Global Cognition and Integrated Online Tech
Global cognition is the key to learning and intellectual growth. Information and specialized skills are important to understanding and living in the world, but connecting information and linking skills one to another is vastly better for holistic fulfillment. Integration, in other words, is the key to making education personally relevant and meaningful in the larger scheme of personal and social life. Global cognition tools and social learning through integrated online technologies are steps toward greater educational fulfillment.
We will discuss the tools for global cognition in our particular reviews of sites later, but for now let’s focus on social learning in the web 2.0 environment. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe the non-static applications of the web: the social media and online mashup world. Social media, we know, is the world of Facebook, Twitter, and various media sharing sites like YouTube and Pinterest. Mashups are integrations of existing stand-alone technologies. For example, if YouTube links up with Prezi to provide a seamless integration of video for animated presentations, a mashup has occurred. The phenomenal aspect of mashups is that they’re exponential. Once one connection is made, several more seem to open up. If YouTube could connect with Prezi, why not open up to SoundCloud for audio support, and why not create this synthesis as a sharing site in its own right, complete with profiles and followers, and, on that note, why not make products of those collaborations sharable on Facebook and Twitter, and on and on...?
You get the point. The connections are endless, and the end goal is the integration of online technology into increasingly unified applications. This is what we call a brain. That’s not tech talk, that’s philosophy. It seems that the relentless drive for seamlessly integrated unification in the acquisition, compilation, and production of knowledge is, itself, a kind of online brain. We link to this brain to create virtual knowledge communities–a phrase which really means nothing other than “culture.” Education has always been about the acquisition, compilation, and production of knowledge on a personal basis for a shared purpose–the very definition of culture (and cultural literacy). What has changed is the medium, which has broadened the scope of the cultural enterprise.
Having framed the philosophical basis of Web 2.0, we can now turn to a specific example from the classroom. I’ve used bits and pieces of Web 2.0 for education, but I’ve learned a lot more in recent study that have produced broader leads I can use in the future. Rather than provide a litany of disconnected applications, I’d prefer to put together an integrated hypothetical unit. So here goes.
Our hypothetical unit is “The History of Public Education in the 20th Century and Its Implications for the 21st.” A variety of web 2.0 tools will be used in this project-based unit for university underclassmen.
Lesson 1: Create Pic-Lits accounts for students, and add them as followers to the teacher’s own Pic-Lit page. Provide a set of pictures depicting education in the pre-20th through 21st century eras of education taken from the PicLit gallery or from other image sources uploaded to PicLit. Ask the students to work individually to add a narrative to those pictures as an anticipatory set to the unit.
Lesson 2: Discuss, as a class, each PicLit by accessing each student’s PicLit page. If the classroom equipment is available, students can access each student’s PicLit by navigating to it on their computers, or the teacher can access each site on his/her computer and project.
Lessons 3-5: Have students form small groups and begin to research the history of education in the 2oth century. Provide helpful links for them through the teacher’s Delicious account. Links would include encyclopedic sources as well as webquests such as this one http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=56931. Students would keep track of their research collaboratively using Diigo. There they can archive important sites, annotate and highlight their online findings, and comment on each others’ findings. It’s the online equivalent of keeping a group set of research paper index cards and photocopies of sources.
Lessons 6-7: Students create Google groups and, using Google Docs, co-author a 500-word essay on this prompt: “Explain the main developments in education in the 20th century, and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century.”
Lessons 8-10: Have students use their Google Doc as narration for an iMovie or Animoto video presentation using images and video clips acquired online. Again, links to relevant image and video sharing sites could be provided through Delicious. The video documentaries of each group would then be uploaded to a classroom channel in YouTube (or other media sharing site) and viewed together as a class. These could be commented online and then discussed in person as a whole class.
Now, this is obviously pulling out all the stops. It would require a lot of preliminary footwork from the teacher, and would take up, as you can see, up to 10 or 11 class periods (virtual or actual). The point is to illustrate the many connections that can be made through 2.0 technologies and how those connections are, or might, affect classroom planning and student learning. I would not recommend this approach for every unit of a semester long class. It is best used as a once-per-quarter project, and might serve well as a semester capstone project. Students actually need to hold books, listen, take notes, have face-to-face large group discussions, etc., during the semester, that is if the class is a brick-and-mortar. In a virtual classroom, those face-to-face meetings would be streamed.
The challenges are worth navigating for a unit project such as this. The main challenge would be managing the simultaneous demands of the unit content with the skills needed for the online media. Students might not know how to engage these media and would need special instruction. Another challenge would be making sure everyone has subscribed to all the online services they would use for the unit. This could be accomplished by having students show or send URLs for registered sites to the teacher as part of the grade for the unit. Insuring that students have learned the requisite online skills would be a bit of an uphill climb at first, but once they are acquired they can be used in subsequent projects. It’s likely that once the students pick up the expertise, they’ll extend them and make connections on their own. As usual, I must add the caution that the medium can take over the message, so teachers must interact with students to help them produce content-packed media. This can be accomplished, in part, by proportioning content as the main part of the score–with the quality of media as a secondary and even peer-evaluated aspect.
