Using Social Bookmarking in Schools and with Students- Part One

There is too much information available. No doubt… Everyone feels overwhelmed by this information overload. EVERYONE…One of my favorite images to visualize this feeling is the one of a fire hydrant with a quote by Mitchell Kapor

Image licensed under Creative Commons by Will Lion.

How can we expect teachers and their students to not feel overwhelmed too? How can we ask them to find, research, read, evaluate, analyze, cite, organize, categorize and make sense of all the information that they consumed.

What is social bookmarking?

According to Wikipedia

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”

Take a look at Common Craft’s video “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” to get started…

There are a few (free)  social bookmark services available to educators. Leading the list was Delicious. Yahoo announced a few days ago (December 2010) though that it will shut down the services or look for “new home” for it. I have started to save my bookmarks to Diigo with the option that automatically saves the bookmark to my Delicious account too. As with all free services, we must be flexible and have backups and alternatives for our content.

• Delicious
• Diigo
• Trunkly
• Licorize

This blog post is not about the alternatives to Delicious though. Part I attempts to point out the skills and  literacies involved and required when using social bookmarking tools to its full potential. I am looking at the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy as well as 21st century skills to see where social bookmarking fits in. Part II looks deeper at the skills involved when using social bookmarking, gives specific examples of how schools, teachers and students can use social bookmarking for learning and reiterates that it’s not about the tools we use but about the skills we try to instill in our students or as Andrew Churches on his Edorigami Wiki points out that

Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy isn’t about the tools or technologies rather it is about using these to facilitate learning. Outcomes on rubrics are measured by competence of use and most importantly the quality of the process or product. For example. Bookmarking a resource is of no value if the resource is inappropriate, invalid, out of date or inaccurate.

Churches puts Social Bookmarking in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy on the level of:

Remembering

Social Bookmarking  is an online version of local bookmarking or favourites, it is more advanced because you can draw on others bookmarks and tags. While higher order thinking skills like, collaborating and sharing, can and do make use of these skills, this is its simplest form – a simple list of sites saved to an online format rather than locally to the machine.

and Understanding

Categorising & Tagging – digital classification – organising and classify files, web sites and materials using folders, using Del.ico,us and other similar tools beyond simple bookmarking. This can be organising, structuring and attributing online data, meta-tagging web pages etc. Students need to be able understand the content of the pages to be able to tag it

Take a look at the Edorigami’s  Bookmarking Rubric and a Delicious Starter sheet.

Social bookmarking allows teachers and students to practice essential skills, such as communicating, collaborating, connecting and critical thinking.

Communicate:

• By saving bookmarks online (in the cloud), we allow others to see our bread crumbs where we have been and we share the road map how we arrived where we are.
• We are also able to access  (communicate with) our resources from any device with Internet access (home computer, school computer, mobile devices).
• We can add notes to explain our train of thought, further questions, or future direction our research could take and communicate like this with potential collaborators.
• Summarizing the site we are bookmarking allows others to quickly read if the site would warrant an extended visit.
• Adding highlights to the website shows others in a glance what we felt was the most important message.

Collaborate:

• Social bookmarking allows for group based research. With a little organization, groups can divide research areas and pull them together via pre-arranged tags.
• Folksonomy (“the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”) allows to take advantage of collaborating on a much larger scale. Other users, including possible experts in the field, share and add resources to your research by simply using a shared tag.

Connect:

• By publically sharing you bookmarks in the cloud (instead of in your browser and on your computer alone)  you automatically connect with anyone who finds your userpage or when your bookmarks (using a specific tag ) are added to their search results.
• By using tags in your own searches you connect automatically to others who chose to share and tag bookmarks with the same tags.
• Most social bookmarking services allow you to create or join groups or become members of a network that you select. This way you are connected to a specific group of users who share common interest in one way or another.
• Each user, tag or string of tags has its own RSS feed, which connects you instantly to any update and addition by any user using these tags.

