Social Bookmarking with Nkwiry

There are a few social bookmarking tools out there.  I’ve used, presented, and written about DIIGO and Delicious.  DIIGO is the one I am currently using as a web based bookmarking platform personally. It’s beauty is that I can access my bookmarks on any device or computer and save new links to DIIGO from any device  I happen to be on.  I can tag them with as many tags (course code, topic, type of resource…) as I want so I can find the bookmark again when I need it.  I have also been part of groups that have used it to share resources for a project, but I have not successfully used it with a class.

There is a new social bookmarking site/application I’d like to share with you.  It’s called nkwiry and it was developed by Brian Aspinall, a self professed “Dork. Teacher. Blogger. Presenter.” from Ontario (@mraspinall on twitter).

Because I haven’t used it (yet), I’m not sure what to tell you about it that doesn’t come directly from the website.  So here’s the website’s sales pitch:

And finally, a testimonial from an educator: “Not only has nkwiry empowered my students to curate the web for the best content and gather weblinks based on specific topics, we now have a safe and secure way to showcase student work from other sources.  Since it is a bookmark sharing platform, I can collect links of student work from other sources like Prezi and Bitstrips and keep them all in one spot!”

You can see more comments from teachers using nkwiry by checking out @nkwiry on twitter.  You don’t have to have a twitter account to see the tweets/retweets (just click on the link).

If this sounds interesting to you and is something you try with a class, I’d love to hear about your experiences with nkwiry.  Please share!  

Read&Write for Google part two

The following was originally written for my school's staff newsletter (Bear Essentials), but was never published there.

Previously, I wrote about using Texthelp as a marking/feedback tool. You can refer to it here.

This time I’d like to share with you how to use Texthelp as a tool to annotate .pdf files.

If you have a .pdf in your Drive (you can save .pdf files in your Drive without converting them to google), right click on the document, choose “Open With”, then select “Read&Write for Google.”  This will open your document with Read&Write capabilities.  

By selecting text, you have access to highlighting tools (4 different colours), dictionary, fact finder, translation, and picture dictionary.  If highlighting is used, you can collect all highlights as a separate google doc if you want. Selecting text only works if the text in your .pdf is recognized as text, and your .pdf doesn’t act like an image.

There are 2 different ways of creating notes on your .pdf as well.  You can choose the T at the top of the screen and it will allow you to choose a place within the .pdf to type your own note.  That note will stay there, on the .pdf (you can relocate it or delete it, but it’s right on the document). If you print your document from Read&Write, your notes will appear on the printed page. Or you can choose the thumbtack with the comment looking box beside it and place a thumbtack on your document.  You can then type your annotation in a box that will disappear from the document, unless you click the thumbtack to open it. These will not appear if you print your document.

I was a little concerned that I didn’t see a save button.  I didn’t know if I had permanently changed my .pdfs or not.  (Since I was randomly playing, and I didn’t know if I wanted them permanently changed or not, I was kind of scared.)  I discovered if I close the .pdf and reopen it not in “Read&Write for Google” I still have my originals with no notes.  If I re-open the .pdf with “Read&Write for Google” all my notes, highlights and thumbtacks are still there. You can also share the document in Read&Write for Google with someone else and they will be able to see your comments/notes.

I just started playing with this.  It was relatively easy.  I’d be glad to help you play if you want.  I’d also be interested in feedback if you use it.  How can you or your students use this?  If you share .pdfs with students for notetaking purposes, can this help them take notes on line? Can you see this being useful as a research tool?

Read&Write for Google part one.

The following was first written for my school's staff newsletter (Bear Essentials) May 30, 2014. Bracketed and italics have been added after publication in Bear Essentials.

Have you enabled Texthelp in your ugcloud account?  If you have, you see a gold and green pull down tab at the top of your documents.  Or maybe it is already pulled down and covering your document title - you can click the little up arrows and make it almost disappear.  But don’t do that, because I want to talk to you about how useful it can be.

(If you are not part of UGDSB, Texthelp, also known as Read&Write for Google is a Google app you can add to your account through the chrome store.)

