School 2.0 in South Africa

Social media is fast becoming the default Internet mode of interaction, communication and collaboration. As teachers of good journalism habits you need to start modelling the educational and responsible use of social media tools in your classroom.  This poses a problem. Where do you start?  Which tools do you choose? How do you yourself become familiar with the tools in order to use it in a pedagogically innovative way in your classrooms? To get you started,  I have put together a basic toolkit for teachers and students of journalism.

The number one tool indisputably must be Twitter. Twitter allows you to tweet or make short 140 character updates  (tweets) of your life and your learning. Instead of being an arbitrary tool, you can use it to focus your students’ attention in the classroom by asking them to tweet lectures, ask or respond to questions and share resources. I find it quite amazing how trying to dot down presenters notes forces me to think about what they are saying in summary mode and making sense in the process. You can even use it as a notice board for assignments, test dates and resource sharing. The greatest advantage of using this tool, however, is that it provides cutting edge access to news, as The Times editor Ray Hartley (@hartley on twitter) pointed out: “the default switch has been set to online”. Twitter is now a must-have journalist earpiece, networking and primary news breaking tool. You can also create an informal tweetpaper (twitter newspaper) from your favourite twits’ tweets (authoritative people that use twitter effectively in your field of interest) or student tweets,  using a secondary twitter tool like http://paper.li/ For my detailed step by step twitter tutorial, see http://bit.ly/twitter2teach.

Knowing how to use RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed tools efficiently can provide any student or seasoned journalist with a way to keep track of all cutting edge news. You can subscribe to any blog, news source and twitter feed and it will automatically be downloaded onto your computer or mobile phone, ready for you to scan through when you have time. No longer do you have to worry about missing out on news as the feed provides a simplified stream of information as it is created and updated. My favourite RSS Reader (a tool that collates RSS feeds for easy reading) is Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) which allows for sharing feeds, grouping of related feeds and mobile access for when you are on the move but want to stay in touch.

A blog (web-log or online journal) is a place where you can claim your online presence or allow your students to practise their writing skills. Blogging platforms are mostly free and you can have your own individualised blog site up and running in no time at all. It comes with all the built-in social media bells and whistles, like commenting facilities, RSS feeds, widgets (embedded tools from secondary sources e.g.  a calendar or any other RSS feed), tagging (keyword metadata) and search  facilities.  Students can leave comments and get feedback, or become co-authors on a class blog. The advantage of using blogging tools is that you can maintain total control.  It facilitates sending blog posts using traditional modes like e-mail which promotes easy publishing. There are quite a few blogging platforms that make it possible to set up free, good-looking collaborative, multi authored or individual blogs. My favourites are WordPress (www.wordpress.com), Blogger (www.bloggger.com) and Edublogs (www.edublogs.org). For my detailed blogging tutorial see http://bit.ly/blog2teach.

Googledocs (www.google.com/docs) is a collaborative online writing space for anyone wanting to work on documents or articles together. You can use it to store documents online and it makes sharing a breeze. All articles can be changed into widgets and embedded into blogs or any learning management system like Blackboard or Moodle. You can even upload a presentation and have an online live discussion session with your students. Another inventive advantage is that you can create online forms which allow for multiple choice, short as well as longer questions, an ideal feature to help with student assessment.

Wordle (www.wordle.net) is a visual tool that brings out important elements of pieces of text. This means that you can paste your article into this tool and it will create a word cloud of all the important words or ideas that are most prominent. It calculates the frequency of words in a piece of text and enlarges the words with the highest count. You can even measure student involvement when pasting discussion threads or chats. Try ‘wordling” your next article as a final check to see if your intended topic has taken its rightful place in the script.

