Research Skills-No Excuses

Research skills can be tricky to teach. When you sit down to think about it, the term research skills is a bit of an umbrella, encompassing so many important skills.

When considering the research process, strategies and tools for searching come to mind.  I have been teaching this for 4 years, but still wonder how I can better teach kids to be effective and efficient seekers of information. What strategies can we use and what tools are available? Throughout this stage of the process determining the quality, relevance and reliability and fairness of sources (see filter bubbles) and  is also imperative. Evaluation skills are brought into the mix.

It is important that students learn how to scan, identify important information and separate it from that which is not, read for understanding and take notes on the information they have found (This in itself is a huge skill to learn.) Before any of this takes place however, students must learn how to structure their research questions, and plan their ideas, so outlining skills need to be taught.

All of this must happen in order for students to use their findings to create something through which to share their understanding. The type of project undertaken will affect the structure and content they will use. But we are not done yet. Students must also be taught to reference their work and somewhere along the line, students must be given the opportunity to reflect on their findings, writing and final project.

It is too late to begin this process in high school. It needs to start much lower down, in elementary school, and through meaningful experiences, preferably before bad habits develop. It needs to be planned for with care and a progression determined. Students won't learn all of these skills in isolation, they should be taught across subjects (where applicable) as part of any research task they undertake. They won't learn them all on their own and may have trouble seeing their worth unless otherwise pointed out to them, strategies taught and plenty of relevant practice provided.

We teach searching skills and evaluation skills, and help equip students with some of the best tools available to do so. We teach them how to take notes and share their findings and ideas with others using Twitter and Diigo. We teach them a great variety of ways in which they can publish and share their work and also focus on delivery to a group. I think about all that we do, and when it is done, knowing how much goes into it, recognising the quality of the work we do and yet I know we don't have it right yet. I have never been as convinced as I am right now that the teaching of research skills needs to begin prior to middle school.

Something happened this past week that had never happened before. I was teaching 6th grade how to use smart searching tools and strategies, evaluate websites and share their sources and annotations socially through Diigo. This was the first time we did this quite so thoroughly with 6th grade and I was blown away. Where the older grades are accepting and basically put up with it prior to many of them reverting back to their old habits, 6th grade embraces this type of  learning, they hunger to try things out and make a huge effort to get the work done, and even take on additional work outside of class time that wasn't required of them.

We are getting closer, 6th grade is the right grade to go full throttle with this, but wouldn't it have been even more powerful if the groundwork were already in place? There would be less direct teaching of research skills and more guided application. This should be an expectation in the 21st century. There are no acceptable excuses for not teaching students to be information literate and doing so not only from the middle years on but from an earlier age.

Here are some links to my favourite tools and resources for teaching these skills.

Diigo-Social bookmarking, annotations and more.
Twitter and Today's Meet-Microblogging Platforms for sharing succinct nuggets of information
EasyBib-for citing work.
21st Century Information Fluency- for teaching searching skills and website evaluation
May Favourite Hoax Sites-Buy Dehydrated Water, Dog Island, The Northwest Tree Ocotpus, and anything http://zapatopi.net/.    You can find plenty more here and here to choose from.
The Big Six-Framework for teaching and learning research
BrainPop Online Sources(login required)
BrainPop Internet Search (login required)

The Power of Prezi, on Social Bookmarking

This came through on Twitter a few minute ago, from Shamblesguru. The following is not only a great demo about the importance of Social Bookmarking tools Not only does it spotlight one of the best of the bunch- Diigo, but it is also a prime example of how to truly harness the power of Prezi. Just look at how cleverly this presentation has been put together.

Social Bookmarking for Educators on Prezi

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Presentation-Research Using Social Networks

Image via CrunchBase

I will be presenting a poster session on the Research Project I did using Social Neworks,  at  ISTE 2010. I have included  a brief description of the topics I hope to discuss during the presentation.

Diigo

In this presentation we will discuss the the educational potential of Diigo as a learning network, showing participants how to set up and manage student learning groups, collect in homework digitally and encourage student collaboration through the creation of a learning network.In working with Diigo, we will look at: social bookmarking to groups, use of tags, highlighting and sticky notes, comments, following and being followed.

Twitter

I hope to demonstrate some ways in which students can use Twitter to take research notes and share them with others in their groups, using hash tags.  We will look at other alternative to Twitter, as well as the pros and cons of using each with students.

