s a great blog search tool and a fantastic way to keep up with the current global conversation.Digg allows users to share content of all kinds and to participate in a global dialoge about current happenings of note. Users vote on and rate content so the most “talked about” is at the top of the list. It’s an excellent way to keep up with the zeitgeist!
Many of these tools allow you to express your tags as tag or word clouds, visual representations of the frequency of your tags. The application Wordle allows you to apply this to ANY text. Student Applications
This is an example of the Declaration of Independence on Wordle.
Can you imagine the possibilities of studying important texts with this tool? Or using it for vocabulary? How about having the kids paste their own work and analyzing word usage during the writing process? Read “It’s a Mad Mad Wordle” by Carolyn Foote (School Library Journal, July 2009) for some great classroom ideas and additional resources.Assignment
1. Explore Delicious (feel free to look at my links – username damonca) and Technorati.
2. Play with Wordle. Paste any text – an e-mail, an assignment, a blog post – and see what comes up. Play with fonts and layouts.
3. Create a blog post about the professional and classroom applications you can imagine for these tools.
Popular Applications
Probably the most well known wiki ever is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has both good points and bad points (and entire dissertations have been written on this) but the point is that a collaborative tool such as this definitely has its place both in our classrooms and in our professional lives. Wikis differ from blogs; where blogs are call and response, wikis are completely collaborative and user editable. You really have to decide which tool is best for what you want to do, but it is helpful to know a little about both.
This video, by Common Craft, explains wikis quite well.
Student Applications
An approved site for NISD is pbwiki. As a teacher, you are probably thinking, “Give that much control to the kids? Are you crazy?” But one benefit of a wiki, particularly pbwiki, is that you can track what was changed and by whom. Since wikis can be edited by anyone, this may be one of those cases where you want your editors to be registered users, which will require an e-mail address. Talk to the CIT or computer lit teacher on your campus about Gaggle accounts (free e-mail accounts to students, approved by NISD). Many students will already have them.
Again, because student work on wikis is considered “student work”, a Web Publishing Permission Form signed by a parent is required for student participation. Although many of these permission forms went home with AUP forms at the beginning of the year, they were not systematically recorded, and so the teacher should collect these and track them him/herself. Be sure to have alternate assignments available in case permission is not granted.Examples
Here’s a wiki that was done during an NISD training about Texan immigrant groups.
A group of 5th and 6th graders did this wiki on the Dewey Decimal System.
Here’s a high school U.S. history class wiki.
Popular Applications
Make your own music and learn about Intellectual Property rights at the same time! Do it now at MyBytes.
Free, streaming, live music from classic concerts, from Fleetwood Mac to Black Sabbath. Have fun at Wolfgang’s Vault.
Find video and audio from thousands of sites at Odeo.
Popular Applications
How about our old friend Google? Did you know you can use Google as a translator, calculator, and measurement conversion tool? Or that with Google Docs, you can collaborate on a document with anyone else, anywhere in the world? Can you imagine how that might clear your e-mail inbox? Go play with any or all of the cool Google apps.
Ever wish you had a highlighter for webpages? Or virtual sticky notes? Fear not – Diigo has heard you!
You’ve seen the funny little orange RSS icon:
This is how your get the content you want syndicated to your reader or widget. Sometimes it’s even easier than that – you just add the URL!