If you are familiar with it, chances are you are in special ed and are using it as a text reader with some of our students.  It is a replacement for kurzweil in some cases.  It works for text documents, webpages and .pdfs if they are opened through Drive.

But it can do so much more.  There are 4 highlighters that you can use, much faster and simpler than using the highlight tool in the menu bar across the top of your document page.  There is also a button that will collect your highlights and collate them in another document.  There are a number of reasons both teachers and students might find this useful. The following ideas come from Rebecca Grimes (@glblcanuck), a fellow teacher in UGDSB.  

Ideas for Teacher Use in the Classroom

• Teachers could use the highlight tool to provide visual feedback --> provide students with a legend of what the colours mean, then just highlight the common errors without having to write the same comment over and over again (ie: verb tense = pink, sentence structure = yellow, missing citation = green)  If you make the legend consistent in your class or department it will be easy for you and your students.

• You could then use the "Collect" option to create a list of sample errors you could use with the class quickly and easily.

Ideas for Student Use in the Classroom:

• In Language classes, students could use the different colour to identify required language components in assignments.

• Students could use a colour to identify the facts that they've included in their assignment.
• Similarly, based on the business department’s self-evalution, they could use the different colours to demonstrate where they’ve met the requirement for the assignment.

• In English, students could identify quotations used in their essays.  (Use a different colour for each book if doing a comparative essay or, one colour for quotations from the novel and another colour for quotations from secondary sources.)

• Students could use the "Collect Highlights" feature to collate the highlighted information into an overview document that they could then share with their teacher.  

• For study purposes in any subject, students could highlight their notes and then export their highlights to create a page of key facts / ideas / etc to study.

Rebecca’s original blog post can be found at http://mllegrimes.blogspot.ca/2014/04/improving-feedback-and-student-self.html

A Few Keyboard Shortcuts for Chromebooks

This post was originally written for my school's weekly staff newsletter, Bear Essentials, March 28.

Chromebook shortcuts

Many of us have been using the chromebooks with our classes a lot.  Here is a short list of keyboard shortcuts to hopefully make life easier for you and your students.  Some of them are the same as any computer, but not everyone is familiar with keyboard shortcuts at all.  I’ll start with the more common ones:

Cut = ctrl + x

Copy = ctrl + c

Paste = ctrl + v

Our chromebooks don’t have a caps lock.                            

If you want capitals locked on =  alt + the search button  

To take a screen shot (of the whole screen) = ctrl + the 3 overlapped boxes in middle of top row

If you just want part of the screen, = ctrl + shift + same button as above

Here’s the last one for today.  And maybe it’s all you really need?

Source:  http://www.omgchrome.com/10-shortcuts-every-chromebook-owner-should-know/

Reflections on Student Trip

This post was originally written for my school's weekly staff newsletter, Bear Essentials, May 15, 2014.

At ECOO this year (I think this was the place) Jamie Casap (I think it was him) said that for today’s young people wifi and being connected is expected.  He likened it to electricity for everyone else.  No one alive today walks into a building and says “Hey!  They have lights in here!  I can see where I’m going!  This is awesome!”  We just expect it and are quite concerned when something happens to take it away.

For young people today, the ability to connect (wifi) is almost as expected. They are more confused and feel like their needs aren’t being met if it is not available, than they are surprised when it is.  I saw this with our students in Washington last week.  Everyone (OK, including me) expected that the hotels would have free wifi (I really resent having to pay for wifi in a hotel) - and they did, thankfully.  On our bus, one student noticed that there was another bus in Gettysburg that had free wifi on board. The comment wasn’t “hey, that’s cool.”  The comment was “hey, why don’t we?”  

What was interesting to me was that the ability to be connected wasn’t just about talking to their friends at home, or posting instagram photos, it was also about verifying information and answering questions they had.  They heard things on tour and wanted more information, or wanted to find out if what they heard could be validated.  One group desperately needed to know who the 3rd Prime Minister of Canada was. (They didn’t know all 22, but they really wanted to know the 3rd for some reason.)  When at the next lunch break they found wifi, and discovered the answer they came back and let us know - because obviously Nelson and Unger should know this as Canadian history teachers.

