Journal 14

Source Evaluation:

This weeks reading came from School Library Monthly—a source I hadn’t looked at much in the past.  Articles were pretty easy to find by clicking on the ARTICLES button on the left tool bar, but they were a little bit more dated than I would have liked.  Some were as old as 2005, and few were written in the last year.  This isn’t a huge drawback, but relevance is pretty important in a career so linked with technology as school librarianship.  I did like that the articles were displayed by category/topic, and I chose “Forging a Positive Cyber-Reputation: Who Are You?” by Kathy Fredrick, a library director in Ohio.  Another nice feature of this source, or at least this article, is that there are lists of extra resources related to the article at the bottom of the page.

 

This article jumped out at me because in the last few weeks I have thought about my own online image and those of my students as I have been making the webpage for my final assessment.  I keep hearing one of my classmates—and I’m sorry that I can’t remember who!—say that she emphasizes that her students should make a positive digital footprint, not just avoid making a negative one.

 

Summary:

Fredrick explains several issues relating to digital personas and how they affect students.  She, too, notes that educators have been spending time teaching internet safety, but that we need to go beyond that and give students the tools to communicate effectively online, just as we teach them how to write and speak differently according to different face to face situations. Frederick suggests that educators ask students to reflect on what their web presence looks like and share tools with them that can help them change their online reputation if necessary. 
 
She lays out a detailed and helpful list that includes:

1.       Have students Google themselves and contact sites if they have published something incorrect

      2.       Teachers model responsible behavior by creating sites and sharing work ethically online
      3.       Provide opportunities for students to create their own websites
      4.       Provide safe opportunities for students to publish work
      5.       Make sure that the students have school access to the online work—be sure it’s not blocked by the school’s filters
      6.       Speak with students about their “web cred” whenever there’s a teachable moment

 Frederick closes by stressing that kids are already living on the web, and it would be irresponsible to just tell them to keep everything private. 

 
Content Evaluation:
I want every parent and teacher everywhere to read this article!  It makes me feel like I have been overprotective of my students in the past or that I’ve taken the approach of an ostrich with my head in the sand.  Just this year I had students publish videos for class, but I forbade them from disclosing any personal information—including their full names.  I did this because I felt like it was the safest option—but now I see that those students could have used those videos to build up a positive online presence (or most of them could have, anyway!).  I have even limited myself by making my ISU blogs and classroom websites private only—not searchable via Google.  But there’s nothing on any of those sites that I am ashamed of or that would hurt myself or my students if it were public.

 I particularly liked the point Frederick made that new content will begin to balance out old content, so it’s important to keep posting positive, responsible materials.  Not only am I going to help my students do this, but I’m going to improve my own online image, too!  I’m really afraid to Google myself, though—I haven’t done it yet.  I will, though… how about after school is out?  In addition to the final project for 414, I’m also going to make my classroom website searchable via Google, and I’m going to make a new page for my personal use.

 

This article has spurred me to do a little bit more research on improving one’s digital footprint. Here are a few of the best things I’ve dug up:

·         Improving your Digital Footprint—a slideshare presentation by Matt Lingard, 2009

·         Granville Elementary Computer Lab—webarticle on the importance of a positive digital footprint and how it reflects you as a person

·         Top 10 Strategies to Improve your Online Reputation—a blog post by Duncan Morris, 2007

 The possibilities for helping kids with their literacy skills here is evident: they will build critical thinking skills as they evaluate their current reputations and problem solve to build better ones.  They will also be motivated to build technology literacy/tool literacy skills to help them put their ideas into practice. 

Overall, this article was just the right amount of philosophy backed by ready-to-use, practical ideas that can help all my students, as well as myself!

Journal #13

Journal #13

Diigo.com

In my last technology blog, I looked a delicious.com, and was a bit underwhelmed.  This time I decided to compare Diigo to see if it was any better.

