'Educational Technology'
The acronym Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” No matter what the letters stand for, Diigo is a popular and powerful social bookmarking site that gives you access to websites you save from any browser and any computer. After registering for an account you can save and tag websites as well as add a description. You can organize your bookmarks even further with the lists feature and share them with your students or workshop participants via a slideshow. Additionally, Diigo allows you to highlight any part of a webpage as well as attach sticky notes with comments to your highlights or to a whole web page. You can keep your comments private or share them with your Diigo groups.
Diigo now has educator accounts with some very nice features for teachers and their students. Teachers can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation). Students in the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and comments. Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
You can get started with Diigo here: http://www.diigo.com/index
You can view video tutorials about Diigo’s features here: http://help.diigo.com/Getting_Started/Videos_Tutorials
If you sign up for an account and you’d like to collaborate with me, please let me know. I have lots of websites bookmarked and ready to share! I’m “cummingsl” on Diigo.
Laura Cummings
May 13th, 2009
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of amateurish ways to create a web site. My first experience was with Netscape Composer. From there I moved to saving MS Word files as web pages and then on to using the MS Publisher webpage creation tools. All of these options also required a host server and a rudimentary knowledge of ftp. When I tried to teach other educators how to make web sites with these tools I met with limited success. All of the participants created sites, 90% of them actually got them uploaded to a server and available online, but only a very small percentage ever followed through with regular updates. It was just too complicated…
Now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of freely available tools on the Internet there are many options that make creating a web site fast and easy. The creator of the site simply logs in and, using tools much like those found in word processing software, creates the site and posts it to the Internet by clicking “Publish.” The three online tools for web site creation that I want to highlight here are Protopage, Pageflakes and Weebly.
Protopage
I was first exposed to Protopage at a “Let’s Talk Technology” meeting. Jim Wenzloff was our presenter and as a sidebar showed us his Protopage site. We all immediately wanted to know how the site was created and Jim was gracious enough to stray from his original topic and show us how to get started. Basically, you get a page before you even register. You add and manipulate a variety of widgets and tabs to personalize your site. If you like what you create, you can then register and you’ll be able to save and share your site. Several of the “Let’s Talk” members have gone on to use Protopage as the means to share resources with other educators. (Be sure to use the tabs near the top of the page when you are exploring these sites.) Jane Perzyk created this Protopage site for a presentation at the 2008 Educational Technology Coordinators Conference (ETCC) on “Juicing up the Online Learning Experience with Twitter, Protopage and other Web 2.O Tools.” Carol Isakson uses this Protopage site to hold the resources from a variety of workshops she has facilitated for Wayne RESA and the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL.) Chris Skoglund and Rose McKenzie use this Protopage site to support the work of the MACUL special interest group for Special Education. Their site links to even more examples of Protopage sites created by educators.
Pageflakes
I don’t recall how I first learned about Pageflakes, but it is another web site creation tool that is worth exploring. Pageflakes and Protopage are very similar, but on Pageflakes the “widgets” stay in nice orderly rows. Pageflakes has the same “tab format” for accessing other pages within a site. In Pageflakes, your site and pages are private to you until you create a “Pagecast” which then gives the public access to your work. I created a Pageflakes site to collect and share resources with classroom teachers. You can check out my site here. Frank Miracola made this Pageflakes site to share resources from workshops he facilitates.
Weebly
The last site I’m going to talk about is Weebly. I learned about this one from the aforementioned Frank Miracola. At a meeting for the REMC Instructional Technology Specialists group, Frank showed us the website “Begin With Me,” which was created with Weebly. We were all very impressed with the look and feel of the site! Frank gave us a quick overview of how Weebly works and we were even more impressed. With Weebly you create a more traditional looking website. The tools are set up in a tabbed format and many of them are drag & drop or one click away from becoming a part of your site. Your site remains private until you choose to publish it. A nice feature of Weebly is that you can download the site to keep a backup copy and/or host it on your own server. Frank shared with us how quickly and easily he has been able to get other educators and even students up and running with their websites. Teaching with Technology and Curriculum and Instructional Technology are two more examples of sites created with Weebly:
With these tools and the many others that are out there, it’s now convenient, fun and easy to create and update your own web site. Let us know which tool you are using for your site and why you like it. Please share a link to your site too!
