Two for the Price of One!!!! AKA Week 6's Professional Development Plan and Week 7's Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Tools Combined!

Strategizing a Plan of Attack for Professional Development on Web 2.0 ToolsAKA the Week 6 Blog

Going forward I will continue much as I always have. I've always enjoyed searching out and testing new technology. I intend to move cities and find a job with a different school district for the 2017-2018 school year. I'm really hoping that I can find some sort of position that entails teaching technology itself, because I feel like that is one of my strongest suites. Whatever happens my plan of action moving forward will be to continue to attend available technology CPE courses offered by the district.

I will continue to attend education tech conferences as I am able to. I'd love to be able to attend TCEA next year and ISTE in San Antonio this summer. I'm currently learning coding with Swift Playgrounds. I just recently learned that Khan Academy has revamped their computer animation course in partnership with Pixar. From what I've seen in briefly looking at it, there's a lot of math crossover. I think this is a good way to integrate technology with applying core content skills.

In addition to attending classes and conferences and learning technology on my own, I will continue to use my dreaded Twitter account to follow trending #edtech. I will also continue to read articles and explore new app possibilities. I hope to be able to discover many new tools and learn new skills that I can pass on to my students.

Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Tools AKA the Week 7 Blog

Over the course of the last few months we've been exploring several different web 2.0 tools. As a tech savvy person many of these I have some general knowledge of in the past. One thing that has been really useful to me is to see the web 2.0 tool suggestions of my classmates. There are so many new apps and tools available out there that it would take several lifetimes to discover and test them all. New technology comes out everyday.

One of the big takeaways from the class itself that I will continue to use is the technology assessment rubric. I think it is very true that as teachers we are often very busy individuals. If we find a technology that works for us, we don't always take the time to stop and consider it from the standpoint of how will this work in the classroom. We simply assume, because it works well for us, it will work well in that context. This isn't always the case. Using the rubric to pre assess a technology can save us time in the long run and save our students frustration when things don't quite work out. I wish I had thought of using something like this in the past. Even while working on my final project, I chose several technologies in my proposal; however, after I went back and looked at them through the lens of the rubric, I realized that there were better choices to use. I also realized that though I loved a technology and could fully see it being applicable in the classroom, that particular technology would not really meet the learning goal of my students. Using the rubric beforehand seems time consuming, but in the end it may actually save us time.

One of my favorite tools that I've been introduced to in this class is aggregated pages. I can think of a lot of different ways that a site like Protopages can be used in the classroom, for parent communication, as a school info hub, or even as just a personal page.

One of the things we must be really careful about with any published technology or online web usage is protecting our students under COPPA. I've always wondered how some teachers can manage to post pictures of their students working in the classroom to their personal Facebook, IG, or blog. Even if you are posting a lesson plan with embedded instructions, you have to get permission for any embedded photos of students. Even if the student is over the age defined in COPPA, 13, I don't think that any parent would approve of a teacher posting pictures of their child in a place that they don't know about and approve.

Finally, we know that teaching and learning anything is a process. Some will acquire the skills sooner than others. Some will like an app more than others. As future technology teachers, coaches, leaders, or mentors, we should be ready and willing to provide support to our fellow peers as well as the students.

Adventures in Social Bookmarking

Digging into Diigo

This week's big task was to explore social bookmarking using the Web 2.0 tool Diigo. I have to admit, at first glance I wasn't at all enchanted with Diigo. Perhaps it would be more apt for me to label this post Disenchanted with Diigo. Last week when I was exploring Protopages, I was hooked! I couldn't stop playing with the technology. I wanted to know more! I had to figure out how I could make different things work. This week, my reaction to Diigo was simply....meh.

I think in terms of technology, we're always going to come across something that we LOVE and can't do without and then other things that we'd gladly pick up and toss out the window never to see the light of day again. Goodbye Diigo! Goodbye!!! Well, in spite of the dramatics, after coming back to it later in the week I found it truly wasn't that bad.

