Robust Visual Literacy: Flikr in the Classroom

I'm just now becoming aware of the possibilities of using Flikr.com in the classroom.

I do a project with my 4th graders titled 'Globally Connected', where they look at the lives of children their age growing up in a country other than our own.

I don't allow students to choose the same country. This usually produces some angst, as most Jewish kids want to do Israel, the Irish kids Ireland, etc. The Korean kids routinely choose South Korea first, and choose North Korea as a distant second place selection only if they have to.

The information sites I direct them to for their research have sparse details about North Korea generally. and even less about the daily lives of kids. But with Flikr...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/ / CC BY 2.0
Retrieved October 12, 2009

Simply typing the country's name and the additional tag 'children' yielded an array of compelling, relevant images utterly different than what Google Images yields.

There are additional classroom benefits to using Flikr:

• The annotation tool offers the prospect of running commentary about given images.  I wonder if an email address (which many of my young students don't have yet) is the price of admission...
• There is a great opportunity to discuss intellectual property & source citation via the commons.

I'm sure there are others, but these are my initial thoughts.  What a resource!

Consider the Wiki

This past week has gone by in a whirlwind!  While I have been a Wikipedia user for a while, and had a passing understanding of what a wiki was and even how it worked, I've never integrated them into my practice.  Once again,  I find myself on the brink of applying what I believe to be a revolutionary new technology to my professional life.

I sit on various committees at my school, all broken into sub-committees.  Information is all passed via e-mail along the line, until it eventually gets to the poor principal, whose inbox is perpetually bulging.  I suggested using a wiki to offset the burden of organizing all of that information from one person to the entire group.  Balanced and equitable.  I hope my principal loves it.

In the classroom with my students, I'm beginning to think about using wikis too.  I've begun to rollout the 5th grade environmental project I blogged about earlier, and have students working in teams of 4.  I'm thinking of setting up a wiki for them to hold their collected knowledge on the various topics I've assigned each group.  I think it will be new and exciting for them - and possibly a little frustrating.  But the collaborative paradigm is one I would like to introduce them to early, to build on in future years.
Actually contributing to a wiki with a group myself this past week has been informative too.  It's highlighted some of the possible pitfalls I should be aware of for my young students, including:

• Time Management: if one team member is holding up the rest due to a lack of participation, the whole project suffers.
  
  
• Inventing an organizational structure out of nothing was a bit of a challenge for me.  I imagine that they will also struggle with how to order their thoughts and research.  they will need some pointers on this.
  
  
• This isn't one I felt personally, but I suspect that it will rear up for my students: a sense of possessiveness or individual ownership.  Or maybe it will be a sense of indignation that  some contribute more than others, or contribute more thoughtful and substantive content than others.  I will need to learn how to assess the various products produced, but I'm not quite sure how yet.

I'd like to mention a word about Wikipedia.  I've always been a fan, and have thought that it's detractors were old sticks-in-the-mud.  Reading about Wikipedia and exploring the safeguards that have been recently put in place make me all the more excited.  I'll confess that I'm in a bit of disagreement with the school librarian on this!  I don't believe that Wikipedia can be used blindly or uncritically, but to ban it's use outright seems like throwing the baby out with the bath-water.  I feel compelled to expose my student to this tool in a structured and supervised way; rather than have them encounter and interact with it in their own time, unsupervised, unguided, and likely less critical.

Network Them Bookmarks!

I've been using Delicious for a while now, but not it's 'social' functions.

(To add me to your Delicious network: cheefinspector)

I started using it a few years back, whe I was a substitute teacher.
I would be in a different classroom everyday.  I never had my favorites with me, and was frequently encountering cool new resources that I wanted to add.  I used Delicious as a portable (and essentially private) favorites list.  It was way more awesome than writing things on post-its and scraps of paper, to be keyed in later when I got home.

Over time, I've added a small handful of people to my delicious network, but rarely if ever go check their tagged content.  I mostly just keep adding to my list from my own surfing.