Critical Thinking:

• It is easy to bookmark any resource. Most social bookmarking services have browser specific buttons, that allow you to easily add the link to your bookmarking library. Once bookmarked, you are prompted to add tags. These tags allow you to categorize and organize your resources. Choosing appropriate tags are of vital importance to connect to resources tagged with the same keywords.
• Looking at a bookmark shared by other user lends itself to begin analyzing what kind of tags s(he) used to categorize the link. Did they see a connection to another category that you did not? Did they interpret the content of the link differently than you did? Can I use their tags to follow my research towards a new direction?
• How do we organize thousands and thousands of bookmarks? Some services allow for tag bundles to be created. Some allow your tags to be seen in a word cloud. How can we interpret the collaborative tagging of a single bookmark by potentially thousands of people around the world?

Continue taking a look at Social Bookmarking in your schools and with your students Part II

What Do You Have to Lose?

It is a new idea for many classroom teachers/students to move from writing, reading and “doing” work, not only for themselves, supervisors/parents or for a monetary compensation/grade, to share their work openly and freely with others. The idea of putting oneself “out there on the internet” (on a larger scale than the teacher lounge) and publicly “brag” about successes, admit failures, ask for help or document one’s learning and teaching process,  feels unnatural and even scares many of them.

It is not the first time I am thinking about this “sharing thing”.  You can read about my train of  thought by looking at previous posts about the topic:

• It’s All About Sharing & Collaborating
• There is a responsibility of sharing among Educators
• Sharing in Education- Is it Changing?

In the last few months I am reading and hearing more and more about sharing from others. Starting with Dean Shareski‘s keynote at the K12Online Conference 2010 “Sharing, the Moral Imperative“.

Dean starts out his presentation with a strong quote by Ewan Mcintosh.

Dean says that we are in the early stages of a sharing revolution that includes so much more sharing than previous generations would have ever considered. Dean makes us think about how we share so much nowadays,  our “immediate presence, location, photos, thoughts, videos, reading lists and more”. He continues to ask: Is sharing an obligation in education? All the “sharing” that was required of teachers before was an occasional presentation at a conference, a faculty meeting or with a colleague down the hall. Sharing was “rare, hard and a luxury”. Now that these obstacles seem to have evaporated due to technology tools and social network platforms, they have been replaced by the “who, where and the how” part of sharing.

What is your reaction to that statement?

You have a moral obligation to share as an educator!

What are your reasons to share or not to share as a teacher?

Alan November in his book “Empowering Students with Technology” says:

Collaboration and sharing knowledge are the highly prized skills. This expectation of collaboration will eventually reach the teaching profession. Teachers will be valued for their ability to share their knowledge and solve problems about teaching and learning than an individual teacher could not solve alone.

Sharing seen as a valued skill for educators? Wow! What a divergence to the concept of teaching behind closed doors and holding on to all the resources, lesson plans and expertise a teacher has developed and reserved for the students they have in front of them. Not only does November predict that sharing will be valued, but he also designates sharing as a “skill”, which is defined as the:

Capacity to do something well; technique, ability. Skills are usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities, which are often thought of as innate

If sharing is a skill and a skill is “usually acquired or learned”, then we might have to re-think start thinking about sharing as something we need to point out, incorporate, teach, model and coach others in.

Clay Shirkey also talks about sharing in his book “Cognitive Surplus”. He makes the point, like Shareski, that “sharing” is changing. It has changed because of social media and networking tools, that allow anyone to produce and publish. He is very clear about the effect large quantities of people who share are having on media and society. They share for free, simply because they can and because they enjoy being able to connect with each other. We have not grasped the potential sharing might have on society and more particular on learning and education, due to the vast (and growing) number of people who share and aggregate an infinite number of topics.

Expanding our focus to include producing and sharing doesn’t even require making big shifts in individual behavior to create enormous changes in outcome. The world’s cognitive surplus is so large that small changes can have huge ramifications in aggregate.

We are increasingly becoming one another’s infrastructure. This may be a cold-blooded way of looking at sharing- that we increasingly learn about the world through stranger’s random choices about what to share- but even that has some human benefits.

Our ability to balance consumption with production and sharing, our ability to connect with one another, is transforming the sense of media from a particular sector of the economy to a cheap and globally available tool for organized sharing.

Once we understand the moral imperative  of sharing (Dean Shareski)…once we buy into our part in the cognitive surplus to solve universal problems too big to solve on an individual basis (Clay Shirkey)… once we acknowledge that  sharing knowledge is a valued skill nowadays (Alan November), then we NEED to make “sharing” a vital component of our professional planning, collaboration, curriculum mapping, unit plans,  lesson plans and daily interaction with students.

