Well, it’s here! I can already hear the seagulls and detect the faint smell of coconut lotion in the air….That’s right, Summer Break is officially in full swing!  That special time of the year that us New Jersey educators try to renew our minds, bodies and our souls.  While I hope that the feel of warm sand between your toes, salty sea air and warm, ocean breezes will help replenish your body and soul, I thought I’d share some inspiration for your mind inthis last post of the 2008-2009 school year.

Throughout history, humans have always created our own learning networks. When we needed to know how to do something, we sought out the expert in that field and they shared their knowledge. For example, hunters knew who to talk to about the latest in hunting techniques. Farmers knew who to talk to regarding the latest in agricultural technology practices. (And students could talk to their brilliant teachers!) Now we have the Internet to access more information about whatever we need to know. However, now there is not necessarily a need anymore to find “the” expert in a field of study. Instead, we need to create our own network of experts, our own Personal Learning Network.

What is a Personal Learning Network? It is a collection of resources that you can go to when you want to learn something. This includes family and friends, teachers, and people in the local community. It can also include non-human resources, such as books, journals and other forms of media. In the 21^st century, there’s also an extensive electronic network of resources that you can – and should – include in your network. This includes resources on the Internet such as webpages and podcasts. But it also includes human resources that are available to you via the Internet- your own personal collection of “experts” on various topics from all over the world! One way to build that collection of experts is via RSS Feeds, which allows you to subscribe to their content and have it delivered to you in your RSS Aggregator (e.g., Google Reader). Every time they produce new content, it automatically gets delivered to you, allowing you to tap their knowledge and wisdom from afar. It helps you to develop your own understanding of the world, to participate in the conversations that are going on, and to have a say in the world that we live in.

There are approximately 9 weeks of Summer Vacation to relax, recover and recharge our educational batteries.  Here are some suggestions I’ve come up with to help you make sure you do all three! 

I hope you have a wonderfully nourishing summer

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. - Ferris Beuller

SUMMER To-Do List

After seeing the education community embrace Diigo with so much excitement, the good folks that run it decided to create an educator-specific incantation of the popular tool.  They listened to what teachers had to say- what special features they’d like to see in order to better use Diigo with their students- and recently introduced Diigo Educator Accounts.

What are Diigo Educator Accounts?

These are special, FREE premium accounts provided, specifically to K-12 & higher-ed educators. Once your Diigo Educator application is approved, your regular Diigo account will be upgraded to have additional features.  So, you need to create a basic Diigo account first, then upgrade to the free education account after wards.  The upgraded educational features include:

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of 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 annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

Here’s a link to the offical Diigo Educator Account FAQ Sheet.  You’ll find loads of valuable information there to help you set up your educator account, get your students registered, and get started digging with Diigo!

Here’s an example of what I plan on doing with my Diigo Educator account (I’ll let you know how it goes )

• Every week, I have one student choose a current event article & pose a question about it.  It started out great, but after a while, everyone just started reading previous posts & trying to mimic them instead of thinking critically on their own.  I am going to shake things up a bit by using a  Diigo Education account for our current event conversations.
• Every week, I will choose a current event article and begin marking it up in Diigo with a question (bubble annotation).  My students will have to choose segments of the article to annotate themselves.  They must make a statement AND ask a question in their annotation.
• I’m just fleshing this out now, so any feedback you can provide is GREATLY appreciated!

1. We all begin on the Web by “telegathering” (surfing) and “telehunting” (searching. This we can do pretty well. What we don’t do very well yet is to take educationally sound steps beyond telegathering and telehunting).
2. We need to help our students and ourselves “teleharvest” (sift through, cogitate, comprehend, etc.) the information that we find, and “telepackage” the knowledge that results from active interaction (application, synthesis, evaluation, etc.) with the information.
3. Then, we need to “teleplant” (telepublish, telecollaborate, etc.) these telepackages by sharing them with others…who use them as information in their…
4. …telegathering & telehunting, and the process cycles back around again.
Most of us are at the tele-gathering and hunting stage, finding and collecting web sites that we believe are useful. How many educational web sites do you visit that have a list of lists, collections of fantastic sites on the web? Impossible to keep track of and maintain, these lists are just more information that each of us has to wade through, each time creating our own links. The pack mules can’t carry all the gold that we’ve found out there. Maybe, now that we’ve accumulated the gold, it’s time to do more than look at it. To do that, we have to know what’s valuable, what’s not. According to Jim McNamara (jmcn@tenet.edu), evaluating something means being able to extract the value out of it.

QUESTION: “How do we help out students determine and extract the value of web resources?” or as Guhlin puts it, “pan for internet gold”.  How do we help our students to think critically in such a fast-paced, multi-tasking culture, when they typically have ten internet tabs open at once, an IM’ing window open as well, a Youtube video streaming AND their iPod playing in the background?

ANSWER: The best way to help our students better evaluate internet resources is to get them (students) to interact with them (websites).  That’s what Web 2.0 is all about-Collaboration, Evaluation & Synthesis

TOOL: A great way to harness the power of Web 2.0  and interact with websites is Social Bookmarking

DIIGO.com is my favorite social bookmarking tool because it has AMAZING educational possibilities. The social aspect of learning is important, especially with our increasing focus on conversations that add value to what we are learning! What sets Diigo apart from other social bookmarkers is that Diigo not only lets you bookmark Web sites but also have online conversations about them… on the actual sites themselves!.

As soon as you start playing around with Diigo, you’ll figure out countless applications for your own personal use & communication with colleagues, so I’ve decided instead, just to share a few really great ways to use Diigo with your students:

• Create a slideshow of clickable web sites grabbed from your bookmarks (A great way to present awesome resources for children, parents and colleagues)

• Annotate and add comments to a web page via Diigo, and invite your students to do the same.  You will essentially be hosting online, critical thinking & writing excercises about internet content on the actual webpages themselves!  (All of the comments you & your students make will remain on the webpage for you all to see anytime you are signed in on Diigo & visit the site)

• If you have students posting their own work online (ex. Literary students writing their own blogs), you can use highlighting & sticky notes (annotations) to leave public feedback of their work with invisible ink.  A wonderful modeling tool for your students to learn how to appropriately & meaningfully comment on each others work.

Clay Burell: 3 Uses of Diigo in the Classroom

Innovative teachers all over the world are constantly discovering new ways to use Diigo with their students.  If your interest is peeked,  check out some of the following videos:

• Emily Barney: Making the Web Work for You
• Highlight & Share the Web
• Improving how we Find, Share & Save Information
• Diigo’s Web Slides Feature
• Kristin Hokanson: How to Diigo
  
• Key Features of Diigo
• Jen Dorman: Dig Deeper with Diigo

As you begin to use Diigo & develop your own educational uses, join the conversation and share your ideas with the rest of us

• Why would teachers use Diigo? (Thanks, Clif Mims for starting this conversation!)

Now that you know about Diigo, you can help your students evolve from Internet Cavemen, hunting & gathering information that can sometimes be harmful and can often be useless, into modern Digital Citizens, harvesting information in a safe & sustainable manner, which includes contributing their own thoughts and ideas to online conversations.  Sure that takes more work, and the results may seem slower to realize, but as any responsible farmer will tell you, it’s the only way to ensure that future generations will also be able to reap the benefits of the seeds we plant now…