I was reading a post by Gardner Cambell this morning and I am glad that I did. Gardner introduced me to a Web 2.0 tool called Wordle - I must say, Wow. Wordle is a thought provoking tool that provides anyone who views it a visual representation of words. Hmm. It wraps around what we call tags (keywords) and creates an image around them.
Below is a visual representation (word cloud) of my delicious tags. Hmm…
Notice how it takes my tags (key words) and creates a cloud of it. It manipulates the text and wraps them together to create its own meaning.
Gardner in his post, provides a link to a visual cloud of Martin Luther King’s speech, I Have a Dream. I was amazed, what a great way to ‘hear’ this speech - visually.
This has tremendous potential for use in our classrooms. My suggestion, explore Wordle.
Students in the Instructional Technologies course I am teaching this summer are creating some good projects and organizing them into a Web portfolio. They are using googlepages for their portfolio and I must say that this tool only gets better and better. I thought I would share a few of the student portfolios (this is a large class) with you. If you like them, post a comment onto their blog to let them know. They will like that.
Our class wikibook is coming along nicely. Actually, the students have taken over and are doing a terrific job. They found good research to support their topics and have written a draft page on wikispaces for their portion of the book as a group or independently. Now, it is time to look at each draft in order to make suggestions for edits, provide comments, and begin to look at how interactivity and media can be incorporated onto the page to enhance the content, message, and meaning.
Reminder: This book is intended for K12 teachers and is being written by K12 teachers. The goal is to provide a resource for teachers to learn about information literacy topics, ideas, and skills. It is important that teachers meet the needs of their students and to enhance their classrooms by incorporating these ideas into their curriculum. Our hope, this book will help with this process.
Take a look and provide any and all suggestions that you have directly on the wiki document itself. As one of my students suggested, please provide many and all suggestions that you have!
I just heard about a Web site designed and maintained to get the community involved with public schools. How powerful. This is what collaboration is all about.
The site is based on the premise that the community should be involved with and in schools. The school community should share specific needs and the community at large should get involved to help fulfill them. This idea created by Dave Eggers and aided by Hot Studio is a great one. Take a few moments to explore. Most importantly get involved and spread the word!
Dave Eggers talk at this years TED conference
Take a look at this great collaborative community. The goal is to have 1,000 transformative projects within the year. Let’s help!
I find it interesting that each fiscal year in this country educators must fight the same battle over and over. The battle to keep the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program funded for another year. Each year educators send letters to Members of Congress to reject the President’s proposal to eliminate EETT and to restore funding for the program to its FY05 level ($496 million). How are we going to prepare our students if we do not have proper technology tools, resources, and support in our schools? Due to the consistent drop in funding this has been an occurring issue. The new eSchools study - Access, Adequacy, and Equity in Education Technology, indicates that problems continue to be vast and deep in our schools. How will they improve if federal funding continually drops?
My information literacy students are going to work on creating an information literacy book on Wikibooks. We are now in the initial stages of book creation. As anyone knows who has created a book or thought about creating a book this is a big task but an exciting one. I have had students do something similar in the past - the difference - it was a page within an existing Wikibook.
I like the idea of students working with Wikipedia in some shape or form. It is a good way to get a true experience in creating a shared public document. In this case, a shared public presentation of work that others, colleagues and other teachers from around the world, will potentially access and use. A lot goes into creating something public - from needing to ensure the information is accurate and necessary to ensuring that information gathered is done so ethically.
I hope that anyone who reads this posting helps to keep tabs on this project to ensure that it is and remains a quality product. The idea is to create a book for K12 teachers to learn about information literacy concepts and ideas in this digital world that we live in. Hopefully, this information will provide what teachers need to begin carefully evaluating information found on the Internet as well as carefully creating and using information for and on the Web.
This is a work in progress that will be developed through the semesters.
An article I was recently reading, Make Students Info Literate, in TechLearning Magazine, highlights Wikipedia. It suggests that teachers provide opportunities for students to work with Wikipedia in different ways in their classroom in order to teach and enhance skills of information literacy. Timely I think.
Below are some resources that came through my email today. I thought I would pass them on to you. They provide teachers with resources, activities, and most importantly ideas.
Science Whatzit!an online science learning project created by the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI), in collaboration with the Science Learning Network. Students can send the Science Whatzit Gremlin their science questions, queries, thoughts and ideas. They can also look on this site to find ideas for science projects.
Kennedy Center’s ARTSEDGEsite is giving the who, what, when were, and how of storytelling. There are also lesson plans.
eMentoring is a collaborative tool where adult penpal mentors, chosen by teachers, will mentor your students through reading and discussing books, via email, about curriculum-aligned topics.
COOL SCHOOL: Where Peace Rules!is an interactive computer game designed to teach children (ages 5 to 7) about conflict resolution.
Climate Change: Connections and Solutions consists of two 2-week curriculum units—one for middle school and one for high school. The units have critical thinking activities built in. Focus is the global problem of climate change. Students are expected to collaborate on finding possible solutions.
Mixing in Math offers 40 activities that can be used to “slip a little math” into students’ everyday routines.
WorldWide Telescope a project at Microsoft that incorporates astronomy, education and computing together to create a great tool and resource site.
My students in ITEC521 looked at information literacy from a personal viewpoint this week. They applied their understandings and their personal research to the term ‘information literacy.’ Through this process, they explored the deeper meaning of information literacy in the digital age. They designed a definition and then highlighted key points of the definition in graphic format.
I feel strongly that learners should personalize learning by taking information, transforming it to meet their specific needs and understandings. Once information has been personalized it is time for learners to push themselves further to move from their comfort zone (Vytgotsky would say - the zone of proximal development) in order to create a solid understanding of the content itself.
As life-long learners, we need to research, explore, personalize, reflect, and hopefully share our understandings so others can question and reflect in new ways. We also did this, here is how…
Next, students created a model of information literacy that applied to their specific needs and that they could apply to lessons for their students. Yes, there are many models that could have been used without creating a personal one. Again, I wanted each student to personalize the ideas and concepts that they were exploring to ensure that they had a good understanding of the model’s overall importance - personally and professionally.
Students in the class, researched and learned from other models and then created their own model - some are continuing to work on this. Creating a new model is difficult. To share this new knowledge, students created a wiki to post both their definition and model onto. Throughout the semester, students will use this model to explore, dig deeper, and share their new understandings with you. They may even alter the model as they begin to utilize it and apply its concepts to actual lessons and activities.
Each student did a terrific job, but I will only highlight a few in this posting. I randomly chose a few to share.
