BP15_2009113_EyePlorer Video

BP14_2009113_Comment on David's Scrapblogging

P9_1182009_From Scrapbooking to Scrapblogging

Remember when English teachers used to ask students to cut pictures out of magazines to create a collage to represent either the student or some character from literature? The students would flip through magazines that appealed to their interests looking for something they thought represented their interests, or more likely, looked for images they thought were cool and then came up with a reason for including the image. Such examples often came through as "I like snowboarding so I put a picture of Shaun White (The Flying Tomato) on my collage."

When I used to use this activity, students struggled to move past the literal level of meaning, which is why the collages often ended up being a collection of "likes" rather than a picture of the student's personality. I stopped using this activity due to the frustration of hearing "I like..." statements all day long.

However, using bothFlickr and Scrapblog, this activity is ready to be revived. Instead of flipping pages in a magazine, students can search conceptually. What images are returned when one searches for "stubborn" in Flickr? These are only two of the images that are returned using this search. Students can be as literal or as symbolic as they wish, depending on their needs and intentions.

WithinScrapblog students can create scrapbooking-style pages that can be used for autobiography of the student, for the student to create a biography of a particular author through images and text, or to create a character analysis or summary.

Other activities could include explorations of historical figures, an artist's scrapbooked portfolio, or a student creating a scrapbook based on a virtual or real-life field trip.

The tool presents students with a variety of templates, which are customizable, and the students can share the resource and results with fellow students and with teachers. Creating the Scrapblog is relatively simple, and users will find that importing pictures is as simple as dragging and dropping into a part of the template. The result of the Scrapblog is a shareable, fun artifact that students will engage in. One example of a student-created scrapblog page is this one from a French-language student.

References

[Untitled screenshot]. Captured Nov. 9, 2009 fromhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/44306447@N03/galleries/72157622768626244/

[Untitled screenshot]. Captured Nov. 9, 2009 from http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=16579

Bp13_2009113_Comment on Coleen's Glog

The web 2.0 tool I chose to highlight this week

is called Glogster. The newest version is for

educators Glogster EDU. This tool is perfect for

educators that want to fully engage their students

in an interactive learning process. Students are

only limited by their own imagination on what

they can create. Glogs have been used successfully

in many subject areas from math to history and art.

The website marketing information highlights how

to integrate Glogster in your classroom. It can be

used as an interactive poster-board to display

information, videos, pictures and other types of

media. A recent addition allows educators and

students to upload videos directly from Schooltube.

This is an incredible way to bring poster projects

into the 21st century. Designing a glog allows you

to create multimedia collages about any topic you

can imagine. I think I have created the first

leader glog.

I created the leader glog that you see pictured on

my blog. My leader glog can be found at

http://celmers.edu.glogster.com/Leaderglog

Please go to the site and see the many multi-

media features I have already added. You will

recognize my Leader Storybird. I created a short

video for my leadership students to help

encourage them to tell their leadership stories.

I believe we all learn so much from sharing

stories both successes and failures.

By sharing our leadership stories I am hoping

that all leaders will be able to grow from the

knowledge and experience of the others.

BP12_2009113_Comment for E. Roe

Tikatok:

This is a community for children to write, illustrate, and publish a real book. The minute I saw this Web 2.0 tool, I fell in love. The first idea that popped into my head was the students who always finish all of their work first. What an amazing extra curricular activity to work on. Although it costs money to buy a book, they are selling the PDF version of the book for $2.99. Not bad when you can print them out and photo copy them for an entire class.

While I was playing around with the site, I noticed that there are many different types of books you can create. You can make your own, or there are a lot of different story starters you may use. It is a very easy layout and once you click a page you can get right to work. You can add photos or draw your own. There are just so many options to choose from.

I can see so many of my students really getting into this. It is such a great way to get kids writing creatively. I think it would be such a reward to have a real hard cover book from your own imagination. I think it would also be a great for parents. What a great activity to do on the weekend or summer vacation. It would be incorporating technology with improving writing skills. The best part being, the children would not even know they are improving their writing skills and creativity skills.