I think about questions my friends and I may have had on tour and I see them as fleeting wonderings.  By the time we got somewhere we could have looked up the information (a library or back at school), we wouldn’t have remembered or cared anymore.  

It’s not a big deal, but it goes to the assumption that information and connectivity is ubiquitous or should be.  I think that’s amazing.

BTW, did you know that the UN ruled that internet connection is a basic human right in June 2011?  (http://mashable.com/2012/07/06/internet-human-right/)

Diigo for organization and collaboration

This post was originally written for my school's weekly staff newsletter, March 21, 2014.

According to their website, “Diigo is a powerful research tool and knowledge sharing website.”

Personally, I use it as a cloud based bookmarking site.  I bookmark websites, articles, blogs, online videos that I think I will want to return to; much in the same way you may use “favourites” in your browser on your personal computer.  Because it is cloud based, I have access to them no matter what computer I am using.

I have also used it with a number of different PD groups to share resources.  It is very easy to create groups so that you can all collect and share resources.  You can tag articles so they can be easily found at a later date.  You can also mark up the website or article with highlighting or “sticky notes” or other “notes”.  If you are sharing resources with a colleague for a course, why not try Diigo?  You just need to create a login and start saving!

If you want more information, here is a video showing you how it works:

Mystery Skype

This was originally written for my school's weekly staff newsletter, Bear Essentials, November 22, 2013.

One of the great things about going to a large conference with a colleague is you can divide and conquer - each person goes to a different session then shares over lunch or dinner.  At ECOO, one of the sessions I didn’t attend was on Mystery Skypes.  But even though I didn’t see it, I’ve learned quite a bit about it over the past week because Sarah went to the session and was inspired to try it. (Skype is a free video calling service on line.)

The idea behind a mystery Skype is that you connect your class to another class somewhere else in the world and each class tries to figure out where the other is located.  It is a great way to start talking about location, weather, or culture.  It inspires curiosity and engagement.  It forces the students to ask specific questions that will help them solve the mystery of where the other class is.  It also forces the class to think about where they are in the world, and how it might be discovered by another class.  Excellent option for getting students thinking about perspectives or point of view.

Over the past week, Sarah set up 2 mystery Skype sessions with 2 different classes.  The first was only a mystery for Sarah’s class, as they skyped with a friend of hers at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.  The class is studying the holocaust and creating a museum to demonstrate their learning.  They skype session was able to give them access to an expert to expand their research.  Sarah’s second class will do a mystery Skype with a First Nations class as both classes are reading The Rez Sisters play in 3U English. In this case, both classes are in the dark about the other’s location.

But mystery skype is not the only way to use skype.  There is a website with ideas for using skype in your classroom (https://education.skype.com/‎) that suggests using skype to collaborate with other classes around the world, to invite experts into your class or take a virtual field trip.  Here you can find all kinds of ideas for using skype in your class (experts, lessons, topics, classes looking for a connection).  There is also a skype blog, twitter feed and facebook group if you want to see what others are doing.

Update, after this was put in Bear Essentials.

See Sarah's reflection on her first Skype session with her friend at the Holocaust Centre. Her reflection on the second Skype session should follow soon.

taking notes with videonot.es

This post was originally written for my school's staff newsletter, Bear Essentials, November 29, 2013.

image from http://www.videonot.es/img/logo.png

I ran across this very cool new chrome app/website recently.  It came to me through one of my circles/communities in Google+.  It would be great for blended or e-learning classes, but useful for anyone taking notes on videos.

The app/site is videonot.es and it allows you to take notes while you are watching a video - side by side, on the same screen.  Each point you type is automatically tagged with the minute/second in the video when you typed it.  When you go back through your notes, if you click on a point, it will load the video to that part of the video.