Delicious | Delicious.com
Bookmarks on steroids
Delicious is a personalized repository for your favorite links. It's your bookmarks on steroids--organized according to your topics and sharable with invited users or by linking to Facebook and Twitter. It allows users to develop a profile and invite friends Facebook-style. Once users add friends, it creates a network of link sharing. Links can be tagged for easier searching. A “Discover” tab allows users to view a feed of the most popular links on Delicious. Oh, and all this is available on an iPhone app as well.
The obvious use for teachers would be to provide access to students to explore teacher-generated link sets for learning and research. Students can “follow” teachers by being accepted by the teacher. One can see moderate value in providing a set of links, but there’s not nearly as much tying the links together as a webquest or LMS might provide. If a teacher wanted to leave the dot-connecting to the students, the raw form of link compilations might serve some purpose. From a practical standpoint, Delicious’ most useful feature might simply be as an online bookmark utility that allows access to bookmarks from any and all of one’s internet-connected devices. Not only that, but the online format is essentially a bookmark backup/cloud and organizer. Placing bookmarks in Delicious is a snap. When an account is created, Delicious prompts the user to drag the “+Delicious” button to the user’s bookmark toolbar. When the user finds a site to bookmark, it is added with the simple click of the +Delicious button.
HistoryPin | Historypin.com
Pictoral history collections and wikis
To put it as succinctly as possible, HistoryPin is Pinterest for the history-minded. It might be a bit easier than Pinterest in that photos can be searched and viewed without an account. However, in order to pin your own photos, users must create an account. Once an account is created, users can create a profile and begin uploading images.
HistoryPin collects historical photos. Each photo is shown in a special display window that has tabs including comments, the location with which the photo is associated, and copyright information (if provided/available). The site invites users to contribute to photo wikis/projects as well. Accounts can be linked to social media sites for easy sharing. Once projects are created they are added to existing collections, which are organized by topic and/or location. In addition, photos are tagged for location, after which they are placed on an interactive map.
The history and geography uses for HistoryPin are obvious. Students can access the site to get a visual history of the subjects they study. They can also produce their own photo projects. Many of the photos contain an extended caption that provides historical context. Taking a “tour” might be the best way to acquire information about historical topics since the photos, themselves, tell a story about a given topic (along with captions). It is easy to navigate the tours part of the site. Channel surfing in HistoryPin is not nearly as convenient, though. The channels listed give little indication of their content. Unless users subscribe to a particular channel (YouTube-style), they would not be familiar with content. In other words, the channel function is less structured and involves a lot of trial and error. The typical student would get a lot more use out of the search and tour features. Students would find this site particularly useful in putting together presentation slide shows. In fact, many of the collections/tours are viewable as slide shows within the site. Teachers might find this useful for bringing history to life. It’s a remarkably useful tool for history teachers or any teacher that wants to add historical context to a unit or lesson.
Diigo | Diigo.com
Not your father’s research paper
Diigo might be one of the most interesting and promising tools for bookmarking, sharing, and collaborating around online research and information. Like Delicious, Diigo allows users to create a profile and store bookmarks easily. However, Diigo offers a lot more features, all of which are well-suited for teaching and learning.
Diigo allows users to store and tag highlights from articles, annotate web pages and highlights for future reference, and archive screenshots of online articles. Pages can also be cached in Diigo to develop a personalized search engine. Anything stored on Diigo can also be shared. Users can select how and what they want to share from sharing everything to just sharing a tag, or from sharing with one person to sharing with the general public. For collaboration, users can for “Personal Learning Networks” in which all members can co-submit and co-edit materials acquired on the web. Members of networks can annotate together, on or off the webpages they’ve cached. Pricing is reasonable, with free, $20/year, and $40/year options. Paid options allow for more utilities, storage, and caching.
Diigo is ready made for the classroom. So long as student accounts are easy to set up, students could use Diigo to do personal research and/or group research. Once registered, students can access all shared information in order to find information on topics. Classes can share and collaborate in order to create information databases for the topics they study. With collaboration enabled, Diigo becomes a research wiki. Once information is compiled, edited, and annotated, students can synthesize the material into research papers and presentations. For anyone who used note cards to write their research papers back in the day, this is a welcome technology. It’s a slick repository of everything one finds on a research subject, and for teachers it’s an intriguing new way to teach good research paper writing habits.
