Trying again...

OK, so it's been a while.  Like working out, or eating better, it's important not to beat myself up about missing the mark in the past, and more important to just try to get back on track now.  I am not going to make any big promises or goals about how often I will write, or what I will contribute this time. I will just start again now:

So it's back to school time.  The learning fair was very good, I saw many teachers willing to jump in and get messy so they can model being learners to their classes.  Learning is challenging and messy and doesn't just mean success all the time.  I believe we need to remember that and be willing to show our students that we may struggle with somethings too - it's OK, it's how you learn.

Helping people get set up and work in Edmodo at the Minds On Media carrousel was great.  There were many different teachers thinking about different ways of using it in various subjects and grade levels.  The stations all looked busy: People working with Maddie Davies and her iPads, Alanna working with people establishing a positive digital identity, others working with Adobe programs, or Voice thread, or computer animation and of course google apps for education.  If you were unable to be there, the wikispace is up and running with information from each of the stations, as well as contact information if you want help with something you are trying.

I am very excited that some members of my department are going to try having their classes blog (as am I).  I think aside from the technology, our collective fear is that we won't be able to sustain it - we will start out fine, then we'll miss a week or two.  I hope that if we are all tackling this together, we will be able to encourage each other through the rough spots, and if we miss a couple weeks/posts here and there we just get back on, don't give it up for good.

I'm also feeling really positive about the work we've committed to in terms of new units and new assessment ideas.  I hope we continue to rely on each other, be vulnerable with one another and support one another as we try new things.

Here's to a great, messy, learning filled semester.

Specialized Google Searches

Alerts:
Do you want your students to follow a current event? Is there an issue that your students need to be following for their research?  Is there something happening in the world that you want to follow more closely?  With a google account you can set up an alert with whatever news sources and frequency best work for you.  

It is a simple as filling in 5 fields:
Search Query - your topic of interest
Result Type - choose from: blog, news, videos, discussions, books or everything
How Often - choose from: as it happens, once a day or once a week options
How many - choose from: all or only the best
Your email address

When you add your search query, you will see sample results on the right hand side so you can determine if you’ve chosen the exact term you want.   When you are done with this research, you can “manage your alerts” and delete the alert so you don’t continue receiving emails.

From the Google Scholar page:
What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Features of Google Scholar

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research

How are documents ranked?
Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

To access both Google Alerts and Google Scholar, on the google search page go to the pull down menu “More” then select “even more.”

Tags and Social Bookmarking

The cloud (on-line workspaces/storage) is amazing.  It used to be if you wanted to keep something, you put it in a file that had one title/heading and you needed to remember where you put it.  If it was something you had more than one use for you may have made a copy and put it in another file somewhere else.  This was true of paper copies in metal filing cabinets and word processing documents.
Online you save stuff using TAGS.  You can give one thing as many different tags as you want so that you can find it again.  So, for example if I found an article on Gladiators that I used for Adventures in World History and I might want to use it for the Ancient Civ course, I can tag it with CHM4E, CHW3M, gladiators, history.  I could later search for it using any one of those tags.
So, “where would one use these tags?” you ask.  Social bookmarking is one place.
Social bookmarking is pretty incredible whether you use it for social/sharing purposes or not.  I’ll start with not, because I think that’s the way most in our department would use it.  
If you are working on your computer at home and you see a website you like, you can bookmark it in Internet Explorer (or Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari...) so you can get back to it later.  But it is only available on that computer, unless you also email it to yourself so you can bookmark it at school (on your network login), but it is still only available in those two places, and only if you are signed in at school.  It is also only part of a long list (that you may have started organizing into folders if you are really on top of things).
If you use a social bookmarking tool (diigo, delicious, google) you have access to your bookmarks on any computer that is connected to the internet.  And rather than one long list to scroll through, you can sort through your bookmarks by using the tags you create.  I have found this quite useful.  It is a great way to save things for later as well.  The tag concept is key here - you should be consistent with the tags you use and think about how you will want to search for the website/article/blog next time.  (Example; I am trying to change my tags ipad, iPad, iPads to something consistent now and it is a little bit of a pain.)

How to use this in class:
Because these are social bookmarking tools, you can share your bookmarks with whomever you want.  
My delicious account is:  http://www.delicious.com/LisaUnger711/ You can go here and see what I’ve saved and what tags I’ve used.  You can click on the links and use my bookmarks if they are of use to you.  You could set up an account and share your link with your class, telling them which tags are of most use to them.  You can also make somethings in your list private so they won’t be shared with whomever has the link.  Example: I have the maplewood site saved for myself, but I don’t think you see that if you go in.  You can also use delicious (or diigo) as a search engine.  Type in a tag, see what others have saved using that tag.  It also gives you the popularity of that site/article - how many others have tagged it.
My diigo account is:   http://www.diigo.com/user/lunger711  It works much the same way but is a little more sophisticated.  You can create groups in diigo and other people with a diigo account can add to a group page.  So you could create a CGW4U group and have students with a diigo account also add useful websites or articles to the group (class) page.

Evernote

There was a request that I write about Evernote.  For those of you that don't know, Evernote is a cross platform app/program/website that allows you to save anything (all types of files, websites, images) in one place so you can access them anywhere - there are smart phone apps as well as a website.  You can organize your stuff by folders and tags so you can find what you want again.

I've been trying to write about it for a while, but haven't figured out what to say.  I use it, but not to its full potential, so I've been having trouble figuring out what to say.  Then I ran across this blog that does a MUCH better job than I could, so here's the link:  evernote for education blog

If you would like me to add the evernote app to the iPads so you can encourage students to use it, just let me know.