Social Bookmarking is defined as:

Social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy system for bookmark s. Such a taxonomy is sometimes called a folksonomy and the bookmarks are referred to as tags. Unlike storing bookmarks in a folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and can be accessed from any computer. Technorati, a blogging site, describes the system as "The real-time Web, organized by you." Web sites dedicated to social bookmarking, such as Flickr and del.icio.us, provide users with a place to store, categorize, annotate and share favorite Web pages and files. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-bookmarking)

On the outside this seems like a great idea. I've been bookmarking sites for years. As anyone who has gone through multiple computers knows, migrating your bookmarks can sometimes be a hassle. The ability to store and share your bookmarks on a website or in the cloud would eliminate the problem of bookmarked sites disappearing when your old computer dies a sudden death. Of course, if your multitudes of bookmarks lead to websites that are no longer in existence you may be out of luck. There's always one of my favorite tools, the Internet Archive aka Wayback Machine available to try and save the day. Even that tool has it's limitations, but it can help you track down some favorite sites that have bit the dust since you last visited.

Considering the above definition, I have used social bookmarking in the past with Flickr. Although it isn't mentioned in the above, I would think that a website like Pinterest could also be considered a social bookmarking tool. I digress, let's get back to the disenchanting, but not so bad technology known as Diigo.

Signing up & Installing Diigo

My first experience with Diigo this week was in the Safari browser on an iMac. The sign-up process was fairly simple. I was able to easily sign up using my Google credentials. I was also able to request an educator account with no problems. When I went to actually install Diigo the instructions to drag the app into the bookmark area did not seem to work for Safari. I simply switched over to Chrome and had it working fairly quickly. I also decided to download the app on my phone.

The Diigo App

The Diigo app for iPhone I would primarily find useful for it's ability to save a page and allow you to highlight on that saved page. iPhone's Safari App already allows you to bookmark pages, so I really didn't care much one way or the other for an additional way to bookmark. I've included a few screenshots of the bookmarking and highlighting process on iPhone below:

I found this website for EdTech Magazine. To save it with Diigo, I first clicked on the share icon at the bottom center.

Swiping right all the way to the end of my options, I found Diigo.

The Add Bookmark dialog allows you to add the page an outline, share with a group, add tags, and add a description in addition to simply bookmarking the page. You can also mark it as private. 

If you open the Diigo app on your phone, you'll see a list of all your saved bookmarks. You can tap on the name to open the bookmarked page. 

With the bookmarked page open in the app, you'll be able to add highlights.

Diigo in Education

I think overall the grouping ability of Diigo has the most use in an educational context. With a Diigo group, the teacher can share bookmarks with the students in the class and they can in turn post links. 

A screenshot of the ETEC 527 class Diigo page. My classmates have been diligently posting links!

The Diigo Teacher Console. It's fairly easy to add a class and add/invite students.  You'll see my console above is from before I added any groups.

After clicking on Create a group for my class, the above dialog pops up. 

If you are not so creative in choosing your group name, you'll have to try again...

The newly created group page. 

Once you've created a group, you can use one of three ways to invite students to join. I think the most useful option for the classroom may be the first, where the teacher can create student accounts without students needing to share personal info like email addresses. 

It's pretty simple to just add student names in the list and click create. To further preserve student privacy, I would likely use assigned pseudonyms.

I think this tool might be useful in grades 6/7-12. I likely wouldn't use it with younger students as the interface isn't overly appealing to children. 

Aggregated Pages

Aggregated Site Overload

For the past week we have been exploring aggregated sites. An aggregated site is essentially a website that lets you collect and display information from multiple different sources on the internet. On the particular aggregated site creator that I chose to use, Protopage, this process is done via the use of widgets.


We were given two different aggregated page creators to explore (Netvibes & Protopage) with the directive to create a site using one of them. I decided to start off by taking a quick peek at each of the two. I looked at Protopages first. At first glance, it seemed really busy. I then went to take a look at Netvibes. I loved the clean look of the sites that could be created. I quickly signed up for an account. When I went to start adding widgets to the page, the frustration began. I have some experience with website creation and widgets in the past. Netvibes looks really cool, but adding custom widgets can be overly complicated. I know if I kept playing with it, I could have figured it out. At that point, I didn't want to waste any time, so I headed back to Protopages.