Posted by: Laura Cummings, SIGTELE Director
September 19th, 2008
I’m not a programmer, but I’ve always been interested in trying to make a computer do something I told it to do. From the early text-based adventure games where my “yes or no” selection could cause unique things to happen I was hooked! One of my graduate courses introduced me to BASIC programming. I was very proud of the Math program I wrote but even prouder of the wonderful things my 8th grade students created! The students used logical thinking, mathematical reasoning and developed lots of patience and teamwork skills through the process of getting their programs to do what they wanted them to do. It was very clear that the students enjoyed making computers do things even more than they enjoyed reacting to a program someone else had written.
Over the years I’ve explored Logo, Stagecast Creator and Microworlds. These are all wonderful programs that allow the user to be creative and in control of the computer but I had very limited opportunities to use them with students. They weren’t part of the programs on the computers where I was teaching and there was no funding to add them.
Now there is Scratch to add to the mix. Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Their purpose was to help young students (ages 8 and up) learn 21st Century skills. To quote from their website, “As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.” Best of all, Scratch is available as a FREE download for both Mac and Windows platforms!
James Daly has posted a very nice write up about Scratch at the Edutopia website. You can learn a lot more about what has been happening with the tool in its first year by reading his article. One of the key things which intrigues me is that, via the Scratch website, Scratch users can upload their creations for feedback and collaboration. More than 175,000 projects have been placed on the site in the first year! Many of the projects have been created by students outside of the school day. How cool is that?
From the time I first heard about Scratch I had the best of intentions to explore it and begin to think about how it could be used to enhance learning, but I never found the time until I was at NECC 2008. One of the “Bring Your Own Laptop” sessions was “Using Scratch to Teach Programming at the Elementary Level” and the description stated, “Participants will acquire the skills needed to use Scratch and teach programming.” That was enough to hook me. I went to the session and the facilitator, Christopher Michaud from Georgia, did not disappoint. 120 “students” in the room did not daunt him. He even provided differentiated instruction by letting independent learners use the tutorials on his website while he gave direct, step-by-step instructions to those of us who wanted to learn that way. By the end of the hour I had created a “Pac-Man style” game where my dog would move around the maze eating food for points that showed up on my scoreboard! I was impressed, not only with my project, but with the potential Scratch has to engage learners in higher-level thinking, mathematical reasoning, collaboration, design and story writing.
If you’d like to learn how to use Scratch too, download it from the Scratch website and take advantage of Christopher Michaud’s wonderful project tutorials via this link. If you decide Scratch has educational value for the students you work with and you move forward to ask to have it on the computers at your school, please let us know! We’d love to follow you on this adventure and learn from your experiences.
Laura Cummings, MACUL SIGTELE Director
August 1st, 2008
Class ended today. In just two short hours all the projects were presented and final thoughts shared. Nearly every student commented on how overwhelmed they had felt at the beginning of the course, how pleased they were with their final project, how much they had enjoyed learning Dreamweaver, and how excited they were to continue developing these sorts of web-based tools. It was a very satisfying closing for not only the students but also for me. I now have the pleasure of reviewing and grading the projects. I think they all have A’s:) You take a look and let me know what you think.
Despite a couple of late or missing posts, I have enjoyed blogging more than I thought I would. It has provided me with a place to reflect and share and I hope it has been been interesting and beneficial to those who might have been following along.
This is my final post on this topic, IT 6140, but I’ll certainly be back. Thanks for reading!
Mary
July 18th, 2007
As a novice blogger it has become apparent that taking more than one or two days away from the blog will likely result in no writing at all. Yesterday was one of those marathon days that resulted in me completely forgetting about this blog. Detroit Public Schools have teamed with the Instructional Technology department at WSU this summer in a program that any teacher will surely envy. A small group of DPS teachers (approx. 100) have been able to take one or two of the IT classes that are designed specifically for teachers. Each of these classes will (or has) been taught using the three-week schedule that my current class is following, including one on-line course. Tuition and books are provided for the teachers while earning graduate credit hours and receiving what I consider to be top notch instruction and training in technology integration. I began teaching another section of this class (6140) with a DPS group yesterday that will run from 7/16 through 8/2. This class meets in the afternoon from 1:30 – 5:30, so the first three days of this week require full days on campus for me. This is a larger group than my current class with a much wider ranger of technology skills. I’ll be busy guiding this group through the course, but again, it is only three weeks.
