I have been mesmerized by Infographics for a while now. Take a look at my previously written posts.

• Infographics- What? Why? How?
• Visual Thinking and Learning in the Classroom

What are infographics? Here are some definitions I ran across as I was learning and wrapping my mid around teaching with infographics:

• “They are fun visual representation of data“
• “The art of making information comprehensible“
• “Infographics are: fun, informative, inspiring, thought-provoking, knowledge-enhancing, stimulating and above all, engaging. If you don’t know what an infographic is, it’s the fusion of graphic design, with data handling. An infographic takes some data and turns it into an attractive poster which uses a variety of data representation techniques to communicate the message that emerges from the data.”

Visua.ly, a soon-to-be-released site to “Create, Share, Explore Great Visualizations” states in their intro video:

Visualization= Story+Data+Design

The video clip also points out the following three elements of an Infographic

• Design
• Journalism
• Analysis

which lead directly into the reasons why we should not only teach students WITH but also to allow the to CREATE their own infographics.

You can download the following flyer “Creating Infographics with your Students” as a pdf file.

Creating Infographics with your Students

Why teach with infographics?

• help students make sense of vast amount of information
• organize and group related information together
• tell a story
• connect information
• make raw data more appealing to most learners who are visual
• understand complex relationships between data over time
• analyze and interpret information

How to create your own infographics?

• Know (about) the information you want to represent
• Find a good and catchy title to hook the interest of potential viewers (What Makes a Great Infographic)
• Have information data already collected and available
• An infographic’s job is to make the viewers:
• aware of an issue, a problem and make them respond with an action or an attitude. (Designing an effective Infographic)
• grasp the implications of the data and the big picture (What Makes a Great Infographic)
• put data into context (Cool Infographics)
• You can ask the following questions (examples):
  • How has the information changed over time? (use timeline, line chart)
  • How is the information different based on geographic location (use maps)
  • How do the numbers compare (use bar graph, pie chart, individual blocks/clipart and ten-, hundred-blocks, use same graphic in proportionate size differences)
  • How does information differ or overlap in some areas (use Venn Diagram)
• Use a visual metaphor or analogy to represent your topic/information.
• Try to use a theme with supporting images & icons
• Use same colors to connect information
• Use proximity of objects to group information together
• Leave a section/space towards the bottom of page to include your data’s sources

What tools to use to create your infographic:

Creating charts and other components

• Excel/Numbers/Google Docs
• Wordle/Tagxedo
• Many Eyes
• Hohli: Online Chart Builders
• StatPlanet Map Builder

Pulling all together:

• Word/Pages
• Powerpoint/Keynote
• PhotoShop
• ComicLife (mac and iPad app)
• Visualize (iPad app)

Where do I get the clipart, photos or other images from?

• Microsoft Office Clipart Gallery
• Stock.xchng
• Open ClipArt Library
• Clker (Thank you  EdTech Toolbox for the tip)

Jeff Utecht, from the International School of Bangkok,  shared a great student infographic example via Twitter. It was created in Word and I believe is a great way for a beginning project and for students to “get their feet wet”.

Created in Word

Resources:

• Infographics: Intersecting Art and Science
• Infographics as Creative Assessments by Kathy Schrock
• Infographics at School
• Langwitches Delicious Links tagged “infographics”
• Langwitches Delicious Links tagged “infographics_examples”
• Langwitches Delicious Links tagged “infographics_tools“

Have you created infographics with students? Please share the link to the image or document. Seeing examples created by students is the best way to show other educators that “this is do-able”.

As an extension to my first blog post “Add a Global Perspective to your Google Search“, I wanted to add a video that was inspired by last week’s keynote presentation by Alan November at CMI 2011.

If we want web literate students, we need to be web literate educators. Please share how you add global perspective to a Google Search? What are some tips and tricks of the trade to support your students in becoming web literate?

Images like the following ones, visualize for me the urgency for all of us to become information literate to wade through the incredible, ever increasing, amount of information being created and shared with the world.

licesed under CC by will-lion

Lincensed under CC by verbeeldingskr8

We are with no doubt in the age of information overload and IN DIRE NEED of knowing how to filter in order to get to the information we need. Think about Clay Shirky’s quote below.

Clay Shirky

Information Overload

In comes the idea of becoming a Curator of Information.