NoodlbeBib and EasyBib

I plan on sharing our experiences with using NoodleBib for generating citation lists, paraphrasing and creating outlines and discuss EasyBib as an free/paid alternative for generating citations.

Prezi

We will finish by looking at Prezi as a powerful presentation application, with a focus on how it can support presentation reform and empower students to create interactive presentations.

What We Hope is an Exceptional Resource

Our LRC website was created to house a rich assortment of teaching tools, student resources, picture and video galleries and more.
The main interface is a pictorial, user friendly Glog embedded in a wiki. The Glog allows designers to link images and text to web pages and can be embedded on most sites.

Within the LRC Website community members can access, virtual bookshelves, which highlight new arrivals, and link to user reviews. They can also enjoy a great assortment of e-books from many different collections.

Community members can find collections of web tools, for editing photos, working with audio and video, as well as access digital image, video, and audio collections. Many of the resource in these collections are licensed for reuse and remixing into digital projects.

There are times when community members might want to request a resource for the LRC library. Our website offers an easy solution to this by hosting a request for resources section. Using this option members of the community can ask for books and magazines as well as other resources to be included in the yearly orders.  These requests will be reviewed by LRC staff members several times a year.

It is easy to browse the current library collection online. This includes not only books, but magazines as well. ABC users, and people from around the world, are able to check which resources the library contains and which copies are available for checking out.

Keeping up to date with happenings at the LRC is also quite easy. Regular reminders and information updates are issued through the LRC Twitter stream and Voki services, on the right side bar.

Community news and events are also posted weekly and can be found under the News Section. The LRC Events Calendar is embedded in the website for easy browsing of upcoming orders and events.

In house video and photo galleries are available for viewing and the Ustream link will take interested parties to live streaming of LOL’s Friday shows.

The research section provides students and teachers with important guidelines and resources for teaching and learning, as does the section on presentation guidelines.

Don’t be surprised if the main page changes a bit throughout the year. It’s to be expected, as relevant links to topical or new initiatives are added.

Some LRC Quick Links

• Browse the recently updated ABCICT Scratch Gallery.


• Browse the New  Book Arrivals.


• Browse the community events which are published on the LRC Website in the News Section.


• View LOL videos from the In House Video section of the LRC Website.


• Browse and read e-books online.


• Search our Useful Resources collections.


• Browse the Library Collection online.

My Wish Lists for Diigo and SimplyBox

I love Diigo and can't live without SimplyBox.

Diigo is there for me in so many ways. Bookmarks are just the beginning. It is my new lifeline to Delicious (my backups of all backups), my research central, a big part of my PLN, and a vital teaching tool. I love the ease of bookmarking and annotating, sending to Twitter is also a perk. That said there are  a few things I would really like to see in Diigo.

1. Bookmarking to multiple groups- So often I would like to bookmark to several groups at a time, but can't. This means bookmarking once for each group.


2. Easy list construction using tag bundles or something similar-I am too far gone with my bookmarking to go back into each one and add it to a list. Tag bundles are a great way to easily bring in content to a list. Can we have that please?


3. Easy user searches within groups- I use Diigo groups for teaching research and when I want to see what each member of the group has contributed, I would like to be able to search out that member, and have all the content they have added to the group appear. As it stands I need to go to each member's library or scroll through pages of group bookmarks and comments.


4. Citation Generator-Diigo would be the perfect tool for teaching research skills if it had a citation generator similar perhaps to Noodle Tools.


5. Sending to Twitter-might be a bit easier if the actual tweet was based on the description section of the bookmark. It would be important for this to remain editable of course, in order to keep things succinct.

SimplyBox

SimplyBox is my Digital Teacher Toolkit. Only the best of the best gets in there, tools which I know I am going to use or recommend to others in our school, now or later on in the school year. I am very careful about its organisation and am trying to ensure that bookmarks have decent, if somewhat brief comments and a workable tag system. I love the fact that I can share my public url's directly to Twitter as well as on websites and with friends. Again, there are some changes that I think would make it ever more fantastic.

1. Sub Boxes or Boxes within Boxes-Presently I have things organised into crates which contain boxes, but I now feel the need to have a boxes within boxes in order to keep things organised in a hierarchy.


2. Shared Boxes-When having students share their boxes with me (They use it for collborative research much in the same way we use Diigo Groups.)I receive the emails, but only certain boxes actually appear as shared in my account.


3. Boxing to Multiple Boxes-Just like with Diigo, I would live to be able to box to several boxes simultaneously. At present I need to bookmark to each box separately.


