Steve Kinney

During the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, Guy Kawasaki (can you tell I’m on a kick lately?) moderated a panel titled “True Stories from Social Media.” During the discussion, Aaron Mentele (partner at one of my favorite web development houses, Electric Pulp), noticed the shift in shift in social media from “Moderate, moderate, moderate” to site owners letting go of the reigns a bit and letting the community take control. The other panelists concurred that a big part of their sites’ success has been in encouraging open and free communication.

I teach in a middle school. Middle school students are not known for their eloquence when it comes to discussing the virtues and pitfalls of their teachers as evident by the writing in the bathroom – I’ve never been the topic of conversation on the bathroom walls, which may either be a good or bad thing.

During the final days of the school year, my co-teacher and I invited students to whip out a piece of paper and tell us what they think of us. We told them not to include their names, but they chose to anyway (or weren’t listening to the instructions – not uncommon). It wasn’t my idea and I was prepared for the worst, but I was blown away by the response. Our students responded with thoughtful and reflective responses, some of which may have been their best prose to date. They were open and honest in their appreciation for the work we had done and respectful in their criticism.

There was a lot that I glossed over in the introduction to this post. The moral of Aaron’s story was that controversy causes spikes in site in traffic – this isn’t the goal for most educators. My moral is slightly different. If we let go of the reigns and stop moderating with an iron fist, we may be surprised with the result. Integrating social media into the classroom is scary and requires a giant leap of faith (or reckless abandon, in my case) but it just might be worth it in the long run.

When students write for social media. They write for audience that isn’t just the teacher. As a result, they need to be more thoughtful in their writing. At the same time, in my experience, they tend to also be more thoughtful in the way they respond to each other’s work.

The result of the student surveys? I’m a caring, dedicated teacher who needs to lighten up on the sarcasm.

By the way, this post was inspired by a post over at Creating Knowledge with Technology as well as Guy Kawasaki, Aaron Mentele, and friends.

This post is a follow-up to a post I wrote last week about using Web 2.0 strategies to encourage collaborative student learning. Web 2.0 is all about sharing and collaboration and with any luck, so is your classroom. The trick is finding new and innovative ways for Web 2.0 and your classroom to get along.

In the article, I talked about using wikis as a tool to empower students to collaborate on outlines and other documents. This time, let’s take a different approach: taking the general idea of Digg applying it in the classroom. If you’ve never been to Digg, I highly recommend that you stop on over (after you finish reading this post, of course). Digg is like a news website – albeit a bit more irreverent – with one major difference: There are no moderators or editors. Interesting stories are selected by the Digg community and appear on the front page of Digg. When a user comes across a story on Digg, they can choose to digg it. As a article earn more diggs, it ascends in the rankings until it finally reaches the front page.

Incredibly, this user interaction is what makes Digg so addictive for its users. Peers tend to pick stories that the mainstream press, but submitters to Digg also scour the internet looking for the most interesting content in order to increase their chances of being dugg. Allow me to rephrase, users – without any compensation whatsoever – are investing large amounts of time and effort seeking out content. Doesn’t this sound like something you should have in your classroom (hint: yes)?

There are a few caveats of course – you don’t want just any content; you want relevant content. Some teachers may scoff at the arduous task of training their students to use the internet responsibly. I argue that such skills are essential in the Internet Age (or the Information Age or the Ingenuity Age) and that it’s unfair to pass this responsibility off to someone else (or likely no one else). As teachers, we’ve accomplished much more difficult tasks in the past.

There are a few ways you can use a Digg model in your classroom. First, you can allow students to writing prompts and topic ideas. The class decide which subjects are the most interesting – this sure beats you giving yourself a headache on Sunday night trying to think of something. Students could share and comment on eachother’s drafts during writing process, eliciting instant feedback from their peers. In math and science, students could submit proposed answers and digg solutions that seem correct or comment on a peers approach.

