Create a Permeable Classroom - Part I: Google Docs Presentations

Over the past few weeks educators around the globe have discovered some powerful new tools. Google added presentations to their web-based office suite, which already had word processor and spreadsheet components. Also, a wide variety of services now allow users to create their own streaming video "channel" using just a webcam and an Internet connection. These tools make it easier than ever to give your students an authentic audience for their work - and to bring their peers or content area experts into the classroom. This post is the first of two. In this post I'll share about Google Docs presentations and in part II I'll share several services that allow you to create your own streaming video shows.

Google Docs Presentations

Google Docs (formerly Google Docs & Spreadsheets) now allows mulitple users to view or edit a presentation online. Users can create a presentation from scratch or import and then share an existing Powerpoint presentation. Surprisingly, these presentations are also a way to bring an international learning community into your classroom. Here are some of the benefits and limits of this new tool, followed by some early educational examples.

The Benefits

• Web-based: File storage, editing, and even the final presentation happens right on the web. This means that your presentation (or a student's presentation) can be accessed at school, at home, or on any other internet connected computer. You can edit from anywhere, and even present anywhere. There is no need to worry about software versions or compatibility when you move from computer to computer - and no need to worry about paying for software or updates.
  
• Collaborative: Users can edit or view presentations from multiple locations... simultaneously - or asynchronously. This means that students can complete group work from their own homes, and you can collaborate with other classes world wide, all without worrying about juggling multiple versions of a document via email. This also means that students, teachers, parents, or others around the globe can virtually "attend" a presentation online.
  
• Backchannel Chat: During an online presentation, participants have a chat "room" to the right side of the presentation slides. This allows face-to-face participants the opportunity to interact with each other while the presenter is speaking. Presentations can now be interactive, and many more students can participate via text than they can via voice. More importantly, it allows peers and experts from around the world to interact with the class. These two things enable a shift of power (and authority) away from the presenter to the students and to other experts around the world. It is a compelling new sort of presentation experience, particularly if visitors are actively included as part of the presentation.
  

The Limits:

• Computers and Google Accounts Needed: A presenter can project the presentation on a large screen as they would with powerpoint, but obviously for face-to-face students to take advantage of the chat room functionality they will need to have their own computers. Also, in order to participate in the chat students (and any virtual visitors) will need to login using a Google account. Naturally, anyone who wants to participate in collaboratively editing the presentation will also require a Google account. Google accounts are free, but do require an email account and a registration procedure.
  
• No Archives & Limited Export: It is easy to get information into Google Docs, but not nearly as easy to get information out. The chat transcript is not (or at least no longer) archived, and it cannot be cut and pasted. (Screen capture programs can be used to save a chat as an image or video, though.) Also, although you can import PowerPoint presentations into Google Docs, it will not export PowerPoint presentations. It will only export a zipped html file that will allow you to run the presentation in a web browser when you are offline.
  
• No Audio, Video, or Screencasting: If you are attending a presentation remotely via the web it is easy to follow the presenter through the slides, however you cannot see the presenter or hear what they are saying. Also, if the presenter shows other programs or sites to their face-to-face audience, you cannot see these remotely. In short, Google Docs does not provide any streaming audio or video and does not provide any screen sharing or screencasting features. This makes a Google Presentation of limited effectiveness for remote attendees... unless a third-party application is used to transmit audio, video, or the presenter's desktop. This is where several new streaming video services might come in useful.

In part II of this post, which I'll share next week, I'll discuss the benefits and limits of new services that make it easy for anyone to stream video using a webcam. In the meantime, here are a few examples of pioneering early uses of Google Presentations in education.

Examples

• Google Presentations - A presentation about Google presentations, originally created by Vicki Davis and forty (40) other educators around the world! This presentation actually serves as an introduction to using Google Presentations, including ideas for classroom and professional development uses.
  
• ES PTA Presentation - A presentation about Web 2.0 tools for parents, including the benefits, concerns, and proactive strategies for safety (based on the Internet Awareness presentation which I created for the Laguna Beach USD under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license). Kim Cofino presented this to parents in Bankok, with an audience of educators from around the globe contributing in the backchannel chat.
  
• BTC Interview - A presentation that Jennifer Jones used during a job interview - using the presentation she brought her online learning network to the job interview with her! She explicitly involved "the network" by including prompts in small text in the lower corner of most slides. This is a good model for being sure the online audience can participate and contribute to the presentation, even without streaming video or audio.