The video and corresponding notes are saved in your google drive.  This means that you could start watching and taking notes on a video notes at school, then go home and pick up right where you left off.  You (or your students) can also share it with others and take group notes.  There is also an option to export to Evernote if you are an Evernote user.

To use videonot.es you need to go to the chrome store, find the app, then install it.  When you install a chrome app it is connected to your chrome id and therefore is with you on any computer with chrome that you are on.  To use it (after install), type videonote.es into your URL, or from Drive, go to create and find the app in the list.

There is a youtube 3 ½ minute demo you can watch at http://goo.gl/H0EccN (shortened URL is case sensitive) or in Youtube, search for “Videonot.es as Demo”.

Read & Write

This was originally written for my school's staff weekly newsletter "Bear Essentials" October 11, 2013

You may have seen this app on your chromebooks. It often pops up as an add on app, and students randomly click on install or not without a reason.  Then they complain that there is a bothersome tool bar at the top of their screen that looks like this:

You can hide the bar when it shows up by clicking on the green and yellow square.  The pull down menu will stay and you can click on it again to bring it back.  So why would anyone want this or use this?

It is a text to speech app.  It will read what is on your document within google docs.  I think it’s a great tool for students to edit their work.  I often tell my students to read their work  aloud and listen for mistakes or awkward wording.  This does that out loud reading for them.  It is a simple replacement for kurzweil that doesn’t require extra software downloads.  It will work for pdfs that are saved within your Drive as well.  Students can scan text, upload to google Drive and open with Read&Write for google (you can choose “open with” by right clicking on the document name in Drive).  You do have to highlight the text you want read.

I’m sure it will do lots of other stuff, but I haven’t played with it very much.  But if you or your students use kurzweil, or you know students who have trouble reading or editing their work you may want to check it out.

This was first posted October 4, in my school's staff weekly newsletter "Bear Essentials."

I have a few ideas bouncing around in my head right now that I think are related somehow.

The first is reflection on the staff meeting Monday.  I haven’t received much feedback, but what I have gotten has been positive. (might be selective sharing)  What I liked about it is that a) it was to some extent self directed PD, and b) it was based on things real teachers are actually doing in their classes.  I also think that having the ALPs as a shared document was a very practical way of giving staff practice at using ugcloud.  I’m not certain, but by the sounds of it, more people finished their ALP this year during the session than previous years.  Hopefully fewer people will be chased come November.

The second thing going around my head that I want to share is the title of a session I might go to at ECOO this year.  It’s called “It’s OK to be right where you are (it’s not OK to stay there).”  I love this idea.  It can be both affirming and a challenge.  I think it can speak to the life-long learner in all of us.  You are OK where you are, but how can you grow?  I think the ALPs ideally address this as well.  Think about what you’ve done to get where you are, set some new goals, and plan out how to get there.

The third related idea is the SAMR model.  It is a model of technology integration.  Like the ECOO session name, it’s OK to be at any stage at any given time, but you need to know there are other option for growth and change.  The challenge is thinking about how you most use technology for student learning, and thinking about how you can try new things.  Here’s the model:

Twitter Experiment in class

Yesterday I decided I’d inject a little bit of digital citizenship and connectedness into my grade 9 geography class.  We were talking about ecological footprints, so in class I logged into my @ODSSUnger twitter account and sent two tweets.  We composed the tweets together (OK, I did it, but I did it in front of them and got their input) in class.

The first one was fairly general: “My gr9 geog class wants to know what you do to reduce your ecological footprint #UngerCGC1P”  This is not my PLN twitter account, and I only have 43 followers (most of which are Orangeville businesses that just follow anyone/everyone in Orangeville with a twitter account), so I also retweeted it on my PLN twitter account hoping for more feedback.  

One response to this tweet was

From this we were able to discuss how this would help reduce his footprint.  How many different areas this would affect of his footprint.  We also talked about how this would be possible in the winter months.  The class seemed to think he must have a greenhouse whereas I thought he likely froze or canned his produce.  So we tweeted him back to see. We will (hopefully) look at his response on Monday.