Diigo is a little more complex than delicious.com because it's not just social bookmarking.  This is a helpful infographic the site provides as explanation:

 

https://www.diigo.com/index

It makes me wonder what the next figure will be for 6.0.  Alien? Man in a flying car? No, we'll probably get a new Diigo sooner than flying cars. :)

 

Right off the bat I noticed that Diigo is much nicer looking than Delicious because of graphics like this and others.  I know that looks shouldn't matter and that "it's what's on the inside that counts."  But let's be honest-- kids won't use it if it doesn't look cool.  And part of the purpose of visual media like the web is to be VISUAL.  Diigo wins here.

More importantly, the additional features are apparent from the beginning, and they're fairly easy to use.  As soon as I signed up, I had the option to take the tour, but I declined thinking I could come back to that easily later.  Big mistake!  Now I can't find it, but there is a help section that covers most of what I need, I think.  So that's my fault for trying to multitask too much.

The features that Diigo has that Delicious doesn't are many because I can choose from different versions of Diigo. The recommended version is called Diigolet, and it includes bookmarking, higlighting, sticky notes, and sharing.  These features are just pretty much what they sound like.  You can also go to a very basic version that just includes bookmarking, but why not have some options?  Like Delicious, Diigo also has an app for iphones, but it also has an app for android, which as far as I can tell Delicious does not.

Like delicious, diigo offers the option to follow people and groups.  By searching “library,” I found several users who, by their other tags, seem to be school librarians, so I decided to follow 2 that seemed most relevant.  I found a group called Teacher-Librarians and joined it, as well.  Then I saw that it is run by none other than Joyce Valenza!  I got to choose how often I could receive email updates from the group.  Choices ranged from as often as daily to never at all.  Right now I’m set for weekly updates—we’ll see how useful they are.

You can actually “cross save” to delicious, essentially saving to both delicious and diigo at the same time.  I didn’t try this, but it seems like a nice feature. 

A downside is that there are ads right above the list of bookmarks that closely resemble my bookmarks, so it's easy to confuse the sponsored links with things I actually saved myself.

The bookmarking function is pretty much the same between the two pages.  I personally like the look of my bookmark list a little bit more on diigo than on delicious in terms of color and formatting, but the difference is negligible.  I do think that diigo is slightly easier to use and since it has the additional tools like highlighting it has an edge over delicious.  It’s not a huge difference, and since delicious is more widely known it has a bit of an advantage if you want others to follow you or if you want to follow others who are not on diigo.  Aside from that, though, I prefer diigo.  In the interest of simplicity, I considred closing my delicious account, but I do follow a couple of people who are not on diigo, so for now I will keep both.

The literacy skills that diigo promotes are similar to that of delicious: research, collaboration, source evaluation.  On top of that, the highlighter would be good for taking notes.  I can see that used in an assignment in which students found pieces of information, highlighting the best/most useful parts of a source, and then submitting it via a screen capture software.

 

Journal #12 Readings

This week I chose to review the article by Karen Springen entitled "Flipping the Classroom:  A revolutionary approach to learning presents some prose and cons" found in this month's School Library Journal.

Summary
As the title suggests, Springen reviews the advantages and challenges of the flipped classroom, citing numerous professionals in the fields of education, technology, and librarianship.  Springen collects points of view from some of the original proponents of the flipped classroom, as well as those who are slightly critical of the approach. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a flipped lesson is when students view content at home, usually in the form of lecture videos, so they can view at their own pace.  Then the class time that might have been used for lecture in a traditional lesson is instead used for in-depth class discussions, individual practice with teacher guidance, or small group projects.  As Springen notes, proponents of the approach laud it for its time-saving aspects as well as the fact that it allows some students to stop and rewind the videos as needed.  Some critics caution that relying on video as a way to deliver content material can hurt the students with limited access.  Springen relates this all to the world of the library by talking to experts who feel that it is the librarian's duty to help aleviate access issues by providing computer time and recorded videos on flashdrives, if need be, and to help teachers and students find the best videos for their information needs.