BP11_2009113_EyePlorer

I found another new web 2.0 tool today called eyePlorer. It is a web search engine with some really cool features. It is much more like a mind-map than a traditional search engine. It also has a place to store notes as you go along, if you choose to log in. It is a free tool (as you’ve already noticed, that is one of my favorite words), and can be used anonymously, if you don’t want to log in. I noticed that when I was an anonymous user, there was way more advertising, and some of it would have been inappropriate for younger kids, so that would be something to watch out for if you are working in that type of environment.

Now, I know some people will have a problem with this, so I have to be sure I am up-front about this; eyePlorer is powered by Wikipedia. There it is, right out in the open. I know that there is sometimes a question about the reliability of Wikipedia, but before you dismiss eyePolorer, please take a look. One of the features of this tool is a nice little toolbox that automatically provides a search on the topic you have chosen either as a web search, image search, or even a Twitter search! So, even if you are Wikepedia-phobic, this tool is a great way to get started on your search. It really helps you visualize what topics are related to your initial search, helps you narrow down your topic, while giving you great little tidbits of information as you go. Once you’ve decided where you really want to go, you can always revert to your favorite trusted sources to confirm or build with.

I can see this as a very useful tool for anyone doing research on almost anything, students and teachers alike. You might think when you first look at the tool that you are limited to the topics it suggests on the initial graphic, or the A-Z topic list that is populated according to the topic heading you chose. That is not the case, though. I tried two search topics that were not on the list, and got back great results both times.

bp10_2009112_Web 2.0 Reflection

BP9_2009112_Web 2.0 Slideshare

The tool I explored today is called Slideshare. It is free, one of my favorite words in the English language. This is a social networking site for sharing and hosting slide presentations. Audio can be synchronized with the slideshow, and you can embed video as well, so this is a way of hosting a multimedia presentation asynchronously. So far, this is the easiest to use tool I have found. You can choose whether to house your presentation publicly, only make it visible to your friends, or make it completely private as an ultra-secret URL invitation-only presentation. For my purposes, having the network or invitation-only settings is perfect. This would allow me to produce a course, and either invite my class members to be part of my network so that they could view my presentation, or I could send them the URL directly. Tying this in with an earlier tool that I blogged about, Nicenet, I could make the URL part of an assignment with a due date. I can almost feel things starting to click into place to allow me to put some of my content into an online format that is accessible to my learners anywhere they have Internet access, and it won’t cost any more money for my company than they are already spending on our LMS that is a bit too confining for my purposes.

I hope you will find my explorations useful. It has been a long, hard trail, but I think I’m finally getting somewhere. I hope I left myself some breadcrumbs to find my way back.

BP8_2009112_Web 2.0 Nicenet

The web 2.0 tool that I discovered today is called Nicenet. It is a web-based communication tool for teachers that allows a lot of the functionality of distance classrooms for free. The tool gives teachers the ability to create assignments, make a calendar for students to view on-line, and even allows students to “turn in” assignments through the site. The whole thing is hosted on the Nicenet server, so the teacher does not have to provide the URL for the course work. This is a big plus for me, since I am working “around” my IT department and can’t get permission to use our server fast enough to meet my purposes.

Nicenet was simple to set up. In just a few minutes I was able to sign up for this service and create a class. I can create conference topics, assign homework that is either perpetual (ugh!) or with a due date. As the teacher, you can decide whether to allow the students to see each other’s submissions and comment on them, or whether you want that limited to you and your teaching assistants. Now if they would only provide the teaching assistants, I would have it made!

Here is the list of features from the Nicenet web site:

• Conferencing: Create your own private, threaded conferencing on topics you make for the class or opt to allow students to create their own topics.

• Scheduling: Put the class schedule on-line. With a seven-day advance view on your class homepage, students will have a heads-up display of upcoming assignments and class events.

• Document sharing: Students and professors have the ability to publish their documents on the site using simple web-based forms. No knowledge of HTML is needed. Automatically integrated with scheduling, students are one click away from turning in their assignments on-line, giving their peers feedback on published papers and receiving professor’s comments.

