I was playing around with the tool VoiceThread and enjoyed myself immensely. The idea of Web 2.0 is exciting. I love the ability to create and share content with the masses. VoiceThread is such a tool, it allows you to create presentations and then allows others to comment directly onto them. The comments can be text, video, or voice. Imagine the possibilities of this tool in an online classroom. Imagine providing opportunities for your students to post a presentation that they have worked hard creating. Imagine if your students then receive feedback or input from a global audience. Imagine.
This is knowledge creation and sharing of content at its best.
I was reading an article this morning in ISTE’s Technology and Learning journal for November that caught my eye. Well actually, two articles caught my eye and I thought I would share them with you. In both articles technology is emphasized as a tool to support and challenge learners. Technology is not a standalone device that is seen as the center of learning but instead a tool that is enhanced by solid teaching strategies.
The first article is Digital Storytelling by Regina Royer and Patricia Richards. Within the article the authors identify 16 strategies that have been found to enhance reading comprehension in students. These strategies include active listening, cooperative learning, fluency, graphic organizers, mental imagery, question asking, reciprocal teaching, sequencing, summarizing, and vocabulary. These strategies are incorporated into the five pillars of effective reading which is outlined by the National Reading Panel. The authors tie these strategies into content goals, scaffolding, and multimedia literacy.
Many tools popped into my head when I read this article. Below are a few.
The second article is about technology professional development. It is entitled, Staff Development Café Style (PDF), by Jennifer Arns. I love this title. What a warm cozy feeling you get just from the title. I am already imaging the smell of fresh brewed coffee and pastries just waiting for me to dig in and enjoy. I am sitting with friends discussing issues of the day and we are sharing our solutions and or providing suggestions. Hey, this is a great idea for a technology professional development session isn’t it. It involves collaboration, excitement, and a supportive environment where tools and ideas can be shared and tried.
What a great idea.
I am happy with this first phase of the Wikibook project. Each student in the online Information Literacy course participated by researching, writing, ultimately conveying this new found information in an interactive and visual manner. Not to mention, each student learned how to work with wikibooks itself, within a relatively short period of time. This activity provided good experience on many levels but definitely it highlighted information literacy skills in our digital age. Future classes will work on this book by adding to it and ensuring that the content is relevant, accurate, and timely.
Lately, I have been juggling classes, writing a book, finishing a grant, and trying to have just a bit of a summer. I am not sure I have achieved my last task - a bit of a summer - but, I am hanging on in the hopes that I will get one soon. I have, though, had a terrific summer as classes go. My students in my instructional technologies course are producing interesting, creative, and engaging activities and products that can be easily transferred to their present or future classrooms. Most of my students are trying new tools and doing so by combining personal interests. How terrific is that. In this way, students will begin to learn something new and foreign to them and then, when comfortable, apply these lessons learned into their classroom.
For example, a student created a flickr photostory of a process - making brownies.
My information literacy course is beginning to combine their hard work and effort into their wikibook. They as a class are learning a lot about wikibooks - style, formatting, coding, etc. - as well as, working as a team to create an interactive book. This is a difficult task but one that each student is accomplishing very well.
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!
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.
For the last couple of weeks my instructional technology students have been talking about and exploring the importance of digital literacy. They have been exploring the Internet by conducting research and identifying effective strategies to implement in order to critically evaluate information found online. As a class, they have explored necessary competencies to develop good research questions so they could/can conduct effective and efficient online research. Lastly, they have been exploring both ethical and legal issues of using all types of information found online.
Through this process, my students have explored Web 2.0 tools in order to share, collaborate, and experience learning and teaching in this digital age with colleagues, students, and the digital community. In creating content for online use, each student is slowly becoming digital citizens. Students are personalizing readings and investigations because they are becoming a part of the digital society. Meaning is beginning to take shape. As a class, they ask questions of the information they are finding, seeking, and creating. They begin to ask themselves, am I digitally literate? Are my students digitally literate?
Through this entire process my students are exploring and experiencing the first steps of critical thinking in this digital age. Each student is beginning to connect the ‘digital dots’ by reading, interpreting, and creating media in all formats. Slowly, they are beginning to understand what it means to be a citizen in this digital world. It has been a good couple of weeks so far this summer.
