A new year, time for new strategies and new tools! We just launched our Facebook Fan page (CCHS LC) and our first newsletter of the year is a digital glog. Please join us on Facebook for regular updates on trends, books, learning, and new tools for students.
The CCHS Learning Commons glog marks the start of our campaign to re-brand ourselves in the hearts and minds of our students, faculty and parent community. We want our brand to convey energy, creativity, embracing technology and innovation, and most of all, learning and critical thinking skills.
You can access our glog via the link provided, or below.
Photosynth is a very cool 3D platform where you "use your camera to stitch the world." Consider yourself warned, you can waste a lot of time messing around here.
There are lots of searchable galleries, which is where I found this example of La Push Beach. Fans of Twilight will recognize the iconic setting from the book and film adaptations, but this dream-like 3D tour brings a different experience. Try it out!
"Different than static photos and video, Photosynth allows you to explore details of places, objects, and events unlike any other media. You can’t stop video, move around and zoom in to check out the smallest details, but with Photosynth you can. And you can’t look at a photo gallery and immediately see the spatial relation between the photos, but with Photosynth you can."
This free web-based platform offers yet another way to share learning. By creating an account, students can upload their own photos and create their own interpretation of a reading experience. A team of photographers could document a field trip activity and use Photosynth to share the event in a detailed way. Imagine this in a scientific field study, with the ability to zoom in closely on a specimen.
It also offers a new way to visit places from around the world to build context. The archeology gallery brings visitors everywhere from Stonehenge to the Dazu Rock Carvings in Chongqing, China. Prefer cityscapes? Search Venice for an incredible 3D tour, stitched together from thousands and thousands of uploads. This is a great example of the power of social media to aggregate and create something stunning.
Photosynth is definitely going into the wiki as an alternate presentation platform for students.Maybe I should create a new page for virtual tourists? Hmm...
Another great post from Stephen's Lighthouse
got me thinking about about convergence. So much is going on with technology that at times it is overwhelming. Our students are also overwhelmed with multiple platforms and developing strategies for merging their work with presentation formats.
Two examples from this morning.
A teacher walked in with a stressed student before the first bell. She had spent the weekend trying to merge a powerpoint with audio, a downloaded YouTube clip, images and other elements of her project into an video presentation using iMovie. She had been emailing her teacher, who was out of town, and the two of them were trying to trouble shoot long distance. It was frustrating for both of them, and ate up a lot of their Sunday. She is coming back later today for help and instruction in how to generate this project.
A student creating a digital book trailer using Animoto stopped by for advice on how to embed his photo and music credits. After a couple minutes of brainstorming we came up with a very elegant solution. He would type them up as a document, save it as an image and then upload the image. Easy, but we needed to talk it through.
Creating knowledge in the digital age can be really challenging, and it can be frustrating. This is what learning looks like today, and it is very different than it was a short five years ago. Learning, information, technology, social media, and globalization have changed the landscape of work, and this is the future our students face.
The Economist agrees. In October of 2009 they hosted a global conference on media convergence in New York. They created this short video on the topic as a wake-up call to the captains of industry.
Teaching academic content now includes convergence. Teachers as well as students have a lot on their plates. This is the new terrain of the learning commons. A place where students and teachers turn for instruction and support in navigating the new world of work in a media rich environment.
Every day there is something new to learn, and challenges to troubleshoot. This is my world of work, and I wouldn't change a thing.
Last week one of my students (from now on I will refer to her as Reader Rabbit* ) came up with sigh, slumped across the circulation desk and gasped "You gotta help me." Working in schools my mind raced and I quickly ran through the possibilities. Epi-pen? Diabetes? Swine flu?
"What is it?" I asked, maintaining calm.
Her cheek was flat on the desk, her hair flopped over her face and, in a weak voice, moaned "I need a reeeaally good book." Seriously, that is what she said.
The conversation that followed revealed that Reader Rabbit had just read a few books in quick succession and not one of them had been satisfying. She was seriously hungry for a really good book. She also said that she didn't want to have to hunt. She needed someone to give her a really good book. Just put it in her hands. I could relate, having had exactly that same experience myself.