What do you have to lose?

• Look at the fifth grade teacher who shared her Christopher Columbus unit with the world by producing a video newscast and is receiving requests for her students to be “experts” to teach others about what they have learned.
• Look at the fourth grade teacher who uploaded her students’ book trailer videos to her classroom blog only to be contacted by one of the book’s author. They are arranging a Skype call by the author into the classroom.
• Look at the Middle School Language Arts teacher who shared her student’s essay on the classroom blog only to have the family and friends of the fallen soldier  she wrote about contact them to express a thank you.
• Look at what happens when I created a blogging unit and someone from St. Petersburg, Russia chose to translate the work into Russian for teachers and students, who most likely I will never meet, to benefit from.
• Look what happens when a college professor, Alec Couros, creates and shares a diagram of “The Networked Teacher”.
• Watch more “Amazing Stories” (of sharing) collected by Alan Levine (2009)(2010)

How do you, as an educator, share your wisdom, your experience, your knowledge? How do you enable and encourage your students to share for the sake of sharing? How do you share to contribute to a larger goal of solving a problem or teaching others who you might never meet or hear from?

What are some of the kickbacks you have gotten from sharing on a larger scale?

Take a few minutes to watch Dean’s excellent video and his view on the moral imperative of sharing and… well…share your thoughts!

Give Something Back…

If you enjoy reading my ramblings on Langwitches and have used resources I created and shared…. here is an opportunity for your to give something back

Andrea Hernandez, my colleague and partner in crime as the 21st Century Learning Specialist at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School has worked with our second graders to create a PSA for The Fire Safety Project. She shares the process and her reflection about the project.

We would really like to win the contest ($10,000 for school and $2500 for our local fire department).

All you’ll need to do is to “like” our video. To do this, click on the “thumbs up” icon in the lower left of the video frame. (You’ll need a YouTube account to do this.

http://www.youtube.com/user/FireSafetyProject#p/u/9/mNJLYDNfzN8

Andrea graciously allowed me to cross post her Planning + Collaboration = Success post from EdTechWorkshop blog on Langwitches, where she details the process of creating the PSA with the second graders.

I am so excited to share this fire safety PSA created by a second grade class. I think this represents an example of what can be achieved with good planning and collaboration between the classroom teacher and an integration facilitator- someone to help with the technology.

Many classroom teachers simply do not have the time and/or the technical skills to do such a project on their own, and a computer lab resource teacher does not have the necessary time to work and plan with the students.

The idea for this came from an email notification about The Fire Safety Project, a video contest for students. The teacher and I agreed that this would be a worthwhile and appropriate project for the class.

We spent several classes in the classroom, planning. This is something that, as a lab resource teacher, I was never able to do. It was hard to have students come into the computer lab and then not go onto the computers. If I tried to have them plan on the computers, the computers often got in the way, due to technical skills issues and other distractions.

Planning is key-

First we watched some fire safety public service announcements. The students took notes on the fire safety and prevention tips. We talked about what makes a video interesting, what makes a video stick in your mind, how to best communicate through this medium. We also discussed the idea of a PSA- using your movie to teach others.

Then we brainstormed ideas for our movie. Through the brainstorming process (which took two whole classes) students considered several different concepts and ideas for the video. They really took ownership- discussing, deciding, revising- until they agreed upon a slogan and 5 safety and prevention tips.

We filmed pairs of students saying “Stay safe, Be cool. Don’t be a fool” and students created individual storyboards to generate ideas for filming the 5 tips. Finally we created a whole class storyboard:

We used the storyboard as a guide as we filmed each scene.

Student ownership-

This project completely belonged to the students. The students came up with each and every idea for how to film the scenes, what to say, what props to use. If they didn’t think it was right, they did it again, changing, adding, subtracting, improving. I can not emphasize enough the involvement and ownership of the students in each and every decision. They showed patience, perseverance, creativity and an impressive ability to work together as a group.

Process and Product

The process worked, and the students are so proud of their video. Whether it wins the $10,000 prize or not, they have achieved success.

Please, don’t forget to vote for us!  http://www.youtube.com/user/FireSafetyProject#p/u/9/mNJLYDNfzN8