You can also read my personal reflections about these examples and about Google Docs presentations in general at Google Docs Presentations: Limits, Benefits, and Questions.

If you've tried Google Docs presentations with your students, or if your students have already used a Google presentation themselves, please leave a comment (and a link). We'd love to hear your story. If you've got other stories about your own learning with Google Docs, we'd love to hear those as well. Please leave a link to any blog posts you may have written on this topic yourself, too. And of course, feel free to leave questions or other comments about this post.

Check back next week for Create a Permeable Classroom - Part II: Live Web TV.

ITM 7: Show & Tell

Dive-in to see amazing examples of how students are using a wide-range of innovative tools in the classroom.

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Show Notes:

Dive into our Virtual Open House! We can talk all we want about "cool tools," but it doesn't mean much until we see how it impacts kids. So, this episode is all about students: what interests them, how they understand and generate knowledge, and the amazing things they can do when we give them the right tools and guidance. It's time to let the kids show off!

BTW - if you've got great clips of student work, send them our way. We'd love to include them on the ITM.

Here the examples highlighted in the show...

> MacBeth Wars was produced by 12th grade students for an English project. It's embedded here for you to watch or you can download it from Google Video. PS - Don't be fooled by the fake opening...



> While you're at it, check out a different Star Wars MacBeth video that was produced back in 1997 by students from Glen Ridge High School, New Jersey. The creators digitized it and put it online with behind the scenes details on how it was produced.

> "Does History Repeat Itself?" is a project from City Arts and Tech High School, San Francisco, CA.

> Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams is a non-competitive initiative that awards grants up to $10,000 each to teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors to identify a problem and invent a solution for it. Designed to excite, empower, and encourage students through hands-on problem solving, InvenTeams aims to inspire a new generation of inventors. Initial applications are due April 27, 2007, or e-mail questions to inventeams@mit.edu. And if you live in the Boston area, plan on joining them at the InvenTeams Odyssey, June 19-23, 2007.

> The Envision Schools Project Exchange is an online workspace for Envision teachers to share best practices in project design and implementation. It's an initiative of Envision Schools - a network of high performing charter schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Be sure to check out the Holocaust & Genocide Museum project.

> Rock Our World is an international collaborative project led by Carol Anne McGuire and her students in Orange Unified School District. During the project students use video conferencing and media production to collaborate on challenges and learn about the world. ROW 6 is called "Are You Game", and it involves 20 schools from 6 different continents. Look for their live webcast on June 9th!

> ITM Correspondent Mark Wagner talked to kids at the CA Student Technology Showcase during the 2007 CUE Conference. Explore Cypress High School's "Digital DNA" project, Eureka High Schools "East Lab", and the great work being done at Echo Horizon School.

Special thanks to the students from Rock Our World for their shout outs! And to Mike Morrison and Scott Smith for helping me take my first Segway experience!

It Really Is Really Simple: RSS for Educators

Teachers often ask me "how do you find these things?" or "how did you know about this?" Much of the time I don't have to find or even look for innovative new things, because the news comes to me... and not because anyone is sending it to me, but because I'm using a tool called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Once you learn about RSS, learning about other new tools becomes much easier, which makes RSS a potentially very important thing for educators (and students) to understand.

What is RSS?

RSS allows you to subscribe to online news and updates that are important to you. Once you subscribe to a source, you no longer need to visit that individual web site to check for updates... the updates come to you. Searching or browsing the web is a good way to locate sources initially, but once you've located them there is no need to return to them over and over. If they offer an RSS feed, all you need to do is subscribe.

TIP: Subscription, by the way, is FREE.


What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is really just a file (on a webserver) that includes information about the updates you are interested in. RSS is a lot like HTML, the programming language behind websites. Web browsers (like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari) can read HTML code and display a web page for you. RSS code is very similar, but must be read by an RSS aggregator (or reader), which can then display the update for you, including any enclosured files such as PDF documents or podcasts.

What is an RSS aggregator (or reader)?

An aggregator, sometimes called a reader, collects (or aggregates) all of your subscriptions in one place, like a magazine rack in your house or classroom. Once you subscribe to few sources, you no longer need to visit each site, you simply open your aggregator to read any new updates. The experience can be a lot like reading email, but can also be thought of as reading your own customized newspaper.

