Digg Attempt 1

I tried Digg yesterday. While I found some interesting bits of information, it felt very crowded with random, useless-to-me content. It was annoying to sift through the flotsam and jetsam of the internet, even though there were gems here and there. While I know that there have been some insightful observations about how this might work in the classroom, I'm not sure that I'm ready to figure yet, let alone teach, a system to filtering all of the vast quantities of information. Besides, if I find something useful, I have to save the link (which I already do) to show that content to the class, because it will be further (perhaps by quite a bit) down the page/site. Digg is still in its early days, so there is time to find uses for it, but I'm not ready to tackle this particular technology in my classroom. I might, however, show it to my Media Lit. students. :-)

WIkis in Education

I started using wikis last year, when I stole the idea of wiki book reports from SWC Geek Girl. You can see my ninth grade students' work (of the expected variety in quality) by visiting the AVHS-Omega-English wikispace. This individual/interlinked project went fairly well, while the tenth grade literary group discussion pages where less successful. A blog site would have been a better starting place for the group discussion project. Both sets (9th and 10th) linked their pages to the master index. My current twelfth graders are using a wiki page as a links bulletin board for their individual blogs. The set up was a bit rocky, but it's now helpful for finding each other's thoughts.

I still haven't figured out how to best show my students the ins and outs of the wiki. How much do I, as the teacher, show them versus just cutting them loose to figure it out on their own? I tried setting my senior loose, but they struggled with lost material due to overwriting each other. In the end, the content made it up for everyone to see, but I still feel that there is (as always) finessing to be done with the creation process.

Facebook...

As mentioned earlier, social networking and I aren't buddies. However, a friend shared this article with me recently. While I'm not sure that I like the idea personally, I am pleased to see that people are exploring positive ways to use Facebook (and similar sites) in the professional sphere. As a public site, it provides employers and potential employers with a lot of seemingly private information. Here is an opportunity to shift the "My boss fired me because of the pictures on my profile!" problems to "I got my dream job because of my ad!"

What next? :-)

Starred Items in Google Reader

As I've been looking at student work, I've found many blog posts that I want to highlight as examples of good work. I've "starred" several entries in each section, but didn't know what to do from there. So, I dug a bit deeper. It turns out that I have a public page that shows what I've starred. Check it out!

Advantage for students: Many of my young bloggers have asked about grading. "How long should the entry be?" "What will earn a good grade?" and so on... Now, students can see which blog entries caught my eye.