My morning class has been doing extraordinary work. We spent just a little time in class yesterday talking about using these curriculum webs in mostly hardware terms. By this I mean how teachers can access this learning tool in their buildings. Even though it is currently on the IT server, this is not a permanent arrangement. One option is for teachers to put a copy of their website onto the share server in a computer lab (if available) so their students can use it without having to upload it somewhere. Once students have opened the web folder and clicked on index, the site will open in the browser and work just like a “live” website. If your district is willing, curriculum webs could be uploaded to a district server. I have also uploaded a website to class Blackboard sites and this works very well, too.
Today is our last day in the lab and the discussion centered around teachers teaching with curriculum webs and just plain teaching in general. Peg Ertmer at Purdue has written several articles on the topic of teachers using technology and the barriers that they face, identifying first-order (external, like equipment and training) and second-order (internal, such as changing the way you think and go about the process of teaching). First-order barriers are relatively simple to fix. Those second-order barriers, however, require that teachers really think about how they teach and why they teach that way and challenge themselves to consider new classroom strategies and instructional approaches. I know that many teachers are still battling the first-order barriers to some degree, but I believe we are all standing in the doorway of second-order barriers. MACUL is a good example of an organization working to help teachers through this door of change. Through the annual conference and on-going workshops and events, MACUL provides support and learning opportunities for its members. Will Richardson, through his blog and workshops, addresses these barriers and offers suggestions for those ready to take that step. Finally, FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems is a new initiative sponsored through AECT (Association for Educational Communications and Technology). Seeking a systemic transformational change to education in this country, this committe outlines the need for sweeping reform and changes at the district level. There are no simple solutions to these challenges facing education and educators, but I think these questions of change, within ourselves and our educational system, are ones that we all should be asking.
And so, on those thoughts, I passed out the course evaluation and left the lab while the class completed this university requirement. Once the evaluations were completed and submitted I was permitted to re-enter the lab. Everyone is furiously working to complete their project before they leave today. I have received permission from the class to post their final projects on this blog tomorrow. I have seen these projects in progress – you will be really impressed!
Mary
July 17th, 2007
This is a two-for-one post as yesterday and today were mostly spent working on projects in the IT lab. In fact, today was an optional attendance day that resulted in five out of 11 students coming down to campus. At this point in the course all the students have successfully uploaded their sites and are able to work in the lab or at home as their 30-day trial of Dreamweaver still has about half its working days available. Those who chose to come to campus today came for the work environment (no distractions from family or friends), additional classes to attend, or for support from me should the need arise. I have offered a lab day each time I have taught this class and usually have about a 50% turnout, just like today.
Yesterday in class I did touch briefly on the multimedia and interactivity that can be added into Dreamweaver. Video, music, sounds, podcasts, flash movies – all these objects plus more can be linked to or embedded into Dreamweaver with remarkable ease and success. For most in this class this is too much to attempt at this time, but the conversation puts the ideas out there so that later on, when confidence has grown, these sorts of add-ons can be tackled. My continuing recommendation for all my students remains: less is more! We’ve all seen those learning tools that overload the user with too many images, too many colors, too many fonts, too much everything. Just because you are able to embed jazzy flash animations or graphics that jump on and off the screen doesn’t mean you should. Rule number one: remember your audience.
Today is Thursday, and that brings me to the end of another work week (these four-day weeks are great!). Just three class days left. More on Monday.
Mary
July 12th, 2007
I just finished reading and scoring the last midterm and the results are just as I expected – extremely well written exams with scores to match. I am relieved to have the exams graded and I am certain my students are equally glad to have the experience behind them.
There is something special about the classroom environment during an exam – no matter what the age of the student might happen to be. Think about every test you have taken or given. Once that exam is distributed a hush falls over the room. Should a question arise, students usually come to the teacher and ask their question in a voice often no louder than a whisper. I sat in the back row of the lab, working on a paper that needs to be finished this summer and enjoyed that special kind of testing quiet. Truly an interesting phenomenon.
Tomorrow we are returning our full focus to the curriculum web projects. Assessment and evaluation plans are due on Thursday. Just four more classes to go – and the projects are really looking great!