4. Copy and Paste-I would like to be able to copy and paste bits and pieces of text from the comments box to the tags, twitter etc...instead of typing things out each time. It would be a real time saver if we could have this option.

Both of these applications are fantastic tools that no teacher or student should go with out. If you haven't checked them out yet, you are truly missing out on the organizational and collaborative power they offer. If used effectively both applications can act as the foundation for teacher digital toolkit as well as  potent teaching tools.

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TweetCloud- What are You Tweeting?

This just came in over twitter from someone you need to follow if you aren't already doing so, Joyce Valenza.

TweetCloud is a  useful little Twitter tool  that allows you to create word clouds from your tweets, very much in the same way that Wordle creates tag clouds from text. I had a play with it and the results are below.

It would appear that my tweets for a month are a bit video-centric, not exactly what I had expected. The one below is from a year of tweets...Useful Tools and Ideas are the trend, must be all the SimplyBox-ing.

I am now working out ways I can use this tool with my students when they use Twitter  for collaborative research. They each have individual accounts through which they could generate their own clouds and display the main topics they are researching. If you have a class Twitter account it would be an interesting way of visualising the content of your Twitter stream with the students who have contributed to its growth. If you can think of any other ways to make this a part of teaching and learning, do let me know.

For now, have a play with TweetCloud. All you need is an active Twitter account.

Wikis as Websites for Libraries-It's not just about the code, is it?

This morning we held our second Wikis as Websites session of the year for members of the Salvadoran library community and members of ABES, the Salvadoran Librarians association.

Widget Fever

It was great to see everyone again, and they were certainly revved to get back into their wikis. After a brief refresher it became all about the widgets and code. The looks of surprise and then joy on people's faces when they saw not only the variety of useful widgets and ways to embed codes from various online services, took me back about 6 months, when I too caught the widget bug. Of course fantastic websites are not just about the code, but what a hook! Code in the form of widgets is like opening a little door or window to another source or collection of ideas, in an highly engaging manner.

The sheer enormity of of widgets/gadgets/flakes and embedding code out there, for free I might add, is enough to give anyone widget fever.

Today we looked at embedding slideshows, glogs, Librarything and Shelfari book shelves, blogs and rss feeds using widgetbox, youtube videos and Twitter feeds. In the end we could have used at least one more exploratory session, but hopefully participants will maintain their momentum over the next few months.

But there is more!

During the last part of the session our Library Assistant fed back from her Guatemalan Digital Literacy conference experience using Prezi. It was her first time presenting and her first time using Prezi.

What's Prezi?

If you haven't tried Prezi yet...you are missing out on a great interactive presentation tool. Yes it's a web app and yes you can also download your work! Try teaching it to kids, what a fantastic way to get away from the ppt and enforce presentation reform guidelines!

Back to the Conference

Our conference wasjoined by others who had attended in Guatemala.  Some joined us in person and others  did so virutally using Elluminate. It was the first time I was able to use my Learn Central V-Room with anything larger than a group of friends. It was fantastic and the participants in El Salvador got to listen to and learn from  speakers in other areas of the continent as well as those physically present. This was the first such experience for most of the participants and they were thrilled by it.

I am going to break out the V-Room again this school year with our Spanish classes, enabling students and teachers to  link up and participate to student presentations in real time.

Is anyone else out there using Elluminate with their kids?

The Day the Internet Went Down!

Yesterday upon arriving to school, staff members encountered a school without an internet connection. For some it was  a moment to rejoice, no more email hammering through the system to deal with and no more computer based admin work to be done. Some of us saw it differently, asking ourselves the question, "How on Earth could we function without it?" Now I am not referring to emails and admin, but digital teaching and learning. I teach ICT and let's face most of my lessons are web based, as well as parked on a wiki or Google Doc. It wasn't so much the lack of access to the lessons, but the resources I very carefully park online to use in my teaching, as well as the web applications I am teaching students to use.  Let's face it the Twitter research lesson was going to have to be scrapped!

In the end I opted for having the 8th grade create a story map of sorts, an outline for their upcoming work with Prezi. They actually cheered when I told them the internet was down-go figure. Anyway we pulled some books off the shelves, handed out the paper and they got to it. It was worth it. Each group engaged in a lot of discussion and planning and now has a plan for organising their presentation.

It is not the end of the world when the internet goes down, there are other ways to cope, and other activities which can be done, but my Twitter lesson will still have to take place, even if its a week later, causing a domino effect for all the followup activities-again not the end of the world.