Thank goodness for user-friendliness! Although Protopages seemed cluttered to me at first, it was so much easier to add custom widgets to the page. I was able to add timers, weather, YouTube, Twitter, my blog, etc. The widgets on Protopage use OPML aka Outline Processor Markup Language to create and display widgets. For most users, you can simply use the news feed option or web page widget to embed a website. The news feed option utilizes an RSS feed (Rich Site Summary--sometimes called Really Simple Summary) to display a list of linked headlines or other links on a given site. If you embed a website using the web page widget it uses inline frame embedding to display an accurate view of the website. You can scroll and even click to go to another page within the embedded frame. If a website does not display using the web page widget, you can use the web page code widget.


Embedding & iFrames:

With the web page code widget on Protopage,  you must either know the embed code for a given site OR you must know iframe tags. On most websites that allow embedding, if you click on SHARE, you will find an option for embedding. Copy/Pasting the information provided there will allow you to easily embed your site. If there is no embed code provided, then you can use iframe tags on most sites. To embed a page with iframes, simply type the following:


<iframe width="360" height="400" src="http://www.typesitenamehere.com"></iframe>


Within each iframe you can specify the height and width of the resulting object. A common error people make is embedding an object without specifying the height and width. If you do this, you might only get a small box on the page. Using the width and height tags, you can easily change the size the object is displayed within the frame. The src tag is the source or link for the embedded object. Two other common errors people make when adding iframe tags on their own is either forgetting to use quotation marks around the link or forgetting to add the closing angle bracket or close the iframe tag. A breakdown of the code is as follows:


<iframe --- open the tag

width="360" --- width of the embedded object. It must be followed by an equals sign. The number value must be displayed in quotes.

height="400" --- height of the embedded object. It must be followed by an equals sign. The number value must be displayed in quotes.

src="http://www.example.com" --- source of the embedded object. Must be enclosed in quotes.

> close the tag

</iframe> end tag


There are other things that you can add to the tag to change the appearance of the embedded object, but for the sake of simplicity, I only messed with the width and height attributes. Note that iframe tags do not work on all websites.




My Protopage Site:

Link: Techie Ally

Screenshots:

Home

YouTube

Ed Tech on Twitter

Evaluating Tech Tools

Tutorials:

After messing around with the page for awhile, I decided to make a few tutorials. I filmed the tutorials using the screen recording feature of Quicktime on my iMac. I was able to upload them to YouTube fairly easily. Since I'd made a slight error in the instructions on one of the videos, I even learned how to add annotations to an uploaded video using YouTube! :)


The following video covers the following:


How to add a hyperlink using a Rich Text Sticky Note.

How to add a YouTube channel using RSS.

How to add a YouTube playlist using the Web Page Code widget.

How to add a website using the Web Page widget.

How to add a Twitter feed using RSS.

How to add a Twitter search term (hashtag) using RSS.

I also created a quick video on how to add background music using Spotify:

After going through the process of creating a Protopage aggregated site this week, I realized that this was A LOT OF FUN! I think I gave up on Netvibes too quickly, so I'll go back and explore that platform more at a later date.

So long till next week.

Further Adventures into the Land of Web 2.0

The Twitter Adventure Continues and the YouTube Adventure Takes Flight!

This past week has been a whirlwind of checking out YouTube (which I was already very familiar with) and more explorations on Twitter while delving further into the land of Web 2.0. Combined with working on a group project, it was a very chaotic week with a rush to the end zone! Now it's time to kick off this blog entry! 

Chilling on YouTube

I've been using YouTube since the caveman days when I was still connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem and waiting an hour or two for a five minute video to load. Oh the frustration! YouTube now has evolved quite a bit from where it was years ago. Thankfully I now have high speed cable internet to keep up with our HD world. This week I was tasked with creating a YouTube channel, and then creating five playlists with videos about: Twitter, Wikispaces, Web 2.0 for Learning, something classroom related, and...dun, dun, dun!!! A playlist of my choice! Cue the K-Pop music!

It wasn't very difficult for me to set up a channel because I already had one channel on my account that I am using for this particular class. I simply had to add a new one. I've also created playlists in the past, so that was nothing new. To make it a bit of a challenge, I decided to try to create and add videos to the playlists using the YouTube app on my iPhone. I typically have used my computer to create playlists in the past. 

After a quick Google search, I easily found the correct button to push to add a video to a playlist.

In the above image, you can see my channel TechieAlly with the playlists I've created thus far. It also displays my saved playlists. Scrolling further down the page you would find a list of uploaded videos. I still need to create cover art to my channel page. 