“Curating” is defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as:

Select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).

Digital Curation, Curated Learning & Collective Curation?

I have started hearing and reading about the terms “Digital Curation”, “Curated Learning” and “Collective Curation” as well. Naturally it intrigued me. What does that mean? How can I bring it into the classroom? How can “curated learning” be connected to the idea of teachers and students creating their own textbooks?

Digital Curation is defined in Wikipedia as:

the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation is generally referred to the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, historians, and scholars.

In a fabulous article, Jeff Cobb, on his blog Mission to Learn asks Who Are Your Curators? (Thank you to Mike Amante for pointing me to the description of the ISTE panel discussion he will be participating in at the end of the month and all the included resources)

The idea behind curators and content curation is that there is such a flood of new content pouring through the Internet pipes these days that being aware of all of it and sorting it out in meaningful ways is simply not possible. Curators are people or organizations that do the hard work of sifting through the content within a particular topic area or “meme” and pulling out the things that seem to make most sense. This effort involves significantly more than finding and regurgitating links, though.

Cobb continues by pointing out two opportunities for the life long learner. The first one is to FIND great curators and the second one is to BE a great curator.

Curated Learning

How can this concept of “curation” of information be brought into the “classroom” (however you define the classrooms of the present/future and how it should/could look like)? If we can use Cobb’s suggestion and teach/coach our students to Number 1) find and connect to great curators and Number 2) be great curators for their own network, then we have moved closer to understanding Shirky’s warning about information overload and filter failure. “Quality” curation takes higher level thinking skills. It requires responsibility towards your network who rely on you to filter information on a specific topic. Curation requires the ability to organize, categorize, tag and know how to make the content available to others and to be able to format and disseminate it via various platforms.

How can we take advantage of  Collective Curation?

Here is a short video clip explaining the concept of Collective Curation

I think the following questions are worthwhile exploring for the learner in ourselves, but also for our students (elementary school and up). Facilitating the role of being a curator fits in perfectly with the role of “researcher”, Alan November suggests in his Digital Learning Farm model.

• What tools do I use to curate?
• How can I use my network to filter and find quality information?
• How can/do I contribute and become the filter for others?

Tools that Support and Facilitate Curation of Information:

• RSS Readers
  • Google Reader
    subscribe
    bundles
• We based Curation Tools
  • ScoopIt
    Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic!
    Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant streams
    Publish it to your favorite social media or to your blog
  • CuratedBy
    A growing collection of topics & interest edited, organized and curated by everyone. Follow the topics you are interested in or create and share your own topics with everyone else.
  • PaperLi
    Create your newspaper. Today. Turn Twitter and Facebook into online newspapers in just a few clicks.Treat your readers to fresh news daily.
  • Bundlr
    Bundlr is a new and free tool for online curation: clipping, aggregation and sharing web content easily.With Bundlr you can create bundles of any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets and links. Cover real-time breaking news from your sources. Wrap up an event with a collection of online feedback. Build a page where you pick the most relevant content on your area of expertise.
  • PearlTrees
    Pearltrees is the social curation community. It’s the place where you can organize, discover and share the stuff you like on the web.
  • LiveBinders
    Your 3-ring binder for the Web. Collect your resources. Organize them neatly and easily. Present them
• Social Bookmarking
  • Delicious
  • Diigo
• Blogs
  • categories
  • tags

Further Resources:

• Teachers as Curators of Learning (Edutopia)
• Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Age of Curation (Wired)
• Content Curating: Learning from Others

The issue of copyright came up with our 7th graders as they were creating Gloggs about different characters of a story. The Language Arts teacher asked me to join them to reinforce and discuss copyright, creative commons, public domain and fair use. Not an easy task…

I decided to show the class the ~10 minute The Fair(y) Use Tale video clip.

At the same time, I wanted them to take notes collaboratively. I chose to create a Today’s Meet chat room and then directed them to log in by sharing the URL with them. To make sure that all of them were in the “room” and signed in with their first names only, we performed a simple roll call by asking to quickly write a “Hello”. That let me know too that all of them knew how to post to the channel.