Source
I was pleased to see that even though I can't view the entire issue online for free, SLJ still allows accesss to the full article for this cover story.  I also appreciate that it is easy to read and Springen included links to all of her research and the websites of her expert sources.  I'll be adding many of these links to my own diigo.

Content
Springen appears to present an unbiased treatment of this issue, and it has given me several things to think about as a current classroom teacher and future librarian.  I only heard of the flipped classroom last semester at a BER technology conference I attended.  I was very excited about the idea and asked my fellow faculty members how/if they flipped any of their own lessons.  As far as I know, only one other teacher does very much "flipping" in this sense.  As I started to brainstorm some ideas for flipped lessons, I started to doubt myself and how good this would be for my students because of access issues.  Even if they all had computer/internet access, there truly are times when some things just don't work, so I worried that I would actually waste time rather than save it because I would have to deliver lecture in class anyway.  I see that I'm not the only one who has concerns about equitable access, and I like Springen's suggestion via David L. Loertscher that librarians can alleviate some of these issues by providing computer access.  As to his suggestion that the librarians can put the videos on flashdrives, however, I felt like that was a bit impractical.  But if it works every once in a while for some students, great!  Loertscher also said:

"'The job of the librarian is to flip for every kid...If one little tutorial doesn’t work, we’ve got 10 others in the wings. There are all kinds of learners, all styles of learners.' To find the best materials, librarians should 'use the same criteria they’ve always used for printed materials—authority, interest, accuracy,' he says. They shouldn’t just fall in love with the latest trend."

This quote really put things in place for me.  As sad as it is, I never really thought of our librarian as someone who could do this for me, but I know that as a future librarian it will be something I suggest to other teachers.  Of course it will take a lot of collaboration and communication, but it is a perfect example of how a librarian can support teachers in creating the best lessons for each kid.

Overall, I thought that Springen's coverage of the topic was very fair.  I was glad that she presented the obstacles as well as the benefits because every teacher should pause to be sure that the lessons are right for them and their students and not just jump on the bandwagon.

 

Journal #11

This week I browsed Delcious.com (formerly del.icio.us)—a social bookmarking site.  

 

Pros:

• It’s great to have access to links anywhere.
• The tags make things somewhat easy to find.
• It’s an easy way to share links with others.

 

Cons:

• It’s not that user-friendly or visually appealing.
• It’s not as powerful as I would expect in this day and age. (limited features)

 

Several years ago I started an account when the site was del.icio.us, but things seem to have changed significantly, and I don’t think that my former account even exists anymore.  So I made a new account, which was different than in the past.

 

Today my summary and evaluation are mixed together:

First, I was asked to connect to my facebook account (or twitter) so that all the links I share will be in the same place.  I understand why some people would like this feature, but since I would like to keep this as a professional account and keep my facebook for personal use, I chose not to do that. Next, I had to chose from a rather short list of links to add as my first link, with the knowledge that I would remove the link later.  They were mostly news stories, but there was a book review, so I chose that (Melanie Warner’sPandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal).  At this point, I got the option to include comments and tags with this link, so for practice’s sake I made some tags about book reviews and school lunches.  I’m not sure if this would be different on another computer (maybe our school filter is changing the appearance of the site), but the suggested tags—E, b, c, etc…--were very hard to read, and nothing explained what they meant. I also got the option to make this link private, which I did.
 

Lastly, I was asked to install the bookmarklet, and here again is a time when our school computers might be causing me problems.  I needed to “simply” click on the bookmarklet button and drag it to my bookmark tool bar, which I tried in a variety of ways, none of which worked.  I’ll try it at home, but so much of my browsing for school-related links happens at school that this is an inconvenience.  I can still use delicious; it just won’t be as easy as clicking a button will browsing.