We also sent a tweet to our Mayor Adams:

This was good in terms of giving the class something to talk about that was local.  Which one they thought was most significant, what each meant and how it affected our footprint and land use.

I appreciated that the students could see what we were talking about in class was something that other people were thinking about and focused on.

The added bonus was in a couple replies to Mayor Adams’ tweet.  

These two tweets allowed us to discuss point of view and bias. We looked at the profiles of each of the people and discussed how their backgrounds and professions may affect their view. This was all outside of my "lesson plan" but really got the students thinking and discussing with real life examples.

Since then there has been a discussion between Mayor Adams and Chris Halliday on twitter that I can’t wait to show my class.  I love that asking a fairly simple question on behalf of my geography class has blossomed into an interesting discussion that has moved beyond my room, but that my students still get to see it.

This little experiment of mine resulted in a few different good discussions and teachable moments that would not have happened had I not reached out beyond my class.

We got to talk about what I thought were good twitter etiquette guidelines. And as a class we wrote thank-you tweets to the people who responded.

I am thinking about getting the students to do a little side research about the EAB issue and what the students think the town should do about an arborist.

This is not something I have tried before, but feel fairly good about how it went and will try again.

What have you done to bring “real world” examples into your class?

What bonus ‘teachable moments’  have you had this week?

And if you would like to share how you've reduced your ecological footprint please tweet to @ODSSUnger and use #UngerCGC1P. Thanks!

Reflection on April 20-21, Ontario GAFE

The following post was written for Bear Essentials (my school’s staff weekly newsletter).  I have a regular column “On-line with Lisa.”  I will cross post the columns to this blog.  This post was originally written for the newsletter the week of April 26, 2013. It has been slightly modified to reflect an online format.

Reflection on April 20-21, Ontario GAFE (google apps for education) Summit

Last weekend, I was one of 100 UGDSB participants out of 525 total participants at the Google Summit sponsored by ECOO and hosted by Eastwood Collegiate of WRDSB.  I’d like to share a few of the ideas that I found interesting from Sunday morning’s keynote by Molly Schroeder (@followmolly on twitter, Google certified teacher and Google Apps for Education certified trainer).

Google loves being in BETA.  Part of their philosophy is “launch early and iterate.”  The idea is that you don’t have to have something perfect before you try it out.  If something doesn’t work, or becomes obsolete it is not a failure, it is simply a part of a larger path to find something great.  Someone has actually created a graveyard for google products that google has killed (http://goo.gl/4XXfE).  You can leave flowers at the headstone for the google project you miss most.  I left a flower on iGoogle and Google Reader.

Kids are in beta.  It is part of our job to help them fine tune so they can launch.  It is important for students to be able to think about where they are in the journey, and not just be told “this is important for your future.”  

Interestingly enough, as I was thinking about writing this, and reflecting on the idea of “being in beta” from the google summit, I ran across a blog by Shelley Wright called “Beta: The Courage to Fail and Change.” (you can find it at http://goo.gl/QCUfN)  She writes: “I’ve decided to live my life in Beta. Always incomplete. Always failing. Always trying to get better.  ...  What if our kids learned that failure is a good thing, something to be embraced, instead of something to be avoided like the plague.  What if teachers were set free to teach messy, fail often & “fail fast”, as Seth Godin says. ... What if teaching & learning was a fluid process that was never finished?”  I love serendipity.

Another nugget from Molly’s keynote: speed date devices, apps or websites, but marry the transferable skills.  I really like this and think it’s tied to idea of being in beta.  Try something; use it while it works; let it go when it’s done (or when you are).  It is the ability to take the skills or knowledge you gain and apply them to another situation.  

The last big take away I’d like to share with you is that everyone has experienced something not working the way you wanted/expected.  The fact that it didn’t work isn’t what’s important.  It is what you do with that experience that is important.  Problem solve.  Hit ‘refresh.’ And keep trying.