Sign in and Roll Call

We had a talk about:

• appropriateness (or not) about social comments to the channel like “This is sooooooo cooool!!!!!! or “You said this already…”
• How do we focus on the content?
• spelling and format- text talk ok? full sentences? Length? 140 characters or less?
• collaborative writing: don’t repeat what the person before you shared, add something new
• note taking: What is important from the video? What will help us later remember key points of the content?
• organization of the notes: How can we show when a new segment starts in the video? How will this reflect in the notes?
• multitasking: listening, summarizing, writing, reading

7th graders backchanneling while watching movie clip

As we switched the Todaysmeet chat screen on the projector to the video, we reminded students that their teacher was the chat room moderator and would be following along what they were writing. We made sure we stopped the video at appropriate intervals to switch back to the chat screen to go over the notes they had taken so far. We also started asking them what they thought would be discussed next or if questions they had would be answered in the next segment? That helped them focus on content and listen in on specific facts.

Organizing and pulling out information

The TodaysMeet log was copied and pasted into a Google Doc that was shared with all the students. Then the “Backchannel Clean-up” started. Google Docs allows all collaborators to edit the document at the same time. You will see each other’s cursor in different colors and with their username attached.Remember that the backchannel log will appear in reverse chronological order.

Someone is responsible for:

• deleting the time stamp and author’s name from each Today’s Meet entry
• deleting duplicate entries
• double checking for fact accuracy
• adding (if they were not added via Today’s Meet) and bolding relevant segment titles
• add bullets, if appropriate, for visual clarity

After the clean-up is completed, students can add further notes that were missed during the live backchannel or connections to other information or facts (via links) that they thought of later.

I can also see a student use different highlighter colors in Google Docs to color-code and group certain information and segments.

Using a backchannel tool like Today’s Meet, is a great way to give your students the role of “Official Scribe”. The official scribe is one of the six roles Alan November advocates to empower learners. Alan furthermore says that

Do all of your students take excellent notes everyday? What if there were online collaboration tools that would give your class the opportunity to collaboratively build one set of perfect notes? Using a shared blog, wiki or another collaborative writing tool like Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) students can share this responsibility and create a detailed set of notes that can be used by the entire class.

Students leaving a lesson with the PERFECT NOTES….We are getting there…

Adapted from Alan November (pp.188-193), Curriculum 21 (ASCD, 2010) by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.

Interested in other blog posts about upgrading and teaching note taking and summarizing to your students? Take a look a:

• Taking Notes- Summarizing Information- 2nd Grade Style by Langwitches
• Note taking to aid remembering and understanding by Maggie Hos-McGrane
• Notaking by Leslie Healey
• How to Teach Summarizing: A Critical Learning Skill for Students by Peter Pappas

Have you written a blog post about note taking? Do you have ideas and resources to share? Leave a comment with a link on this post or use the Twitter Hashtag #notetaking to add your voice.

I remember when I placed in the top three of an international writing contest for students in German schools abroad. My essay “What is typical German” was published in a magazine. I was  proud as I could be to have my work “published” for the first (and only) time as a student.

Times have changed…

We are pushing teachers and students to blog , wiki, podcast, and video conference. We are upgrading our teacher toolbox to include web based tools to engage, motivate and connect our students locally and globally. We are asking them to create, produce, share and collaborate online. Publishing students’ work can be as easy as hitting a button.

But…

…we can’t forget to update our policies at school to reflect these changes.

As the 21st century learning team was looking at the current Media Release of our school, we realized that it did not address any of the media creation and publishing concerns associated with these new tools nor the philosophy behind sharing, authentic audiences, collaboration and anytime/anywhere accessiblity. It “only” addressed permission to have:

• images of students used as marketing and promotional purposes
• photos of students published in a school newsletter  or bulletins (paper version)
• video by the local news media
• images published on the school website

The media release clearly did not address the school’s move towards cloud based storage and digital creations to be shared with an authentic global audience.

I started to research other schools’ media and publishing releases.  There was clearly a trend that most of them were outdated and  addressed Internet access, images and videos published for traditional media outlets and  possibly for a school website. Very few addressed the use of digital portfolios, blogs, wikis, video conferences or other web based tools with content created and published  in the cloud.

See some examples I came across below.

Internet, "media coverage", images and videos published on Internet

Published in print, media, broadcast or video

Traditional media and website

Traditional Media & Internet Resrtrictions

Mentions website and podcast

In order to be transparent and to comply with what we ask our parents to sign, it was time to craft a new Media & Publishing Release for our school.