As a reader you can go through a few titles and each seems better than the last, and then you hit a dry run. Nothing is really, deeply satisfying. When Reader Rabbit next comes by I am going to put this in her hands.
Sixteen year old Cameron just wants to get by in life. He has no direction, no ambition. Then he finds out he is going to die. This is a coming-of-age/road trip that involves gnomes, jazz, fire monsters, and Nordic Gods, to name a few themes. But really it is an analysis of society, religion and the meaning of life. And love.
Excellent.
The link is to my GoodReads account. Like Reader Rabbit, a lot of people respond better to a personal recommendation. They want that 5 star assurance that puts a book into their hands. As part of our continued effort to build our virtual learning commons I'll be assessing GoodReads, Shelfari and LibraryThing as tools to reach out to our students and act as a virtual reader's advisory. Gotta keep our readers satisfied!
*Reader Rabbit is a real student who has made a few appearances in past blog posts. She is a great kid who gives me a lot to think about.
Come by the CCHS Learning Commons and you will see a lot of students, doing a lot of stuff. Are they working hard, or hardly working? Two recent blog posts had me thinking about this.
New tools are replacing the familiar, and work looks different. With students what might look like messing around on Facebook may actually be very valid work.
As an example, in Jenica Rogers post, Attempting Elegance, she reflects on transliteracy as literacy in using new media. She was pulling photos off her iPhone and communicating on Facebook and Twitter during a seriously busy day. Why? She was studying her library's Facebook presence because they are "about to use it as a reply venue for our lobby’s suggestion board". She was Twittering a source regarding assessment data. All work, all important, and these are the tools that are most efficient for her and the stakeholders she works with.
Stephen Abrams writes in his blog, Stephen's Lighthouse, about building relationships as being of primary importance to libraries, and perhaps more relevant data than circulation statistics. Harder to quantify as well. "...the foundation of library relationships is communication – one to one and one to many. It’s not really what we measure a lot – circulation. And it’s not easy to measure."
We need to be doing more with these communication methods in the CCHS Learning Commons. We will definitely be creating a Facebook Group as well as a Twitter feed. Our wiki portal will be updated to include a photo stream from our account for images of the work and fun we experience daily. So if you see us typing away on Facebook, you might think we are hardly working, but we will be working very hard to build our relationships with students and staff through these dynamic communication tools. Just like our students.
Photo Credit:
Abram, Stephen. Stephen's Lighthouse. 2.25.10
The Foundation of Library Relationships
http://stephenslighthouse.com/2010/02/24/the-foundation-of-library-relationships/
The problem isn't the book, which I really liked (my GoodReads review). The problem is the post-it notes. This book had so much original research and concepts so eloquently developed that I ended up with over 40 post-it notes that I now need to go back and review.
If this were a digital text I could have been using Diigo to highlight and annotate the whole time. From Diigo I could share with a group, like HS Librarians, and see what others had to say, discussing ideas and their application to school libraries with my professional peers. I could export my notes to NoodleTools for organizing for future reference if I want to write a grant or article. As it stands now, I will end up re-typing passages into NoodleTools. What a waste of time. (It also needs to be pointed out that if I had a reading disability I would be unable to access this text because paper has no text-to-speech option, and it isn't available in audio format.)
Research, investigation and inquiry tend to be solitary endeavors. This no longer needs to be the case and, by utilizing the symphony of free digital tools, we can offer a much richer experience, enhanced by collaborative networks and accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities.
After reading this book I have a much better understanding of our digital natives. They are very polite and patient with us, but for how much longer? Pretty soon they are going to start getting annoyed.
These are my daily tools, and this is how I work. Every single day my iGoogle page acts as my portal for work, play, and socializing. So, let's break it down. (You can click on the image for a clear enlargement.)
