Teaching in the 21st Century

How will educators revise how we teach to promote literacy in the 21st Century? 

Literacy was once about reading and writing print text. Teachers could close their classroom doors and teach simple reading comprehension and basic writing skills. It was enough for the teacher and maybe a few peers to review and assess the progress of the students. The world has changed radically over the last five years. Creativity and collaboration are skills that are core to 21st century literacy. Literacy today requires teachers to open the classroom door and communicate and collaborate in: graphics, videos, audio, text, and combinations of these. We need to speak and write as well as interpret what we access. A sound understanding of design, production and appreciation is required. Here is a standards based rubric that I created  for the Smart Choices Project. Critical thinking is a skill that combines many areas of literacy: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, Thinking and Reasoning. All of these literacies in combination are required for people to interact successfully in the 21st century.

All of these changes mean that we need to teach differently. Educators must stay current with technology and methods for reaching our students. We can’t rely on conveying information and requiring memorization as assessment. Any of our students can check our sources and verify accuracy. We all have to be “learners”. Teachers have to be willing to guide and coach rather than control students. Young people today are very comfortable with devices, apps, and media of all sorts. They are way ahead of most of their teachers. It is easy for them to access global audiences and up to the minute media. Teachers don’t have to know everything- we do have to be willing to let our students use their skills to access information, and problem solve.

The last two years have produced a plethora of Web 2.0 tools that we take for granted today. Up until two years ago, Google applications were not nearly as user friendly or accessible as they are today. Today, we can go anywhere in the world with an iOS or Android device and collaborate easily using Google apps. These are available for free to most users. Schools can apply for Google Apps for Education, and provide supervised oversight for students to use GAFE. Every day there is a new and improved app to make creative production and collaboration easier and more attractive. Last week I bought an i Pad app for one or two dollars for Flickr. Now I can easily upload and access Flickr photos on my i Pad. In another example, I was using Padlet for a while, but it didn’t allow me to embed a Padlet on Kidblog for students to collaborate. I looked for alternatives, and found two possibilities- Coggle (from Google) and Stormboard. Coggle is a mind map program. Anyone can add to the mind map once it is embedded into a website. Stormboard has many options. I’m still experimenting with it. It is also having technical difficulties, but their tech support is very responsive.

About a month ago, while participating in a #caedchat, the topic of Design Thinking was raised. I followed up by participating in the #dtk12chat over the last three weeks. Design Thinking brings together the elements of learning at its best in the 21st century. Design Thinking is defined as “an approach to addressing challenges in a thoughtful and fun way, where you get to apply the 4C’s - collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication - to  your own work as you develop new solutions for your classroom, school, and community.” (“What is Design Thinking for Educators” in Edutopia, retrieved March 20, 2014). Design Thinking is a process, mindset, human centered, collaborative, experimental, and optimistic. Process is the place where learning happens, including self reflection and multiple revisions. We also understand that without a product, students will not see a purpose to their learning. Learners who see purpose in their learning are highly engaged.

The Design Thinking conversation shows that 21st century learning has to be much more than techniques, products, apps, and bells and whistles. Learning today has to be meaningful and personalized. If learners are engaged in authentic, well planned, collaborative process, working toward a constructive result, they will demonstrate mastery of content and 21st century literacy.

Design Thinking Resources:

Beginner's Guide to K-12 Design Thinking

http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=1062783

Reducing Inaccurate Stereotypes about Design Process

https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/crusbult/web/design/index.htm?left=dp-go.htm%23roadmap&right=ws.htm%23dpgo

Teachers Design for Education

http://td4ed.businessinnovationfactory.com/

A Taxonomy of Innovation

http://hbr.org/2014/01/a-taxonomy-of-innovation/ar/1

Making Education More Like Real Life Through Design Thinking

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leeanne-gray-psyd/making-education-more-lik_b_3949352.html