I sent a request on Twitter to share the releases others had put together to address the shift towards publishing students’ work.

Richard Byrne pointed me to an Internet and Media Publishing Consent and Waiver Form by  Tim Landeck, Director, Technology Services from the Pajaro Valley Unified School District

These templates can be downloaded, modified, and printed to obtain parental consent for students who publish their work and/or photos and videos online. A signed consent form allows the school or district to also publish photographs and videos of students.

• English template (Word®)
• Spanish template (Word®)

The above template was the one, that addressed the most points we wanted to cover in an updated media release. Take a look, download if you want to, edit and in the end share back by publishing and making it accessible to others. You can leave a comment with a link to your media release on this post. Media & Publishing Release

Part I of Using Social Bookmarking in Schools and with your Students attempted to point out the skills and  literacies involved and required when using social bookmarking tools to its full potential. I looked at the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy as well as 21st century skills to see where social bookmarking fit in.

Part II takes a 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.

How can we take advantage of Social Bookmarking in our schools?

Once you have decided on a social bookmarking service, it is time to look at the reasons how you could and why you possibly should use social bookmarking in your school and/or in your classroom. Remember that it is NOT about the tools we use with our students, but the skills we are exposing them to and want them to get proficient in.

Alan November in Curriculum 21 by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (ASCD, 2010) talks about six new roles for developing empowered learners. Social bookmarking allows your students to be researchers, which is one of these six roles. It can be the perfect venue to make students meaningful contributors to their own learning as November advocates.

Adapted from Alan November (pp.188-193), Curriculum 21 (ASCD, 2010) by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.

Teachers and Schools can:

• organize, filter and bookmark resources for their students
• categorize bookmarks for specific classes, projects, grade levels, units, lessons, areas of interest (Take a look at top five reasons for using social bookmarking by Vicki Davis)
• use a common group tag or hashtag to share resources of interest to all students in the same level class across sections (Thanks to @lrosen)
• reinforce lessons on primary vs. secondary sources. Discussion of what makes high quality sources. Periodic (informal) reviews of collected and shared bookmarks by students (Thanks to @kyteacher)
• use social bookmarking to collect sources & evaluate the information together with students. The goal is to find credible & relevant sources (Thanks to @learnfromcarson)
• extract and use the same tags as experts in a field. It feeds “Phd” quality links to students (Thanks to @coolcatteacher)
• create a school account on one of the social bookmarking sites and come up with specific tags for your school, ex.”MJGDS_science”, “MJGDS_language_arts”, “MJGDS_5thtgrade”, “MJGDS_parent_resources”.
• share these “specially-created-for-your-school” tags with school’s faculty, asking them to start using these tags when their bookmark with their own account.
• share a “parent_resource” tag with your parent community to subscribe to or embed the RSS feed of the specific tag on your school website.

Students can:

• need to evaluate and interpret information
• tag bookmarks (their own and/or the ones collected by their teacher)
• summarize bookmarks (their own and/or the ones shared by teacher)
• take advantage of “experts in the field” (by subscribing to their RSS for specific tags)
• learn to search for relevant information beyond “googling”
• collaborate with other members of a study group (local or global)

We can’t assume that by simply giving students access to a social bookmarking classroom or school account, they will automatically know how to research, evaluate, tag, categorize or annotate. You can read on Bill Ferriter’s DigitallySpeaking Wiki that:

Many of today’s teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together. The results can be disastrous. Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.

Continue reading on the wiki and you will find, in Alan November’s fashion, assigned roles to students as they bookmark and annotate. Bill Ferriter does an incredible job in outlining these roles and makes several handouts available for teachers to download:

• Handout_SocialBookmarkingRoles.pdf
• Handout_SharedAnnotationRoles.pdf

Shared Bookmarking Roles:

The Original Thinker:

Any group of students working together with social bookmarking applications depends on having a healthy collection of weblinks worth exploring. The Original Thinker’s role in a social bookmarking group is to bring content to the collective table by searching for websites connected to the current topic of study. [...]

The Reliability Cop:

The Reliability Cop must know everything that there is to know about sniffing out websites that just can’t be trusted and they must be willing to review every website that your social bookmarking group spotlights as worthy of continued study. When they find sites that are “fishy,” it is your Reliability Cop’s job to delete them from your shared collection. [...]