The upper toolbar holds the bookmarks I use most often. Google Wave is still in beta, and I play here, seeing what it can do and how it might be used by students and teachers. Once it is opened for general use I can see it as an ideal collaborative space for group project work. My blogging tools are Blog This, Blogger Dashboard, Share on FaceBook and Flickr Creative Commons. I can grab interesting posts from my RSS feed and quickly add them to a post to blog about later, or even just to re-visit and think about and try. Of course, a picture tells a thousand words and Flickr Creative Commons is my one-stop shop for great images I can use with attribution.
The next bar is for Diigo, a FREE social networking site designed for researchers. The Diigo toolbar allows me to grab a website or blog post, annotate it on the live web, attach digital sticky notes, archive it for later use, save it to lists, and if I want I can share it with my Diigo network. Every morning I get an email from my Diigo groups with articles that have been shared by other educators and researchers. The generosity of the Diigo community is a large source of information, most recently from a guy in the U.K. who has been sharing wonderful European primary source sites. I follow lists for school librarians, Web 2.0 Educators, History and English Teachers and a couple of others. Each morning (at the ridiculous hour of 5:30am) I have my tea, listen to the weather, ignore the dogs, and go through my Diigo updates. Right then I will pull out valuable resources and post them to the library wiki. This allows us to keep enriching our portal to be a true 24/7 support and resource for students.
After Diigo comes the YoLink toolbar. Another FREE resource, this facilitates deep web searching in a very elegant, easy to use way. As a case study, if you look carefully you can see I accessed Google Scholar (academic sources - terrific resource!) to search "Brecht" and "anti-colonialism", used YoLink to help with the search, and annotated the site using Diigo. YoLink plays beautifully with other applications and also archives searches and sites for notation. If they would partner with NoodleTools life would be perfect in research land. (Why I was searching Brecht and anti-colonialism is another story that involves my college age daughter, a late hour call and a fast approaching deadline.)
Finally you can see the tabs I had open at the time, which are generally always the tabs I have open. Google Docs holds my library documentation, primarily the forms we created to track library data and lesson plans. These forms keep our data organized and churn out beautiful little graphs that I can share on a moment's notice. At this point Google has so much information about me they could create a clone and nobody would ever notice. I got over that reality awhile ago.
And Facebook. I check in quite a bit and use this for professional as as well as personal connections. Awhile ago a library colleague from central Massachusetts recommended a friend. I had never met this person but over Facebook we developed a lively friendship based on similar humor and a mutual (slightly manic) addiction to quizzes. This online friendship resulted in Anita (hi, Anita!) spending professional days observing in the CCHS Library and we will be attending the ALA Mid-Winter conference in Boston together.
There is always something new to try, to play with, to learn. I am connected to smart people who care passionately about learning and generously share this wealth. Our students and staff are the beneficiaries.
Shazam! It is official. I now have super-powers beyond those of the average mortal. Harnessing the powers of Diigo, I can take notes on web pages (!) and collaborate and share with anyone in my research process.
I was playing around with Google Books (very cool) and found this article giving an overview of their platform. This is an area of interest for me, so using Diigo I have started a research project on e-books. You can see the link, the description I gave it, and then the tags I assigned the article. Below that you will find paragraphs I highlighted, and bulleted notes (brief) with my name. Go ahead and scan. I'll see you on the other end. You will recognize it is me again by the orange font ;)
Before physical books were invented, thoughts were constrained by both space and time. It was difficult for humans to share their thoughts and feelings with a set of people too far from their physical location. Printed books changed that by allowing authors to record their experiences in a medium that could be shipped around the world. Similarly, the words written down could be preserved through time. The result was an explosion in collaboration and creativity. Via printed books, a 17th century physicist in Great Britain could build on the work of a 16th century Italian scholar.
The first step in global collaboration - post by rcicchetti
it can be difficult and costly to reproduce and transport the information that older physical books contain. Some can't afford these works. Others who might be able to afford to purchase them can't unless they can find a physical copy available for sale or loan. Some important books are so limited in quantity that one must fly around the world to find a copy. Access to other works is only available to those who attend certain universities or belong to certain organizations.
convert atoms from physical books into digital bits
New format - evolution. Same content. - post by rcicchetti
While atoms remain fairly expensive, digital bits are on a trend where they become ever cheaper to produce, transport, and store. For example, providing every student in a school district with a paper copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet might cost thousands of dollars. Yet if those same students already have cell phones, laptops, or access to the Internet, then they can access a digital copy of Hamlet for just a fraction of the cost.
