In the Clouds

I am following three cloud computing sites on Diigo. Quizlet is a free website where users can find or create flashcard sets for study purposes. A wide variety of flashcards are available on the site, and users can easily create and share their own sets of flashcards. Sophia offers a number of resources for students and teachers. Teachers can create tutorials, quizzes, and evaluations, organize them for use by their students, and monitor the progress of their students. The site also offers pathways to challenge gifted students, and provides support and certification for teachers interested in learning more about the concept of flipped classrooms. Student users can join or form study groups, and create and practice tutorials. On Classdojo, teachers can give feedback to students and their families on student behavior and engagement. Reports can be shared with parents and school staff, and teachers can easily record behavior, attendance and engagement with one click of the mouse.

The group that I follow on Diigo is the Apple Group, because I have been a fan of Apple products since I purchased my first Mac over five years ago. I also own a MacBook Pro and a 6th generation iPod nano, which is one of the coolest little devices ever developed.

Tags are keywords or terms assigned to a piece of information. The keywords are descriptive, allowing a user to find the information while browsing or searching the web. A tag cloud is a visual representation of text data, commonly called a word cloud. The choice of font type, size, character and colors make the tag cloud a visually appealing and attractive display of related terms and key words.

The readings for this week list a number of ideas for lessons using word clouds. The suggestions included detailing famous speeches, an analysis of current affairs, listing definitions of vocabulary words, and teaching about bullying. Using word clouds in the classroom are a simple way to engage students, who can easily create their own word clouds on sites like Wordle.

Social bookmarking allows users to add, annotate and share bookmarks of websites. Diigo, the website we explored this week, offers highlighting, screen image capture, and sticky notes for users to organize, arrange and store bookmarks in the user’s library for reference or sharing with others.

Social bookmarking can benefit teaching and learning by allowing users to share knowledge and information, and create a social network for interaction and discussion. Individuals can create their own online personal learning network, connecting with others who share similar interests, and make their network as private sharing it more openly. Personal learning networks permit the individual to tailor their network in ways that help them meet their own learning needs and goals.

Blogging and Twittering

Blogging is one tool that can be effectively used in education. A blog, or web log, is a collection of posts or news stories. One of the advantages of a blog is its interactive nature, in that individuals can comment on blog posts. Bloggers can create a network of blogs by commenting on other blogs and linking back to them, building social relationships with others. Since bloggers tend to write about certain themes or topics, and post on a regular basis, this lends itself to a continual stream of comments and feedback.  Educational blogs can be used to reinforce lessons taught in class. Teachers can create assignments for students to create their own blogs or interact on an established classroom blog to discuss classroom lessons, collaborate on projects with classmates, and reflect on lessons learned outside of the classroom.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging site. Individuals communicate on Twitter using 140 character tweets to post comments that are read, shared, and commented on by their followers. The power of Twitter is in the strength of one’s social network of followers. Twitter users typically frequently monitor their Twitter streams, and it is easy to read and follow posts on a smart phone or other mobile device.

Educators can use Twitter as a tool for classroom discussion. The conversational nature of Twitter and the tendency for immediate or real time responses lends itself to this type of use, and may even help some more shy classmates actively participate in discussions. Twitter can be used as a collaborative tool, since it is easy to generate discussion and to contribute to a discussion thread. One notable classroom project is the  “Many Voices” assignment, where students contributed, with Twitter posts, so an on-line story. The thread is available on Twitter, was published as a book for purchase and available for download.  This is a great, creative example of what can be accomplished on Twitter for education.

I must admit that I was skeptical of how Twitter could be used in education until I read this week’s module for class. The Twitter account that I set up specifically for my current course follows the Toledo Zoo and the Mud Hens, some local news sources, and media types, because their posts are of interest to me.  My original Twitter account, one that I have had for years, is much different. I do not post to it as much as I used to, but this week’s lesson has given me a renewed interest in posting to that account. That account has over 6000 tweets and 672 followers, many organized into specific areas of interest. Twitter is an excellent vehicle for following breaking news stories and local news, building your own social network, and sharing tidbits with your followers.