The Connector:

The Connector’s role in a social bookmarking group is to be on the constant lookout for links related to these kinds of secondary themes. Without Connectors, social bookmarking groups will struggle to build the kinds of background knowledge necessary for understanding their primary topics. [...]

Johnny Opposite:

Johnny Opposite’s role in a social bookmarking group is to make sure that personal biases don’t taint the quality of a set of links by intentionally searching for sites that represent alternative viewpoints on any hot-button issue that a group is trying to explore. [...]

The Mind Reader:

The Mind Reader’s role in a social bookmarking group is to poke through these tag libraries looking for sites that may be valuable. [...] Essentially, the Mind Reader is looking into the collective brain of other users of social bookmarking services to tap into materials that their group may have missed. [...]

The Cleaning Crew:

Understanding the important role that accurate titles, clean descriptions and common tags play in efficient learning, the Cleaning Crew is constantly reviewing the bookmarks added to a shared collection and polishing incomplete entries.

Bill continues by reminding educators that the final goal of educators is not to teach them the technical “know-how” behind one web tool or another, but to expose them to “powerful learning” techniques that ‘depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together”. He lists yet five more roles for students to take on as they use annotation tools.

Shared Annotation Roles:

Consider introducing the following shared annotation roles to your students before they begin using Diigo for reading together. Doing so will ensure that shared annotation experiences result in the kinds of high-level thinking that you expect:

Captain Cannonball:

[...] With a critical eye and an understanding of a group’s interests and responsibilities, Captain Cannonball should find four or five key points in a shared reading to highlight and craft initial questions for other readers to consider. Captain Cannonball’s choices are important. The success of a shared reading often depends on the quality of the first comments and questions added.

The Provocateur:

[...] The Provocateur’s role in a shared annotation group is to stir things up a bit, challenging the thinking of peers in the conversation. Directly responding to comments made by others, the Provocateur works to remind everyone that there are two sides to every story.

The Middle Man:

[...] The Middle Man’s role in a shared annotation group is to carefully consider the different viewpoints being shared in a conversation looking for connections. Middle Men are often the glue that holds contentious conversations together.

The Author’s Worst Nightmare:

[...] Bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to the conversation, the Author’s Worst Nightmare looks to question statements made and conclusions drawn throughout a shared reading. While groups may eventually decide that an author’s assertions are spot-on, the Author’s Worst Nightmare’s responsibility is to make sure that every point is put through the fires of shared reflection.

The Repo Man:

[...] The Repo Man’s role in a shared annotation group is to carefully monitor conversations, looking for summary points that define exactly what it is that a group learned together during the course of a collective reading. While the Repo Man’s real work begins as a conversation is ending, he or she must stay “in tune” with the thoughts and ideas being shared as a conversation develops in order to identify important “takeaways” that a group can learn from.

Bill’s DigitallySpeaking Wiki contains a wealth of resources and downloadables for you to explore around the topic of social bookmarking with students. I encourage everyone to click their way to the wiki and explore.

How are you using social bookmarking in your school and with your students. Please share.

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

All of our classrooms at MJGDS have their own blog. Several grade levels are piloting individual student portfolios based on a blogging platform.

• How do you keep up with all this information?
• How do you filter and organize it?
• How can you avoid having to go back to blogs to check if the owner has updated with a new post?

You can download this How-To-Guide for Subscribing via RSS & Google Reader to Classroom Blogs as a pdf.

According to Wikipedia an

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.

RSS Feed Icons

RSS in Plain English Video

Google Reader in Pain English Video

Start scanning websites you frequent often for different variations of this RSS feed icon. Some will have the icon listed in a prominent place on the website, others will just have a text link in the sidebar of footer of the page or some will have NO sign that there is an RSS feed available.

You can subscribe, among others to the following RSS feeds:

• ·      Blogs
• ·      Wikis
• ·      Google Searches for specific topics or keywords
• ·      Twitter feeds of individual users
• ·      Facebook feeds for individual users or pages

If you are not sure if  a certain page has an RSS feed available and you are using Firefox as your browser, you check for an RSS icon on the right side in the URL Address box. If a feed is available you can see the RSS icon, if there is no icon, then there is no RSS feed available for this site.