Barriers to access - economics. The devices are expensive, though. For the poor, is a book still the most cost effective way to go? If books disappear will the poor be without free access to information? Digital bits are cheaper than atoms, but the cost of the device and access must also be figured in. - post by rcicchetti
Thanks for sticking with me so far! What I want you to notice is that my "rcicchetti" link is live and can take you to my Diigo page. I can invite others to participate in reading this article and taking notes along with me, collaborating as we go. This is an online discussion platform. There are lots of privacy feature, but I haven't set them up on my account, because I want it to be as open as possible at this point.
Cooler yet, I exported the whole thing to this blog with the click of the keypad! Versatile, powerful, collaborative - I haven't found the kryptonite for Diigo yet.
Created by the California School Library Association, Classroom Learning 2.0 is a great resource for tutorials on 23 Web 2.0 "things".
This is a crash course on a range of things including blogs, wikis, podcasts, Flickr, RSS feeds, tagging and much more. Anyone interested in crash course should play with this site.
Thanks to Peter Badalement, Principal of Concord-Carlisle High School, for sending out the link to CCHS faculty.
This is a great 4 min. 22 second video. It speaks to the power of social media, and the challenges in teaching our students critical thinking and evaluative skills. I look at this type of message as a provocative way to illustrate the sea change that has occurred in our society. Many educators have missed this shift, and are wondering why people are yammering on about 21st century skills. They really want to be left alone to prepare their lecture notes and make copies of their handouts. They don't want to add anything new to their practice because they don't have the time.
This isn't about "in addition to". This is about "instead of."
I posted the link to Facebook and got some interesting responses. This one in particular really summed up the issues really well.
From Ellen: I completely agree with the point of the video-social media is a major cultural change, and not a fad-but some of the data is misleading, or just plain wrong. For example, the source listed on the website (www.socialnomics.net) for the claim that Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica is...Wikipedia. Hmm. Yes, *some* studies have ... Read Moreshown as many or more factual errors in EB as in Wikipedia. But it's crucial to look at the *nature* of the most damaging misinformation in Wikipedia: vandalism, pranks, corporations trashing their competitors' products, politicians defaming their opponents' character, etc. Wikipedia has stepped up their efforts to improve the credibility of their articles in the last couple of years, to their credit. But I want to look at this video (not just the Wikipedia vs. EB piece) critically. What are the larger implications of our getting our information through social media, and how should we be teaching our kids to think critically about that.
It ain't your parents research project any more. New sources and formats for information call for new ways of searching, organizing and managing the research process. These tools are powerful, and they are (mostly) free. They will also blow your socks off.
This nine minute tutorial on Diigo is well worth the time, because Diigo is simply astounding. It helps manage Web content through web highlighting, sticky notes, tags, and sharing functions. Originally designed for professional researchers, it has found a key spot in education. I am switching over to Diigo for my own use. This is a tool that will help every type of learner.
yolink is an information literacy tool that "with a single click, searches through links and electronic documents for multiple terms and relationships and brings the information to you." What does this mean? This (free) browser add-on helps you do a deep web search, and assists the researcher in drilling deeply into his/her search results. This works with basic websites, e-books, pdf's, any web content. Think about your basic search on, let's say, explorers. A Google search will return millions of hits, so you refine it by adding a few more keywords. Now you narrowed your results to tens of thousands of hits. Instead of having to hit each link and look for your information, yolink finds it for you, splitting your screen, searching each page for your keywords and displaying the paragraphs with text including your keyword on the right screen. A students can quickly dig deeply through multiple webpages at a time and mine the web for information more efficiently. yolink also has bookmarking and notation capabilities, and findings can be exported to a citation tool. Which brings us to...
