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.

Over the years I’ve acquired and read a substantial number of books on the many facets of education. My collection, which spans several shelves in our home library, includes names that should be familiar to us all: Howard Gardner,  Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, Alfie Kohn, Carol Dweck, Robert  Marzano, Charlotte Danielson, Eric Jensen, John Bransford, John Bruer, Rick Wormeli, Carol Tomlinson, and scores of others. Collectively, this group has influenced countless educators across the country and around the world; teachers flock to their keynotes, administrators make their work required reading.  And while they represent some of the brightest, most respected minds of our time, not one of them appears to have mastered the subtle art of social networking.

If you search Twitter for Dweck or Danielson, you’ll come up empty.  Same holds true for Gardner, Jensen, Bransford, Bruer, and Wormeli.  Carol Tomlinson aka @cat3y has tweeted only twice, most recently in August of 2009.  Marzano, Wiggins, and Kohn have written dozens of books and hundreds of articles; together they follow a total of eight people.  Perhaps McTighe was speaking for them all with his one and only tweet: “I just signed on [to] TWITTER. Now what?????”  Now what indeed.

Social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have enabled educators to form vibrant, extended learning communities.  Pre-service and veteran teachers alike are able to exchange ideas, shape and expand their thinking, and find and develop their professional voice.  Some voices are more learned, some simply more vocal, but the voices we should all be listening to are largely missing or silent.  And yes, I did say “we should all be listening to.”  Whether you agree with their research and theories or not, the aforementioned literally wrote the book (or at the very least a good number of its chapters) on modern education.

Imagine being able to read Gardner’s latest tweets about multiple intelligences, or Danielson’s thoughts on successful teaching practices.  Wouldn’t it be something to follow a conversation thread about differentiation with Wormeli and Tomlinson, or put a few questions to Wiggins and McTighe regarding essential questions and enduring understandings?  Granted, there are certainly others who tweet about these topics, and many do an exceptional job.  Does it really matter, then, if Gardner et al. are not engaging us online?

Absolutely.

By not effectively participating in social media, the aforementioned are missing opportunities to share and accurately represent their work with a global audience and solicit feedback from those of us who put theory into practice.  Because these luminaries are not part of our learning landscape, they risk becoming irrelevant to a growing populous of networked teachers.  Without lending their voices to the often chaotic stream of online thought that is social media, louder but often less thoughtful voices will lead the way.

To those whose ideologies have shaped this profession, it’s not too late to get started; come join us.

This approach to introducing the Flat Stanley series has engaged young children for decades.  And while I appreciate the classics as much as anyone, I thought it might be fun for Emma’s class to put a contemporary spin on the project.  After uploading the image below to Flickr, I asked my Twitter network to say “hello” to Flat Stanley.  The response I received was simply incredible and truly humbling.

Within seconds I had a response from New York.  A few minutes later, visitors from Virginia, Georgia, and Pennsylvania had sent their regards.  In the course of 24 hours, more than 450 people viewed Emma’s flat self and left nearly 80 comments from across the country and around the world.

While Emma is far too young to grasp all the implications of living in a flat world, the generosity of the people who participated have set her on the path, given me a new appreciation for the power of professional networks, and will hopefully inspire other educators to provide students learning opportunities that reach beyond classroom walls.  Thanks so much for sharing in the experience and taking Flat Stanley on the journey of a lifetime!

N.B.  If you’d like to say “hi” to Stanley, you can visit his Flickr page or leave a comment below.  Cheers!

Engaging the Eye Generation

In a recent post, I shared the news that  Stenhouse Publishers have invited readers of Technology in the Middle to participate in a book blog tour for Johanna Riddle’s Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom.  The entire book is free to browse online and offers practical suggestions, based on Johanna’s extensive classroom experience, for incorporating visual literacy into the curriculum.  Visual literacy, or the ability to make meaning from images, is one of several important and emerging literacies:

• Basic Literacy: The language and mathematics skills needed to function successfully on the job.
• Scientific Literacy: The ability to understand scientific concepts and processes to make good personal and social decisions.
• Economic Literacy: The ability to identify and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of public policies and economic conditions.
• Technological Literacy: The ability to understand and use the tools of technology to reach identified objectives.
• Visual Literacy: The ability to interpret, use, and create visual media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning.
• Information Literacy: The knowledge and skills necessary to find, analyze, and synthesize information using technology.
• Mulicultural Literacy: The ability to understand and respect differences among cultures.
• Global Awareness: The ability to understand the world’s interconnections.