Create a Google Account (if you don’t have one already), sign in and and go to Google Reader- http://www.google.com/reader .

When you are at a website that has a RSS feed, you have a few options available to you.

Copy the URL (Web Address) of the site you want to subscribe to and then paste it into the  “Add Subscription” box

In your Firefox browser, click on the RSS icon in the URL Address bar

A dropdown menu will appear. Choose the RSS feed

Make sure you select Google from the dropdown menu, you might want to check off the option “Always use Google to subscribe to feeds”, then click the “Subscribe Now” button.

Click “Add to Google Reader”

Click on dropdown menu of  “Feed Settings”

Choose an already created folder or choose “New Folder” to create and name.

Your RSS feed will be filed and available in the Subscription Folders in the left sidebar.

A new and unread post will be shown in bold letters.

In order to read the post, click on the title. The post will drop down.

If you would like to read leave a comment on the post  or look directly on the blog click on the arrow  to the right of the post’s title.

You can also star, organize (tag), share or e-mail the posts by choosing and clicking on one of the icon at the bottom of the post in Google Reader.

Getting an entire school on board with a digital communication platform aka classroom blog is a PROCESS. A (baby) step by (baby) step process… As the interaction between teachers, school, students, parent and global community increases, so does the need for other “little” pieces of 21st century literacies. For example

• Social and global networking
• Global awareness
• Social Bookmarking
• Copyright

As teachers and students become PRODUCERS of content on their blogs it is becoming essential that we model good behavior when it comes to Copyright issues. Rodd Lucier, aka as  thecleversheep ( @thecleversheep on Twitter) has contributed a fabulous presentation to the K12 Online Conference 2010.

Creative Commons: What Every Educator Needs to Know

Here is presentation I had created in the past to give a brief overview of different copyright licenses.

The two videos mentioned in the slideshow are:
Copyright and Fair Use

Creative Commons: Wanna Work Together?

I am seeing more and more “InfoGraphics” springing up everywhere. They are catching my visual eye immediately.

As a native German speaker, I love compound words and it comes naturally to me to want to take them apart in order to create meaning of the word: “Info” and “Graphic”- Information that is written or drawn…

A quick search for the the definition of “InfoGraphic” reveals on Wikipedia:

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge

In PC Magazine it reads:

An umbrella term for illustrations and charts that instruct people, which otherwise would be difficult or impossible with only text. Infographics are used worldwide in every discipline from road maps and street signs to the many technical drawings.

On Dave Gray’s Blog Communication Nation, he explains:

WHAT IS AN INFOGRAPHIC?

1. It’s a visual explanation that helps you more easily understand, find or do something.
2. It’s visual, and when necessary, integrates words and pictures in a fluid, dynamic way.
3. It stands alone and is completely self-explanatory.
4. It reveals information that was formerly hidden or submerged.
5. It makes possible faster, more consistent understanding.
6. It’s universally understandable.

What I am reading out of these definitions are the following words: Information, Knowledge, Visualization, and Communication! Those words are some of the puzzle pieces to 21st Century Skills and Literacies.

Immediately I am wondering:

• How can I create my own infographic?
• How can I use this to teach students?
• How can I teach students to make their OWN infographics?
• How can I use infographics in Professional Development?

I found the following infographic explaining the steps in creating an infographic. What seems to be important to remember is:

The Challenge with creating an infographic is not the Graphic Design, it’s getting the data to the point where it’s streamlined enough to see the visual metaphor.

Speaking about metaphors and visualization takes me back to Daniel Pink’s book “A whole New Mind”. I wrote about Pink’s quote MQ (Metaphor Quotient) is as important as the IQ a while back. Infographics might fit the bill when it comes to incorporating many of the qualities of teaching and learning in our time and age.

What do you think? Have you incorporated infographics in your lessons? Have you created your own infographics for your students or asked them to create their own?

I am off to think about creating my first infographic. Stay tuned for what I will come up with.

Mindflash Blog

Here are a few examples of infographics that caught my eye:

• Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
• College degrees- earning power
• Evolution of the Book
• 50 Great examples of infographics
• Infographics Showcase

Interested in creating your own infographic? Here are a few links to help you along:

• Wild Apricot Blog : Make Your Own Infographic
• Designing “The World of Programming” Tutorial