Mary
July 10th, 2007
Do you write learning objectives when you write your lessons? How do you know if the objectives have been met? Do you test? What kind of tests do you give? What about a project that meets the objectives? How do you evaluate these? Is all this assessment and evaluation necessary? Is it important? Have you ever seen so many question marks in one paragraph?
Today we touched on this topic in class. One tool we spent time reviewing is the rubric. My favorite source for on-line rubric generators is the RubiStar Rubric Maker. If you have never used this, visit this site. A well designed rubric for all your student projects can streamline the evaluation process and guide your students in their project by clearly stating your expectations. Sometimes simple true/false or multiple choice questions can help meet your learning objectives. CourseBuilder is a free add-in from Adobe specifically for Dreamweaver that allows you to build interactivity into your website. These sorts of tools are a great source for practice or remediation and can be tailored to meet your learner’s needs. A student from last summer’s class discovered Hot Potatoes and just loved it. There are several other on-line resources available through the on-line text – check them out!
Tomorrow the class will be completing their own midterm exam. Why should our students have all the fun? I think it is worthwhile to experience some test-taking anxiety just to help us all remember what it is like to be seated behind the student desk. My class will be answering a problem-based essay question and producing a small (two-page) site in Dreamweaver. Half-way through the course the midterm will provide me with evidence that the class is “getting” it or not. If not, I will need to readjust and reteach quickly, as July 18 is getting closer. Based on results from previous years, I am fairly certain that the midterms will provide proof that my students are meeting the course objectives. All work due tomorrow by 12 noon. Wish you were here!
Mary
July 9th, 2007
An invitation to head north for the weekend was all it took for me to fall off the blogging wagon. Somewhere on I-75 north on Thursday afternoon I realized I had forgotten to post in my rush to get out of town. My deepest apologies to those who might be reading along with me. Two days without the internet and email was just wonderful – good company, good weather, good scenery. I know you’ll understand….
The objective for class on 7/5 was to get everyone’s site on-line. Welcome to the wonderful world of FTP (file transfer protocol). Dreamweaver has a built-in feature as part of its site definition process that streamlines the entire process. I crossed my fingers as we all entered in the necessary information and attempted to connect. Success was met at this stage – only one student was unable to connect. Now came the big step; everyone selected the folder containing their curriculum web and clicked on the “put” arrow to send their sites up to the server. Success as well at this step. The final step for the class was to type in the URL and see their work out there on the world wide web. The excitement built as we all typed in the address of our sites. It was short lived as a FORBIDDEN page returned for all but one of the students, stating that we were not authorized to view this page. A computer lab teacher’s worst nightmare had occurred, again! We all tried several more times (unsuccessfully) to view the sites now sitting on the server, but eventually had to settle with knowing that the sites were there and and this bump would need to be straightened out by the administrator of the server. I can say with great certainty that I was much more disappointed than the rest of the class that the process had not gone right through. Thankfully this was a classroom of adults who understood that sometimes things do not work as planned, who were able (and willing) to look beyond the immediate problem, and continued working away on their sites. No chaos or calls for a “free day,” no, work continued as needed with no complaints. Amazing.
We have just seven class meetings left. This week will include the topic of evaluation and the midterm exam. When was the last time you had a midterm? More on this tomorrow.
Mary
July 8th, 2007
Our focus shifted away from the curriculum today and towards the challenge of developing a user-friendly and eye-friendly website. It is not hard to reach consensus on what a good website looks like – colors not too hard on the eyes, balanced use of headings and text, font selection, and the hierarchy (or not) of the site itself. Putting these elements together yourself presents a whole new list of challenges, especially when you have never built a website and are still learning the software.
An activity I always include when I teach this class is a hyperlinked list of some of the most awful websites you have ever seen. Today we discussed the sites as a class but I have also done this in small groups. I also use this activity with my high school web design students who quickly become website experts on some level with some interesting comments to share. Adults looking at websites with critical eyes are often less direct and/or sharp in their responses (thank goodness!), but seem to enjoy this exercise as much as my young students. It didn’t take much time for the class to quickly identify problems such as distracting background images, clashing of colors, poor navigation, poor page layout, and the biggest offense of all, too many serif fonts!
Happy web design and Happy Independence day.
Mary
July 3rd, 2007
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