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.