All of these techniques remove you as the sole source of knowledge. They encourage students to collaborate, share, discuss, and critically think about ideas. This, in turn, increases their investment in whatever you’re teaching and makes the lesson more sticky. On top of that, you’re reinforcing accountable talk and the social skills necessary to succeed in today’s collaboration based workforce.

So, how do you incorporate your own home-grown version of Digg? Pligg is a free alternative (clever name, I know). It does take a hosting of some sort and a little bit of customization to get it up and running. I believe that it is well worth the investment. Someone should write a tutorial on how to implement Pligg (instead of just musing on its potential uses). My web host, Dreamhost, allows for one-click installation of Pligg – very convenient. Technology coordinators, check out Pligg at your earliest convenience.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Jott can help students with disabilities (both physical and learning) get a jump on the writing process. Basically, Jott takes short voice messages and transcribes it into text. It’s a great tool for helping students who have difficulty getting started writing.

Recently, Jott added a feature that allows it to work in the other direction. You can have your feeds read to you (or a special student in your life). If you can roll your own feed (I suggest Tumblr; it’s quick and deceptively simple), then you can create a Jott Feed.

Jott Feeds has a lot of potential uses: parent news for homes without computers, homework assignments for students who tend to forget to record their homework, and homework readings for students that might need the text read to them.

Jott Feeds makes it easy to create readings for students so that they can access the curriculum. Instead of slaving away for hours in front of Audacity, you can simply copy and past text into Tumblr. You can take it a step further and use an OCR scanner to scan in text from books.

There has been a lot of talk about change lately. Robert Scoble wrote up a post about how blogs and social networking have transformed how business is done in Washington, D.C. Guy Kawasaki interviewed Ariane de Bonvoisi, author of The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change (and Loving Your Life More).

Change, for better or for worse, has a tendency to come whether you want it to or not. The educational landscape is going to change a lot over the next few years; whether or not you consider this to be a good thing or not all depends on your perspective. How will you deal with change? Will you resist it? Or, will you embrace it and bring it into your classroom?

The burgeoning use of technology in the classroom is likely to have its growing pains. Early adopters will not have the luxury of tried and true teaching methods to consult when trying to implement Second Life into their classrooms. Things will break when you need them most; imagine how early adopters of the copy machine must have felt or how you feel now when your beloved Xerox machine kicks the bucket. There will be a number of awkward conversations about appropriateness on the web (remember, the web never forgets).

The return on investment will be worth the effort. DimensionM is already having a substantial impact on student achievement and teachers are finding exciting ways integrate Second Life in ways are academically rigorous. Be the change you want to see.

P.S. I resisted the urge to use a certain Bob Dylan song for the title of this post. You’re welcome. Also, the photo is courtesy of HVX Silverstar on Flickr.

Web applications that do everything your favorite desktop applications ever did and more are springing up all over the place. Are they worth integrating into your classroom?

They’re updated much more frequently.

Microsoft releases a major update to their Office suite about every three to four years, which is short compared to how long it takes them to release an operating system. Apple is on a two-year time table (although with only two incarnations of iWork so far, that may not be the case in the future). In comparison Google Documents has been serviced with a number of minor tweaks, a few major upgrades, and one complete overhaul within the past few months. Bugs and quirks get worked out much faster.

The updates are instantaneously installed on the client side.

There is no need to spend the better part of a week (or longer) updating every computer in your classroom (or school); updates to web applications are instantaneous and require no work on your part. Just log on, fire up your favorite browser, and pull up the site. Not having to worry about installing upgrades, bug fixes, and security patches allows you to focus on the more important aspects of your job – e.g. thinking of new, interesting, and effective ways for your students to engage the curriculum. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t envy anyone trying to integrate technology in their classrooms; it’s difficult. Aside from the maintenance and upkeep required keep everything running smoothly (if it doesn’t work well, then teacher’s won’t even bother), instructional technology requires a total shift in our thinking about education.