TIP: Web based aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader are particularly popular with teachers because they let you check your feeds from any computer, while aggregators like NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedReader (Windows) have more options. iTunes (Windows or Mac) includes an aggregator for subscribing to Podcasts.

How do you subscribe to a feed using your aggregator?

Most aggregators have a subscribe button of some kind. Generally, all you need to do is locate the web address of the RSS feed (see the tip below), copy the address, click on the subscribe button in your aggregator, and then paste in the address. From then on, any new updates will appear in your aggregator and save you the trip back to the website.

TIP: Most sites with an RSS feed provide a link on their main page, often in a side column, and often indicated by an icon such as the orange one pictured above, or such as the ones here at the ITM, depicted (and annotated) to the right. Notice that sometimes a direct link is used for subscribing to a particular aggregator such as Google Reader.

Why do you need RSS?

Now that it is as easy to create online content as it is to consume it, the amount of information available online can be overwhelming. Once you find a trusted source, you want to be able to take advantage of future updates. However, you don't want to waste time checking sites when they haven't been updated... and on the flip side, you don't want to miss a potentially important update because you haven't checked back in a while. Ultimately, RSS saves you time by brining the updates to you when they are available.

What can you subscribe to?

RSS was initially intended to help people subscribe to news updates. Not surprisingly, many news sources have RSS feeds (also called news feeds). Check out all of the specialized feeds available at CNN.com, including an Education feed.

Blogs may be the most common source of RSS feeds. Almost all blogs have an RSS feed of some kind, if not several. As you can see the ITM offers a feed. If your students are blogging , you an subscribe to your student's blogs. For instance, if I were teaching high school English again right now, I wouldn't want to visit 180 student blogs to see who had answered their reflection questions, I'd want the updates to come to me as the students posted them. Also, for your own professional development you can subscribe to other educators' blogs... or even the ITM. Visit supportblogging.com to learn more about educational blogs and to find blogs to subscribe to.

Podcasts are another common source of RSS feeds. In fact, podcasting wouldn't be possible without RSS. Teachers often ask me what makes a podcast different from simply posting an mp3 file on their homepage... and the difference is RSS, which allows others to subscribe to a podcast and listen to it (or view it) at their own convenience - even on their iPod. You can subscribe to student podcasts (from your school or others) and to other educators' podcasts... or even the ITM shows. iTunes is a common aggregator used particularly for collecting podcasts. Visit the Educational Podcasting Network (or the Education category in the iTunes Podcast Directory) to learn more about educational podcasting and to find podcasts to subscribe to.

Other Web 2.0 (or read/write web) tools also commonly include RSS feeds. Most wikis allow you to subscribe to any changes. So, if students are posting to a group work wiki or making changes on the class wiki, you will be notified. Also, services such as social bookmarking (like FURL or del.icio.us), photo sharing (like Flickr), or even web searches (such as Google News, MSN Search, or Technorati) can provide additional sources of RSS feeds. This can be like having your computer research for you 24/7!

Where can you learn more about RSS in Education?

Will Richardson shares an excellent eleven page guide to RSS for educators. Also, feel free to leave your questions in the comments. The ITM bloggers and readers can help.


Image Credits: The RSS logo comes from the Wikimedia Commons. The annotated diagram of the ITM feeds I created with Snipping Tool 2.0 on my HP TC4200 Tablet PC.

The ITM @ CUE

Some of the "ITM gang" (our whatever we call ourselves) were at the CUE Conference in Palm Springs last week. It was a great event - great people, great ideas, great tech tools, and great blog coverage. My favorite moment of the conference came when a high school student named Tony ran up to me with a big smile and said, "Are you the guy from the Infinite Thinking Machine?!" Turns out we have a fan or two! Very cool. If you watch long enough you'll see him in this video.

Another highlight was CUE Live. With the help of my production partner, Jonathan Lemon, we recorded a series of informal discussions with speakers, attendees, and anyone else foolish enough to stop by our "studio."

In particular, I thought some of you may be interested in our special segment, "We ARE the Infinite Thinking Machine", where Mark Wagner, Steve Hargadon, and myself shared some insights on how AND why we produce the ITM. Let us know if you like it, and we'll put it into the ITM iTunes feed for easy downloading.

BTW - In our FAQ, we recently posted some additional details on the technical equipment and tools we use to produce the ITM shows. Of course, you can produce a video podcast with less expensive equipment than ours, so don't let this scare you off. If you have something to say, don't let the technology stand in your way! Thanks to YouTube, Google Video, and other sites, it's never been easier to "broadcast yourself." In fact, we're looking for students and teachers to be official "correspondents" for the ITM shows, so drop me a line if you want to produce segments with us!

