Playing with Diigo

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Linus

I signed up with Diigo.com last year. Diigo is a social bookmarking site, very similar to Delicious. Both sites allow you to take the bookmarks that you would normally create in Explorer or Firefox and easily post them on a public website so that you can share them with other people. These are very handy sites for teachers (especially those who don’t know how to create a website) because they both allow you to setup a collection of links for a research assignment and then send your students to just one URL where all your sites are listed.

In other words, instead of separately writing down the websites and their URLs for my assignment on Sir John A Macdonald, and having the kids punch them into their browsers (and make lots of errors in the process) I can simply give them my Deliious link http://delicious.com/mrpuffin/sirjohna which has all the various sites listed.

Social bookmarking is handy on its own, but Diigo allows you to share bookmarks in a cool way. A group of people (students in my case) can share a common area to post their bookmarks. They can edit each other’s work and leave comments for each other.

This is really very cool for students collaborating on research projects. Yesterday I had students researching historical Canadian human rights issues pool their bookmarks in a Diigo group so they could each use the best of the material that the others had found. The login of the person who posted the link is put beside the posted link so you, as teacher, can easily see who’s contributing and who’s not. It’s quite easy to hold people accountable.

You also have an ability to edit most things. I haven’t checked out everything yet, but I think you can edit almost anything potentially offensive that your students could post.

There is an educator version of Diigo, as well, which allows you to create users (without them having to submit e-mail addresses) and create groups for your users to work in. Understandably, that’s incredibly useful in a classroom setting.

The only downside I’ve seen so far was the length of time it took Diigo to process my application for an educator account. I first applied last May and it seems to have been approved last week. Admittedly, all of this service is free (including the education upgrade) so I can’t really complain, but with the lagtime involved I wouldn’t plan on using Diigo really soon after you apply for it.

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Saving ourselves from technology

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Linus

On Monday there was a train accident a block or two from school. The rumor going around was that it was a pedestrian-train accident. It’s something I find fairly amazing since there are an abudance of flashing lights and guard rails at that rail crossing, it seems amazing that anyone could not know a train was coming. Yet somehow all the the technology available didn’t prevent this collision.

That might reflect how responsibly we use technology. Technology can be used positively, or negatively but ultimately if it saves us or hurts us really depends on what we do with it. That point was brought home this week when I came across PleaseRobMe.com which looks how people use Twitter. I use Twitter to keep in touch with other teachers around the globe and share lesson ideas. It’s my source of professional development without even leaving the school.

Others don’t use Twitter in such a positive way. PleaseRobMe.com highlights the tweets on Twitter where someone has announced to the world that they are not at home and that, consequently, their home is available for burglaring.

Most people I know who use Twitter (or other social networks) will keep in contact with colleagues and learn from them, but having established a level of friendliness, they will very readily give out personal information in a very pubic way. You know exactly where they are within seconds of them announcing it.

PleaseRobMe.com highlights the need for caution when we use social networks. They can do so much to help us, but without safeguards, they can do so much to hurt us, too.

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So what did I learn?

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Linus

I recently had my students create and record some songs on the Prime Ministers of Canada. It was an interesting experience from which I learned at least as much as the kids did, though about different things. They learned a bit about each of Canada’s 22 Prime Ministers, how to use Audacity software and how to sing badly. So what did I learn?

  1. For a project like this set very specific requirements.
    •  How many lines long should it be?
    • Should your song rhyme?
    • What will the teacher tolerate in terms of choice of melody for the song? (Can it be copyrighted? Can it be rock, country or a nursery rhyme? Two girls took the tune of a popular hymn, much to my surprise.)
    • Without specific requirements, it’s really hard to tell if the kids’ are reaching your objectives or not.
  2. There’s a certain amount of chaos to be expected with a project like this
    • You can try to keep it quiet all you like, but when the kids need to find music they can remember, or when they have to sing it will be noisy, like it not. Get ready for it.
    • Noise can be good. You need to figure out the difference between good noise and bad and that’s a fine line with something like this.
  3. As much as some kids do horrible songs, some do wonderful ones.
    • Most kids used the recording software to disguise their voices. I have quite a few kids who apparently sound like chipmunks.
    • Some kids picked well known songs and adapted them in creative ways. The most interesting song was probably “Why can’t we be Prime Ministers?”
    • Other students actually created their own music. It wasn’t brilliant, but it gave them an opportunity to express themselves they wouldn’t normally have.
  4. Giving kids new opportunities is worth it.
    • Not all kids excel at essays, or projects, or PowerPoints, or drawings, or whatever you can dream up.
    • This project gave other kids an opportunity.
Posted in Social Studies | 2 Comments