A Designer's Reading List

http://dschool.stanford.edu/fellowships/2014/02/19/a-designers-reading-list/

#DTK12chat

https://sites.google.com/site/dtk12chat/

More Web 2.0 Tools

Picture of Dvora's Tweetdeck

Web 2.0 Tools

The Edutopia Five Minute Film Festival provides links to a dozen quick tutorials for useful free Web 2.0 tools for the classroom. They include: Storybird, VoiceThread, Pinterest, Dropbox, Animoto, and more. Although I have experience using most of the tools, the tutorials still provide useful tips for using these in the classroom. For example, the Twitter tutorial provides instructions for sending Tweets directly to cell phones. This is a free reminder system for students and parents. I’ve been using Evernote for over a year, but it might be a useful tool for sharing information with students and parents. Once into a tutorial, it’s easy to go directly into Youtube and look for additional tutorials on the same tools and find new ideas.I have a subscription to Glogster. I don’t use it with the students, though. It is only accessible on the computer, since it relies on Flash, which makes it unfriendly to iPads.

Will Richardson’s chapter on social Networks emphasizes that young people today access social networks very frequently. Not only do young people use social networks to interact with others, they also use them to explore and research and share their  personal interests. They learn from these interactions effectively teaching and learning outside of school.  Facebook is quickly becoming popular with the older folks. A newer social network, which younger folks are adopting, is Ning. This network is organized around common interests. Social Networks emphasize collaboration and  communication over competition. Richardson makes the case that whether we like it or not, our youth is accessing Facebook and similar social networks. As educators, we need to use these tools for own use so we can understand what our students are doing. How would we utilize these tools for our students to communication and digital citizenship? We would need to respect professional boundaries while using Facebook with students. Teachers are not friends, and we need to respect the privacy of the students and not expose them to our personal lives as well. A class Facebook page could be created that would be a closed group. The class could use this to share links and comments. The advantage of this over a class blog would be that students would be on Facebook anyway, and it would be more attractive for them to use it as a familiar tool. Ning, which is another social network, is self contained. It can be private. Teachers can have administrative rights to approve posts. With all the possible tools, it's important to be selective. It seems to me, that if a class that is already using kidblog,org, there doesn't seem to be a need to add an additional tool like these.

My Experiences with Web 2.0 Tools

Nothing that I do with media and tech comes easy to me. There are so many tools that I have difficulty deciding what to use. Once I use a tool, I have to figure out how to make the different tools work with each other. If I had older students, maybe they would be able to experiment and find solutions to these conundrums. In the meantime, I’m spinning my wheels as I go.

Here are a few examples of my experiences with Web 2.0 tools: I used Kidblog.org and Explain Everything in the classroom with 7-8 year old girls. We were working on story elements and History, linking these with the Purim holiday. The students drew pictures of Esther and the Purim story. I asked them to take pictures of their pictures and either post them on their blogs or start creating a project in Explain Everything. We weren’t able to post the pictures and videos on Kidblog from the iPads. In addition, anything that was on one iPad in Explain Everything was not available to the other devices. We needed a plug-in on kidblog to access the media on the iPads. I didn’t have the expertise to determine how to do that. We also needed a way to save media on Explain Everything so we would be able to share it with each other. I was able to upload pictures from my iPad and a short video to my Google drive. It took some work to find where they went. I took my questions to my colleagues on my PLN in Twitter. Previously, when I asked questions this way, I didn’t get responses. This time, I was already in conversation with a local Jewish educator. He used Explain Everything to flip his Prophets class. He didn’t know the answer to my question, but other folks on our shared network of educators took up the conversation. We resolved the issue in part, and I was able to continue with my work.

I wanted to play with Animoto, so I took a 6 second video that I had saved in Google Drive, downloaded onto my computer, and edited it in Windows Movie Maker. Then I imported it into Animoto. I didn’t have a free teacher account because I didn’t have a school email. Rather than paying a fee, I created a sample 30 second video and was able to embed it on my class kidblog.  I wondered if I was making extra work for myself, or if this was the only way to make the different tools talk to each other.

I’ve been using Evernote for over a year. It’s a perfect tool for taking notes and setting up reminders. I would recommend it to students as a time management and note taking tool. It requires an email address, however, which some students don’t have access to.