Social bookmarking can be seen as the digital library of any journalist social media toolkit. You can use it to save and share all your most valuable resource links. Instead of saving your favourite web pages inside your computer browser, you can save it into an online repository where it can be accessed from any computer anywhere, as well as by your network of co-learners, co-workers or students. By using online social bookmaking tools like Delicious (www.delicious.com)  or Diigo (www.diigo.com), you can build powerful knowledge sharing and resource databases which can be searched according to keywords or tags. Diigo allows you to annotate pages collaboratively, create groups for your students to share and discuss resource links, as well as generating automated tweets and blog posts. Think of it as a tool that exponentially amplifies your resource database and exposure.  To get started in using a social bookmarking tool, see my tutorial at http://bit.ly/bookmark2teach

Facebook is the social networking tool of choice and it is where we will find, and connect with, our students. We do not need to befriend them and infringe on their social space or worse, navigate tricky ethical barriers, but rather gently establish a learning handshake using Facebook fan pages or groups. Using either of these Facebook tools you can create a social space from where you can send notices, organise classroom events and aggregate learning feeds from any of the aforementioned tools using Facebook’s built-in array of tools. You can make it your classroom’s informal start page to kick-start any formal assignments and discussions. I would suggest creating a Facebook group for more structured internal classroom activities and a fan page for special subject related endeavours that will require a more global marketing approach. For a good insight into how to use Facebook in the classroom, see my blog post with an embedded presentation from Zaid Alsagoff at http://bit.ly/fb2teach

So, give each of these tools a try and if you are brave, get your students involved in helping you set it up. Remember, it is not about the tools but about the learning.

[This post is to be published in edited form in the Rhodes Journalism Review in time for the World Journalism Educators Conference happening in Grahamstown at the beginning of July (see http://wjec.ru.ac.za)]

I am currently busy creating learning objects for the COL (Commonwealth of learning) for their CCNC (Commonwealth Computer Navigators Certificate). It is kind of hard for me to return to my roots to create a “web 1.0″ learning object and I am hoping (time permitting) to advance the process to elementary web 2.0 level. So what I thought is to incorporate some subtle social media references and emerging the learners (novice computer using teachers and vocational students) into some social media examples.

So I thought to incorporate a blog commentary as well as short twitter examples into the learning object. This is where I need your help. What were your worst experiences with presenters and their presentations?

I attend a lot of local conferences and are sometimes flabbergasted at the level of boring/bad presentations and even the way people are presenting. It is as if they do not care and think that by merely having their speeches up on the screen, it is enough and that they have the right to bore us to death. As teachers we neither have the time or the money to attend conferences and workshops where we are exposed to the mushroom effect (sitting in the dark growing mould in our brains)

So come on, tell me your stories! What have been your worst experiences? I do reserve the right to include it in my learning object as examples. You can also submit short ones to me via twitter: @maggiev

When we ask learners do research on the internet, they are sometimes faced with inappropriate search results. This is any firewall administrator’s nightmare as well as a valid concern for most teachers and librarians. A search can also bring up millions of results, some of which are either commercial in nature or irrelevant. By creating a custom search engine we can make sure that learners only search within pre- approved search sites.

To create such a search engine is actually remarkably easy, the hard part is to collect relevant sites to populate your search engine with. I have decided to START with a kid safe search engine and built on it! Here is my search engine and a learning object that I have created to assist you to get going with your own one as well. I would be grateful if you can play with the learning object and let me know if there are any mistakes (grammar/spelling, broken links etc).

Come on try it out! Search for something!

I attended a librarians’ conference last week and at some stage we got into a discussion about wether or not reading books online will ever take off. After thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that I was in any case doing most of my reading online. I still love books and I don’t think this will ever change, but I definitely do not have a lot of time to actually read a saucy novel curled up in bed or on the sofa. The “sad” reality of my life is that I am mostly curled up with my laptop, reading blogs and articles and bookmarking them for distribution to my learning networks. The only time I get to indulge myself (and it is a specific treat for me now) is when I visit my house in Hogsback (paradise). There you just have to sit in front of the fireplace with a good book or go and read it next to the stream or something!

I am trying to get my mind around actually reading whole books online and set out to see what is available. I was inspired to find a treasure cove of goodies online. In the past I have mainly downloaded ebooks in PDF format for offline reading. I on principle never print ebooks, as it is a far more costly exercise as actually buying the book and having that fresh book smell welcoming you every time you turn a page. I must also admit to never actually reading a whole book online, just snippets of text here and there for use in papers and articles. If there is anyone who would read a book online, surely it will be me?