NoodleTools. yolink is working with NoodleTools on a partnership, and when they pen the agreement I will be singing from the rooftop of CCHS. This is not a free service, but CCHS has an account and every student should be using this for citation and note taking. The student is provided a scaffold for the entire research process, and their new outline feature is fantastic. I use this for my own research projects.
Does everything have to be technology based? Absolutely not. The 5 's of note taking remain the same.
The Cornell Note Taking system is ideal for recording lecture notes, and every student should be adept with this. Kids must be able to take notes by hand, and this is a great way to manage that process
1. Record. During the lecture, as many meaningful facts as possible are recorded.
2. Reduce. As soon after class as possible, ideas and facts are concisely summarized in the Recall Column. Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory.
3. Recite. Most of the page is covered and the student tries to recall as much of the lecture as possible, using only what has been written in the Recall Column. This procedure helps to transfer the facts and ideas to the long term memory.
4. Reflect. The student's own opinion is distilled from the notes. This also has the effect of training the mind to find and categorize vital information, leading to more efficient memorization.
5. Review. The student reviews the notes briefly but regularly. Because of the highly condensed nature of the notes, the student remembers a significant amount of material.
So, how does a student know which tool to use, and when? Isn't this all overload? I don't think so. We all have many tools we use in managing our daily lives. In this age of abundant information students will require diverse tools to find, evaluate, and manage their information needs. Tools like Diigo, yolink and NoodleTools give students power and control in their learning, and I can't think of anything more exciting than that.
During the height of the political protests in Iran it was possible to follow an amazing stream of tweets, and witness history. Twitter was the main conduit for getting news and images out of the country, and for protest coordination within. Iranians outside the borders worked feverishly to unblock government filters to protect Twitter access.
Tracking the "computational history" of the event gives real insight into the evolution of social clusters, and the organic nature of these platforms. Analysis like this provide compelling evidence that digital tools like Twitter are vital for students to use and understand if they are to have a true global understanding. We need to change how we teach to include these new literacies.
We have Google, Cha Cha, Wikipedia and a gazillion other sites to help us find information. What about those tougher life/relationship questions? Now we have hunch, a "decision-making site that gets smarter the more its used." Called "machine learning", it gathers information about the user's personality and preferences to generate customized decisions. hunch is "like a friend getting to know someone's taste and preferences over time, so they can provide sound and trusted advice."
What kind of car should I buy? Where should I go on vacation? Should I really go to my 30th high school reunion? The Magic 8 Ball is designed for yes/no questions, with 20 standard answers. It has worked very well for me over the years, so I am going to run both applications side by side for awhile ;)
The hunch team says "Mostly we're a bunch of MIT nerds with backgrounds in computer science and math, which comes in pretty handy when you're building a massive collective knowledge project based on machine learning."
Caterina Fake, the genius behind Flickr, launched this start up on June 11th. It will be fun to watch and see if it takes off.
When I asked the Magic 8 Ball about attending my 30th reunion it said "cannot predict now". I wonder what hunch will advise?
My mother is a baseball lunatic. She makes fanatics look like sane, balanced individuals. Bear with me here. When she turned 70 in October, 2004, Boston was still in the grip of the Curse of the Bambino. My mother had a dream that she could break the curse by rounding the bases at Fenway with the Infant of Prague in her grocery cart. (Otherwise known as the IOP in our family, the Infant is a religious statue that lives under a glass dome in the living room and has been passed down for a few generations.) We got my Mom onto the field and while she didn't actually round the bases, she got the IOP onto home base. The rest is history. She takes sole credit.
Fast forward to this past weekend. My son was working on his travel itinerary for a trip to Europe, and was wondering about how to find a certain location in Prague. My daughter piped up "Cha Cha". Following her instructions, he texted 242242 (chacha). Transcript:
5:03 pm Where in Prague is the Infant of Prague statue? 5:04pm Acknowledgement of question receive. 5:05pm Infant Jesus of Prague is a famous statue located in the Church of Our Lady Victorious in Mala Strana, Prague.
Question asked, acknowledged and answered in two minutes.