• Personal Messaging: Similar to traditional email but fully integrated with document sharing and conferencing, personal messaging is a great way communicate with and between individuals in your class, comment privately on conferencing postings or give private feedback on published papers.

• Link Sharing: Share links to pertinent Internet resources sorted by topics that you create.

BP7_2009112_Comment

From Coleen Elmers ETC blog: The Web 2.0 tool that I chose to learn about and use for educational purposes is called Storybird. Although it states in the abstract that it is for family and friend collaboration in storytelling, I believe this will be a great adjunct to my leadership classes. This collaborative storytelling site allows you to create stories with a template that includes pictures and areas for text that you can easily share with others in a collaborative venture. When you are done you can choose to publish your storybook as either private or public. You can also view any of the other public storybooks on the same site.

For this assignment I created a short story on leaders and leadership that would work with any age group. The picture above shows you the cover to my storybook. Here is the link so that you can read my story

http://storybird.com/books/leaders-make-a-differenceare-you-a-leader/

I believe personal stories are very powerful learning tools. I frequently use stories in class to highlight important concepts such as trust, communication, teamwork and caring. I also have students share their personal leadership stories...these have the unique capacity to create true engagement in their colleagues. Some of the greatest leaders have the distinct ability to tell inspiring stories.

From my own personal perspective, I believe that stories have the capability to connect people through lessons learned, inspiring acts displayed and creativity shared. Stories help people learn in a way that is not possible through any other format. Stories create emotional ties to the information that allow students to more easily retain it. Stories can illustrate success or failure in a way that is vivid and inspiring.

BP6_2009112_Flickr

Flickr is another web 2.0 tool that I had not really seen in the light of having educational uses, beyond the obvious one of being a great place to create a collection of images to use in presentations. However, with just a little digging, I found some great ideas from the Illinois Education and Technology Conference. From their list of ideas, I selected one I could tailor for use in my setting for continuing nursing education. The suggestion was to use an image for analysis or as a writing prompt. I could use a picture of a patient with the related data displayed as a writing prompt. For example, I could show a picture of a patient with poor skin color, and have the monitoring equipment showing abnormal vital signs. The nurse could then select one of the differential diagnoses, and write about how he/she would prove or disprove that this was the problem, what nursing treatments are needed, what to report to the physician, and what orders the physician would be expected to give.

The reason that Flickr would be a good venue for this type of assignment is that it could be done from any computer with Internet access. I could be assured that everyone was seeing the same photo, or I could provide a group of photos and let the nurse select one. It would also be possible to have treatments depicted in a series of photos and ask the nurse to tell what sequence the photos should be in, and why. I can think of about a dozen other permutations of this scenario. What can you do with Flickr?

BP5_2009112_Delicious

As much as I hate to admit it, social bookmarking is a concept that is pretty new to me. Not that the idea of bookmarking websites is new. I figured out that feature pretty quickly, never having been one to remember things if the computer could remember for me, or one to write things down if I could find a way to make the computer write it for me. So, I quickly found the bookmarking feature of my favorite web browser. Yes, the list got kind of long, but I managed to wade through it and find what I needed. And yes, sometimes I would be in a colleague’s office and would not be able to access my bookmarks, but generally speaking, I was pretty happy with this function.

Sharing bookmarks is also not a new concept to me. I used to jot them down for friends, or send them out in an email as a link. That worked pretty well. But I was always working around the little problems…bookmarks only saved on the computer where you made the bookmark, so if you were a computer nomad, like I am, you only have access to your bookmarks part of the time. Organization depends upon your ability to project your future needs – what folder should I put this link in? What if it belongs in multiple folders? Social bookmarking comes to the rescue!

Like any good superhero, social bookmarking services, like Delicious, are not one-dimensional figures. There is more to them than meets the eye. Not only will Delicious organize and search my bookmarks with an almost limitless number of tags, but it also allows me to search through sites that others have bookmarked and shared. This becomes a powerful research tool for both student and teacher alike. Guldi (2007) had the fabulous idea of using “dissertation” as one of her tags. Every article, picture, PDF, movie, etc. that she came across that had to do with her dissertation, was tagged with this tag; instantly searchable. Further tags placed it in whatever category within the dissertation that the information occupied. The added benefit of being able to add a description, then creates a list of items that has information that she, personally found important about that item. This is very applicable to the research I am doing for my Action Research project. Guldi (2007) has also formed a small group with which she shares research information. Many of these folks she has never met, but “stumbled” across through shared use of some arcane tags.