We’ve all been there: “Rather than give them a reading, I’ll fire up a website on.”

There is no point in employing traditional methods on a glowing screen. There’s nothing wrong with the traditional methods, but books, paper, and scripting tools (pens and pencils) have been around for thousands of years and they’re relatively good at what they do. The computer is not going to beat them at their own game – and that’s okay. The web is a different game and you need to play by different rules to get the most from it.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times (and I’ve said it at least a dozen times): the web is about collaboration. The web is about interaction. If you put your pen and paper lessons on the computer, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you embrace the nature of the web and design new lessons around these principals, then the sky is the limit.

With the Web 2.0, collaboration is the name of the game – but it’s about more than that. We’ve regretfully moved past the era of the armchair philosopher. While this will indefinitely put the kibosh on my career aspirations, it will provide an exciting landscape for those entering and moving about the workforce over the course of the next hundred years or so. Dare to give collaboration a try in your classroom. I guarantee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised. As I’ve mentioned, Web 2.0 is all about collaboration.

Allow students to collaborate on study guides for their guided reading books, textbooks, or any other content that could use some further digestion. Encourage conversation and initiate dialogue. This collaboration can be done using Google Documents, but it can also be accomplished, quite easily, using a wiki (such as WikiSpaces).

Through collaboration, students will have taken on the role of differentiating the content in question for those who may struggle with it in its previous incarnation. If you are concerned that everyone is pulling their weight (I choose to concern myself with whether or not the students are learning – by whatever means necessary), you can track collaboration from the administrator’s page; but why not instead focus your efforts on making the experience more engaging so that student’s want to participate?

Empower your students to create videos, podcasts, slide shows, or artwork on the topic in question. Encourage them to scour the internet, researching supplementary resources such as video clips, relevant websites, or BrainPOP lessons.

Jott is a text dictation services that works via your mobile phone. You call up the speed dial and name who you want to Jott. The next step is to start speaking. Shortly after, Jott transcribes your voice into text and leaves you a note. You can send Jotts to your friends, family, calendar, or blog.

If I had to guess — especially given the picture I included with this post — I’d say that Jott was intended for a professional audience. But let’s take a moment to think about Jott in the classroom. I’m a special education teacher by trade and when I first heard of Jott, a light bulb went off in my head. At the time, I was tutoring a student with a learning disability who struggled with writing. His writing problems made him completely adverse to even attempt to put pen to paper. Jott freed him from that fear and allowed him to pre-write his narrative by dictating it over the phone.

Could I have taken dictation? Yes, but that’s not the point. Jott is a tool; I am a person. The idea is that we want to empower our students to take control over their own learning. We want to introduce them to resources that allow them to access life independently. I may not always be there in the room to take dictation, but tools like Jott will become increasing popular and advanced.

Some people are naturally organized. Others (e.g. me) struggle with organization, so they use tools like PDAs, GTD (David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or iwantsandy.com to organize themselves organized. Most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring someone else to organize us. When working with students with special needs, some skills can be mastered; for others, we need to help them develop strategies to work around their problems — Jott is one such strategy.

Julie Thompson has scoured the web in search of great SMARTboard lessons that you can download and use in your classroom. It should be noted, that Julie’s list is targeted at the kindergarten to third grade demographic. If you teach middle school, I still highly recommend this site as it will provide you with inspiration for your own SMARTboard endeavors.

Photo by algona81.

Patrick Woessner at Technology in the Middle put together an amazing piece on using podcasts in the classroom back in February –- a testament to how far behind I am on things. I’ll post a bite-sized sample of it here, but I strongly encourage you to head over to his blog and read the full article — it will take you from podcast neophyte to seasoned expert in a very short period of time.

Read the full article:
Technology in the Middle » Blog Archive » In the Classroom: Podcasting

I’ll probably be writing more on podcasting in the near future and I hope to make a short video taking you through the process of creating one — once the semester ends.