Edunology

I publish a monthly newsletter for my school district. In my last issue before the summer break I discussed personal learning networks. I provided 5 options that teachers and administrators could look into in order to begin to develop their network.

Technology has allowed for 24/7 learning on-demand. I started building my personal learning network about 3 years ago. I have never been so excited about learning since it became so easy. I have access to thousands of individuals who share the same interests as i do. Many of these are professional contacts, but some are individuals with similar personal interests Ex: fly fishing, travel and the health/fitness. I check/communicate with my network many times throughout the day. I learn something new every time I do.

My network consists of the following:

A maintain a feed aggregator page. I use Igoogle and Google Reader. I subscribe to a number of blogs. Each time someone updates their blog postings i receive an update in my aggregator. I subscribe to blogs that focus on many topics. Primarily i subscribe to Educational Technology Blogs. I also subscribe to some that relate to my personal interests.  This has probably been the number 1 resource in my network.

I am a member of Twitter. Currently my network consists of about 300 followers. I network with individuals who work in educational technology. I also follow espn, cnn and some other organizations that I am interested in. I must admit that i do not spend a lot of time on Twitter. I find it hard to find the time to stay connected. I do not use mobile technologies to connect to it. However, every single time I do interact with my network i walk about with at least 3-5 new resources, ideas or thoughts. I sometimes use it to throw out questions. It has been a valuable resource for me.

I am a member a few social networks. Primarily I am a member of NING networks. The most notable is www.classroom20.com. This is a network for educators who utilize web2.0 tools and technology in general in their classrooms. Recently they have reached 25,000 members. I could go on an on about the value here but i will leave it at ” you have to join”.  I subscribe to updates in the forum in my feed aggregator.

I read a number of publications. Most of them I subscribe to in my feed reader. I can get a quick snapshot of the new articles. I can then decide which ones are of interest to me. It makes it very easy to stay on top of multiple publications without spending a lot of time. The best part is that it is free. A few that i read are eschool news, the journal, technology and learning and ASCD publications.

I maintain a social bookmarking account. I use www.delicious.com. This is a powerful tool. Social bookmarking sites allow you to save your favorite websites on a website. This means they are accessible from any computer with an internet connection. You add and access bookmarks easily by installing a couple of buttons on your internet browser toolbar. I have organized thousands of sites with tags (keywords that you apply to sites you bookmark). The real power of this service is the social aspect. You can search and share bookmarks with everyone that uses the service. I have networked with many individuals who share the same interests that i do. I am constantly reviewing their resources in addition to my own. It is such a time saver and a valuable tool.

Open courseware and video sharing are the newest addition to my network. www.academicearth.org, www.ted.com, itunesU,  ustream, and other open course providers are some of my favorites. i can watch short videos or take complete courses on topics that are of interest to me professionally and personally. I can even take part in live workshops. I am really starting to take advantage of these resources lately.

I encourage you to start to develop your own personal learning network. If you would like to read my newsletter that discusses RSS feeds and developing you ”PLN” you can view it here. I invite you to add me to your networks and feeds as a start. I will share my contact info below.

twitter: walkerd
delicious: dwalker500
Classroom20: dwalker500
Skype: dwalker500
Gmail: dwalker500

I have been a member of Delicious for a long time now. I have used it primarily to bookmark all of the great websites I find online. I am a big fan of social bookmarking. However, it has only been within the last year that I really started taking advantage of the “social” aspect of  social bookmarking.

For those of you who are not on the social bookmarking wagon yet, here is a short summary. Traditional bookmarking of sites consisted of adding them to your favorites. You can add the site and place it in a folder. While this is helpful it has limitations. The major limitation is that you can only access these favorites from the computer you saved them on. You are also limited in the how you can organize them for retrieval.

Social bookmarking is web based. You can access your boomarked sites from any computer with an internet connection. These services also allow you to add ‘tags” to your  bookmarks. Tags are keywords that you assign to a bookmark. You use these tags to organize and search your bookmarks. You can bundle your tags to be better organized. This is the equivalent of putting them in folders.  By downloading some toolbar buttons you can add and access sites in your delicious account right from your Internet explorer or firefox toolbar.

The most power feature of social bookmarking is the “social” aspect.  Delicous and other social boomarking services are a network. You not only have access to sites that you bookmark, but you also have access to sites that other delicious users bookmarked. The service allows you to add members to your network to make it easy to view their bookmarks. You may be interested in this if you know of other users that share the same interests or profession. You do not have to have someone as part of your network to search their bookmarks.