Carvin (2006) goes a bit further with the social part of social bookmarking. He keeps a link to Delicious on his blog, and encourages readers to bookmark anything they find that they think we be of interest to his readership with the learning.now bookmark that populates the blog link box. Carvin has turned over control of his list of links to his readers, embracing the read-write web and further removing barriers between “experts” and “learners”. Carvin’s idea could be used as a means of getting buy-in from students when we ask them to do research. It would feel more like purposeful work, rather than busy-work.

One of the functions that Kristi (2009) points out is the ability to form networks in Delicious. As a class assignment, I could send students to the web to research various aspects of a topic, and share their research findings with each other within the network. Each student could then prepare his/her own final product, but with less time spent trying to gather the information. In addition, this process would introduce them to some of the uses of delicious.

Carvin, A. (2006, May). Tag - You’re Delicious! PBS Teachers. http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/05/tag_youre_delicious.html

Guldi, J. (2007, March). How delicious is changing academic research. http://landscape.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-delicious-is-changing-academic.html

Kristi. (2009, April). 8 Reasons to use Delicious for social bookmarking. Social Media. http://kikolani.com/8-reasons-delicious-social-bookmarking.html

BP4_2009112_MyUdutu

Today I explored a web-based rapid authoring tool called MyUdutu. I choose an authoring tool because our current LMS has a very complex and low-powered tool. The assessment options are very limited in our current LMS, and converting slides is difficult. There is one person who controls the LMS and she is really the only one who can post any educational activity. As you can imagine, this means she is VERY busy, and not always available when we need something created and posted right away.

I read some reviews about myUdutu before I tried it out. The one that was most impressive was the one by the Brandon Hall Research Labs. Janet Clarey blogged about the product just last month. She has used many other authoring tools, including Dreamweaver, Captivate, and others, so I think her opinion holds weight. She called MyUdutu one of the best kept secrets in authoring tools. What really convinced me to try it was that the company describes its users this way, “

(MyUdutu is) a tool used by rogue designers (many clients are people circumventing their current solution (LMS, LCMS, etc. Seriously.)” (Clarey, 2009). That could not describe me more perfectly!

So, from the viewpoint of this rogue designer, here is my experience in using MyUdutu. The first thing I noticed is that it is free. That is a very important attribute, since I am basically designing without a budget. I am doing this to make my presentations at work asynchronous and blended learning experiences. I love my job, but I am not going to pay for my company to move into the current century. Another thing that was very important to me is that I could learn quickly how to use it. The tool is fairly easy to learn, but there is definitely a learning curve. I could quickly import my PowerPoint presentation into MyUdutu, which was a big plus. I didn’t want to throw out everything I had done. I pulled in a presentation I have been wanting to update for Internet use, and I was able to figure out how to do that with just a few mis-steps. TIP: The one thing the user guide does not tell you is that when you are uploading files, pictures, etc. there is no indicator that it is actually importing. It looks like your screen just froze. I ended up with multiple copies of the same images/presentations because I kept doing it over.

The program has some great assessment screens that you can add into your presentation, which is exactly what I wanted. These can include drag-and-drop, multiple choice, and many other options. You can add pictures, video, or audio to the slides and/or to the assessment slides. Assessments allow you to provide immediate feedback through audio or text. You can even include branching logic. In addition to adding interactivity with self-assessments within the presentation, MyUdutu also allows you to add assessments that are graded. You can allow or disallow the learner to keep going back through the assessment until they have mastered the answers.

Unfortunately I did not have time to get very far into the workings of this tool, but I did import a presentation and add an assessment slide. I barely scratched the surface in learning how to use this tool, but my preview of its functionality definitely leads me to believe I have found something that will let me move forward with my plan for blended and asynchronous learning without having to wait for technical assistance.