 

I then filled in a little bit of profile verbiage—the profile space is not too elaborate—and got the option to add my facebook friends, which I did not. Returning to the main page, I found a list of suggested links based on my “interests”, which they must be basing solely  on my book review link because they were all about food.  Yes, food is an interest of mine, but I really want to use the site for other purposes.  So I searched “library” and started adding links that others had shared with that tag.  I found a few things, but the search yielded far too many results, and most of them were not anything I needed.  Therefore, I started adding the links that were already in my favorites bar.

 

Once I added about 10 links, I tried to see if delicious would give me some better suggested sites.  Unfortunately, now it doesn’t suggest anything, or at least I can’t find a place for those suggestions.  I checked out the Feed tab, but it just says that I’m not following any profiles yet.  Wouldn’t that be a nice place to have a “Click Here to Find Profiles to Follow” button?  But no, nothing like that is provided, and I can’t even find another spot to find people to follow.  I would say I’m more computer savvy than the average person, even the average teacher, and yet there were still too many features I couldn’t find.  Maybe for my next tech journal I’ll look at Diigo and see if it is more powerful or user-friendly.  To be honest, if I can’t figure it out pretty easily, I’m not going to send my whole class there.

After my perusal, I still wanted to know if I could organize the bookmarks into folders, like I can in an internet browser.  I tried to find that option or an explanation in the help section, but I found nothing.  That’s disappointing because I really like having my links grouped in categories.  I did find an option called Tag Bundles, which allow me to group similar tags together.  This is somewhat helpful, but still not very visually appealing.  Along the same lines, I don’t really like the visual layout of the site—it’s rather monotonous.

Despite its limited capabilities, there are multiple ways I would use this site to increase students’ literacy skills:

1.       I could use delicious to connect all the class or library-related sites that students might need to access throughout the year.

2.       I could ask students to visit my delicious page and use the links I selected for research or ask them to evaluate the links I included.

3.       More powerfully, I would ask them to contribute their own links either to one class page or to individual pages.  They could share resources with other students and help each other evaluate sources.  This could be used as a digital class bulletin board of helpful links.

Journal #10

This week I meandered through some unread posts by Doug Johnson, sampling tastes of articles here and there until I arrived at one that made me stop and really concentrate. http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2013/3/20/one-big-room-redux.html

 Summary: In “One Big Room- Redux” Johnson revisits an older post on censorship in light of a new article (Pornography online is warping children's minds, teachers warn. The Telegraph, March 17, 2013). The Telegraph states that children start searching for sexual images on the net and sexting around age 12, and that it is prevalent. Johnson finds this trend alarming, but “a fool’s errand” for adults who try to shelter children from adult content completely. He argues that rather than keeping this material away from our students and children, we need to teach and reinforce values no more than ever.

Resource:
As always, The Blue Skunk Blog does not disappoint in its rich content, ease of use, and prolific hyperlinks to cited material.

Content:

At first I was slightly surprised at what appeared to be an irresponsible reaction from an educator. Of course we should try to keep adult materials away from kids! I thought. Then Johnson brought me around to his side as he usually does. I found this example particularly poignant: He relates how he asked educators if children should be kept from these titles (and more…):

· "Sex After 35: Why It's Different, Why it Can be Better"

· "Men & Sex: Their 7 Secret Wishes"

· "How Our Sex Life Was Saved"

Of course the educators (and I) said “Yes!” And Johnson said, “Too late.” I recognized this truth as he elaborated: these are just a few of the titles emblazoned on numerous magazines in the average grocery store checkout line. This made me remember how I’ve (as an adult!) been embarrassed to see these things while waiting in line with family, both older and younger than myself. An innocent trip to the store is saturated (and has been since I can remember) with sexualized images and verbage—right at a child’s eye level. Now would I or any librarian bring this in to the school? Of course not. But I see now that it’s no use pretending that our kids haven’t heard all this before. I agree that we must give kids the tools to deal with this information responsibly. My only criticism of the article is that I wish it came with a few concrete tips, or at least a link to some resources on how to do that. It’s a big task for a blog post to accomplish, but some baby steps are better than nothing.