Talking Calculator | http://pbskids.org/cyberchase/math-games/calculator/
Calculators come to life (a little bit)
The talking calculator is a learning application sponsored by pbskids.org as part of the Cyberchase show theme. As the name indicates, it speaks numbers as they are typed into the calculator, and also narrates all operations. If I type in the number 4, I hear, “four,” but when I follow the four with a 9, I hear, “forty-nine.” So the calculator adjusts to the number combinations the user enters, and it will do this out to the trillions. The right side toolbar next to the calculator offers show-themed supplemental videos and activities that help teach simple math operations. The calculator–math activity tie-in is yet another clever multimedia educational application from pbs kids. They seem to have the formula for entertainment and learning. Granted, it’s not the same as sitting down with a math book and a teacher practicing variations of a math operation, but it’s an engaging supplemental offering.
Big Simple Talking Calculator | Softpedia.com/get/Science-CAD/Big-Simple-Talking-Calculator.shtml
The Big Simple Talking Calculator is downloadable by Softpedia, a free software sharing site. It’s, more or less, a larger version of the pbs talking calculator. In fact, the calculator can be used in full-screen mode. This offers a bit more accessibility for the vision impaired. In both calculators the functions are simple, not the advanced stuff that you’d see in a scientific calculator. The Softpedia option can narrate numbers and operations in a variety of languages as well, which could be useful for ESL students. Aside from adding another sense (audio) to the calculator (and some engaging visuals) the calculator is a standard tool available on most computer desktops or widget layers. However, it might offer some stimulus variety for students who have been staring at a math book for too long and need to mix things up.
Both of these could be dramatically improved by adding animation. If we want to bring the calculator to life, let’s actually do it. Let’s give the calculator a face and arms, and when you push the buttons, let’s have the living calculator reach down and poke his number belly. This is more in line with the imagination of children, but as-is both of these calculators have a little more to offer than the bland ones we tuck in a desk drawer or desktop.
2Write4Math | http://2write4math.pbworks.com/w/page/882013/FrontPage
What does a math paper look like?
2Write4Math is a wiki for math teachers (or administrators, parents, etc.), which offers basic instruction in integrating writing into math. The principles are universally applicable across the curriculum, but the examples given are mathematical. The examples are one of the great strengths of the wiki. It includes a variety of examples of math in writing so teachers and students can see for themselves what a finished product would look like. 2Write4Math is a quality wiki in that it is well written, well organized, and straightforward. Lesson ideas are included:
• Journals
• Solving and applying
• Explaining math ideas
• Reflective math writing
• Creative math writing
Each type is followed by a practical example/suggestion (although the journal and reflective might be redundant).
2Write4Math is particularly useful in that it takes some of the pressure off teachers to lead every integration. It helps teachers to facilitate student thinking on the issues and then lets them share their thoughts with the class. Students, too, are asked to take some responsibility for reflecting on the bigger picture, instead of expecting teachers to spoon feed it to them. Students often ask, “Why do we have to know this; we’re never going to use it?”, but they fail to put any effort into finding the applications themselves. Writing in math helps avert this learned helplessness in a really positive and engaging way.
Pic-Lits | http://www.piclits.com/compose_dragdrop.aspx
Writing muses to kickstart imagination
Pic-Lits provides a gallery of pictures with empty fields into which users can enter text. They are designed for short phrases that tend to end with elipses that encourage the writer/reader to use the phrase as a springboard for further writing. Simply put, the pictures are writing muses. Users can type their own words in the fields provided or they can use a drag-and-drop function that provides suggestions related to the picture as well as universal words, all of which are organized by parts of speech.
Teachers might not want to make this the central writing activity of a class. However, as a supplement to provide some variety and open-ended thinking, these could be really effective. In fact, a lot of teachers might find them handy for lesson starters–the little thought primers that occur at the beginning of class. These are nice prompts for creative, open-ended thinking. They require students to interpret a scene and use effective descriptions, but they also ask the student to think inductively about where to go with the scene. They have little use, it would seem, unless this spring-board option is employed. The function is twofold: (1) to frame the scene in a phrase (i.e. thesis/topic), and (2) to think beyond the scene to related implications and applications.
The writing suggestions are also transferrable and subject independent. Despite the claims of Common Core, variations in subject matter do not create stand-alone writing styles. It may be the case that writing in math has a little different flavor than writing in history, but it’s nowhere near an absolute difference. Students and teachers do well to teach the universal adaptability of good writing regardless of subject. A good writer is able to write, using the same writing standards regardless of subject.
Hopefully the advent of Common Core will not negate all the work that has been done in writing across the curriculum (WAC), because schools were just beginning to catch on to it. One caveat on the WAC issue that needs mentioning, that is, WAC doesn’t work unless classroom activities are challenging and reason-based on a regular basis. Writing is simply documented reasoning. If students are not in the daily habit of reasoning, their writing will never improve. Schools that over-accommodate students or fail to challenge them for fear of parent-student mutiny work in vain to improve writing.
