P, p, p, pin it!

I've heard through my web there's something new on the scene.

It is called Pinterest, but what does this mean?

A pin board online, to make and to share.

Finding others finds from here and from there.

Pinterest is one of the "new kids on the block" when it comes to social bookmarking, but it has become very popular, very quickly. I find Pinterest appealing because it is so visual. By pinning an image from a site you want to bookmark, you organize pins onto boards based on groups you make.

Here is my Pinterest page:

Due to its visual nature, I think that Pinterest is especially useful as a bookmarking system for students. In this video from Edudemic, Lisi Gopin discusses using Pinterest in the classroom.

Some great ideas from the video include:

• having images for writing prompts
• collections of resources to share with students
• collections of books

Additionally, Gopin points out that the built-in interactivity allows students to discuss things directly on the pins; there is a comment space under each pin.

I am liking many of these ideas for integrating Pinterest into the classroom. Additionally, the ideas for using Pinterest in the library abound. In 20 Ways Libraries are Using Pinterest Right Now, there are 20 great ideas including:

• creating book lists
• showing new aquisitions
• research

Additionally, this blog post gives some more ideas for Pinterest for Librarians, though most are for the librarians use as opposed to student use.

Recently, there has been some concern about Pinterest and copyright, which, as a teacher-librarian, rightfully worries me. Because Pinterest simply pins any images on a website, people are taking copyrighted images that do not belong to them. This article is about a lawyer who has deleted all her Pinterest boards because of this issue. Her personal blog gives more legal background regarding this issue.

So, this really complicates things! I like Pinterest and find the visual appeal would be useful for students. However, I can not, as a teacher-librarian be using this site that is known to be breaking copyright, either personally or professionally.

Au revoir, Pinterest! :(

What's in a book . . . mark?

How goes the bookmark, spidey says to me?

Has it keep your place, keeping it safe in the vast web-like sea?

I have found a system, though it is just for me.

For students, I'll search 'till I like what I see.

I have been using Diigo for about a year now to keep track of things on the web. For my inquiry project, I really wanted to take a look at how I might use it in the library to keep track of good sites for students doing various research projects.

Will Richardson (2010) illustrates all kinds of uses for Diigo in the classroom: setting up accounts for the class, tagging them for individual students to follow, annotating comments for them (pp. 95-96). While I can see the merit in this kind of use of Diigo, I think the students at my elementary school are not quite ready for this yet.

My investigation into Diigo Educator left me disappointed. While I was successfully able to create a class and start making bookmarks, the "social" part of the application made me nervous. While many of the "education" formats for Web 2.0 platforms are closed, Diigo seems to allow students more liberty at veering off the site and into something else. While I am definitely pushing the edges of what parents and teachers at my school are comfortable with in terms of working and creating online, I do not think this would work.

Here is a link to the Diigo page for Elementary School Safety. It is a list of resources related to safely implementing EdTech in elementary schools. Quite ironically, students can easily click on the top of the page and get sidetracked into some links that might not be great.

In this Tip of the Day - Using Diigo, J. Bauer suggests some other uses of Diigo such as:

• Have a virtual discussions about a website or article by having every student include a sticky note with their thoughts.
  
• Make notations beside videos to let teachers or students know what sections to watch or to explain if something is unclear.

In this video, an elementary teacher-librarian is interviewed about how she uses Diigo with her students. The collaborative way that the students use Diigo is very impressive, and learning how to tag as well as annotate their bookmarks is a very useful research skill.

While these are some other good ways of using Diigo, I think I will wait to implement them until I am at a secondary school.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin.

The power of Pinterest

Where am I?

I am still on my web, but where are you?

The spider asks as I wander through.

You've tried so many things on your great big web,

When will you be done? the spider said.

I feel like I need to check in with my progress for this class, and see how I am doing and if I am still on track.

I have been very consumed with creating a video at the moment with students from the environment club at the school. We are putting the final touches on our entry for the BC Green Games. It is created in iMovie, which is not technically Web 2.0, so I am not sure if I should include it as part of my project here.

