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.

Privacy and social media

How do you keep your life to yourself?

Your web seems so vast, it's like you're out on a shelf.

Sometimes it is hard, I say to my friend,

But it is possible to maintain some privacy in the end.

One of my concerns with social media and Facebook in particular has been around privacy. The whole concept of "friending" people and gathering up hundreds of "friends" seems rather bizarre to me.

Apparently, some of the novelty has worn off as people are beginning to "unfriend" and keep more of their information private.

Unfriending and private profiles are the new trends in social networks

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 . . .

The history of social media

Given that our course began with a history of our own technology use, I found this infographic at Silicon Republic very interesting.

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 . . .

Social media and education . . . again!

This interesting infographic from OnlineEducation.net looks at the good and the bad effects social media is having on students.


While the final verdict is inconclusive, I concur with the final statements:

 "Social media is now a vital part of life, and academia needs to learn how to effectively take advantage. When social media is integrated with academics, studies have shown serious positive impacts on students."

Social Media in Education

This infographic created by OnlineUniversities.com shows how social media is being used in higher education.  As things tend to filter down from universities/colleges to other educational systems, I think the stats are an interesting read.

What's all the Twitter about?

You tweet and you Twitter but what's it all for?

It seems like a hassle and almost a bore.

Well, little spider, it really is fun,

I use it every day to get work done.

I must admit that I was skeptical about beginning to use Twitter, as I thought it was just about celebrities writing about what they had for breakfast and other mundane bits of trivia from their daily lives. I quickly discovered how useful Twitter is though, in establishing a PLN or personal learning network of like minded professionals. I use it daily to find the latest research on education and libraries as well as new and exciting teaching strategies and resources.

In Twimpact: Twitter's impact on my week, Noah Geisel describes the things he has used Twitter for in the past week, including:

• reading dozens of articles
• attending a TED talk
• learning about new apps
• conversed with 16 other educators, most whom he didn't know

I am constantly sending articles, websites and other links to the teachers to my school from things that I have found on Twitter. They are amazing and wonder where I am able to find such things - Twitter - is the simple response.


This cute xtranormal video very simply points out some of the uses for Twitter in education.

Students and social media

Wow, look at these stats on student use of social media!  Educators definitely need to enter the mix.

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.

Facing the Book

A book full of faces, how strange is that?

Is it all just your friends or also the cat?

A picture of you and your friends on this space

Connecting with words but not face to face.

So, why should I be on Facebook? Personally and professionally - what can it do for me?

Will Richardson (2010) suggests that:

"whether we like it or not, if we're working with kids in schools, we have a responsibility to understand what Facebook is all about, even if it's just to the extent that we participate there for ourselves." (p. 132) 

This is where I am coming from right now - everyone is using Facebook, so I need to understand it and know what it is all about. Although they are too young to actually have Facebook accounts, I know that there are students at my elementary school who have them. Many of my friends use Facebook to communicate and I know that most parents at my school use it.

What else should I be thinking about as I explore Facebook?

In Why #Educators Should Use Social Media, Anne O'Brien suggests the following major points:

• communication - with parents
• public relations - highlighting successes
• branding - of the school and its name
• professional growth and development - communicating with PLN
• student engagement - innovative projects using social media
• opportunities - connections throughout the world

In The Why and How of Using Facebook for Educators - No Need to be Friends at All!, Ronnie Burt suggests different ways of using Facebook, including how to safely "friend" students so that they do not see the rest of your personal information and communications. He also suggests setting up a separate page to connect with students or a "fan" page that can be used to disseminate information or setting up a Facebook "group" for students.

Here is a quick video that shows how to alter your privacy settings:

While I am going to stick with using Facebook personally for the moment, if I end ever end up teaching at a high school again, I can see that Facebook may be come part of my teaching life as well. Having students so connected in this way, it only makes sense to tap into this method of communication as a teacher.

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

About face!

So how do you keep in touch with your friends?

Are they on other webs, just around the bend?

Or is your web so big that everyone can fit,

With conversations around bit by little bit?

Somehow, I have managed to avoid Facebook, the social media phenomenon that began in 2004.  While many (most?) of my friends have used Facebook extensively, I have always been tentative about jumping on the bandwagon.  In the past two years, as my technological aptitude has skyrocketed, I have started to interact more with the web, creating blogs and using Twitter, yet have still avoided Facebook.  However, I think the time has come to take the plunge.  As part of my Web 2.0 inquiry project for LIBE 477, I will be adding Facebook to my repertoire of social networking tools.

I have actually been a bit of a Facebook "lurker" since January, when I initially set up my account.  This allowed me into Facebook, where I could look at information about various organizations that are on Facebook.  I even searched for some people I knew, checking out how much information (or not) was visible.  One of my big concerns about Facebook has been the privacy/safety issue, so I was interested to see the level of control people had over their accounts.  It seems some of my acquaintances have their information wide open while others are very limited.

I did a quick search looking for "hazard of Facebook" and came up with some good tips:

• use the lists function to limit who can see what; ie. family vs. friends vs. the boss
• take some time to go through all the profile pages and make the settings appropriate
• review all privacy settings; "only friends" is the safest setting for any feature
• keep friends from sharing your info; in applications and websites
• don't friend people you don't know
• don't reveal your location
• limit use of applications; they may take your personal info
• you can remove a tag of yourself from someone else's photo
• turn the "social ads appearance" to no one

Some of these tips seem very obvious.  I went back to check out how I had set up everything and my settings were pretty much in line with the recommendations.

References:

Facebook. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 30, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Liu, A. (2010, October 24).  5 ways to stay safe on Facebook.  Foxnews.com  Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/10/23/ways-stay-safe-facebook/

Null, C. (2009, June 25).  Facebook hazards - and how you can avoid them. itbusiness.ca Retrieved from http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=53662&PageMem=1