UnConferencing History Education

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Linus

This morning I read a great post by Joel Ralph of Canada’s National History Society. In his position as the education guy with the History Society, Joel spends a lot of time working with teachers in general, and at conferences in particular. He’s seen how a lot of history teachers meet for PD sessions and he has some doubts about how it works.

What’s the problem? Teachers who teach the same discipline all show up at these conferences, but the conference does “not actually provide space and time for them to talk to each other.” In other words, as teachers we go to conferences, listen to and watch presentations, and never actually talk to the many people there who are working in the history classrooms doing the same things we do.

Joel wants more of an “unconference” where people are free to talk and mill about with others in an environment with limited structure. Lightning Talks may be featured to give the event some cohesion and talking points to start conversations.

I like Joel’s ideas. I know him and he’s a bright guy so I don’t doubt his ideas. What I’m a bit skeptical about is the teachers. I’ve tried coaxing teachers into sharing ideas, lesson plans, or exams face-to-face and online and it’s not easy. Teachers don’t readily share. We learn quickly to scrabble and collect all the resources we can so our own classroom can be better and our own lives can be a little bit simpler. We don’t quickly share our ideas because if another teacher takes our idea and uses it in his classroom, we may not be able to use it in our own.

We tend to go to conferences the same way we teach. Most teachers stand in front of the room and the class is very teacher-centric. The notable exception to that is computer teachers, especially those dealing with new media that emphasizes collaboration. These teachers tend to go alongside their students and spend time coaching rather than lecturing. Lecturing is still necessary from time to time, but it’s not the focus.

In the same way, most teachers expect to be told what to do by some authority figure, rather than gently nudged and coaxed into doing something in a sharing session. The notable exception to that seems to be computer teachers. The Manitoba Association of Computing Educators has held a couple of brilliant and unorthodox unconferences that Joel would’ve really appreciated. (One was even held in a pub.)

Can an unconference work with history teachers? Maybe. I hope so because I think Joel’s right and the current system of conferences needs updating. Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones are changing the way kids communicate, and as teachers we can learn from that and figure out better ways for us to communicate. While some of the things the kids are doing aren’t great, a lot bear some investigation. Milling about with a bit less structure can lead to surprising conversations and unexpected insights.

It’s risky. Trying something new in your classroom or your professional development can lead to miserably disappointing results. But the only way to test an idea’s brilliance is to take it and run with it. If we never try anything new, we’ll never know if there’s a better way.

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Google Buzz

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Linus

I just checked into my GMail and discovered I now had Google “Buzz.” I’m not yet exactly what it does, but here’s what Google says about it.

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The enthusiam of the new

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Linus

A new semester has started and, in addition to my Social Studies courses, I get to teach a bunch of computer stuff. I”m always amazed at this point in the semester just how keen the kids are. I’m showing them a few new things that are old hat to me (blogs, wikis, Audacity) but are new to the kids. Because these things are new to the students, they embrace them with enthusiasm.

It’s a good wake up call for me as a teacher. What we can do with computers is practically limitless when compared with what we had when I was my students’ age (I still adore my 64!) and when I see them react excitedly, I wake up one more time and see just a few of the things that can be done.

I’m trying to spill this enthusiasm over into my Social Studies class. To start off this year I’m having the kids write and record songs about all 22 Prime Ministers. Goofy? Yes, but it gets the kids interested and excited because, frankly, I’m the only teacher just odd enough to try something like this.

The new, the different, and the unusual can create excite. Looking at the familiar through fresh eyes can make us better teachers and better learners, too.

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Singing a song

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Linus

I’ve been busy the last few weeks and haven’t blogged much at all, much to my embarassment, but I’ve still been up to interesting things in class.