 My Playlist Breakdown

• Twitter Tips & Tools: This playlist is primarily filled with videos of #TwitterTips from the official Twitter YouTube account. You'll notice under saved playlists, I also saved a playlist created by Twitter. My main takeaway from watching these videos, BRANDING is the KEY!

• Wikispaces: In this playlist I saved a small variety of videos on using Wikispaces in a classroom context.

• Web 2.0 Tools in Education: When I searched for videos to fit this topic, I found that a lot of the more interesting ones were several years old. Adding a filter for posting date didn't leave me with choices I found visually appealing. I decided to leave this one at three vids and come back to it later. Overall, I found that I learned about far more new Web 2.0 tools from the class discussion forum in eCollege. 

• Camera Shots & Angles Analysis Videos-Horror Theme: This is actually a playlist that I created with my school account for a unit during Halloween in my Introduction to Television class. I was able to copy this playlist over into this account.

• Storybird Videos: These are videos I shared from Storybird for my group project this week. The videos demonstrate how to use the application in an educational context.

• K-Pop Background Chill!!! I am not afraid to admit that I had the most fun adding videos to this playlist. I've been a fan of K-Pop (South Korean pop music) and K-Dramas (South Korean television shows) since 2013. I like to create music playlists on YouTube for each of my class periods using student suggested songs. I always slip in a few songs in different languages from around the globe. This particular playlist I could see myself listening to while working during my planning period. 

Adding a New Video to My Channel

Although I've added videos to YouTube before via GoAnimate and PowToon, I've never tried to upload directly from iMovie. In order to upload my video demonstration of Storybird for the week's group project, I decided to give it a go!

After selecting YouTube from the Sharing menu this box popped up. I added a title and description for my video then clicked sign in.

Sign in led me to a Google account sign in where I logged into one of my many Google accounts.

After signing in and selecting my channel, I gave iMovie permission to control my life...

And POOF! My video was online. This is the first time I've seen the Creator Studio in YouTube. 

For my last hurrah on YouTube for the week, I used the built in sharing capabilities to share my newly created video on Twitter.

Burning the Midnight Oil on Twitter and more Web 2.0

For our further Twitter adventures this week, we were tasked with exploring the treasure trove that is Cybraryman, exploring Twitter compatible apps on our phones, and continuing to live life in 140 characters via tweeting.

Cybraryman's list of edhashtags was overwhelming to the extreme! His site is beyond useful, but I could see it taking me ages to make my way through it all.

In order to meet the second Twitter criteria of the week, I finally bit the bullet and installed the Twitter app on my phone. Afterall, what app is more compatible with Twitter than Twitter. 😉

At the top is a screenshot of the Twitter app on iPhone. I was curious about the Explore button, since I hadn't seen that option while using Hootsuite or TweetDeck last week. Clicking on the button, I discovered that Explore leads to a list of trending topics and hashtags. I of course had to tweet about my discovery! You'll see my retweet on a trending topic above.

I used the Safari app on my iPhone to share this article from the CNN website on Twitter. 

I shared a video on Twitter account management tools via the YouTube app.

Then I tweeted this very deep thought about watching Twitter tutorials.

I posted a variety of Tweets on Web 2.0 tools I was using or looking into this week. Google Docs used as a group project creation tool and Storybird, the Web 2.0 tool I researched. Memrise is one of my favorite vocabulary apps along with Quizizz. I posted about both of these apps in our weekly class discussion forum. Finally, Photos For Class - a Web 2.0 tool I'd never heard of before that was recommended by a classmate. 

Today, I checked to see if I could share a creation on Twitter from one of my favorite photo apps, FotoRUs (above left) and I went into my Instagram settings to see how to connect Twitter there (above center and left). 

I took a break from tweeting to check out the Superbowl halftime show. I was rather surprised to see the emoticons show up when I tweeted about it after the performance. I wasn't aware that some hashtags automatically added emoticons!

Finally post Superbowl madness I went to search for a few of Cybraryman's education hashtags. I then retweeted a bunch of the resulting interesting posts I found. You'll see above that I particularly liked some of the infographics shared by a user named Alex Corbitt. I also read an article on education in England that was shared on Twitter and tweeted my thoughts on it.

All in all, it was a very activity packed week and I'll be very curious to see what new adventure we are set off on tomorrow!