A Web 2.0 Tool for Critical Thinking and Youth Activism

Richardson introduced a Social Networking site designed to help the less fortunate called TakingIt Global.org, I decided to investigate Takingitglobal to find out more about what they did and who they were. I was particularly interested in finding out if they had any kind of bias or agenda which was in conflict with my personal values. The home page was attractive and inviting. It used a tag line of “Inspire, Inform, Involve.” The site stated that it was designed to encourage young people from 15-30 years of age to be activists. Being Jewish, I looked to see there there was any reference to Jews or Israel. There was an article about the Israeli delegation to the U.N taking part in the U.N. Human Rights organization. There was an online video link on the topic of violence in activism, questioning whether it was justified or not. I couldn’t find any link to an archived video. I found that the site was supported by the U.N., Oxfam, and Greenpeace. These organizations had a record of discrimination against Israel. Although Arabic was featured as an option, I didn’t see any Hebrew on the site. After investigating this site, I would recommend that Jewish students access it and explore it carefully. I would even recommend that they take advantage of the resources found there, and use them to communicate and connect with other young people. I would caution Jewish youth to be on guard while there, and to be on the lookout for anti-semitism.(Here is a link to a Wikipedia article on the site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TakingITGlobal.)

After reviewing tigweb.org, I sent the link to my collaborators on the Smart Choices Project curriculum. I suggested that they investigate it. It would be a resource for the program for our Jewish students to communicate with other young people globally who were activists. This would a practical experience in critical thinking and determining bias, with an authentic and current audience of peers.

Resources:

This is a tool for creating interactive videos that engage learners:

http://www.zaption.com/

This is a blog post on two apps that can be used for reading comprehension:

http://edtechteacher.org/blog/?p=2540

Video making made easy:

http://animoto.com/

Second Life: A college student reviews the pros and cons of Second Life, and decides that although it IS a social network, it takes up too much time, and she prefers her first life:

http://youtu.be/vzkJA-pz8rE

Twitter in the classroom: instructions for setting up mobile notifications for students:

http://youtu.be/cv5qvSlXTmA

References:

Five-Minute Film Festival: Learn to Use Web 2.0 Tools, Edutopia, published June 15, 2012

Richardson, Will, “Social Networks: Facebook, Ning, connections, and Communities”, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Third Edition (Kindle version), Corwin, 2010

Podcasts, Vodcasts, and Streaming Videos in 21st Century Learning

Using podcasts and streaming videos in the classroom is a good way to provide flexible access to learning materials. For example, the teacher can create an audio or video a lecture and students can access it to prepare for an interactive class. Teachers can review their teaching effectiveness by reviewing their own audio podcasts. Podcasts can be used to interview guests on specific topics. Maya Payne Smart’s article in Edutopia explains how elementary school teachers can  use Podcasting and streaming to publish and distribute student work to a Global audience on the Web. Students work in partners or small groups to create a script, and then read the script into an audio device such as a microphone and computer or iPad.

Streaming videos into classrooms is a common practice these days. Many teachers use YouTube to upload materials or to access educational videos for instruction during or after school hours. The problem is that YouTube has no way to filter inappropriate videos, so many school have it blocked. LAUSD allows teachers to bypass the firewall one hour at a time, providing that the teachers choose only appropriate materials. Alternatives to YouTube are TeacherTube.com and WatchKnowlearn.org. TeacherTube is appropriate for schools, but content is much more limited than YouTube, and when I tried to open the page, I wasn’t able to .  The Watchknowlearn website has videos which are organized by topic, grade level, and Common Core Standards. I found one site called The We Do Listen Foundation that offers free animated books for children ages 3-8 to help them with life skills. It provides useful activities, including discussion topics and coloring pages. Unfortunately, this website uses Flash. Students would need to use Puffin on their iPads, or access it on device that uses Flash.  It is important to check out all resources to determine how they might be used as part of a curriculum design, and also to make sure they are accessible on all devices. In addition, many of the videos on Watchknowlearn are hosted on YouTube, which may not be accessible on the school network. For higher education, iTunes U offers access to many higher level learning and university podcasts. Some of the podcasts are free, and some have a fee. Edutopia has a very useful iTunes U collection for teachers, including podcasts on Project Based Learning. Radio Willow Web offers free student made podcasts on iTunes.

Jacqueline Mangieri, in her article on using screencasting in online learning, explains that this is an effective tool to bring the classroom to the student. Online instructors can provide a welcome video, deliver instructional lectures, provide feedback to students in asynchronous time, and provide a place for students to post their own screencasts. The article includes links to free screencasting tools.

How would I use podcasts or vodcasts in my classroom? It would be important  to plan and organize this in advance. It would need to be to be a part of my overall unit design. I am using Understanding By Design to plan instruction which targets Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions. We’ve been working on a unit that includes interview techniques, the holiday of Purim, and  the concept of History. The Purim unit emphasizes creativity and communication, research methods, and problem solving. Here is a link to the Purim Unit.

Producing a Podcast or Video Production: We were coming close to creating storyboards for our Purim interview project. My students were planning a video or audio production. I had several formative assessment tools that I used to pace my instruction, including Google forms, observation, work samples, and so on. However, over the last week, it became clear that this project would not be realistic at this time. We needed to keep tasks simple, and reteach rules and procedures. The students wanted to create their own play, but they didn’t understand what kind of organization or work needed to be invested in this kind of project. My standards based expectations would require them to create the play with scaffolding and work collaboratively step by step to complete a finished product..

We will need to backtrack and take care of basic procedures and expectations before we will be ready to produce a play. We will be using Class Dojo. I will call a meeting with the class and discuss our change in plans. I have attached a podcast of the students sharing their opinions about Class Dojo to this blog article. I will ask the students to listen to the Podcast . This can be followed up by additional Podcasts with students reflecting on ideas for improving collaboration and citizenship.

Reflections: All the bells and whistles that technology provides can not be thrown in without careful planning and management. Educators must practice the science and art of pedagogy to support students. We must emphasize citizenship, ethics, literacy skills, meaningful learning, and formative assessment to adjust the process. There is no way to make this simple or to make this a quick fix. With implementation of these kinds of tools, we will have students who will be prepared for adult life in the 21st century.

Terms:

podcasts- audio programs on the Web which users can listen to any time, and subscribe to for future reference. They might include sound effects, music, presentation slides, and videos. Podcasts are created by

YouTube- the most popular site for publishing self made videos of all types. This might be blocked in schools because it is not easy to filter out inappropriate and biased broadcasts.

Teacher Tube- an alternative to YouTube, is monitored by educators, and accessible at most schools.

Screencasting- when users capture the activity on their computer screen. Teachers can use this for tutorials, support materials, or narrating presentations.

Live streaming- users can create online TV shows for use in the classroom.

References:

“7 Things You Should Know About Podcasting” Educause Learning Initiative, Published June 2005. For this, and additional resources, go to this link.

Jacqueline Mangieri, PhD, Using Screencasting to Engage and Build Community with Online Learners, in Online Education, Sept. 23, 2009

Maya Payne Smart, “Listening to Themselves: Podcasting Takes Lessons Beyond the Classroom”, Edutopia, accessed March 2, 2014

Resources:

#CAedchat 3/02/2014 on the topic of student created videos- topics and links  

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kH3tvvELw7X1jKzZF9020J6qT4xb_2J-8hCln1WTIt0/edit

Animoto: Quick and Easy Video Maker

Free Open Source Podcast Platform

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Instructions for creating your own podcast using Audacity

http://youtu.be/2eIqryRZH48

Ditch That Textbook: Broadcast with Podcasts: Summer 2013

http://ditchthattextbook.com/conferences/prev-sessions/broadcast/

Podcasting in Education: What are the benefits? Colin Gray

http://www.thepodcasthost.com/blog/podcasting-in-education/

Cliff Ravenscraft’s Podcast Answer Man

http://podcastanswerman.com/

Cliff’s Video Tutorials for how to podcast:

http://youtu.be/-qD9AsooUcU

White House Student Film Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O-63RbV3vE&feature=share

Interviewing the Students about Class Dojo

Flickr as a Tool for Photo Sharing

Will Richardson explains how to use Flickr in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts. Educators can use photos and videos to capture and share daily activities in the classroom with parents, community, and colleagues. A class can have its own photostream. It is important to take into consideration that not all the images on Flickr are appropriate. Teachers have to explore the site, know the risks, and set guidelines up for the students.