Creative Commons in Education

Note: This post deals explicitly with US Law, but many of the same principles apply in other countries and international jurisdictions. The Creative Commons website allows users to select their jurisdiction from a drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner.

Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright has always been a sticky subject for educators. The demands of the classroom and the scarcity of resources available in schools have often been barriers to legally obtaining the right to use copyrighted media for teaching and learning. Today, the relative ease of access to greater and greater volumes of media available online makes it even more tempting for teachers to ignore copyright law and fair use guidelines. However, it is important for educators (and their students) to understand and respect the fair use guidelines. Luckily, there are new alternatives to traditional copyright that can help simplify the situation.

First, though, it is important to understand copyright law and the traditional fair use guidelines. Copyright is a deliberately grey area of the law, enforced through the subjective judgments of juries and judges in the court system. There are, however, four guidelines that the courts will consider when judging wether a particular case represents fair use or an infringement on the owner's copyright. Stanford University Libraries provide a detailed overview of fair use and of additional guidelines for educational fair use. A very clear discussion can also be found in the Wikipedia article on Fair Use.

Beyond the scope of these guidelines it is best for educators to contact the copyright holder and ask permission to use the desired material in the classroom. Conversely, if a teacher is posting original material (either self-produced or created by students) online, the teacher may want to give permission for others to use the material for educational purposes. (Otherwise, by default, any new creative work is automatically copyrighted.) Thankfully, it's no longer necessary to either ask for or give permission on a case-by-case basis... if you are using the Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons

Using the Creative Commons (CC) license, educators and students can "Share, reuse, and remix — legally." In essence:

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Creative Commons allows authors and artists to allow certain uses of their work. It also allows others to easily identify work that they have permission to use. The Creative Commons website provides tools to accomplish both of these functions...

First, if you are creating instructional materials for your students, or you want them to access media to include in their own assignments and projects, click on "Find CC Licensed Work" in the upper right hand corner of the Creative Commons home page. This CC Search allows you to search Google, Yahoo, flickr (a photo sharing service), blip.tv (a video sharing service), and OWL Music for media that has been released under a Creative Commons license by its owner. You can even limit your search to works you are free to modify, adapt, or build upon so that you and your students can create new works (such as a class podcast) and release them online - legally. Note, though, that these search results will be no more or less filtered for appropriateness than they are at those services' home pages. You may want to supervise student use of this search tool.

Second, if you and your students are creating media (such as podcasts) that you are posting online, you might consider releasing it under a CC license yourself. (You may actually have to if you use CC licensed material that requires you to share-alike.) To get started, click on "License Your Work" in the upper right hand corner of the Creative Commons home page. Answer the few questions about how you want to share your work, what jurisdiction you're in, and the format of your work. The system will automatically choose the appropriate license (using combinations of four different conditions: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works, and Share Alike).

Linktribution

All CC licenses require that users give attribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor. In the absence of specific directions, Alan Levine's concept of linktribution is a good rule of thumb to follow. When you give credit to an original author or artist, link back to the original work (if it is online) or to the original author's homepage (or blog) and be sure to include their name in the link. This not only provides attribution (and an easy way for others to find the original source), it is also motivating to the original author or artist because it increases their web traffic and improves their ranking in search engines.

Open Content

The CC license is not the only license that provides and protects "open" content. The General Public License has protected open source software and documents since 1989.

An increasing amount of software, media, and information are available online under these two licenses. For instance, the MIT Open CourseWare project is released under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, as is the ITM (see the bottom of this page). I now share all my workshop materials using an Attribution-ShareAlike license. And now you and your students can begin contributing your work to the greater good as well.

Note: Lucie deLaBruere wrote about the Creative Commons license in her post, Why Do People Share? on November 13, 2006. Also, I'm indebted to Hall Davidson of Discovery Education and Janet English of KOCE for my understanding of copyright law and fair use. Their presentations on the subject have been excellent - and entertaining.
Finally, I'd like to think Alan Levine and a reader called Rom for leaving comments on my previous post and thus inspiring this one.

Image credit: Creative Commons Spectrum of Rights.