*NCREL/Metri Group

Johanna’s book also touches on information literacy and the research process, and the scope of her work can be applied far beyond the elementary classroom.  I would invite you to read Engaging the Eye Generation and then submit questions for her either by leaving a comment or via e-mail. On March 9, Johanna’s responses will be posted at Technology in the Middle; check this space as the date approaches for more information.

Time Spent Online

Last week, Dr. Aric Sigman published The Biological Implications of Social Networking in the journal Biologist.  The report generated a considerable amount of media attention, including the article Is Social Networking Killing You from the New York Times, and this clip in which Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, shares some of her thoughts on the study with Britian’s Channel Five:

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Her fear that “these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment” stands in contrast to the MacArthur Foundation’s Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.  Released in November of 2008 after a three year study, the report suggests that “spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”

Opinions (and research) on the issue of social networking are sharply divided, but regardless of where you may stand it’s important to see multiple perspectives.  These two studies form a nice framework for understanding the many facets of life in the digital age.

What is Social Networking?

Adults certainly understanding the concept of professional networking, and easily relate to the idea of being networked in a traditional social sense, but online social networking is largely unfamiliar territory.  Before parents can grasp the nuances of Facebook, they must first have a fundamental knowledge of contemporary social networking.  To help bring our audience up to speed, we used a simple yet effective overview from Common Craft:

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A small social network, such as the example in the clip, is quite straightforward, but what about a real social network like Facebook?  The Facebook Friends Wheel, especially when demonstrated using Flash, provides a dynamic view of how people (nodes) are linked on Facebook (the network).  The connections between users are what define the network and make it socially engaging.

What Should Parents Know About Facebook?

From a usability standpoint, Facebook is a relatively simple application.  Learning to create an account, add friends, join groups and networks, and post content is easy; learning to do these tasks responsibly is a different matter.  Here are a few tips/suggestions for parents who want to help their child(ren) use Facebook appropriately:

• Facebook’s Terms of Use state that users must be at least 13 years of age, but there is nothing to stop a younger child from creating an account; a valid e-mail address is all that is required to join Facebook.   Don’t assume that because your child is underage that they aren’t on FaceBook.
• A Facebook profile includes fields for Basic, Contact, Personal, and School/Work information.  Students should not include any information that would compromise their safety and security; leave the Contact information blank.
• It’s easy to find people on Facebook, but to become “friends” both parties must agree; an invitation is sent and then accepted or ignored.  Students need to be reminded that it’s OK not to accept friend requests, and parents should understand that their children will only be exposed to content generated by their friends/groups, so choose wisely.
• Joining a network may change your privacy settings, and anyone can create a Facebook group.  Ask to see which networks/groups your child belongs to and what information they are making available to these large and largely anonymous groups.
• Facebook’s messaging and chat features do not require any installation of software; a lack of “admin rights” will not keep your kids from emailing and chatting.
• With respect to privacy settings, don’t let children share contact information, do make sure they are not part of the public search listing or appear in social ads, and caution them on the use of Facebook applications.
• Becoming “friends” with your child on Facebook is a great first step, but remember that friends can be organized into lists, each with its own privacy settings, and users can block specific friends (i.e. parents) from seeing their content.  Being a “friend” will only let you see what your child wants you to see; being an interested and active parent is the only way to know what is really happening online.
• That said, remind your kids that nothing online is ever truly private; everything you post can/will at some point be seen by someone you don’t know.

Techno-Savvy Parenting: Get Involved!

After providing a quick tour of Facebook and its features, we turned our attention to specific strategies for being a “techno-savvy” parent.  Chrissy Laycob, our Middle School counselor, offered a series of pointers on how to engage and manage our “digital natives”.