Flickr basics from Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts: This is free as long as users stay within the provided free space allowed per month. With editing and file saving it is possible to save and post 500 images per month. The last 200 will be posted in the photo stream. The account has to be active over 90 days to stay active. A $24.95 annual fee provides unlimited storage and viewing. Teachers can create one login for all of the students or have them create their own accounts. They will need a valid email. This works if the school has GAFE, which can be monitored by the teachers. To add images to the user folder, find the image on the local computer or device, and click “upload”. You can use the email setting as well. Flickr includes photo and video editing. Another option is to edit images first, or on a site called “Picnik.com”. It’s possible to restrict access to images to friends, family or invited viewers. Flickr will ask users to tag images with keywords to they can be connected with similar images on Flickr. Flickr allows users to create private groups.

Flickr uses in the classroom: Create presentations and slideshows, virtual field trips, illustrate written work, document school work, teach geography. Users can annotate images by adding notes to parts of the image by dragging a box across an area and typing text into the box. When viewers drag their mouse over the image the annotations pop up. Teachers and students can use this to explain parts of a cell or a battlefield. For assessment purposes, students can be asked to annotate, or label parts of an image. Richardson says that under the Fair Use Doctrine, it is permissible to use any digital image you find on the Web as long as you attribute the source and add a link to the original image. Also, Flickr has over 25 million photos that have Creative Commons copyright licenses, which are useable based on the image’s specific guidelines. It is possible to start online discussions about images on Flickr by adding comments to photos. These conversations can be public or private. Users can subscribe to these discussions using RSS feed. Teachers can track what their students are writing using the RSS feed. Richardson recommends using Flickr to connect people on a global scale, using tags with similar themes or topics. Users can subscribe to a tag by RSS feed. When studying other countries or cultures, classes can interact with people from far away places. Leaving a comment on an image, students can learn more about the photographer. Students can do this safely by not sharing private information about themselves. Another idea is to use Flickr with Google Maps or Google Earth. Richardson provides steps for linking latitude and longitude tags to pictures, and how to share these with others. Flickr has a map tool. Users can set up separate albums for types of pictures. It has a slideshow function as well. These tools are in the “Organize” link. Students can create their own online portfolios with annotations and descriptions, and comments by peers and teachers. Flickr can be used to teach topics such as botany or current events.

Using Flickr in my classroom: One of my goals in my work is to integrate multiple disciplines in my learning experiences. My current emphasis is critical thinking, collaboration, self and peer assessment, and strengthening Jewish identity. The thinking skills are all emphasized in the NETS-S standards. The idea of integrating learning with personal meaning and identity is an important aspect of authentic learning. I used Google maps for an Abraham project earlier in the year. We followed the journey Abraham took from his birthplace to Canaan, Egypt, and back to Canaan. If we used Flickr, we could add more photos and interact with the photos with notes and sharing. Currently, we are learning research methods, including use of interviews and artifacts. Flickr would be a powerful resource to teach the value of artifacts in telling a person or place's story. My students are only seven or eight years old, but they respond to visual images, particularly because they are beginning and intermediate readers. I'm still concerned about inappropriate images. I would definitely have to create separate collections, and restrict the students to safe images.

Additional tools that use Flickr:. This is a link to a blog post with ways to use Flickr: Flickr Toolbox: 100+ Tools for Flickr Addicts”.  Flickr Storm is a way to search for images and create a story. This is a link to instructions for using Flickr images to create stories. The 50+ Ways to Tell a Story Wikipage has instructions to create stories using Flicktion.

The App Garden on Flickr is a collection of user made apps that use the Flickr API (Application Programming Interface). Flickr encourages users to create their own apps, provides instructions, and a place to publish them. I tried to comprehend if I might be able to use any of the apps for my own work. but they were too complicated for me. I found that some were very specific, such as one created by a church in Washington D.C, and a few were no longer active. 

I will need additional exploration and experimentation before I will be able to use any of these apps.

