BP7_2009103_Flickr

I have been thinking of using Flickr in my class for a while, but I never realized the versatility of the tool until this week. I found a phenomenal resource from David Jakes (2006) about the various uses of Flickr in the classroom. Some of the more creative lessons included:

• - Virtual fieldtrips
• - “Geotagging images in Flickr and then using Google Earth to teach Geography”
• - Documentation of student artwork (e-portfolio)

Additionally, I found a brilliant article on using Flickr for English language learners. I believe that many of these concepts could be applied to those that speak English natively as well! Campbell (n.d.) contributed the following ideas:

Making friends: Students can search the keywords they entered in their profile for their interests, likes, favorite movies, favorite books, etc., to browse the profiles and photos of other people who entered the same keyword. If they find someone who looks intriguing, they can make that person a ‘contact’, labeling him/her a ‘friend’. From there, they will be able to receive new photos from their friends on their ‘contacts’ photos’ page. They can and should try to interact with their ‘friend’ by leaving comments on their friend’s photos and/or by sending Flickr emails.

Commenting: Leaving comments on photos is a great way to practice sentence formation. Teachers can have students integrate grammar and vocab being learned in class into the comments students leave on Flickr photos. Furthermore, teachers can teach students common techniques of conversation starting in their comments, such as making complements and criticisms, and asking questions. A student’s record of “comments left” can be viewed for evaluation purposes if desired. Always remind students to answer all comments left by others on their own photos. They should see comments as conversation starters, not merely as one-liners.

Leaving Notes: Another fun way to use English with Flickr is to leave ‘notes’ on photos. These notes can be left on personal photos or those of ‘friends’. Notes are great way to hone in and describe the details of a particular photo. (Campbell, n.d.)

These are great ideas and I would like to use several of them in my classes. I would also like to use Flickr for digital storytelling, for “tagging for concept” (where students take a picture and have to tag it to show the main ideas of the idea), and for showing understanding through a pictorial collage (or, thanks to Jaime, a glog!).

Although I love Flickr, I have some reservations about using it with students. I am concerned that students will come across inappropriate images. While I am certain that they encounter these things on their own, I don’t feel it has a place at school. For example, I was searching for a picture of a question mark the other day, and the search came back with several pictures of scantily clad adults at a party. The picture itself wasn’t offensive, but I could see administrators or parents being unhappy that it was included in a general search (and where those came out of “question mark” has me baffled). Does anyone know a work-around for this issue?

Jakes, D. (2006). Retrieved from http://jakespeak.blogspot.com/2006/03/classroom-uses-of-flickr.html

Campbell, A. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://e-poche.net/flickr/

Pictures courtesy of Flickr. (duh.)

BP6_2009102_Response

Response Jaime Ferguson's Post #1 (jaimemferguson.blogspot.com):

Web 2.0 Tool 1: Glogster

http://edu.glogster.com “Glogster EDU was conceived to imaginatively, productively, and collaboratively respond to the dynamic educational landscape and exceed the needs of today’s educators and learners” (“A New World of Educational Innovation Awaits You”, n.d.).

Glogster is a way to create multimedia virtual posters, scrapbooks, or e-portfolio pages. During my school years I can remember how many projects or presentations I had to create a poster for a visual. I’m sure you can remember cutting up magazines, coloring in words, and making diagrams. In today’s world students are more digital natives and have more computers available. Imagine if posters were a good medium 10 years ago, glogs are today’s answer for the new generation.

Glogster is a free, web-based tool that you can create any type of poster you can think of including adding videos. Registration is quick and easy only basic information like a user name, password, email address, and your birthday are needed. Once you’ve received a confirmation email form Glogster, you can create a profile. Creating a glog is easy and a lot of fun. The website provides a large amount of backgrounds, graphics, and text options. The graphics can be found in a range of styles and colors, sizes and orientation can be changed. They even offer animated graphics that flash or move to add that extra element to the collage. Images can be uploaded from your computer files as a background or just as a part. Glogster adds that digital advantage by allowing sound, videos and hyperlinks to be included. Lastly just click to save and publish.