As stated in her presentation, it’s vital that parents get involved and take responsibility for monitoring online activities.  Developmentally, students in their early teen years need guidance to make smart choices.  While the decision as to when a child should join Facebook (or some other social network) is ultimately a parental decision, it should be made knowing that it’s a team (i.e. parent-child) endeavor.

Resources for Getting Started

Facebook in 15 Minutes (and social networking in an hour) is merely the beginning.  The adults who participated in our session left informed but wanting to know more.  Among the myriad resources available, these four will help parents and students chart an informed course:

• MacArthur Foundation: Time Spend Online Good for Teen Development
• Common Sense Media: Internet Safety Guide
• AllFacebook: 10 Privacy Settings Every User Should Know
• Facebook for Parents: Tips, Tricks, and Resources

Social networking, like movies, television, and video games, is here to stay.  The generation gap we are experiencing may be the widest we’ve seen since Elvis, but it can be narrowed.  Acceptance, understanding, involvement, and guidance are essential…and well within our collective grasp.

Twelve months, 100 posts, and several professional development sessions later, I’m not sure much has changed.

In May, Alec Couros visited campus and spoke about Networked Possibilities.  During his presentation, he asked his Twitter network to say hello and the response was overwhelming.  Not counting myself, there are only three teachers in the Middle School currently using Twitter.

In June, we officially adopted Delicious as our only supported tool for bookmarking and helped every teacher create an account.  In working with faculty since the start of school, I’ve found that less than 25% are still tagging sites instead of saving them locally.  Similarly, although we’ve provided several training sessions on Google Reader, less than 10% of teachers subscribe to any RSS feeds.

In July, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis conducted a workshop here geared toward “flattening classrooms.”  Teachers were shown many PLN resources and even joined a Ning network. Today, only one teacher in my building is actively using Ning.

Lest I sound critical of my colleagues, their hesitation to embrace these resources and establish a PLN is not unique.  I recently and informally polled my PLN and asked for a percentage estimate of teachers/administrators in their schools who’ve created and maintained an electronic personal learning network; responses were overwhelmingly in the low single-digits.

David Warlick, Karl Fisch,  Will Richardson, and others have repeatedly and extensively addressed the importance of the personal learning network, reaching tens (if not hundredes) of thousands of educators.  So why hasn’t the PLN concept gained greater traction?

It’s not a question of willingness, it’s a question of need, or lack thereof.

If one’s classroom/building/district environment is such that the knowledge and skills of a PLN are not required to meet everyday challenges, then there is very little impetus to form a PLN.  If a prescribed curriculum guide, textbook, resource binder, and teacher evaluation rubric are the basis for curriculum and instruction, there is very little need for a PLN. If synchronous, face-to-face, large group instruction is the preferred method of professional development, there is very little need for a PLN.  If the perceived needs of learners can be meet by internal, self-referent means, there is very little need for a PLN.

Those who advocate for personal learning network should continue extolling their virtues, but large-scale  buy-in will not occur until the PLN becomes an essential, vital, “must have” component for professional educators.  And for that to occur, we need to collectively rethink curriculum and instruction, professional development, and the needs of our students in light of the demands of an unknown future.

That’s a mighty big job; good thing I have a PLN to help me.

• Basic Literacy
• Visual/Media Literacy
• Information LIteracy
• Citizenship and Ethical Literacy
• Network Literacy
• Intercultural  Literacy

I’ve previously addressed the first four of these concepts, and the nature and value of Global Literacy are known to most everyone.  To conclude our introduction to 21st Century Literacy, I will focus on one of the most critical yet least understood of the new literacies: Network Literacy.

The Power of the Network

We have all seen commercials from Cisco, Verizon, and other high-tech corporations extolling the virtues and power of “the network.”  And while these advertisements are designed to sway consumers, they carry an important message for educators; there is strength and knowledge in numbers.  In today’s world, knowledge is decentralized and easily distributed.  The nature of networks, be they professional, social, or academic, has changed.  The constraints of time and space no longer apply, and we are shifting from a culture of isolation to connectivism.   As author and elearning expert Jay Cross noted,

“What can you do?” has been replaced with “What can you and your network connections do?”  Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts.

If we are to leverage the potential of this new, interconnected environment, we must come to understand the nature of networks as they relate to teachers, students, and the teaching-learning process.