But now I'm thinking: Perhaps rather than hunt for answers via search engines, I should explore the possibility of growing and establishing my delicious network.  I see some immediate, obvious advantages:

1. There will be no paid placements / skewed rankings.
   
   
2. Some one - likely someone I know personally - will have thought enough of the resource to tag it.  This effectively lets other people act as pre-screeners for any content I may want to explore.
   
   
3. I will get to know the tagging protocols of the people in my network.  I will likely change and modify the way I tag to take best advantage of the shared information, rather than continue to impose my own (private) taxonomy on the entire content of the web.

I'll need to explore this possibility, and post my findings.

Playin' with Pageflakes

I've been experimenting with pageflakes, a customizable web content aggregator, with the ability to make pages public for others to see!

There are probably more targeted ways to populate one of these pagecasts with content, but here is my first crack at it.  It's a page for renewable energy resources:

http://www.pageflakes.com/stevekelly04/27921836

Save the Earth, My 5th Graders!

So I've got a real, genuine quandry.  This is not a made-up 'doing-it-for-the-class' type of post.

I need to flesh out a rough idea I have for my fifth graders this marking period.  I'm their technology education teacher, and have had the idea that they could get into a project that focuses on environmentalism, but which hits on the ISTE standards at the same time.

I've got my plans set for my 4th graders.  6th, 7th, & 8th grades are all dialed in.  But I'm totally hitting a roadblock with 5th. 


Here's what I've got so far:

• I'm about to do two lessons on internet research, focusing on how to determine the relability of an information source. 
  
  
  
  Thoughts on this topic would be great, expecially in light of our ongoing discussion about the read/write web.  In the era of citizen journalism, how to determine veracity?
  
  
  
  
  
• I'm calling the project 'Earth 2060', and asking my 5th graders to imagine the earth in 50 years - within their lifetimes.  It's a place where non-renewable energy sources have been depleated, and new sources of energy have needed to be instituted. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I want them to work in small groups (I'm thinking groups of 3) to research select energy resources, including:
  
  
  
  
  
  • Wind
  • Solar
  • Geothermal
  • Nuclear
  • Hydroelectric
  • Coal
  • Natural Gas/Oil
  • Biomass
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
• At the end of the project, I'm anticipating that they will be able to:
• Pros and Cons of their energy source
• Defend the energy source they
  
  
  
  
  
• So, I'm asking myself:
  
  
  
  
  
  • What will my students be able to do at the end of this unit?
  • PowerPoint basics
  • Internet research basics
  • MS Word basics (table, list, insert picture, footnotes/endnotes)
  • Use citations
  • Articulate pros and cons for different types of energy
  • Read charts and analyze data!
  • Understand unfamiliar units of measurement (ex: Kwh)
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will student know at the end of this unit?
  • How different energy sources actually work.
  • Energy needs are projected to increase
  • There are tradeoffs for any type of energy (pros and cons)
  • Different websites and information sources have different agendas and points of view.
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will students produce to demonstrate their understanding?
  • A PowerPoint presentation about THEIR selected source of energy, it’s pros and cons, and the ability to argue for it in the face of other alternatives.
  • An accompanying paper articulating their main points.
  • Possible: Research the history of a given energy source, and be able to articulate the positive and hopeful discoveries, along with the discoveries of it’s dangers and negative attributes.
    
    
    
    
    
  
  

Here's what I need help with:

• The PowerPoint & Word skills are ones that I think are necessary at this stage - foundational skills that they can build and expand on in other classes and later in their academic career.  But they feel stultifying and dry.  How to pep them up?  (I'm thinking maybe of using voicestream as an extention for the PowerPoint - you can load a presentation right up in there...)
  
• Any one know of age appropriate resources for students to find this data?  I've been hunting, and so many resources are over their heads.

Something about this whole project feels incomplete.  I'm hoping by posting what I've got here, some of you might help me see what's missing.