GAFE and feedback

The following post was written for Bear Essentials (my school’s staff weekly newsletter).  I have a regular column “On-line with Lisa.” This was a guest post written by David Harvey, and English teacher at ODSS. This post was originally written for the newsletter the week of April 12, 2013.

I am a better teacher this semester than every semester before it.  This is not hyperbole, but a direct result of using ugcloud.  ugcloud is a board-supported cloud-based (no hard drive required) service where I create documents in an excellent, auto-saving word processor (google drive), share documents with students and colleagues, and where I receive and provide feedback on all of my students’ work through our ugcloud email addresses.  When I’m working with student writing, ugcloud becomes interactive and allows me to highlight everything from specific words to particular punctuation to entire paragraphs and make corresponding comments in the side margin.  The student sees both the highlights and the comments.  When the student clicks on either the highlighted section or the comment in the margin,  the corresponding information is highlighted.  There is a very concrete and clear link between their writing and my comments.  ugcloud also allows me to make an overall comment on a piece of writing which I often do when I’m done reading it.  

My teaching has become accelerated through ugcloud as it has allowed me to give students more precise, concrete, full-sentence feedback by the mid-term than I can usually manage in an entire semester.  The interim report, which often causes me great concern due to a lack of information, caused me no stress whatsoever this year, as at that point, I’d read and thoroughly commented on 6 pieces of formative writing in my 1D class and 9 in my 4U class.  The cloud makes things more efficient and effective, and while part of this is my ability to type faster than I write, another part of this is the closing of the feedback loop.  

We know that the shorter the time is between the work and the feedback the more likely the learning and, with the cloud, students no longer have to be in class (or even in the same country) to receive feedback, nor do they have to wait for me to mark 30 pieces of work before they get theirs back.  I mark them in the order in which they’re submitted and they can watch me work with their document in real-time.  As a result of the speed of things, I have never had a clearer understanding of my students’ abilities, nor taught them each so much on such an individual basis so early in a course.  I can open up their email folders and instantly see everything they’ve written, the order in which they submitted it, all of my feedback, and then each keystroke of editing the student has made while applying their new understanding.  

This is a game-changer.  While I’ve never accepted technology as the great saviour of education - and still don’t - I’ve never discovered and used a technology with such great benefits to both myself and my students.  I haven’t collected a single piece of paper from either class this semester - not one.  More importantly,  I’ve seen a level of improvement  in their work by midterm that I usually hope to see by the end of a course.  

I’ve witnessed what I consider three legitimate educational revolutions in my 14 year career, and this is the most recent and the most powerful one in terms of what works best for me and what works best for students.

Twitter post for ODSS

The following post was originally written as a post for my school's weekly newsletter (Bear Essentials) in which I have a weekly column. It was written the week of March 22, 2013.

Twitter has gotten a bad reputation.  But, like most things, twitter is as valuable as the user makes it.  And it can have as many uses as people who use it.  Here are some ways people at ODSS are using it.

Share information with students

There are classes, clubs and teachers who are using twitter to communicate information with students.  Some examples:

@ODSSBakeshop @ODSS_News @ODSSlibrary

@ODSS_Bears @NGWEDWE @ODSSUnger

I try to use the hashtag #ngwedwe for school wide activities/information

Professional Learning Network (PLN)

For some people, twitter is a great place to share what you are doing, and see what other professionals are doing.  There is a large community of educators on twitter who regularly share what they are doing and what they’ve found (articles, ideas) that is of use to them professionally.

Uses in class:

There are a lot of students using twitter.  It doesn’t hurt to engage students in places they are already using.

You could follow someone/organization related to your subject.

OR follow a hashtag about an issue or current event

OR you could use classroom hashtag as an exit ticket to check for understanding

Sarah Le (@sarle83) is having her grade 11 English class tweet Macbeth.  Each character has a twitter handle that Sarah set up, students will take on a character and tweet about events from that perspective as well as respond to others’ tweets.  

If being out there and public makes you nervous, you could have students create fake tweets to show understanding of an issue, time period, character, important figure.  Use classtools.net and choose TWISTER.  Here is a slideshow example