So I have decided to investigate some book options and am busy making a listing of all free e-book sites for our  new librarians blog (see lists there) . I could not believe the variety and depth of free e-book collections from all over the internet. You can download books in a variety of formats from audiobooks to photobooks and more. You can subscribe to get a book delivered in your e-mail inbox on a daily basis in smallish chunks and of course, you can buy a Kindle or read books on your cellphone for those wasteful occasions where you are forced to spend time stuck in a que.

While I was busy with my investigations my learning network friends @rashkath and @russeltarr shared some books with me. The one book was made by a grade 3 teacher for/by her class. I like the page turning effects worked into the site….

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

So what do you think? Should we start burning our dusty books yet?

I am busy putting the finishing touches to my chapter on how social media tools help us to not to only communicate but become lifelong learners, when I was passed (via my twitter network) a link to a new platform that allows you to create blog communities called blog.mu. I went to investigate it as I am planning to start another one of my blogging drives for teachers. I also immediately bookmarked my “find”  for future reference using my  Diigo button, which also passed it on to my twitter network.

After a quick investigation (after all I have to finish my chapter by Wednesday) I discovered that it was run using a WordPress engine and it reminded me a lot of my Edublog system (A blogging platform for teachers). I twittered this as I thought that it would give people more info on my “find”. As always, my network is listening in the background, and Sue Waters, who has always supported me on Edublogs, asked me if she could give me a live walkthrough (tutorial) on the spot, using Elluminate. Now how is that for on demand learning?

So using Twitter, we quickly organised a time and a place (6 hours time difference) to have an impromptu online workshop about blogging, and the difference between Edublogs Campus and the new tool Blog.mu. So basically, learning has become boundary-less and instantaneous on a global scale in a flat world! And then people still say that Twitter is a silly little hyped tool….Eaash!

So everybody is invited! Sue will be running it in Elluminate on thursday at 2pm South African time (8pm her time: GMT+8)  Mark your calenders and remember to tune in. If you will be joining us from your school, remember to check that you have access and that Elluminate is not blocked by school firewalls.

Here is a quick walk through on how to get in:

• Go to http://bit.ly/Wpwe6
• Enter your name and click on Login
• Tick “Open with Java…”  –> OK
• It will download and install the Elluminate application (Make sure that your school tech support is on standby or test it before the time)
• A security message will ask you if you want to run the application- choose RUN
• A little window will come up asking you about your connection speed
• Thee meeting room will apear with a little helpscreen on how to use the meeting room. But we will be there to guide and help you as well!!!
• You are welcome to log in before the time to give it a spin.

So see you there!!! And spread the news. Don’t forget to twitter it to your networks as well.

Quite a few of my teachers have asked me how I get it right to twitter, bookmark, chat, engage in social media and get my work done. I do not always get it right to juggle everything as effectively as I would have liked to, but I have devised a way to slip in all the things that I feel strongly about into my workday in a way that I do not even notice that I am doing it. So I thought I will share it with you.

My main daily communication and resource tools are Twitter (microblogging tool), Delicious and Diigo (bookmarking tools), Google reader (keeping track of new posts from my network and all over) as well as Skype/gtalk (for real-time chat and support)

I check my Twitter , say, every 1/2 and hour or so. Mainly to see if my network has anything valuable for me to look at and to see if there are any @replies or direct messages for me to respond to. Twitter is an instantaneous learning tool – it is not as intrusive as e-mail and it is quick to scan. If I am passed a great resource (and my network is really brilliant, so I always have!), I look at it (click through from the tweet) and immediately store it for later reference and use. I do this …