How is that for 24/7 reference? According to Wikipedia - Cha Cha is a mobile question answering service which uses a technique known as the Human search engine. Scrolling through the site is a lot of fun, with live questions and answers from "Guides" being posted, and covering everything from relationship advice to any variety of "real" questions. Now, there is a certain leap of faith here as to veracity, sources, etc., but - wow.
On a certain level Cha Cha seems like nothing more than the ultimate arbiter of a bar bet. I think it is more important than that, as it represents a new twist in the social web. Combining classic reference services previously only available through libraries, free information is readily available via cell phones. Public libraries had a national system of 24/7 web-based reference services but it never seemed to get traction. Cha Cha is quickly succeeding at what public libraries envisioned.
Doing a little digging, this is a company looking to hire. A Guide for Cha Cha can earn $4 - $9/hour, although as one testimonial put it, he felt like "Lucy at the chocolate factory working the conveyor belt." As a business model this is worth watching.
I have a question for Cha Cha.
Who broke the Curse of the Bambino?
I already know the answer.
My mother, and Jesus Infant of Prague.
Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons Jose Madeira - "Dance Band Cha-Cha", 1950s by Retro Today
Twitter has been a challenge for me, but I am finally starting to see the value. Using Twhirl, I now have an open window to Twitter on my desktop, and can watch tweets from my network in real time. A few weeks ago I monitored a conference I was unable to attend, while minding the circulation desk after school.
Today there was a tweet about using wikis for open textbooks. With budgets under such pressure, the benefits and economies of social media are looking better and better. When I clicked the link and saw the list, my eyes lit up! I could also see a number of names I recognized from Twitter had also clicked and saved the list within minutes of me; Twitter makes this kind of sharing incredibly dynamic.
I have a long way to go, but thanks to Twhirl I just took a leap in my understanding of Twitter, and the benefits of using it as a personal learning network. Of course, I also follow Ryan Seacrest. Can't say I have really learned anything from Ryan yet, but I am hoping he might tweet the winner of Idol before next week.
"My cousin has some weird disease. I'm doing that."
"What's he got?"
"My Mom said it once but I don't remember."
"Just Google what you remember and Facebook him."
Less than 30 seconds later, toggling multiple screens, the student had the name of the disease, a list of symptoms, and organizations promoting awareness about the disease.
Web 2.5? Students are already at Web 3.0, and they are not waiting for us to catch up. At best we, as adults, are irrelevant. At worst, we are in their way. The reality is that most of us are still trying to get over feeling stupid about using the phrase Web 2.0.
Teens are living transparently and seamlessly on the Web. Their terrain is different from ours. While we wring our hands and fret, they engage, create, and achieve a fluency and online confidence that we, as adults, can't seem to validate. Why?
What do we bring to the table? Wisdom. This student was awash with information, and struggling to develop the critical skills needed to assess, understand, and apply his new knowledge. Dude - That's what we help with in the library.
Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons
[54/365] Designing for the Social Web by Ben Dodson
Call me naive, but I was surprised by this one. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has signed an agreement with Facebook and other social media networks laying "the ground work for government agencies to use Facebook for any purpose." Facebook Signs Agreement With GSA
Martha Dorris, acting associate administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Communications stated that “USA.gov is breaking new ground by migrating to new media sites to provide a presence and to open up a dialog with the public. We know that many other agencies want to do the same, and having these agreements is an important first step.”
In a way, I applaud our government for being so forward thinking and utilizing the power of social media. At the same time, it feels a little creepy.
515 days ago. I am "following" 28 people, and am "followed" by 23. Let me point out that the Dalai Lama is one of my followers - yeah, that's right. The Dalai Lama! Of course, he follows everyone.
To highlight your - um, deficits in utilizing social media.
I am feeling my deficits. EVERYONE seems to be twittering and tweeting except me. People in the field of school librarianship (talking about the big conference presenting Kahunas, here) rave about it, and wax on about how it feeds their professional growth. I'm working at it. Maybe I have to work harder.
Tell you what. I'll follow you if you'll follow me.