Anyways . . . where am I?

Facebook

I have set up my Facebook account and have added a bunch of friends. I find it is mostly just something else to check each day for news. I am not interested in most of the items my friends post, but do enjoy seeing the occasional fun photo, etc. I have posted some general questions to my friends and a few pictures of my kids. I have also commented on other's posts.

The most useful part of Facebook for me, so far, is the group that I belong to for the climbing gym where my son trains. I like that the group shows up on my home page and I can immediately see if there is anything new posted by the little number that shows up. This was very useful when there was snow and the gym was cancelled.

I can see how the "group" function would be useful as a school to have for parent communication (elementary) or even for students (secondary).

Twitter or more importantly, Tweetdeck

Part of my inquiry was finding a better way to manage Twitter. I believe I have found that with Tweetdeck.

Integral to my use of Tweetdeck is my installation of Google Chrome. At one point last year, I had actually installed Tweetdeck, but didn't like the fact that it sat on the desktop of my computer. With Chrome, the Tweetdeck plug-in allows it to sit in the web browser on the start-up page. I like this much better.

Tweetdeck has allowed me to organize the information I gather from Twitter. I have also loaded my Facebook account into Tweetdeck, so I can also see my Facebook news feed. I am not sure why the Facebook posts I see are not the same in Tweetdeck as in Facebook. I also can't see the "groups" from Facebook, which means I need to open up Facebook separately as well.

But, overall, I like Tweetdeck. I currently have the following columns:

• Facebook news feed
• Home - which is all the people I follow on Twitter
• #edtech
• #tlchat
• #pbl - for Project Based Learning, but seems to be some sort of foot fetish thing as well
• #frimm - French immersion
• @me - for tweets where I am mentioned
• inbox - for direct messages to me

I can easily skim through the columns and click on things that interest me for more information. I am not feeling as overwhelmed with Twitter now.

Social Bookmarking

I continue to use Diigo personally for keeping track and organizing links, but after exploring the education side of it and finding no filters to the outside world, I don't think I would use it with students.

I have just begun using Pinterest and find it very appealing because it is so visual. I believe this would also appeal to students, so will explore a bit further and see how I might use Pinterest with students.

Blogging

I have explored Kidblog, which I like, and Blogmeister, which I don't. I am excited to have enticed a teacher to begin blogging with her Grade 3/4 class. Next week, I will help her set up Kidblogs for her class.

Still to come:

• Voki
• Glogster
• Voicethread

Stay tuned . . .

Pin it here, pin it there

Pin it here, pin it there,

Pinterest is showing up everywhere!

How can I use it in the library?

Will it be helpful, or is it simply ivory?

I am really seeing the appeal of Pinterest, though I have not been using it as much as Diigo. Because I have my "system" for tagging etc. set up for Diigo, I don't really want to switch over to Pinterest. However, I can see how some of my collected bookmarks would fit better into Pinterest. For example, recipes. Rather than having them collected in Diigo and searching for "pancakes," I can keep my recipes collected in Pinterest and see the image of those delicious pancakes. Except, I discovered, not all my recipes have pictures on the page, so there is nothing to "pin" (well, except an image from an advertisement on the page!).

OK - so what about in the library? Will Pinterest be useful for me there?

Here are some ideas for Pinterest for librarians.  Given that Pinterest is so visual, I can see that it would be a useful tool to create boards for student use on projects. Perhaps this is the tool I am looking for to use with classes. Will have to explore this some more . . .


5 Tips for Using Pinterest in Your Classroom
Edu-pinning: Pinterest in Education
Four Ways to Use Pinterest in Education

Good ideas:

• collating sites for lessons & projects
• sharing with others - yes it is another social media!
• grouping/organizing resources - this is useful for students and teachers

A pin for your thoughts?

Isn't Diigo enough, why do you need more?

Something else to keep track of your web, what a bore!

Pinterest is different, I like how it looks,

For visual me, it is like looking at books!

I use Diigo all the time for bookmarking things but thought I would investigate Pinterest as well. I do not know that much about it, but like the visual nature of it, keeping little pictures of the links that have been saved. So, I requested an invite to Pinterest, received it, and created an account.