• Using my Diigo button (installed when I downloaded the Diigo toolbar), a little window then pops up where the
  • Web address is automatically captured as well as…
    Whatever I have highlighted as a description. I always try and insert something relevant there as it makes it easier when searching for resources.
  • I can then tag the resource at the same time. This step is very important as it will make it possible to find the resource again (and that is what it is ultimately all about in the end) So I make sure that I tag it using relevant tags familiar to me.
    • I also use tags that I have set up in Diigo to perform certain actions..
      • like creating a automatic weekly blog post of all my resources tagged with that word (eg see all the weekly bookmark posts- they have been tagged with the word “school2.0” which then make Diigo create a blogpost once a week)
      • also have specific RSS feeds set up that will look for all the resources tagged with a specific word and then send it to a feed located on a different blogpost (eg ML123 tagged resources go  to my mathsliteracy blog feed, and resources marked with “mathematics” go to my mathematics social network on NING)
      • I can also decide if I want to send the bookmark (resource) to a specific list or group (eg if it is a maths literacy resource, I post it to my ML123 group or if it is a general teacher resource I post it to my Educator group)
  • The window also has a little checkbox which, if ticked, will send my resource to twitter. I love this feature as it is a quick way to share resources on the fly with those interested in the same things I am (maths, social media, teacher stuff, ICT4teaching&learning) who are following me on Twitter (instant learning).
    • All my twitters automatically go to my Facebook update, which means that in the process I educate my kids, family and Facebook friends (advocacy ) They moan bitterly about this!!!
  • I have also set up my Diigo to automatically post all my bookmarks to my Delicious bookmarking system as well
    • Diigo is like a database of resources (a very good user friendly one) and depending on how well I tag my resources, I can find anything, drilling down to the last detail, in seconds.
    • I initially started off with Delicious which is also a bookmarking system, but has a far simpler interface (I have tried both with my teachers and Delicious has been more user friendly for new computer users) It is not as social and do not have annotation and discussion features. This means that I physically have to go to it to see what my network is up to (which I do once a month and the tag back to my system). (See my Delicious learning object for teachers here)
    • The reason why am using both systems simultaneously is
      • I actually find that Delicious is an easier search engine to use
      • I have an established network on Delicious that I value and support
      • My novice teachers are on Delicious and I need to support them as well.

I check my Google reader at least once a day. Google Reader is a RSS (real simple syndication) tool that downloads (automatically) all the feeds (from articles) that I have set up for it to fetch.

• When I open it (and I always keep it open) I can see when anyone in my network/blogs/websites have updated their blog etc.
• Scanning through the heading titles quickly brings me up to date with the latest news and Edtech skinner
• and If I find something that I would like to use in future I tag it using my
  Diigo button (see above) –> database–> delicious–>twitter–>twitter replies. So this is a vital part of my daily professional development

Skype/Gtalk is my personal contact with the world and I mostly use it to support my teachers and stay in direct contact with my kids. I can talk anybody through anything using Skype. It is almost like being in the same room. I always mark myself as “away” (even if I am there) in order for me to have the choice to engage or not. This way people do not have to feel bad about bothering me, as they know that I have a choice to talk to them.

I do  not use Google search much any more. I rather search through my database (Diigo and Delicious) or ask my Twitter network directly. I only go to Facebook once a week and get my friend updates in my Tweetdeck or via my Friendfeed. As I find Facebook to be very “slutty” it can be a mindless distraction and I limit it for myself.  In a next blogpost I will highlight all the other tools that I use on a daily basis.

As everybody know I have been having an on-off relationship with my Cell Phone for years. Cell phones do not like me. They break, grow legs, and mostly get alienated from their power cables. I have tried moving over to smart cell phones. They make matters even worse. They are power- hogging little devices out to cripple Eskom and I find myself (that is if I remembered to plug in /had a power cable) without any power by tea time! Also, my eyesight has now officially progressed past puberty and I am struggling to read which new reading glasses I should acquire. But I am digressing. Maybe I just want to mention that I do believe in cell phones as great learning devices and will use it more actively the moment I found my charger cable!

So how do you contact/get hold of me? As you have gathered by now, phoning me on my cell phone might not be a good way to go. In the past e-mail was a very effective way to get my attention. But since I have not been able to catch up on the 3000 e-mails that accumulated during my Christmas virtual break, I have funnelled my e-mail into folders and play eenie-meanie-minie-mo on which folder I will read every day. Those who know me, knows to mark their e-mail as high priority (I check that folder a few times a day)

So what is the best way? My current favourite way of communication is Twitter. I had to smile at my niece, who, on failure to contact me on my cell and landlines (Telkom took 2 weeks to fix it), resorted to see what I am up to on my twitter feed. Clever girl. Contacting me is as easy as sending me an @maggiev or direct message (d maggiev) at www.twitter.com/maggiev . And yes, it does get delivered to my cell phone via sms as well!

What actually inspired this blogpost is this cartoon: