Cooper-Taylor Training

Archive for the ‘Web 2.0 Applications’ Category

[ad]

In case you’ve missed it there is a new report out “Engaging The New Influencers” from Edelman.

null

In June 2009, Edelman convened 100+ professors of communication, journalism, business and pubic relations to discuss how companies and organisations effectively engage with their stake holders through social media. Here are some of the bits that I found applicable to education (bits in italics are my commentary):

1. Go where the people are: don’t expect them to come to you
   So that’s (e)Learning then
   
2. The digital era demands more active media users, which presents an opportunity for academia to integrate social media more into its curricula.
   More active, interactive learning!
3. Organisations can leverage social media to engage employees on any initiative, whether through knowledge-sharing, storytelling or connecting on a network to increase involvement and forge a sense of community.
   So the Vice-Chancellor will have twitter linked to their FaceBook account?
4. Digital communication is well-established and here to stay
   Faculty will have to embrace digital aspects of learning/teaching
5. In Asia one in three people access the Internet by mobile devices
   Our (e)Learning is already behind the times
6. Academic curricula should incorporate what the most appropriate social media tools to use are for specific tasks.
   Our students will need these tools as part of their working life. Faculty need a lot of professional development.
7. Every single website in the coming decade will have some sort of social functionality to it … and those that don’t are going to be at a disadvantage
   So what does your institution’s website look like. Time to engage with your readers!
8. Academia needs to better adapt to the media changes today to help develop the communications workforce of tomorrow.
   Listen up faculty, the way we teach has to change
9. Core skills – using text, photo slide shows with audio and video
   Faculty if you can’t do this now you need some PD. Sign up for the next course
10. Core skills – critical thinking, identifying a problem, taking a risk, offering a new solution
    Are you teaching problem solving or just expecting regurgitation of  facts?
11. Core skills – knowing how to compare content and determine which content is trustworthy
    Do you encourage students to collate information from lots of different sources (including the web) and justify their choice?
12. Core skills – social media principles so students can understand how to apply specific tools to a broader purpose
    A thread through the whole report then – students need social media skills to succeed in the workforce.

Interesting post on the Google Blog recently: “Five million students going back to school are “going Google”.

It relates of course to the number of schools using Google apps education edition.

I love Google apps and use them to share material with all sorts of people. But this post got me uptight by its northern-hemisphere-centricness.  Come on Google the southern hemisphere use your apps as well.

So please remember “fall” it may be for you northernies, but us southeries are in spring. And please don’t cut Australia in half on your map, or leave New Zealand off all together.

If you don’t want a picture of yourself on various blogs, wikis, forums etc. but you still want a picture you can make an avatar of yourself. One of the latest I come across, thanks to Jane’s eLearning Pick of the Day, is DoppelMe. On the right is one I created today.

This is early days for this service and I would have liked the option to change the shape of my face, but otherwise it’s fine as an avatar. You can change clothes, hair, expression etc. and there are a number of accessories you can add. Some of it requires DoppleMe Coins which you get by referring others to the site.

Now more interesting is the question of why people use a photo or an avatar. When avatars first became available in education LMSs I used to use a cartoon of myself quite frequently. I thought this showed students that I was humorous. Now I tend to use a photo, as these days I think it more important that people see me when they read what I say.

If you want to go the avatar route here’s a list of 27 avatar makers at Mashable.

So, what do you do? Photo or avatar? Why?

As I noted in my last post I am preparing a new course. So this cartoon from Being Five really hit the spot for me:

Great article at Stuff today about Fendalton Open Air School, which has won international praise for its innovative use of technology.

The children write about what they’re doing during the day on their blog, they share photos and post video to YouTube. These feed onto the school website during the day.

Parents can comment back and the kids apparently love it. Not surprising as research by John Hattie show that feedback is the most important factor for student achievement.

The school also uses a blog to keep the board of trustees updated.

Not surprisingly, this initiative has noticed around the world.

Great stuff Fendalton!

Now, go look at the school site http://www.fendalton.school.nz/ to see a wonderful mashup of feeds.

Does your school do anything cool like this? Post a comment if you do.

At the beginning of Feb I wrote about “8 Ways to find great edublogs“. Since then I’ve come across many more useful links so I thought I’d reorganize my original post a little to make it more user friendly for those starting to look at Edublogs. One things I forgot to say in the original is “what is an Edublog?” Well wikipedia describes an edublog as, “a blog written by someone with a stake in education.”

Wikipedia goes on to say, “Examples might include blogs written by or for teachers, blogs maintained for the purpose of classroom instruction, or blogs written about educational policy. The collection of these blogs is called the edublogosphere by some, in keeping with the larger blogosphere, although that label is not necessarily universally agreed upon. Others refer to the community or collection of blogs and bloggers as the edusphere.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edublog)

OK, so here are some ways to find great edublogs:

A Starting Place

1) Ask friends/colleagues with an interest in education if they blog, and if they do read their blogs.

2) Ask friends/colleagues which edublogs they recommend, and read those.

3) Look on the blog rolls of edublogs you already read to see which blogs they suggest. If you like they stuff they write, chances are they also read blogs you’ll like.

4) Note other edublogs mentioned in those you already read. You might find an edublogger you would never have found otherwise.