There are a couple other non-iPad things I'd like to share.  If there is something iPad related apps that you'd like me write about just let me know.  Otherwise, the next topic will be social bookmarking. (Coming soon!)

off topic - creative commons

I want to take a break from the iPad discussion this post to explain about Creative Commons and copyright licensing. (please don’t roll your eyes)  I also haven’t played with Popplet in a collaborative way yet and want to try that before I post about it.

Did you know that anything you create has an automatic copyright attached to it?  I didn’t.  That if anyone wants to use something you’ve made they need your expressed permission to do so?  That if you want to use something someone else has created you are supposed to ask their permission?

There is an easy way around this (legal too! - not just ignoring it).  You can use creative commons licensing.  Notice anything new on my page?  I have creative commons licensed it!  Yeah me!  It was easy and fast - took me less than 3 minutes to do and that included finding the website.  (http://creativecommons.org/)  So now, if you want to use my writing for something else you may, as long as you give me credit, aren’t making money from it and also license your work in the same way I licensed mine.  These are choices I made - if you want to license something you can make different choices.

This video does a much better job explaining it than I can.  Watch it.

I believe it is our responsibility as educators to both model this and encourage (make it necessary?) for our students to respect copyright and only use images that are not-copyright protected.  This is good digital citizenship.  This can be done by searching in the creative commons itself, or using the advanced search in google images to select re-usable images.  Most images in flickr and like depositories are CC licensed.

The hardest part for me has been remembering that I want to do this (and I think it’s important), and being willing to be flexible about the image I get - it may not be exactly what I want, but can I find a different way of expressing my point?  At the very least I have been trying to be more diligent when it comes to citing my sources for images I use that aren’t labelled for reuse (art images).

As a positive heads up - the Canadian copyright laws are changing. See this article. This should make it easier (more legal) to use things for educational purposes.  The laws haven’t been changed since 1997 - which is a very long time in the digital age.

Is this on your radar?  Do you think about the intellectual rights of your work?  Of a colleagues work?  Of a stranger’s work?  Do you expect your students to cite images in posters/powerpoints/prezis?  Do you cite them?

Honest thoughts?

Accessories

We have purchased a couple of accessories for the iPads that go with the past couple of blogs.  We now have a mic that will plug into the iPads.  Although the iPads have a built in mic, the hand-held mic is supposed to cut out some of the background noise.  If you are trying ShowMe or Voice Thread in your classes you may want to borrow the mic as well.

We have also purchased 3 camera connection kits.  There are 2 connectors in each box, so we have enough for all 6 of the original iPads.  One connector is for the USB cord from the camera to the iPad, the other connector is for the SD card.  If you are having students take pictures with the department cameras, you can put the images onto the iPads using one of the connectors.

Once the images are on the iPad, they automatically go to the Photos app.  Images there can be shared via twitter, email, iMessage (although we are currently trying to avoid use of this), and copied.  Any of the apps that allow you to post a picture, also automatically access your photos on the iPad.  For example, if you choose add an image in ShowMe, voice thread, or Evernote it will take you to the photos saved on the iPad.

There is another iPad brainstorming/concept mapping app that I’m playing with called Popplet.    It allows pictures which Idea Sketch doesn’t, and it is collaborative (more than one person can work on it at the same time on different devices) which is also nice.  More on this next week.

Voice Thread

Voice Thread is a web based program that you can run on any computer through your browser (ie: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox), but there is also now an app.  According to the Voice Thread website: “VoiceThread … allows you to place collections of media like images, videos, documents, and presentations at the center of an asynchronous conversation. A VoiceThread allows people to have conversations and to make comments using any mix of text, a microphone, a web cam, a telephone, or uploaded audio file.”  Does that sound like a lot of mumbo-jumbo?  Sorry.  Maybe I could show you one easier than I can describe it...  Here’s my first try:

http://voicethread.com/?#u2210871.b2483951.i13152664

I created the above voice thread using my pictures of concentration camps, then asked 2 students in my Aventures in World History class to comment on a few of the images.  They came up with the idea of making it “like a radio show” - their words, not mine.  It wasn’t my intention to have them do it that way, but they were excited about it and were willing to spend more time with it than they have wanted to spend on any one thing all semester.

You can see that there are various options for posting comments - text, audio record, webcam record.  Just like the Show Me app, you can write on the images as well.  If you use video in your voice thread (instead of a still image or text), people commenting on the video can pause it to comment, or to draw on the still image to point something out.  Very cool.

Here is a voice thread example of video commenting use a road runner cartoon:  http://voicethread.com/?#q+voice+thread.b21651.i122786

So, what could you do with this in class?  These are just brainstormed ideas.  
1) You could post a power point and talk about the slides on voice thread if you were going to be away from class for a day.  You could pose critical thinking questions that students would respond to through Voice Thread.  I believe there is a way to fairly easily convert ppt to voice thread (at least the images), then you just add your audio/comments for each slide.
2) You could post a series of images and ask students to respond to the images.  How does each image relate to the course/unit big idea for the course?  What does the image demonstrate about the big idea?
3) You could have students submit images or quotations that they’ve found that best represent a given topic/idea.  Post those in the voice thread and require students to respond to each others’ ideas.
4) You could put debate topics or arguments on slides and have student argue each side through the voice thread.

You can choose to moderate the comments that people put on the Voice Thread if you are concerned about student putting appropriate things up.

 
Here are the draw backs I’ve seen so far.  You have to create an account. When you create a free account, it is just good for you.  Then, to comment, all your students need to create a free account as well.  Not the end of the world, but I would prefer not to ask all my students to have to create accounts for things.  You can create an educator’s account that gives you 50 student accounts attached to your account, but you have to pay for it.  I’m not into that.  (May be able to create a department one, and pay for it with the p-card?) It is possible with your 50 student accounts to use them with more than 50 students if you create, then assign generic ids to students.