This site if more than just creating terrific virtual posters, you can use it as a social network. From your dashboard you can see messages, your friends, add your current status, and see your glogs. You can share your glogs, or keep them private. Users can comment, rate, add it to your favorites, or send to your friends through email. Glogster is a creative social website that allows for creative freedom and collaboration. One of the big bonuses to this site is that you can share your glog outside of their website. You can copy the code to post it on other sites like wikis and blogs, or you can click the easy share button to add it to several other social networking sites.

Glogster additional resources:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgqwv5cr_127g7nqc8fm

http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=936

References

A New World of Educational Innovation Awaits You. (n.d.).Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://edu.glogster.com

1 comments:

Liz said...

Hey Jaime,
This is a really great source! I can really see my students being excited about this and spending quality time to create a fun, informational glog. As a music teacher, I especially appreciate the ability to add audio clips to the "poster" - how cool! This tool could really help add life and excitement into class presentations!
Thanks!
Liz

October 11, 2009 6:52 PM

BP5.3_2009102_Web2.0#3

www.wordle.net

Sadly, there are some instances in which I just cannot be pulled away from a computer. One of those instances is when I am playing on www.wordle.net. Wordle is a site where users can create a word cloud. In order to make communication of the words more effective, “[t]he clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text” (Feinberg, 2009)

Wordle is easy. There is no sign up, no emails, just production. You click “create” and you are on your way. Wordle works in this way: the user types words in a word box. This can be the user’s own words or text copied from an online resource (you can even type in a URL), book, or anywhere else one can think of. These words are then collected and made into a picture full of words. You can then save it by either printing it or taking a screen capture of it. Wordle also encourages sharing by making it an option to save your wordle to a public gallery.

There are a few ways to manipulate a wordle to make it more meaningful. For example, the more frequent the word is typed, the larger it will appear in the picture. Wordles can altered by color, layout, and font.

I have actually used Wordle before this class, but I’ve found that students are interested in it, so I thought it would be valuable to share. My students were floored when I took the expectations (rules) that they came up with on the first day of class and made a wordle out of it. I made a poster of the wordle picture and hung it on a wall. Students are more apt to look at it because of its colors and layout. It also adds excitement to our disgustingly bland walls! Other ideas for using Wordle in the classroom include:

- 1. Having students show the main ideas of a story by typing in common themes of the story

- 2. Describing a character’s traits OR discovering a character by typing in their expressions (“’Don’t do that!” Johnny said angrily.”)

- 3. Describing something, such as an era in history or a style of music

- 4. As a student self expository tool, like an introduction at beginning of the school year

- 5. Pique student interest of a topic by using it for priming (Based on this wordle, what do you expect happened in the lives of young people in the 1950s?)

Try it – it really adds fun into writing.

References

Feinberg, J. (2009). Retrieved October 11, 2009 from http://www.wordle.net/

BP5.2_2009102_Web2.0#2

http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/

ProProfs Flashcards site is extraordinarily easy to use. Teachers are able to create flashcards online with text and pictures. When creating a flashcard set, the user inputs tags so that others may find the set and so that similar sets of flashcards can be aggregated. The sets can also be password protected if the user decides not to share with others. Users may also search for flashcards made by other users based on category (such as Arts, Math & Science, Education & Exams, etc.). Flashcards can be viewed online at the site. Alternatively, users may embed the flashcards into their own site or have students subscribe to a RSS feed. Users may also print or download the flashcards for later use.

The site includes links to other ProProfs sites, such as Quiz School, where teachers can make or find online quizzes (there’s even a quiz to test your knowledge of Web 2.0: http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=Do-you-think-you-know-web-20-1), and Brain Games, where teachers can make or find games such as word searches that include their class vocabulary.

Another unique aspect of this site is the ability to blog about flashcards, school, or whatever else comes to mind. Popular topics include technology certification exams (such as Microsoft certification) and technical issues. Just as with any other blog, others can comment to help one another or offer their take on a given subject.

Although flashcards are not generally thought of as an astounding piece of technology, I believe that having students create flashcards for one another can be a valuable tool for both the student creating the card and the student using the card for review. One cannot make a flashcard without knowing the answer. The creator of the flashcard will then know the types of material that they personally need to study on occasions where a quiz is necessary (or for state exams). Interactive flashcards may also be useful for low-level learners who need extra time with material.