That doesn' t mean I didn't cheer out loud and practically jump out of my chair when Tweetdeck all of a sudden pushed an update through onto my screen.  (You know what? I wasn't the only one!)

Research the Web 2.0 Way

Research plays an important role in the education of students. The development of  a research skills program is one of the LRC’s many important objectives for SY 09/20.

This year we have taken advantage of the wide range of Web 2.0 tools available to support and enhance research work with students. Students are learning more about how to search the web efficiently and effectively, while at the same time evaluating the sources they encounter. Web searching and evaluation are now taught utilising the 21st Century web fluency tutorials and hands on challenges, in combination with the pertinent videos from Brainpop.

One of the most exciting developments in research this year is the introduction of Diigo, a powerful social bookmarking application. Diigo enables students to form learning groups and networks, bookmark, tag and annotate web pages online, share their findings and annotations with their research groups, as well as search the bookmarks and annotations of others interested in the same topics.

In the 8th grade Twitter is being used along with the hashtag #abcict to record nuggets of information in 140 characters or less, forcing students to be succinct in their note taking. They are also using Twipic to upload photographs to their Twitter stream. The entire grade can then access the research as part of the #abcict stream. 7th grade used Google Chat to accomplish a similar feat in small groups, and later on this year, some classes will be using Today’s Meet to do the same.

An updated version of Noodlebib is being used to create notecard from these collaborative streams of information, as well as create outlines and citations. The 8th grade presentations based on all this research, will then be constructed and delivered using Prezi, a very exciting web application for delivering dynamic presentations both on and offline.

It’s a fact that the number of powerful web applications that can be harnessed for educational purposes is rising quickly. Educators from around the world are quick to identify those which are relevant to their work and together with students incorporate them as a part of authentic 21st century learning experiences, which are dynamic, meaningful, and often collaborative.

Backing Up Twitter

I have decided to jump in with both feet and begin using Twitter for collaborative research in lessons next week. This of course brings with it some new problems which need addressing. I noticed a while ago that Tweets aren't eternal, this didn't bother me too much until I decided I wanted access to older tweets. Now it is a real issue, because I want kids to have access to our class tweets utilising a given hashtag, weeks after the fact. I gather from the different posts I read,  that 9-15 days is pretty much the average time they are kept and this itself is relative to the number of tweets etc...

I have done a lot of reading on this today, and I still haven't found a concrete solution to my problem. I tried to sign up with Tweetbackup but had log in issues and later came across the interesting TweetKarma in my travels through the Tweetiverse. I did however place an RSS feed on a query for our hashtag, in my PageFlakes account in the hopes that it will all accumulate there. Naive? Maybe, time will certainly tell. Being the untrusting sort, I am also going to back it up the old fashioned way, copying it all into shared Google doc. That way if in a week's time, when our class meets up again to use  the collaborative research we compiled, the older tweets cannot be accessed, I will have a full copy to provide them with.

If anyone out there has a proven solution for this I would be very interested in hearing from you.

RSS

Finder Fox Widget

Now you can make your webpage/blog more interactive for readers. Just  place the finder fox widget on your web page and any reader who highlights a word or string of words will be given the choice to tweet them, look them up in Wikipedia, or search them out on Google and Twitter. What a great idea!  You can trial it right now as I have added it to this blog.

Making Connections via Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Whos.amung.us

I came across a great blog post by Jeff Utecht this morning on Twitter entitled A Blog Post, a Tweet a Connection. I found it very inspiring and  is definitely worth a read.

In this post Jeff describes how easy it is to connect up educators and students from all over by simply  using teacher social network connections. The experience he describes is very powerful. Most of us are connected to other educators, via Twitter, blogs, FaceBook, Nings, and more, its just finding ways to make them work for us.

Jeff summarised the content of his post as follows:

"I believe this story shows the power of:1. What can happen when we allow students to be “out there”.
2. What happens when our teachers become networked and can bring that network to their students.
3. That through connections educational possibilities are endless.



On a different note, most of us are pretty fond of our ClusterMaps. It's nice to know whose reading and amazing to see where in the world the readers are located. Well after reading Jeff's post I glanced over at the sidebar and found a whos. amung.us map. It's great! Not only does it show the locations of visitors to the blog, but also displays in real time the locations from where it is being read.