Best of 2006: The Read/Write Web in Education

It's the winter break for many educators (at least in North America). Email has slowed to a trickle and most educational blogs are not being updated. During this time of reflection and rejuvenation we'll be celebrating the new year (along with the rest of the world). We at the ITM have discussed posting several "best of 2006" (or "predictions for 2007") posts to mark the occasion. For my part, I've identified five trends in the educational use of the read/write web that I've felt had a significant impact on my work - and ultimately, the work of teachers and students. In each case I discuss a free (and teacher-friendly) service.

For the sake of brevity, I've posted my predictions separately.

1. Educational Blogging at Edublogs.org (and learnerblogs.org): Though blogs and educational blogging have been around for several years, and though James Farmer's Edublogs.org was created in 2005, the impact of these tools grew a great deal in 2006. In February, I switched from using Blogger to using Edublogs when leading blogging workshops for teachers. In addition to being able to post text and pictures (and being able to receive comments), teachers could now post Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files, too. There were no random links to embarrassing or inappropriate blogs, and teachers could set up various levels of permissions for comments and for participants in team blogs. To boot, the tools were free and open source. Also, in June 2006, ITM blogger (and open source advocate) Steve Hargadon created supportblogging.com, which quickly became a valuable resource for teachers interested in these ideas. Read my predictions for 2007.

2. Educational Podcasting at podomatic.com: Podcasting began in 2004, and in 2005 my colleagues and I began leading workshops in which we helped teachers jump through many technical hoops in order to "easily" post a podcast. Podomatic was founded in 2005, but it wasn't until 2006 that we started using the service to help teachers and students. Now, teachers can create a new podcast episode by simply uploading an audio file that they've created using a free program such as Audacity. Or, for even greater simplicity, they can record directly into Podomatic over the web. The hosting of the audio files is free and the system takes care of most of the back end technical issues, creating a blog-like website complete with comments. Read my predictions for 2007.

3. Educational Wikis at Wikispaces.com: Though wikis have been around even longer than blogs, they are arguably behind blogs in educational adoption. But, in January 2006, Wikispaces.com started offering free (and add free) Wikis to teachers. Ten thousand wikis later, the company was so impressed by the work teachers and students were doing on their free wikis that they launched a campaign to give away 100,000 wikis to teachers. Today they are nearing the 20,000 mark. These wikis not only allow teachers to create collaboratively edited online resources, but also to post images and files as well. (I've written about educational use of wikis on the ITM before.) Read my predictions for 2007.

4. Google in Education: When we look back on 2006, this may very well be the biggest impact. This is the year Google began working in the k12 arena (an effort now headed up by Cristin Frodella). They launched the Google for Educators site, and played an critical role in the launch of this blog, the Infinite Thinking Machine. Google also released several new products that benefit educators who use the read/write web... particularly the easy to use RSS aggregator, Google Reader (for keeping up to date on news, blogs, and other "feeds") and the web-based word processor Google Docs (for creating, sharing, and collaboratively editing documents online). Though they existed prior to 2006, free desktop applications such as Picasa and Google Earth have been heavily used in education this year as well. (Of course, the newly updated Blogger is also still used by many educators.) Read my predictions for 2007.

5. The Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA): This may be the biggest change that didn't happen in 2006. Call it the biggest disaster averted (at least in the United States). Introduced in May 2006, the bill proposed to protect students from online predators by limiting their access to "social networking websites," which could have potentially limited student access to a wide range of websites, including everything I've mentioned above. In July, the house of representatives passed the bill by an amazing 410 to 15, and it seemed as if the Senate would quickly follow suit, thus placing an additional burden on many schools receiving federal funding - and placing a significant obstacle in the path of enterprising teachers using these tools with their students. Happily, organizations such as SaveYourSpace.org rose to the occasion and opposed the bill, which has languished in the Senate since before their August recess. Read my predictions for 2007.

Please feel free to discuss these read/write web trends (and predictions), and to leave ones of your own, in the comments. I look forward to reading your reactions.

PS: The image above was taken by Alan Levine and generously shared under the Creative Commons Attribution license on his Flickr account. Read his prediction about Creative Commons licensing in the comments for this post.

The Infinite Wiki Machine

The tagline at the top of this blog says "ideas to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century." Many of my favorite ideas involve the use of blogs - like this one. Our last post and last show here at the ITM discussed the use of blogs in education. Blogs can enable powerful two-way communication and learning, but sometimes a blog may not be the right tool. Sometimes a wiki works better.

When is a wiki better than a blog?