The Networked Teacher

In May, we were fortunate to have Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina, visit our campus and share his insight on Networked Possibilities.  Alec’s presentation provided an excellent overview of networking and is well worth revisiting.  Consider this image he created depicting the Typical Teacher Network:

Although familiar to all, this paradigm will not foster Network Literacy.  Instead, we need to collectively shift our practice to reflect the nature of the Networked Teacher:

Alec’s graphic illustrates a personal learning network (PLN), a dynamic, interactive collection of resources that extends beyond the classroom.  Notice that the elements of the typical teacher network are not replaced in this new model, but rather are complimented by myriad tools that support a bi-directional exchange of information and ideas.  The Networked Teacher benefits from being part of a system that truly expands possibilities.

The Networked Student

Students have ample networking opportunities that begin at a very early age. From preschoolers exploring Club Penguin to teens interacting on Facebook, social networks have become prevalent for many of today’s youth.  While these social sites have received considerable attention as of late (and not all of it positive), the Networked Student also understands the academic advantages of networking:

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Learning can be social and collaborative, and we can help students develop personal learning networks that mirror our own.  We must remember, though, that while we may be the center of our PLN, we might not be the center of theirs.

Teaching, Learning, and Network Literacy

In the words of Will Richardson, Network Literacy is “The ability to create, grow and navigate personal learning networks in safe, ethical, and effective ways.”  Students will engage in the networked world with or without us; our guidance can help them make responsible choices.

The teaching-learning potential for approaching education as a collective effort, as opposed to an isolated endeavor, can be transformative.  The network is always learning and more knowledgeable than its individual components…and that’s the power of the network.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a PLN or Twitter, this may seem a non-event; what difference does it make to lose contact with a few “virtual” friends and colleagues?  For those of us who rely on the wisdom, insight, advice, and collegiality of our professional counterparts from around the world, it means we now have 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of fewer minds with which to connect.  I “lost” more people on Twitter today than teach at my school; imagine losing each and every one of your “real” co-workers….

The lesson here is not to avoid social networking; I’m still using Twitter and I’ll rebuild my network (albeit slowly) as necessary.  I would ask, though, to consider how extensive your PLN has become since the advent of these tools.  It’s been said that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone; as an educator in the digital age, are you “connected” to the point where something like this could affect you?  As bad as this feels for the moment, I would think it worse to not be able to relate to the loss of contact with such a large number of inspiring individuals….

Hopefully Twitter will be restored soon.  In the meantime, who’s in your network?

Communication and Collaboration: Tools and Techniques

As noted in the presentation portion of the session, the nature of communication and collaboration has changed for students and teachers alike. Opportunities abound for expanding one’s learning network, and there is no shortage of tools and techniques that can support these endeavors.

| View | Upload your own

Our students have participated in a several collaborative projects, including The International History Detectives, Life ‘Round Here, and Many Voices for Darfur. Blogs, wikis, Google Docs, VoiceThread, SlideShare, and SplashCast made these opportunities possible and are part of the new toolkit of classroom resources at our disposal.

Connecting with colleagues is important too, and tools like Skype, Ning, Delicious, ePals, and Twitter bring a whole new dimension to professional growth and development. These free and easy-to-use resources bring teachers together from around the world and truly expand learning opportunities.

From Theory to Practice

Learning about tools and techniques is one thing; employing them in the classroom is quite another. The majority of our time together was spent examining and revising curriculum in light of these resources. Although the conversations have just begun, the work of the session participants will continue throughout the summer and we can expect some exciting new initiatives in the coming year. If you would like to learn more, please do not hesitate to contact me; after all, communication and collaboration is what it’s all about!

My professional passion can best be summed up with Alan Kay’s infamous quote, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Watching students express themselves as they craft new and wondrous creations embodies all that is good and right with education; engaging young minds ensures all of us of a bright future.

I hereby tag the following for the Passion Quilt Meme:

• Damian Bariexca
• Graham Wegner
• Naomi Harm
• Bill Ferriter
• Bill Gaskins

Passion Quilt Meme Rules:
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

**Photo courtesy of Western Dave on flickr (Creative Commons, non-commerical)