Pinterest required me to sign in using Facebook or Twitter, like many online applications. While initially this bothered me and I did not want to have everything integrated together, as I get deeper into the "social" aspect of the online world, I am finding it useful to have everything connected. However, I am still struggling with how much to keep my professional and personal lives separate - or not???

Pinterest automatically chose some people for me to "follow" based on the interests I entered. I guess that is a good way to get started, as there is something to play around with.  I left these as is for now. It also suggested some categories for me to use for "boards," but I deleted those and created some of my own. I put the "Pin It" button on my Chrome browser to make it simple to add pins.

I then jumped in and started to explore. I found a good recipe someone had pinned, so I re-pinned it on a "recipe" board I created. I quickly learned that only images can be pinned - so a good link needs to have a good image on the page. I then took a browse through the Pinterest help page to get some more information. I learned that you can follow everything another user does or you can follow specific board.

So, as I am browsing around looking at various "boards" and "pins," one of my first impressions is that Pinterest is going to work for me to collect things for the personal part of my life - recipes, crafts, etc. Right now, I am not seeing how it can be used professionally.

Just figured out that when I push "pin it" on a page, all the images come up and then I can choose which image it is that I actually want to "pin." Got it!

The journey continues . . .

Jumping into Diigo

Diigo again? For your students this time.

Spider tries to get it all in a line.

Wouldn't it be good to make lists of good things,

For the classes, in the library, would really have wings!

I have received confirmation of my Diigo Educator account and now need to figure out how to use it with a class.  I found this useful site on Student Learning with Diigo that has yielded plenty of good information.  However, I find the best way to learn these things is just jumping in and trying.

So, I jumped.  I created a class and added a couple of students to it.  This gave me usernames and passwords for the students.  I was able to do this without having email accounts, which is good when working at the elementary level.  I also added one bookmark to the group.

I then logged out of my own Diigo account and logged in as one of the students to see what they would see and how it would work for them.  Across the top of the page are tabs like this:

• In "My Library" the student would see any bookmarks he/she had made.  
• In "My Groups" would be the groups the student is a part of - in this case, "Les châteaux médiévaux."  
• "My Network" is a place where the student can follow other peoples bookmark lists.  There is a bunch of photos of people you can follow.  I must say that I am not comfortable having this available to elementary students - it is unclear who these individuals are and if they would be safe or appropriate for my students to follow.
• "Community" has "Hot Bookmarks from the Diigo Community."  Again, I am not sure that these  are necessary or appropriate for my students.

I am feeling disappointed right now.  I thought Diigo would be useful with the Grade 5/6 class, but I am worried about them clicking on some of these other people or sites connected through Diigo.

Is a Diigo a dog?

My web is so vast, it is sometimes a chore

To keep up with all I've left piled at the door.

What do you do to keep track of your things?

To find them again when the final bell rings? 

I have been using the Diigo social bookmarking application since the fall to keep track of my numerous bookmarks gathered from my UBC classes, the many blogs, websites and Twitter feeds I follow.  I have used Diigo to create different "lists", for different courses or different projects I have been working on, and have "tagged" the sites so they are easier to find again.  I have also used the highlighting and annotating function in Diigo to, well, highlight and annotate things I want to remember on the pages.

I have been happy with using Diigo in this way, but really want to see how I can use Diigo at school to create lists of resources for students to use on research projects.  I envision creating lists but then allowing students to add to the lists as well.  Richardson (2010) describes how teachers can use Diigo groups with their students who can then access the collected links from home or school.  Groups of teachers can also use Diigo lists for collecting information and articles for ProD (Richardson, 2010).

As I went to explore Diigo farther, I noticed that they have a special Diigo Educator Account.

According to their website, Diigo Educator Accounts have the following 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.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

This looks very interesting, I am going to apply for an educators account and see what I can do with it.  

References:

Diigo, Inc. (2011). What are Diigo Educator Accounts?  Retrieved from http://www.diigo.com/education

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin.