RSS Uses in the Classroom

Will Richardson had a great suggestion for using RSS effectively in the classroom. He suggests, in the Practical Use for Educators , that teachers use Google Alerts and RSS to search for and feed website updates - an invaluable tool for those following daily updates on a particular topic.

I thought this would be useful for my critical information literacy project so that I can track today's updates on the Election and coverage of Barack Obama and John McCain. I setup Google Alerts to update my RSS Aggregator (SharpReader) every time there is an update on Google for "Election 2008", "Barack Obama" and "John McCain".

The benefit to using the RSS feed and not e-mail is that I don't need to flood my inbox every time there is a Google post for my topics. Rather, with an RSS feed, I have the ability to quickly scan a list of updates, and I can choose to read those which are relevant and interesting. Check it out.

Friendfeed - Is it useful in the classroom?

I think Friendfeed is a useful educational tool for two reasons. First, Friendfeed acts as an aggregator, or RSS feed, of its own, gathering all entries made in various Web 2.0 services into one central location. If a student or colleague with whom I am collaborating posts a picture on Flickr, or bookmarks a site on Diigo, I will see immediately just by visiting one site.

With Friendfeed, I have the ability to create a private Room for my students. This will help limit the discussion to our particular group and enable me as the teacher and the student group to easily view info without having to sift through non relevant entries from others.

Friendfeed is a great tool for telecollaborative projects. Teachers can setup rooms that include students from multiple schools or rooms for colleagues in a particular discipline. Friendfeed can be used as the starting point, enabling students and teachers to do a quick check for updates before wasting unnecessary time trying to track down who did updates and where.

Check out some other Friendfeed uses from this Digital Inspiration blog entry titled "FriendFeed Tips: Do You Use All The Great Features of Friend Feed?"

Highlighting and Annotating the Web with Diigo

Wow. As I work more with Diigo, I am in awe of its capabilities. This is a great tool for telecollaboration. I have already setup a selection of bookmarks for my critical info literacy project. The ability to share bookmarks with the class is a great feature.

Even cooler, however, is my ability to highlight relevant text on those websites and add an annotation for the class to review. This ability to highlight and annotate websites is so powerful, especially when a teacher is trying to direct attention to a particular sentence, picture, etc. on a website that is more likely than not distracting. This is also useful if I want to project the website on a screen for the class to see the notes and highlighting that I've added ahead of time.

Check out more educational uses for Diigo on Clay Burrell's blog, Beyond School.

Click here to see a great summary video of Diigo features on YouTube Diigo - Improving how we find, share, and save information

Diigo: Practical Use in the Classroom

Diigo is a great tool to share websites of interest with a class. This can be very useful when a class is working on a particular project, and the teacher wants to limit the search to specific websites and/or guide the activity during classtime or when students are at home.

I've setup a Diigo account of my own and have compiled a list of 13 websites that will be used as part of my critical information literacy project. I will invite the students in my class to view the collected bookmarks as a reference in class and out of class.

Using a tool like Diigo makes it much easier to share bookmarks without having to copy and paste into e-mail or forward a Powerpoint presentation. Groups can be created in Diigo so that bookmarks specific to a particular lesson, grade or class can be easily shared.

This is a tool that will be invaluable to teachers who want to share and organize online access to websites that are relevant to a lesson.

Check out my Diigo page at www.diigo.com/profile/skearney

Ain't that the truth..

Aagghh! How do I keep track of all these web 2.0 services?

I asked myself the same question while ripping my hair out recently (dramatic license taken here..) Then, I stumbled across an interesting article in the New York Times Online edition Sep 18th, 2008 that discusses the issues posed by too many choices in new Web 2.0 technologies. As noted in the article

Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures, which invests solely in these Web services, has been thinking about the problem too. Unlike a few years ago, he said, to get someone to use a Web service now you have to get them to replace something else in their life. The future is in Web services that do not require users to change their behavior by, say, adopting a new service or transferring all their friends’ contacts from one service to another.

Enter Friendfeed. This is a website that allows you to compile all of your web services into one location. Every time you (or one of your friends) adds a photo to Flickr, enters a Twitter comment, or changes a blog entry, it is recorded here. Yes, in one place!

How might you use this in your classroom or for a telecollaborative project? You might learn some new ideas for Friendfeed and other technologies by joining the Friendfeed room, The Future of Education.

Check out my friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/skearney

Diigo: a powerful telecollaboration tool

Diigo is a unique Web 2.0 application that can be easily adapted to educational telecollaborations. Diigo is a combination social network site and shared bookmarking site - think del.icio.us meets Facebook.

Diigo describes it's purpose as an..

online community for learning people, where information, knowledge and community come together. The new Diigo network creates global communities around information, topics, and knowledge. These communities connect people through the content they collect, while also enabling people to discover and share information that matters to them with others in the network.

Diigo is ideally suited to telecollaborative projects. Geographically dispersed groups can create, via Diigo, an online learning community where conversation takes place on a given topic, photographs and data are shared, and bookmarks are compiled and shared on topics of common interest to the particular group.

The combination of social networking and shared bookmarks is a powerful tool. People with shared interests, or a shared telecollaborative project, can come together for discussion and to share collected (and vetted) websites on that particular topic.

For example, students from the USA and students from another democratic country could each research and share relevant and worthwhile websites on their respective country's election process. Conversation and questions could be posted on Diigo as would the collected bookmarks for websites of interest.

Sites like Diigo (whose logo shows the two lower case letters "i" as facing one another and holding hands) pull together powerful web 2.0 technologies and simplify the process of collecting and sharing information - the perfect ingredients for effective telecollaboration.

Twitter: is it really worth the effort?

I have been struggling with practical uses for Twitter in the classroom. When I open my Twitter session, I get tongue tied. Why does anyone really need to know what I am doing at that particular moment? Is this just a waste of time, not to mention as boring as watching paint dry? Is anyone using Twitter for practical educational purposes?

I happily came across an article written for Wired Campus, an e-magazine that reports on 'education technology news from around the web'. This article - the text of which follows this post - discusses practical uses in the classroom. One recommendation is to require students to post a short message regarding a particular topic discussed in class. I agree with the author's suggestion that the immediacy of Twitter creates a feeling of community in a particular class. One professor noted - in a comment attached to this article - that he feels 'closer' to students who follow his twitter and participate on their own.

January 28, 2008
A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

Twitter at first seemed like a bad idea to David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog your life by dashing out very short notes (140 characters max) to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Mr. Parry’s first instinct was that Twittering would just encourage students to speak in sound bites and self-obsess.

But then he gave it a try, and he now sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool.

How is that? He outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” on a post on the blog AcademHack.

Last semester he required the 20 students in his “Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication” course to sign up for Twitter and to send a few messages with the service each week as part of a writing assignment. He also invited his students to follow his own Twitter feed, in which he sometimes writes several short thoughts each day. Yesterday morning, for instance, he sent out a message that read: “Reading, prepping for grad class, putting off running until it warms up a bit.” Last week, one of his messages included a link to a Web site he wanted his students to check out.

The posts from students also mixed the mundane with the useful. One student twittered that she just bought a pet rabbit. Another noted that a topic from the class was being discussed on a TV-news report.

The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel like more of a community, Mr. Parry said in an interview Monday. “It was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching,” he said.

One downside: Some students have to pay a small fee for each text message they receive, and that means all this Twittering can add up to real money. Students can avoid such charges by setting their Twitter account so that they receive e-mail messages instead of text messages, but that eliminates much of the point of the service.

Why Wiki?

So what the heck is a wiki? Why would you want to use this particular technology in your classroom? A wiki is a collaborative website that allows anyone to input, revise, and collaborate to create an web accessible source of information on virtually any topic. According to the online Free Dictionary, http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/, Wiki is an acronym for "What I Know Is" .

Some wikis commonly used in an educational setting include Wikipedia.com, schoolcomputing.wikia.com, schools.wikia.com, and schoolpedia.com. The danger in wiki use from an educational standpoint is the reader's inability to validate information as it is contributed from a variety of sources, some legit, some not so legit.

You may choose to use wikis such as Wikipedia to teach your students critical analysis skills. Ask them to research a particular topic on Wikipedia and on a typically legit resource such as Grolier Online or Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Ask your students to evaluate the information provided on both sites. Have them critique the content, the ability to edit, the legitimacy of the information presented. This exercise can be invaluable in demonstrating to your students that Wikipedia, while offering a wealth of information, is not necessarily a resource that you would allow for a research project.

Check out more educational uses for wikis in the K-12 Classroom at the Wiki in a K-12 classroom wiki.

Collaborating with wikis

I have found that wikis are invaluable for groups that are working together on a common project. Every April, the AIMS (Association of Independent Maryland Schools) Technology Committee, of which I am a member, hosts a Technology Leaders Retreat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

For many years, we planned the event - keynotes, synergy sessions, calendar - using a hodgepodge of methods. Face to face meetings were held once a month, handwritten notes were kept and referred to in subsequent meetings. All information of use to the group was circulated via e-mail. Needless to say, this was not the most efficient method of planning a complex annual event.

About a year ago, our committee created a wiki on schoolcomputing.wikia.com to compile all of our ideas and to summarize discussion in our meetings. We refer often to the current year's wiki during our meeting - keeping it open on one laptop - and after meetings when there are updates regarding speakers, facilitators and the like.

The collaborative nature of the wiki has ultimately allowed a geographically dispersed group of 10 technology administrators to effectively plan a 3 day retreat for 135 educators without too much pain and suffering! Our wiki from last year's retreat can be found at http://schoolcomputing.wikia.com/wiki/AIMS_2008_Retreat

RSS: A Practical Guide for Educators

I love Will Richardson! I enjoy reading his blog, 'Weblogg-ed' ..(see my blog list below!) and receive almost daily entries via the site's RSS feed.

Will has created a very useful RSS guide for educators. RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators Check it out.

Twitter

What is Twitter? How might I use it in the classroom?

According to the Twitter website, 'Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?'

This is a type of social networking site that is simple, uncomplicated and truly does ask/answer the question, what are you doing? This can be a useful tool in the classroom if you want to create a running dialog on a particular subject that does not run on and on and on... Twitter limits comments to 140 characters so that your students are forced to choose their words carefully.

Check out this great resource for Twitter uses in education: Twitter in the Classroom and my personal Twitter page, http://twitter.com/skearney

RSS Feeds

What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as web log (aka blog) entries, news headlines or podcasts. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually. RSS is the equivalent of home delivery of newspapers or your own personal wire service. Websites that offer an RSS feed typically display the following logo:




RSS feeds are best collected, filtered and read using an aggregator. I use SharpReader to collect all of my RSS feeds. Rather than visit each blog to which I subscribe, I just open my aggregator and read all the latest blog entries

Wikipedia offers a list of popular aggregators at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators

RSS can be particularly useful in an educational setting. Teachers may choose to subscribe to blogs from other educators regarding their particular subject area. They may also choose to subscribe to topic specific blogs for a specific unit or topic of interest. Daily blog entries can be collected in the aggregator and shared with the class - perhaps as a warmup exercise or discussion starter.