Note: This post is part of an occasional series of entries devoted to my 7th Grade Digital Literacy Course.

Social bookmarking is nothing new; itLists.com started the concept of shared bookmarks way back in 1996.  Of the myriad tools developed since that time (remember Backflip, Simpy, and Furl?), a handful have withstood the fickle nature of the Web 2.0 world, including Digg, Delicious (recently acquired by AVOS), and Diigo.  While each has its strengths, we are in the process of migrating students from Delicious to Diigo because it offers free education accounts that teachers can manage and monitor.  For those unfamiliar with Diigo, this short clip provides a nice overview of its many features and benefits:

Diigo for Education

As noted on the Diigo for Education website, educator accounts are special accounts provided specifically to K-12 and  higher-ed faculty. Once your Diigo Educator application is approved, your account will be upgraded to have these additional features:

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.

Student accounts have the following special settings to protect their privacy and safety:

• Classmates in the same class are automatically added as friends with one another to facilitate communication, but students cannot add anyone else as friends except through email.
• Students can only communicate with their friends and teachers.  No one except their friends can send message, group invite, or write on their profile wall.
• Student profiles will not be indexed for People Search, nor made available to public search engines.

Accounts can be created quickly and without the need for student email addresses by uploading a simple CSV file.  Once the data has been imported into Diigo, groups and users can be managed via the Teacher Console.

Diigolet or Diigo Toolbar

After accounts are created, students will still need to add either the Diigo Toolbar or Diigolet to their browser before they can annotate and save websites.  The Diigo Toolbar includes a wide suite of tools, is available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, and is recommended for experienced users:

Although Diigolet is not as feature-rich, it can be set up with a simple drag-and-drop, works for all major browsers, and is well suited to middle school:

Bookmarking

Saving bookmarks in Diigo is simple but to be effective requires an understanding of how tags work.  Students, and especially younger children, have been conditioned to organize their physical and digital materials into folders.  This time-honored system, while appealing to many adults, is severely limiting; content must be pigeonholed into a specific container.  With tags, a site can be saved and retreived in numerous ways using whatever tags (keywords) that best describe it.  The Social Bookmarking in Plain English video from CommonCraft, though focused on Delicious, can also be applied to Diigo and used as an introduction to the concepts of tagging and folksonomy.

In addition to choosing tags, users can also opt to share a bookmark to a group.  By default, our students are organized into groups by graduation year (e.g. Class of 2017).   With one click, teachers can share a website to the entire grade or set up groups for their specific courses.  Similarly, students can create Diigo groups for tasks such as research projects and easily share materials with other classmates.

The Social Side of Diigo

At the risk of restating the obvious, Diigo is a social tool; students can create groups, develop networks, send messages, and establish an online profile within the confines of their school account.  Although these features may not be as appealing as those found in Facebook or Twitter, they do provide a safe, secure environment for introducing concepts related to social networking and netiquette.  Whether you choose to address the issue or not, students will find and use these social connectors; I would encourage you to embrace the opportunity and make the most of the learning experience.

For more information, please visit the Getting Started Guide and FAQ area of the Diigo for Education site.

This fall I am once again teaching a “Digital Literacy” course for all seventh grade students.  This trimester class, which meets once every six days, serves as a foundation for our Tablet PC program and is designed to empower students to answer two essential questions:

1. How does your passion affect and reflect who you are as a person and learner?
2. How does technology affect and reflect who you are as a person and learner?

The Digital Literacy curriculum, which I’ve written about extensively in the past (see links below), has served our students well but has not been without its challenges; nine lessons spread over three months can make for a compacted, disjointed learning experience.

• Session 1: Passion-Based Learning
• Session 2: Social Networking
• Session 3: Social Bookmarking
• Session 4: Effective Search Strategies
• Session 5: Website Evaluation
• Session 6: Copyright and Fair Use
• Session 7: Networked Learning
• Session 8: Differentiating via Student Expression Styles
• Session 9: Final Projects

This year, in an effort to relax the pace and increase cohesion, I have extended the course by one month and reworked some of the topics to more directly support the essential questions.  The first major revision to the curriculum was the inclusion of a learning styles inventory.

C.I.T.E Learning Styles Inventory

Unlike expression styles, which focus on how students demonstrate understanding, learning styles address how students acquire understanding and are frequently divided into three main types: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.  The C.I.T.E Instrument (Babich, Burdine, Albright, and Randol, 1976)  organizes and refines these styles into nine major categories as they relate to information gathering, work conditions, and expressiveness:

Auditory Language  These students learn from hearing words spoken. They may vocalize or move their lips or throat while reading, particularly when striving to understand new material. They will be more capable of understanding and remembering words or facts that could only have been learned by hearing.

Visual Language  These students learn well from seeing words in books, on the board, charts or workbooks. They may even write down words that are given orally, in order to learn by seeing them on paper. These students remember and use information better if they have read it.

Auditory Numerical  These students learn from hearing numbers and oral explanations. Remembering telephone and locker numbers is easy, and they may be successful with oral number games and puzzles. They may do just as well without their math book, for written materials are not  important. They can probably work problems in their heads, and may say numbers out loud when reading.

Visual Numerical  These students must see numbers on the board, in a book, or on a paper in order to work with them. They are more likely to remember and understand math facts when they are presented visually, but don’t seem to need as much oral explanation.

Auditory-Visual-Kinesthetic Combination  The A-V-K students learn best by experience, doing, and self-involvement. They profit from a combination of stimuli. The manipulation of materials, along with accompanying sight and sounds (words and numbers seen and heard) will aid their learning. They may not seem to understand or be able to concentrate or work unless totally involved. They seek to handle, touch and work with what they are learning.