Each blog is generally one author's voice. Others can leave comments, but the main posts are written by a single person (or sometimes a small team of people, which is the case with this blog). Comments usually don't even appear on the front page of a blog - you have to click a link to view them. Also, blogs are organized chronologically, and it can sometimes be difficult to find important information that appeared on the blog in the past.

When you want a website that allows truly collaborative contributions and is structured in a flexible way, a wiki is the tool you need.

Wikis (which were actually invented several years before blogs), are websites anyone can edit - and if you can use a word processor, you can use a wiki. They are ideal for collaboration, especially among large groups of people, and are generally easier to navigate than a blog. (Often wikis have a navigation section that resembles a more traditional website.) Because anyone can edit a wiki, they have a feature that allows users to view a history of revisions - and revert to an earlier version if necessary. (Permissions can be assigned so that only certain users can edit a wiki in certain ways; teachers might assign permission to ther students and not other visitors, for instance.)

The Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is collaboratively authored and edited by millions of users, may be the best example of a wiki. It can be both a great resource for students doing research and an authentic project that students can actually contribute too. Of course, because of the nature of it, it must be used with caution and it is a great place to begin conversations about information literacy with students.

Teachers and students are using wikis to create collaboratively authored online class text books, writing projects, and group projects. Wikis are perfect for sharing resources, whether within a student group or within a grade level or subject area teaching team. Like blogs, wikis have a place in effective professional development, particularly in professional learning communities.

Check out what Dan McDowell is doing with wikis in his social studies classes, or what David Conlay (pictured, with me above) is doing with wikis in his literature classes. My wife, Eva, uses a wiki to collect and share technology resources related to the state adopted Houghton-Mifflin reading series. I'm using wikis for almost all of my workshops now, and you can watch my video on the subject, Wiki While You Work, over at the k12onlineconference site. Visit the Educational Wikis site to explore many more wikis used for education. Know of any that aren't shared there? Feel free to add them!

Interested in starting a wiki? The folks over at Wikispaces are giving away 100k free wikis to educators!

Tags and the Infinite Universe of Information

One tool for turning the infinite universe of information into knowledge is the tag. Unfortunately, few students and teachers - or few people for that matter - know what a tag is or why it might be useful for easily making sense of overwhelming amounts of information. It turns out that tags and the act of tagging (no, not the urban practice of spray painting graffiti in public places... well it's a little like that) are also difficult to explain.

In fact, when I use the new googlepedia extension in Firefox to search both Google and the Wikipedia at once, I discover a general lack of clarity on the subject... at least at the time this post was written.

The Wikipedia article on Tags is, well, tagged for not meeting quality standards... the introduction is too long. How is one to explain the concept of tags succinctly when the Wikipedia article, which has been edited over 500 times, doesn't seem up to the task?

The top Google results appear little better at first glance. The excerpt shown from the top site, Technorati (which tracks updates to millions of blogs), seems to presume the reader already knows what a tag is: "Here you'll find the top tags, sized according to popularity. We're currently tracking 11.1 million tags." Whoa. That sounds overwhelming, not helpful, and it doesn't seem to help explain what a tag is.

However, if we click through to Technorati's Tag Page we actually find that "Tags are like labels that people use to categorize their blog posts." If we click through to the next result in Google, Flickr (a photo sharing service), we learn that "You can give your photos a 'tag', which is like a keyword or category label. Tags help you find photos which have something in common. You can assign as many tags as you wish to each photo."

So, tags are like keywords? Yes. By assigning a tag to a blog post, a photo, or any other piece of information, you can make it easier for others to search for and find that information when they need it. But tags generally have an important additional feature... tags are clickable. By clicking on a particular tag, you can find all blog posts or pictures (or whatever type of information you are searching for) that are associated with that tag. For instance if you click on the flower tag at Flickr, you'll see any picture that has been tagged with "flower."

At the next Google result, del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site... for sharing bookmarks or favorites online), we learn about a tag cloud, or "a list of tags where size reflects popularity." It turns out there is a tag cloud right here on the ITM... see it on the right-hand side of the site... under the video images? (This tag cloud is automatically generated by ZoomClouds.) Right now the most popular tag on this blog (by far) is "students," followed closely by "digital." You can tell at a glance that these are two important words or topics here at the Infinite Thinking Machine without having to skim all of the blog posts and shows. And, if you were only interested in posts about a certain topic, say... video, you could click on the video tag and see only those posts that discuss video. This saves time and helps you make sense of the mass of information here at the ITM, doesn't it?