I’ve spent much of the past few hours on this prep day trying to dream up and put together an assignment for my Grade 9s for later this week or early next week. Though I teach them Social Studies, I still think knowing some basic history (which isn’t necessarily part of Social Studies) is pretty important.

I’d like it if all of my students would at least be able to recognize the names of all 22 Canadian prime ministers. To that end, I’m going to tell them a little bit about each, and then have them get together in small groups and write songs about the PMs. Music seems to be a great learning tool, so I figure that if I can get the kids to write a song summarizing all 22 of the prime ministers, then it will help them keep track of them.

We’re not looking for brilliance in the writing (though we have a strong music program at this school, so I may be surprised). All I really want is a bit of rhythm and rhyme sung to a recognizable tune whether that’s something complex and funky, or something simple like Frere Jacques. (I guess we can’t use Happy Birthday to You since that’s under copyright.)

I hope to record the songs using Audacity and then play them back for the class.  It should be an interesting experience. I hope it works.

Posted in History, Social Studies | Leave a comment

Playing with Pictures to Show the Past

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Linus

Over the last few months, I’ve been exposed to a lot of people who, in one way or another, are using photos in their classroom. When I see other folks doing something cool, I start to wonder if I could do something similar myself.

I finally had an idea. My students have been looking at human rights issues for their Social Studies course, things like women’s suffrage, the Japanese Internment, and the Chinese Head Tax. What I did was challenge my students to reduce one of these issues to six key moments. Then they’re to act out these six key moments, and take pictures of them.

They have to select the best shot of each moment, cropping, brightening, and otherwise editing the photos as necessary. From there they have to log on to Big Huge Labs. (Big Huge Labs has an educator option where you register and then generate IDs for your students. They don’t need e-mail addresses to log on, and you get to see their projects as they work on them, if you choose.) Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker lets the kids upload the photos and set them up in a nice 3 by 2 grid (which is just the right proportions to print off as a 4 by 6 print).

Once the kids save their mosaic on my flash drive (I keep a separate drive for just these sorts of occasions. I ‘m not getting my important school stuff accidentally ruined by one careless student), I’ll get them developped. Hopefully, we’ll have neat pictorial summaries of the particular human rights incident each group did brought together in a postcard like format.

This is the theory. In the next few days I’ll see how it turns out.

Posted in History, Social Studies | Leave a comment

Thinking about best practices

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Linus

I was catching up on my Twitter reading this morning as I prepared some notes for my students about the evolution of human rights legislation in Canada. (Okay, I know the topic isn’t exciting, but if we do it quick we can keep them awake.)

As educators, we’re always told to warn our students to be cautious about what personal information we post on the web. We need to be careful about even giving away our real name, which is why most of us have handles or pseudonyms that we post under.

Yet the Twitter posts I was reading today and on other occasions give away an awful lot of information. Presenters at conferences tell when they’re getting on their plane. Basically they’re advertising that their home is empty and available to anyone who might want to take advantage of their situtation.

Other people will tell you what school they work at, and then they’ll complain about a conflict with the their principal, colleague or student.  If the offending party ever reads that tweet, I imagine the consequences will be quite unpleasant.

From still others I’ve learned the gender and approximate age of all their kids. That’s exactly the sort of information we warn our students not to let out because there are creepy people who will take advantage of that knowledege.

Administrators are often nervous to the point of paranoia about letting students online, and this is inspite of assurances by teachers that their kids will conduct themselves safely and properly while online. I can’t help but see the principals’ point of view, given some of the tweets I’ve seen educators post on Twitter lately.

As teachers, we’re giving away a LOT of personal information to an audience we don’t know. If we give away information that we probably shouldn’t, how much can we be trusted to keep our students’ information safe while online?

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Common Craft does it again

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Linus

Common Craft’s latest video is Cloud Computing in Plain English.  Like all their previous video’s, this one is a masterpiece of simplification. They make something complex like cloud computing simple to understand. The only down side to this video is that, unlike many of their previous efforts, it’s not posted on YouTube (and is only on their site) meaning you can’t embed it in one of your own webpages. Even so, it’s quite cool.

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