This is the feature that i have only started to really use in the past year. It has replaced about 40% of my Google searches. You can search by tags on the site. The results that are returned will be seperated by 1. sites you bookmarked, 2.S ites your network bookmarked, 3 Sites that users on delicious bookmarked.

A simple search on “smartboard Math” returned hundreds of websites that other delicous users had bookmarked. What a time saver. Instead of sifting through thousands of google results i have  list of a couple hundred pre-approved sites. Other users thought these sites were good enough to bookmark. If one of these people are in my network then the validity and relevancy of the result is even stronger.

Planning a trip? A tag search of ”rome” and possibly “restaurants” should provide a variety of bookmarked sites.  What about “social studies” “lesson plans”?

Every  post has a number at the end of it. This is the number of people who also bookmarked this site. By clicking on the number you get to see the usernames of the people. This is a great way to add users to your network that share a common interest.

Delicious has become one of the web2.0 tools that i use everyday. As it grows and my network grows it is becoming even more valuable. I encourage you to check out this resource.  I have put together a social bookmarking tutorial page on my wiki. There are printable instructions for using delicious as well as screencast tutorials.

Enjoy

Here is my example of technology integration using a project on global warming. I welcome comments, concerns or additions.

Topic: Global Warming

1. Create a feed aggregator page. Subscribe to feeds on the topic. You can subscribe to blogs, news feeds and searches. (igoogle, pageflakes, google reader)
2.  Gather a number of resources and bookmark. (dilicious, diigo

3.  Organize your facts on a Group wiki. (wikispaces, pbwiki)
4.  Develop questions to ask an expert in the field. Organize these questions on a wiki and ask the expert to respond. You could also organize a video conference with this expert. (wikispaces, skype)
5.  Find blogs on the topic. Review postings and comment on ones of interest.
6. Develop your own blog on the topic. Post your opinions and ideas. Ask for feedback. Share your blog with the individuals who’s blog you read. (blogger, wordpress)
7.  Organize your research into a final outcome. You could create a multimedia presentation, website, wiki, video or presentation. (ms photostory, movie maker, wikispaces)
8. Publish your final outcome for others to comment on.  (Voicethread, teacher tube, you tube, school tube)

Wikipedia is the number one resource that students cite when conducting research. It usually is one of the top 10 search results for most topics researched by students. Because wikipedia can be edited by anyone most teachers question the accuracy of the data. In most cases, faculty members will not accept or recommend wikipedia as a primary source.

While I am in agreement that not all of the information is accurate I have found that most is. I like to utilize wikipedia when conducting research. I find that complex topics are explained in an easy to read format. I typically site information from wikipedia in my professional development classes. I also use it to understand more complex IT information that i need to know for my network admin responsibilities.  I think it is a great place to start. I do agree that all information found on wikipedia needs to be checked and double checked for accuracy. It should not be your primary or only source.

The greatest resource on Wikipedia is the references. At the bottom of all entries is a references section. There it cites all the sources of information used to create the entry. These references are an excellent place to continue your research. This is a much more refined and effective method for finding sources then going through thousands of google search results.

I took part in a very interesting Edtech talk tonight on the topic of RSS feeds and their roll in education. One of the presenters mentioned the above question that she had been presented in a previous workshop. Do your students know how you learn?

I thought this was a very profound statement and an excellent transition  into introducing RSS feeds into your classroom. I use RSS feeds everyday. It has become a daily part of my professional and personal life. In fact, I wonder how I got by without them.

I was introduced in this discussion to some interesting ways that educators are implementing them with their students. I wanted to share some of these to anyone who is listening???

• One of the presenters discussed how she has all of her students create accounts on pageflakes. She then has each student create a tab for each topic they are researching for classes. She has them pull in RSS feeds on that topic. 
• Create a current events tab. They use this for their current events discussion.
• Create tabs that you can share with your students. Pageflakes and igoogle allow you to share tabs with other users. One teacher shares a tab on Cyberbullying. They use the updated feeds as topics for discussion.
• Create a Tab for your department or grade level and share it with them. Discuss updated content at grade level or team meetings.
• Have students pull in homework, assignments or links of interested generated by the teacher.
• Some sites allow you to save searches as RSS feeds. Students can save searches to their aggregators as feeds.

Those are some of the great ideas that was discussed during this session. I hope you find it useful. One of the topics that was brought up is the lack of RSS feeds on elementary sites. By using www.dapper.net you can create RSS feeds for any content on any page. It is a very cool tool. For elementary students you can create the feeds and the tab and then share it with them.