The Great and the Good
Here are some sites listing top edubloggers:

5) The Edublogs awards have been awarded since 2004. It was an honour to be nominated in 2005 for some research I did with my colleague Lyn Boddington at Lincoln University.

6) Dangerously Irrelevant did a posting on the Top 50 P-12 Edublogs? – June 2008 using Technorati’s Authority and Ranking data.

7) OEDB did a list of the top 100 edublogs at the end of 2006. A little old now but I recognise many of the blogs as still being current and great blogs.

8 ) Edutopia did a Top 10 in 2007, not scientifically drawn up but still some good edublogs there.

9) Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer did a list in Jan 2009 of the 50 Top Education Blogs based on their engagement over the past 30 days.

10) 25 EduBlogs You Simply Don’t Want to Miss! by ZaidLearn, is in a different format on Slideshare

11) Outstanding Edublogs is another personal collection with some blogs I follow in the list. This one is presented via Clipmarks

12) Yearly Roundup – The 20 best edublog posts of 2006 is a slightly different approach listing top posts rather than top blogs, but it will still point you to some great edublogs.

Edublog Directories
These provide a list of edublogs, often self nominated, but still worthy of a look. You could add your own blog perhaps?

13) Australian Edubloggers

14) Kiwiedubloggers

15) International Edubloggers Directory

16) UK & Ireland EduBloggers Directory

17) India Edubloggers

18) Teacher Lingo

Search Engines & Indices

19) Edublogs is a Google Beta Custom Search created by Stephen Downs, whose edublog you probably want to add to your list.

The following are blog search engines rather than edublog search engines but you will still find edublogs listed just add edublog or education or school or K12 (you get the idea) to you search term(s)

20) Blogarama

21) Blogdigger

22) Bloglines

23) Blogsearchengine

24) Eatonweb

25) Feedster

26) Globe of blogs

27) Search4blogs

28) Syndic8

29) Technorati

Tools of the Trade
You’ll need some tools to help you, so here are some to get you started.

30) Jane Hart of Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) has a great list of Top Blogging Tools

Once you have a list of 10 or more sites you are going to need a feed reader. This picks up the RSS feed (really simple syndication) from each blog and enables you to read them all in one place. A great time saver, plus you don’t have to go the the blog’s URI only to find there is nothing new posted. Here are some suggestions:

31) Feedreader I started with this one. It is downloaded on to your PC and is great if you only use one machine.

32) Bloglines I moved to this service as it is web based (for Mac and PC) so I could read blogs at work and at home and Bloglines knew what I had read no matter which machine I was on.

33) Google Reader I use this currently as part of my iGoogle page. Also web based.

34) Mac users can find a list of feed readers here

Create your own Edublog
After reading some edublogs perhaps you want to start your own, here are some places to get hosted for free

35) My post back in November – Slides – Blogging. What is it? How do you do it? What does it have to do with learning & teaching? lists some free blog hosts on slide 11. My top three suggestions are:

36) Edublogs – teacher and student blogs service specifically for education

37) Blogger very easy service to start with, I started here before moving to my own WordPress blog on my own domain

38) WordPress‘s hosted service

So what would you add??????

Image: Bluff Sign Post by Rob Young

There are a lot of edublogs (blogs about education) out there. So how do you decide which edublogs to follow?In the “old days”, aka five years ago, you could just do a search and find them. I find these days that technique doesn’t work so well, so here is what I tend to do.

1. Ask friends/colleagues with an interest in education which blogs they recommend.
2. Look on the blog rolls of blogs you already read to see which blogs they suggest. If you like they stuff they write, chances are they also read blogs you’ll like.
3. Note the other blogs mentioned in the blogs your already read. Are these worth adding to your list of blogs?
4. Have a look at the Edublogs awards. Eddies have been awarded since 2004. Indeed I was a nominee in 2005 for some research I did with my colleague Lyn Boddington at Lincoln University.
5. Have a look round the blogs on edublogs.org. They have a list of popular tags on their home page.
6. Use a search engine designed specifically for searching blogs, such as Google Blog Search, Blog Search Engine and Blogdigger. There is also a good list on Wikipedia. Remember these are not specific to edublogs so you may have to be quite specific with your search terms. Try searching for “edublog” to start off with.
7. Technorati has been indexing blogs for years, it has indexed 133 million blog records since 2002. Again this is a general index, so be specific about searching for education content.
8. Bloglines is a blog feedreader, and blog host, but it is also a useful place to search for blogs. You do need an account to search but registration is free.

What do you do to find edublogs?

Image: Found Puppy http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/6246435/

Here’s the latest Tweet app I have come across.

To me what seems different is its ability to put replies in a thread.

It also expands the tinyURLs and gives you the title of the page.

It can also show embedded content like links to YouTube and Flickr.

One to watch I think.

So do you use this app? Or do you think it might be useful?

Get out there and vote for your favourite blogs. Lots of different categories to choose from.

Just trying out an add-in for Firefox called Dash Blog. It allows you to grab a web page as an image, crop it, draw on it, add arrows and text, and then publish to your blog. I Like it.

Great for those people who need to include screen shots for teaching.

What do you use for this purpose?