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

I apologize if you have received multiple RSS posts titled “Links for 10-10-10″.

For the last few years, I had Delicious automatically post my bookmarked sites on the Langwitches Blog. Since yesterday the widget has been acting up and has posted and re-posted the same bookmarks HOURLY.

I have discontinued the automatic postings of my bookmarked links from Delicious.

If these links are normally  of value to you, please subscribe directly to the Langwitches Delicious RSS feed here ( http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/langwitches ). To continue or start  receiving Langwitches Blog Posts (without Delicious Links), please subscribe to the following feed- http://langwitches.org/blog/feed/

Yesterday, during our last technology professional development workshop of the year, I introduced a group of our elementary school faculty to the concept of a custom Google Search Engine. Everyone present was invited to be a collaborator and created (if they did not have one) or signed into their google account. I created a step-by-step tutorial for adding a URL to our custom search engine. We are also encouraging faculty to start adding sites through out the summer months, when planning for next school year.

Dear Faculty,

In an elementary school setting we are hesitant to go to a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, and simply type in a keyword or phrase in front of our class. You will receive millions of search results. It is a lottery to click on a link. You cannot be assured that the website you are about to display will be age- appropriate in text, graphics, videos, advertisement and content for your students. We also worry about our students when they are at home and needing research material for projects and homework assignments.

You are invited to collaborate in growing our very own San Jose Episcopal Day School Google SEARCH ENGINE. This search engine will be accessible for students by going to http://www….
Students will be typing in their search keywords and phrases and will receive ONLY results from websites that have been added by collaborators of the our faculty . By adding relevant and pre-selected websites to our custom search engine, you are aiding your students to focus on content for their research, rather than quantity of information. They will become more efficient web searchers in a safe environment.

Please follow the steps to add a URL (website address, that starts with http://) to our custom search engine.

1- Go to http://www.google.com and click on sign in

2- Type in your e-mail and password, then click “sign in”.

3- After you signed in, click on “more”

4- Then click on “even more”

5- Click on “Custom Search”

6- Click on “Manage your existing search engines

7- Click on “Control Panel”

8- Click on “Include sites”

9- Open up a new tab or window in your Internet browser.
Go to the website you would like to add to SJEDS Custom Search Engine. Highlight the URL (http://www …) and right click on the URL to then copy the address. You can also use CTRL-C on your keyboard to copy after the URL is highlighted. Go back to the search engine and right click into the text box, then choose paste. You can also use CTRL-V on your keyboard to paste the URL after you clicked in the text box. After the URL is visible in the text box click on the “save” button.

10- Congratulations! You just added a valuable site to our search engine!

Remember that this search engine will be only as useful as the sites that are contributed by the faculty. If you are planning for your students to research a certain topic or subject and want to give them a more directed research focus, be sure to add YOUR pre-selected sites to our search engine.

Added thought:

If you want to make adding a URL to your Google Search Engine even easier, you can add a Google Marker button to your FireFox or Internet Explorer toolbar. That will automatically launch a annotation window. You must be logged into your google account though.  I might install this on all our teachers’ computers.

There are amazing conversations going on in the Web 2.0 world. Everybody agrees that it is hard to keep up with everything even to the point that keeping up is becoming a full time job. RSS is the best thing since sliced bread to gain a little advantage and stay informed once there are updates. No doubt about that…

…but as time passes my RSS reader (Google Reader) is getting overcrowded with 168 subscriptions and counting. I am sure that I am not the only one feeling that way, nor the one with the highest number of subscriptions. Many times I feel overwhelmed and have the feeling that some of the good conversations are falling through the cracks.

I have started keeping track of the conversations that I am interested in with a separate folder in Google Reader named creatively “Conversations”.

Any discussion on a Ning network automatically has an RSS button at the end of the page that invites you to subscribe to the discussion via RSS. I simply subscribe and add the feed to my “Conversation” folder.

Most blog sites have two different RSS feeds available. One for the posts and another for the comments. That Comment RSS delivers ALL comments to the blog, not only comments to a specific conversation. Some blogs are now giving you the option to be notified of a follow up comment via e-mail. That will depend on what blogging platform (Blogger, Worldpress, etc. ), theme and plugins you might be using if this option appears for your readers.

I had to add the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin to my blog in order to receive one of the the following choices on the bottom of each comment box.

(PS. If you are logged in as the administrator of the blog post, you will not see this option box in your browser. Log out as admin and refresh your browser to see it)

If you are a blogger and do not have an option for your readers to subscribe easily to a specific conversation, please consider adding that in order to make it easier for the rest of us to keep up with a good thread.

I am still on the hunt of a good plugin to be able to create an RSS feed of the comments for a specific post. Let me know if you are using one for your WordPress blog.