The Flickr website has a clean and uncomplicated look. The homepage has large “recommended” photos, important links, and frequently used links on the side, such as “The Commons”, and “Flickr Blog.” Clicking on the links at the top, there are drop down menus to additional links. With the volume of photos and all the applications that Flickr offers, it is important for users to find their way with as little confusion as possible. The Explore tab at the top has links to Recent Photos, The Commons, Getty Collection, Galleries, World Map, App Garden, Camera Finder, The Weekly Flickr, and FlickrBlog. The World Map has over two million geotagged photos. There are pink circles to click and show photos in specific locations. Then there are annotations and thousands of comments attached to the photos. At the bottom of the page, users can type in a location and links to photos will come up. I typed in the zip code where half of my children live, and local photos appeared. I searched for Ukraine, and most of the photos were of people, and everyday scenes. There was one protest photo, but the link function didn’t show the same view. Here is a screenshot of the map.

Challenges:

Finding photos that are Creative Commons and permitted for posting on a blog is not simple. I spent over an hour searching and attempting to embed photos. There was a setting for Flickr to access my Blogger site, but that didn't help me to embed photos. I tried to search under specific topics, including the city of Netanya and the topic of “joy”. Most of the photos that I liked were not available for sharing. I couldn't find a way to save photos in a ‘favorites’ group. There was a ‘gallery’ option, but the photos I tried to save were not creative commons. I was able to add comments to photos, which was enjoyable, but it was not useful for my work in the long run.

The assignment for this segment of the Web 2.0 course was to add a photo to our Flickr site. I added some family and vacation photos to my site. We were supposed to add a “note” to one of our photos. I couldn't find an “Action” drop down menu. The Flickr site has been updated over the years, and it probably doesn't have the same layout that it did when the course instructions were written.

While I was in my Flickr account, I found out that I had another account, which I created with my gmail professional account. I signed out of my yahoo email Flickr account, and signed into my gmail account. This wasn't a bad arrangement, since I needed to keep personal photos safe, and use a different account for public photos. The profile needed to be set up, including privacy settings. I set the settings for “public”. Now I was able to upload photos and attach notes and tags. I set up the Blogger and WordPress sharing, and was able to post one of  my own photos on my Blogger site.

Moral of the Story:

If some folks find their way around these applications easily, more power to them. Will Richardson titled his chapter “Fun with Flickr”. Maybe if I was having fun, I would find this easier to master. 

My experience tells me that I will make many mistakes before I find my way through a new application or skill. This is not “fun”. However, I know that it is important to try different settings and to persist. Now that I know how to add photos and share them, I will be able to make use of Flickr in new and innovative ways.

Reference:

Richardson, Will, “Fun with Flickr”, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, 3rd Edition, Corwin Press, 2010

Social Bookmarks

The last thing I need is for my students to be surfing the Net with no guidance. We'll need to use a social bookmark system.

The pure volume of data online demands that we find practical ways to organize and archive what we need. Social bookmarks are an online tool which make it possible to save, tag, sort, and share articles for specific uses. In education, we can use social bookmarking to share valid and reviewed resources with students and colleagues. The use of annotations and tags gives us the ability to create our own categories, which is important for future access and applications.

The two main social bookmarking tools were Delicious and Diigo. Del.icio.us was created in 2003, and popular for many years. More recently, educators have been using Diigo, because it had tools such as highlighting, sticky notes, and classroom student accounts, which were free to educators. I had heard of Delicious. I was wondering if it was the same or different from Diigo. I researched the differences, and decided to stay with Diigo. I already  had a Diigo teacher’s account, and it made sense to stay with that.

I have five groups on my Diigo account, including an #IEASC group, and a public group of educators who use Diigo. I started a group for the #Smart Choices Project critical thinking curriculum that I am co-writing. The collaborators will explore how we will utilize Diigo. We have defined five tools for critical thinking that we are incorporating in our design. They are, Awareness, Questions, Research, Decisions, and Actions. The Research piece will provide participants experience evaluating the validity and point of view of sources. Using the Diigo tools will enhance our program’s ability to guide our students in this process. Students will also be able to add their thinking process to the Diigo group, which peers and educators can review.