So, there are a few ways tags might play a role in the way you and your students interact with information online. First, whenever you post anything on a blog, photo sharing site, social bookmarking site, or other service that supports tags... take the time to tag whatever you are posting. This will help you (and others) find it again later by either searching for the tag or clicking on the tag in a tag cloud. Second, of course, you can locate things that others have posted or shared by searching for or clicking on a tag. Finally, you can also use a tag cloud to learn at a glance what a given web site is about. These three things can save a good deal of time when searching for information and determining it's relevance to the task at hand.

Are you getting the idea at this point? Let's check your understanding, or rather, my explanation... how might you (or your students) use tags to make sense of information encountered while completing an assignment? Do you know of an example of students or teachers using tags? Share your ideas (or your questions) in the comments for this post. (The link for comments appears at the top of the post.) I look forward to reading your contributions.

The Power of Multiple Media, Including Video

I enjoy writing for a blog, but I know better than to think that every student will - or even that every teacher will. I've always been a writer. I was a literature major most of my undergraduate years, and I taught literature to high school students, so it is natural that I prefer the written word as my medium of expression. However, I have colleagues who prefer listening to (and creating) podcasts and some readily admit they are auditory learners.

I don't have much of a commute myself and I prefer to uni-task when working, so I have difficulty finding time to listen to podcasts. And even though there is something of a performer in me, I've never been terribly motivated to create audio (or video) podcasts. It is very time consuming.

However, I recently created three hour-long videos for the k12 Online Conference. It was time consuming and challenging for me, but regardless (or perhaps because of the challenge) I had a blast. Video can be a fun medium. (Check out Alton Brown's very fun - and very educational - Good Eats on the Food Network for an excellent example.) My experience was what Seymour Papert likes to call hard fun.

This experience refocused my attention on a recent Internet phenomenon, YouTube. According to the (hard to find) about page, "YouTube is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos." For several years now teachers have seen the benefit of downloading audio-visual instructional media from sites like Atomic Learning and United Streaming, but unlike these fee-based services, the free service at YouTube also allows teachers and students to upload and share videos. This is a bit like Blogger for visual learners.

It might take a little bit more work to find content that is related to educational goals, but I thought I'd search for material on the pyramids in Egypt, for example, and I quickly found several videos like these two bite-sized clips that will bring to life the pyramids and the sphinx for students around the world. Check out the shadow of the man walking next to the sphinx - or the camels on the ridge behind it for a sense of scale!

A quick scholar search for articles on the use of video in education turned up this literature review about "the use of digital video and iMovie in k12 schools." The focus is on "pedagogical issues relating to the process of learners capturing, editing, and generating their own digital video... on the 'student-genreation' of these artifacts and associated outcomes and support structures, rather than the actual digital video products per se."

This, and my own recent experience, reminded me of the powerful learning process required to create a video; students must master the content (in the same way we learn content best when we have to teach it), plan and storyboard their video, execute the recording (while paying attention to the shot frame, lighting, sound, and many other variables of cinematography), assemble and edit the final product (to efficiently achieve their purpose), and usually all the while working as a team with other students. Add to this the ability to share their creation online (via YouTube for example), and students now also have an authentic purpose and audience for their creation - not to mention it might actually benefit other students elsewhere. It's clear to me that asking students to create and share a video not only addresses content standards, but several 21st Century Skills as well. Best of all, it can be hard fun.

Of course, video won't be for everyone either...

21st Century Skills and the Infinite World of Information

Three years ago Steven Glyer, Director of Educational Technology at the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in California, introduced me to a document called enGauge: 21st Century Skills for 21st Century Learners. The framework presented by NCREL and the Metiri Group includes Digital Age Literacies, Inventive Thinking, Effective Communication, and High Productivity. Each of these sections include elements you would expect, but there are a few surprises I find important.

For instance, there are eight Digital-Age Literacies, which include multicultural literacy and global awareness. Also, within the area of inventive thinking, we find my favorite 21st century skill, risk taking. (Teachers often ask me how to teach risk taking, and I think that is another post, but I'm certain it requires a learning environment in which it is ok to fail - and to learn from failure.) Under Effective Communication you'll find sections on personal, social, and civic responsibility. And the most significant element under High Productivity is the ability to produce relevant products.