Thanks, hive mind!

Dipping my toe into RSS

I'll confess that years have gone by, and I never looked into RSS or clicked on the 'RSS Feed' icon.  I always assumed that it was one more technology that I likely didn't need, would take valuable time to learn, and was ultimately unnecessary.

I write this post on the brink of rethinking all of that.

 Yes, it is taking valuable time to learn how to use RSS.  Or perhaps to put it more accurately, to learn all of the related permutations of how one can use RSS.

But I'm coming to understand it as a potentially HUGE time saver.  In the past, I've marveled at the pace and quantity of content generated by educators like Victoria Davis on her blog.  It seemed humanly impossible.  


Now, with RSS, rapid responses and staying abreast of select current events seems manageable.  


I'm unsure of all of the ways this technology will change my life's habits but feel sure that it will.  


I do have a concern however - one that resonates with classroom experiences: I can introduce this tool to my students, and ask them to use it to stay current on a specific topic.  Fine.   But I know that they will likely also search for content that is of their own interest, that addresses the things that they think about.  Once our class is over, I hope and anticipate that they will continue to use this technology.  Might not my tweeny students restrict their online media consumption to very narrow, very specific interests?  I fear a loss of common interests, a lingua franca.  I get that this is the read/write web, and user generated content is paramount, but I can see how one could fill their entire world with up to the minute minutia, and think that they are well-informed and aware of current events.

Globally Connected; Finding Answers

After a little digging, I found answers to some of the questions I had:

1. Question: Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
2. Question: Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?

• Answer: http://comments4kids.wikispaces.com/ - A wiki established to post links to kid-created content worth commenting on.

Details of the origins of #Comments4Kids from Twitter conversations between a group of like-minded educators can be found at:

• http://attheteachersdesk.blogspot.com/2009/04/comments4kids-wednesdays.html?showComment=1254015322109#c4730878677880691336 - 

The question of assessing my student's posts is still an open one...

Globally Connected

I’ve been thinking about ways I can incorporate blogging into some of my student’s lessons, and came across what I thought was a great example. 

• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/dear-kaia-voicethread-and-video.html
• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

Mr. C teaches at Noel Elementary, and holds a session called ‘Comments4Kids’ once a week, where his students:

 “…have the privilege of reading blog posts from around the world and leaving comments.”

For instance on one day, his students looked at blog posts from both Qatar and Iowa.

I thought this was an excellent introduction to blogging, in that it permitted students to interact, collaborate, and publish with their peers, and encouraged cultural understandings and a global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. 

I’d love to incorporate this type of lesson into some work I do with my 4^th graders, who currently are at work on a long term project titled “Globally Connected”, in which they look at similarities and differences between their lives growing up in the U.S., and the lives of same-age students in other countries. 

I do have some questions about implementation, however.  In particular:

• Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
• Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?
• How to assess my students’ posts?

Rest Less: Managing Time, Resources, and Pace of Change

Consider, if you haven't already, some of the following web2.0 resources:

• gliffy - flowcharts
• animoto - slideshows and movies
• audacity - sound editing
• paint.net - image processing
• voicethread - communal digital storytelling
• blogger - blogs
• zotero - new media reference tool

Web 2.0 tools are plentiful and cool.  I'm giddy with the prospects they hold.  Restless.

But the quantity of new tools is overwhelming, to say nothing of learning how to use them effectively.  The resistance some teachers have to learning web 2.0 tools feels familiar:  I, too, am reticient; fearing my already tightly allocated time may be all together obliterated by adapting 'always on' technologies.  How could I possibly attend to them all?  I'd need to rest less.

So add time management and resource management to the list of essential 21st century skills.

And honestly, by time-management, I'm not wanting to wring more out of my minute.  I want to breathe, and quiet my frenetic mind.  I see value both in making effecient, effective use of my working hours, and also in taking my non-working hours to myself; to recooperate, reflect, and rest.  I want a balanced life, and a life well lived. 

How to strike this balance?