While I was reading the post described above, the  El Salvador dot was flashing as wall as another in the states. Two of us in different parts of the world were reading the post at the same time. Upon clicking on the map, more details were available such as how many people were viewing which posts at the time as well as a graph of the last 24 hours of traffic the blog received. Definitely worth following up on!

Poll Daddy on Twitter

Alright, here we go again with Twitter. I just found out how to create Poll Daddy surveys on Twitter. No account is needed and you can create the polls in a variety of languages, with both multiple choice or user defined answers. These same polls, or mini surveys are easily embedded in wikis, blogs etc. I am brewing up ideas for a Twitter training session which I now believe needs to happen early on in the school year, along with a session on Elluminate and Learn Central, which are also definate musts!

HOOT Suite

So I've done it, I now have 3 different Twitter accounts for 3 different reasons. The first one is now very much of my personal learning network, so much in fact that I now look to Twitter a lot more than I do my Google Reader. The second twitter account is for the LRC, which at present is being used simply for broadcast updates about the library, however as of August I hope to take it further. The third account is for the ABCICT wiki, and is meant for updates and interactions with the students in 6th through 8th grade. This last account will hopefully become a big part of our ICT lessons during sy2009/10.

Now, while all of this is great, it has been posing a big problem recently, as I have been forced to log in and out of the different accounts depending on what I am doing- slow going. Not anymore!  I have just come across Hoot Suite, which allows you to update multiple Twitter accounts by simply clicking the profile images from dashboard. Tweeting has just become a lot simpler.

Twitter Widgets

The latest of my obsessions is Twitter Widgets. I discovered them (in a tweet) about a week ago and had to have one, and then more, one for each of my sites. There is so much discussion out there on how to use Twitter effectively for teaching and learning and I am just beginning to get it. I have placed a widget in the different sites for library and class announcements, which I realise is not very collaborative at all, but valuable all the same. Ways in which I can see myself using Twitter as a teaching tool is for class dicussions, brain storming and  data collection. I am toying with the idea of signing my kids up next August. My biggest concern is that most of my students have so many accounts for online applications already.  Dare I suggest they sign up for yet another one? I will of course, and our head of Ict has promised to look into a solution that would allow them to log in simoultaniously to all their accounts, but this may be a while coming.

Simplybox Again!

I am definately going to use Simplybox more than ever now, to box and share my online finds. I no longer have to box and bookmark on Delicious separately. I can now Simplybox items and the bookmark is saved on my Delicious account and get this-it is also automatically posted on Twitter too,  (Keeping up with tweets is one of my goals this year). Great stuff!

More on the Twitter Front!

Just come across a few new Twitter tools while tracking Twitter Posts.

SnapTwitter allows you to easily share Flickr pictures on Twitter.

TwitPic lets you share pictures on Twitter using your Twitter credentials.

I am beginning to think I need a whole Twitter page.

I'd be interested in hearing about the different ways Twitter is used with students.

Getting the Tweet of Things

I have been forcing myself to be more consistent with Twitter lately. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been a most unwilling participant up until now. I just  didn't understand the WOW of it. That is slowly changing.  I have now committed myself to opening it each day and refreshing the page occassionally, which has lead me to stumble across some really great stuff. Tiny url's, little blog snippets, these are two of the most valuable facets of Twitter I have found so far. Yes it is nice to keep in touch and post personal updates on what we are doing, so our friends to read about it, but to be able to share interesting ideas and links with our social networks, without writing or having to read blog posts to get to the meat of things...well, is there a need to elaborate further?

TwitScoop etc.

One of my favourite web 2.0 tools is wordle which allows you to generate tag clouds by copying and pasting text into a box, or by enterring the url of any blog, feed, delicious account, web page ....

Recently in my wanderings, I came across a podcast on k12onlineo8 that mentioned Twitscoop which is a part of Twitter. Now you can use twitscoop to monitor an ever chaning tag cloud of the hottest topics of the moment. This cloud is continually morphing and if you click on a tag it shows you who tweeted it with the tag in context, as it takes you to those tweets.

Just come across Doug Belshaws TwitterFlock which he generated on TwitterSheep, did my own, of course nothing in comparison-really a sad little flock! I keep telling myself I need to get into Twitter more! Anyway I have also just discovered Twitterfall, which allows you to use a tagged search to generate a cascade of tweets which are constantly updated! Neat!

Has it convinced me to use Twitter more often? Hmmm, not yet. While I see the value of it as a discussion tool during conferences etc...I lack the actual network that would make this really valuable. Who's fault is that? Why mine of course, I need to get it together and begin building!