Individual Learner  These students get more work done alone. They think best and remember more when the learning has been done alone. They care more for their own opinions than for the ideas of others. Teachers do not have much difficulty keeping them from over-socializing during class.

Group Learner  These students prefer to study with at least one other student, and will not get as much done alone. They value others’ opinions and preferences. Group interaction increases their learning and later recognition of facts. Class observation will quickly reveal how important socializing is to them.

Oral Expressive  These students prefer to tell what they know. They talk fluently, comfortably, and clearly. Teachers may find that they know more than written tests show. They are probably less shy than others about giving reports or talking to the teacher or classmates. The muscular coordination involved in writing may be difficult for them. Organizing and putting thoughts on paper may be too slow and tedious a task for them.

Written Expressive  These learners can write fluent essays and good answers on tests to show what they know. They feel less comfortable, perhaps even stupid, when oral answers or reports are required. Their thoughts are better organized on paper than when they are given orally.
Descriptor Source: http://bit.ly/neY1gb

The C.I.T.E Instrument, which is freely available online in PDF form, consists of 45 forced-choice Likert items which, when scored, indicate whether a particular style will have a major, minor, or negligible affect on the respondent’s learning.

Going Digital: Google Forms

Administering the C.I.T.E Instrument via pencil and paper to ~140 students is neither convenient nor efficient.  Consequently, I requested and received permission to convert the survey into a Google Form that could capture student data on a Google spreadsheet.  The first sheet in the document contained the student responses for each question which then flowed into a second sheet that automatically tallied the scores for each learning style.  This information was then passed to a third sheet that indicated whether each style was major, minor, or negligible for each student.

Explaining the details of how this document was created is beyond the scope of my intent here, but for those wishing to learn more, here are working models of both the form and spreadsheet:

• Link to a formatted copy of the C.I.T.E Google Form (includes formulas)
• Link to a formatted copy of the Google Spreadsheet  (includes sample data)

Although Google spreadsheets are relatively easy to create, they are not a suitable format for sharing individual student results.  Thankfully, a simple download from Google Docs into Excel and then a mail merge into Word can create customized, professional looking reports in minutes.  Below is an example with the student’s identifying information removed.

Sample CITE Learning Styles Report

Implications for Teaching and Learning

Student data, no matter how carefully gathered and presented, will not affect the teaching-learning process unless understood and acted upon by all.  Our Learning Specialist, Mead Ploszay, and I discussed the students’ results with them, explaining each of the nine learning styles and stressing the importance of becoming self-advocates.  With a common vocabulary and shared understanding, our teachers and students can collaborate and begin identifying the most effective strategies for acquiring knowledge and skills as vested partners in learning.

Although our results only represent a limited population, they do reveal a few trends worth noting.  Consider the graph below which represents the average scores on the inventory for each learning style (click the image for a larger view):

Auditory-Language, or learning from hearing words spoken, was the lowest-scoring style followed closely by Expressiveness-Oral.  While lectures, discussions, and oral presentations are an everyday experience for most students, they may not be the most effective method for many learners, particularly females:

This simple exercise was but the first step toward developing “Digitally Literate” students.  Over the course of the next three months we will actively leverage these findings and discover how technology (and our passions) affect and reflect us.  In the mean time, I would invite you to explore the aforementioned resources and consider how you might apply these ideas to your classroom; teaching students how they learn may be the most importance lesson of all.

This year I am once again fortunate to be participating in the Lausanne Laptop Institute in Memphis, TN, and thus far it has been an incredible learning experience.  In addition to attending several excellent professional development sessions today, I also had the opportunity to present an hour long workshop on Fostering Digital Literacy Through Passion-Based Learning.  Although I’ve written extensive on this topic using my 7th Grade Digital Literacy course as a backdrop, this is the first time I’ve shared this particular work in a conference setting.

The process of preparing and sharing my remarks gave me fresh insight into the role of passion in learning and the importance of providing students passion-based learning experiences.  Although the slideshow and accompanying resource page discuss these in more detail, I think a few points are worth featuring in this space:

Invisible Expertise

Students possess incredible knowledge and skills that we may never see because we never take the time to ask.  All children have deep-seeded interests that motivate them but our hectic daily schedules, over-stuffed curricula, and focus on assessment data often precludes us from engaging them on anything not related to the course syllabus.  How can we profess to inspire life-long learning when nearly the whole of our emphasis is on the short-term acquisition of “core content”?

Students First

If we expect students to explore and understand our passions (i.e. our subject matter) they must first come to explore and understand theirs.  The relevance and  meaning that we strive to create/attach to our lessons cannot be fully appreciated by learners if they have never experienced them before in a truly personal context.  Intellectual empathy cannot be taught, it must be discovered.

Context –> Mastery

The knowledge and skills acquired in a passion-based learning experience are mastered more completely and thus can be more readily applied to new situations.  Research has clearly demonstrated that motivation influences learning, yet we consistently expect students to transfer concepts and processes that were “learned” in less than optimal settings.  Students don’t care if it will “be on the test” as much as whether they can actually use what they’ve learned in real life.

Expression Styles

Utilizing different learning styles can help students learn but they do not help them demonstrate what they know.  Essays and oral presentations are not the only measures of cognition.  The concept of Expression Styles, as described by Kettle, Renzulli and Rizza, provides students options for sharing knowledge in a format that best suits them.  What is the purpose of trying to “reach all learners” in terms of input but then limiting the methods by which we assess their understanding?

Thanks for Coming…

I’d like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who attended the session in person today (what a fun and thoughtful group!) and hope that readers find these materials useful.  As always, please dive in and use whatever you like to your benefit; sharing it what it’s all about!