The specific NETS-S standards which we we are using for our Smart Choices Project include research and information fluency, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking and problem solving. The participants will need to evaluate and synthesize the sources, and determine what their own values are in comparison to those of the sources they evaluate. We are incorporating authentic problems such as how to manage time and social activism into our program. Participants will be guided in creating projects which will demonstrate their abilities to work collaboratively and communicate clearly.  Although we haven’t incorporated use of a social bookmarking system yet into our curriculum plan, it has great potential to provide experiential opportunities for participants to practice the ISTE standards which they will need to be successful in work and personal life.  

This article defines social bookmarking, and explains how to use it.

7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking, Educause Learning Initiative, May 2005

This article provides a detailed comparison between delicious and diigo, making the case that diigo is more flexible and suited for education. It includes screenshots and links to tutorials for using diigo.

Classroom Collaboration Using Social Bookmarking Service Diigo, Educause Learning Initiative,  December 2011

This is an article which defines social bookmarking. It has links to other articles, and was updated in January 2013.

Sites to See: Social Bookmarking, Education World, January 2013

This is a step by step tutorial on how to use bookmarking for teachers and students.

Bookmarking Without Borders, Education World, retrieved Feb. 18, 2014.

Using RSS Feed Readers

 Exploring possible tools for RSS feeds was initially frustrating. Bloglines was blocked by my firewall. Mozilla Live Bookmarks seemed complicated. Pageflakes drew a blank. Netvibes was interesting, but it offered more than I needed as a beginner. I read Will Richardson's chapter on setting up RSS feeds, but the instructions were confusing to me. I signed up for Merlot, but wasn't able to add it into my Feedly. Maybe I'm not doing it right, but for now, I saved the link in my Diigo account.  

This week,  I tried Feedly. It was easy to set up, and there was an app for my iOS devices. It was also free. The links on Richard Byrne's "Free Technology for Teachers" provided a rich set of new resources that I added to my feed. Now that I have Feedly set up, I can move over the blogs that I'm sending to my email inbox, and maybe there will be less "stuff" flooding it.

I'm still confused about a few things.When I tried to add a URL for www.mathpickle.com to my reader, an error message came up. The instructions said to add the full URL, but that didn't work either.I tried to add NASA Education to my reader, but it didn't work either. This was the URL: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/#.UwE6BIWhaO0.  Why do some of the links in the RSS feed discussion board come up as bookmarks instead of URLs? How would I use those to add to my reader?I found a really rich Math and Science website, and wanted to add it to my RSS reader, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I pinned it on my Pinterest board and automatically Tweeted the pin. Then I tried to add this site to my RSS reader, and only the Russian version was accessible.

I had no trouble finding feeds for teacher tools. The difficulties were mostly for student resources. There has to be an easy solution here, but I don't know it yet.

Two websites that I have used in my Middle School classroom are PBS Kids and NY Times Learning Network. When I tried to link PBS Kids to my RSS feed I found Dragonfly TV, which has podcasts for and by kids on science. I added that to my reader.

The NY Times Learning Network is a blog that has short articles on hot topics for teens. The teen readers blog their responses. This is a good exercise in authentic reading and writing. I noticed that one of the articles was about sexuality. This would not be a topic for public or open discussion in some private religious schools. An option would be to use specific articles and have kids blog locally about them, without including a link to the whole site.That would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed. This comes down to the question of whether an open RSS feed is really the best idea for a younger age group of students.Younger children still need to learn to understand their values and evaluate sources. It makes sense to keep those resources for older students. Once students have been trained in critical thinking, and making independent decisions, this can work.

Using RSS feeds in the classroom would require students to practice NETS-S standards for research and information fluency. They would have to analyze and evaluate the sources. They would have to select their own information choices from the teacher provided choices, and report their findings in some format. Students would also be able to practice communication and collaboration, by participating on online blogging. They could blog on their classroom blog on on a student or outside blog, depending on the students and the design of the lesson. Critical thinking and problem solving would be a very important skill to practice in using RSS feed. Students need to evaluate the validity and bias of sources and compare and contrast their own point of view with that of the resources.