ProProfs.com (2009). http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/

BP5.1_2009102_Web2.0#1

www.voicethread.com is a site where people can communicate in various ways, including images, documents, video, and voice. Voicethread documented itself as “…a place for creating and collaborating on digital stories and documentaries, practicing and documenting language skills” (VoiceThread, 2009). People may add audio, pictures, and video to their projects. Students may even add digital drawings (“doodling”) to their projects. Also, VoiceThread supports Microsoft Office applications and pdf documents. If students are not able to contribute their own photos or video, they may import images and video from Flickr, Facebook, or other web-based sites (VoiceThread, 2009).

VoiceThread has addressed the education world by offering a special place for K-12 happenings at ed.voicethread.com. The ability to collaborate will alleviate many issues when students are working to create a digital story or similar project. Students would be able to divide up research tasks and work on separate computers. Currently, when students in my class are collaborating on a project, they must have 1-2 students researching on a computer and 1-2 students creating the PowerPoint. Students can also export their creations so that they may present their projects for classmates. Another advantage to exporting and downloading projects is that teachers may collect projects to add to student e-portfolios. Additionally, teachers may use presentations as a way to document the class progress over time, or as a way to provide information in a quick, concise, and easy way for the students to understand. Assessment is also taken into considerationon ed.voicethread.com. Students can either provide feedback for one another, or, if the teacher unlocks the site, members of the public can comment on the presentation. Feedback can be done in several different ways – by phone (VOIP), by webcam, by audio clip, by typing a comment, or file upload. Users can even re-record, re-write, or delete comments they’ve made.

Personally, this will solve many issues for my classes and I am excited to use it in the near future. Educause (2009) stated: “In providing a simple venue for sharing, creating, and assessing media projects, such applications may promote greater digital literacy and greater enthusiasm for multimedia creation.” I believe it will make a great impact on student collaboration, in that students can truly have equal contribution in an easier way. I am also interested to see if students are able to make more meaningful projects based on the fact that they can use web resources easily and can use many more functions than a general PowerPoint.

Click OK, then it should play

References

Educause (2009, June). 7 things you should know about… voicethread. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7050.pdf

VoiceThread (2009). Retrieved from http://voicethread.com/#home.b409.i848804

iGoogle Screen Captures

Home

ETC

AR/CBL

BP4_2009101_SocialBookmarking

Out With the Old, In With the New

From the teacher’s perspective, social bookmarking can save time and keep one extraordinarily organized. Whereas “regular” bookmarks allow one to organize by single file folders, social bookmarking creates a web-like cross-referencing system through tagging so that a teacher may see the variety of uses for each site. Jackson (2009) noted an example where a particular website would be of interest for two different purposes – the study of alliteration and the study of Langston Hughes. Social bookmarking adds another dose of “Web 2.0-ism” by allowing users to explore the bookmarks of others with the same tags.

A more abstract reason for using social bookmarking in education was offered by Educause (2005): “Activities like social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures.” Because everyone will tag differently based on his or her opinions, the task of research changes with social bookmarking; instead of searching for a single word, the researcher may be asked to think of the “big picture”, where identifying common themes can help the learner build connections to real-life (or in their mind). An exercise might be to use www.wordle.net to create a word cloud about their research. This forces the student to use the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (and it looks really cool too!).

Finally, certain social bookmarking sites, such Diigo (formerly www.furl.net), archive all sites that are bookmarked (Hargadon, 2007). Anyone who has done ongoing research has had the unpleasant reminder that the Web is always changing, and that includes even the best of one’s research pages. This archiving service can be very valuable for teachers who have found an extraordinary resource that they want to share with students or for students who are more visual in learning. Furthermore, Diigo allows the user to write sticky notes and highlight material. This could be beneficial in several ways, including sharing information in group settings or guiding students who need additional help.

On a personal level, I am excited to encourage students and colleagues to use social bookmarking as a tool in our district. I feel that it will significantly increase the effectiveness of student research and will encourage them to think about researching differently.

References

Educause (2005, May). 7 things you should know about… social

bookmarking. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/

library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

Hargadon, S. (2007). Best of social bookmarking. School Library Journal.

53(12). 20. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier.

Jackson, L. (2009). Sites to see: Social bookmarking. Retrieved from

http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites080.shtml

Pictures courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.