My perspective on all of these skills was changed about a year ago when Clark Aldrich (author of Simulations and the Future of Learning and Learn By Doing) remarked as I interviewed him that these are more than just 21st century skills... they might be called life skills (except for the potentially negative connotations) or success skills - and they have been the skills of the successful for centuries, at least.

Some of these skills, though, are changing in the 21st century, particularly information literacy. Students need to be able to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information available today, particularly on the web. In fact, I thought I would use this topic to illustrate some of the search tools that can help make sense of the "infinite world of information" that is at our fingertips.

A quick web search reveals that the enGauge document is not the top hit. An organization called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills at www.21stcenturyskills.org shows up first. They may have a better URL, but their site is much harder to navigate. Still, with a little digging I turned up this alternative framework of 21st Century skills.

Recent news on the subject is equally easy to come by. A news search reveals, among other things, an article from September 25th titled Partnership for 21st Century Skills Calls for Innovative NCLB Reauthorization. Note that adding quotes to this news search focuses the results even further.

More indepth and more scholarly resources are also available. A book search reveals a wide variety of related volumes and excerpts. Similarly, a search of scholarly sources produces still more resources, and if you find one that is relevant to you, such as J Salpeter's 21st Century Skills: Will Our Students Be Prepared, you can then click on Cited by to discover sources that cited the article. (This is the reverse of looking in Salpeter's references to see who he cited... and this produces newer and potentially more relevant results.)

Of course, if you are interested in what people are saying informally about 21st century skills, you can search online groups, which reveals many people with questions (and perhaps answers) about this topic - or better yet, do a blog search. In this case, we discover a relevant post at one of my trusted sources, Jeff Utecht's The Thinking Stick.

And if other media than text interests you, there is always an image search, from which I located the image for this post, or a video search, which brings us to a video in which you can listen to a "Nppissing University Instructor discuss technology in learning and how Nortel LearniT helps his pre-service teachers develop their 21st century learning skills." Whatever your learning style, there is information out there for you.

I even tried a map search, which made me curious about the connection between the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in Tucson, Arizona and this office in New York.

This is only scratching the surface of the research process of course, but my fellow ITM bloggers and I will be returning to these tools often I'm sure. Meanwhile, these links can get anyone started in their own exploration of 21st Century Skills and what they mean to you and your students.

Online Calendars in Schools

Many educators I work with are interested in ways technology can be used to support their professional learning community. DuFour and Eakers (1998) stress the importance of using class time for learning (p. 224), and the importance of smooth and efficient routines (p. 225). One strategy that can decrease the time teachers spend on mundane tasks and reduce the loss of instructional time is to use a shared online calendar system such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange (if your district provides such a system) or a free web-based calendaring system such as Google Calendar.

Math Teacher, Computer Teacher, and Tech Lead Teacher Andy Crisp at Thurston Middle School in Laguna Beach has spearheaded an effort to get important campus-wide calendars online. Crisp has helped migrate the school master calendar, the library sign-ups, computer lab check-outs, and the gym schedule onto Google Calendar. The entire faculty is now able to keep informed of the latest changes to the school calendar - and no one is ever viewing an old copy. Teachers can also check library and computer lab availability from their classrooms (or from home if planning lessons in the evening). Even local coaches and maintenance staff can check the gym (and field) schedule online. (Want to see an authentic example? Check out the public view of Thurston's Master Calendar.)

When I asked Andy about the benefits he sees in using an online calendar, he suggested that it can be accessed from any location, it reduces paper load, it's editable by several people (such as administrators, school secretaries, and the librarian), and it's always updated whenever anyone looks. He also found the efficient flow of information to have an indirect impact on instruction... in short, teachers have more time for other things. In addition, he found Google Calendar in particular to be user friendly and easy for the staff to use.

As for more instructional uses of such a tool, Andy and I discussed the potential benefits for team teaching (in fact, physics teachers at Laguna Beach High School are using Google Calendar for common curriculum planning). We also brainstormed ways it could be used as a class calendar, including homework assignments and due dates -perhaps including notes and resources related to these events. Students could even use an online calendar for their projects - anything from this day in history, to historical reenactments or speculative timelines. And I've always been a fan of helping students develop personal time management skills using real world tools such as handhelds; now, even without a handheld, a student can access their online calendar at home or at school.

Online calendars were not the first tool I thought I'd be writing about here on the Infinite Thinking Machine, but it sure got my brain working this morning. I hope that some of you will find my chat with Andy Crisp inspiring, too.