Social Bookmarking - Diigo or Wakelet?

Airplane's Wake

It turns out I’ve been social bookmarking for quite some time without knowing it. My adventures took me down memory lane. The first time I engaged in this type of Web 2.0 activity was when I used del.icio.us in 2005. The most recent collection of bookmarks I’ve curated has been inside of Wakelet. I love how the founders of Wakelet explain what the name means. You see if you have ever looked up in the sky and looked at a trail an airplane leaves that is called the wake. Similarly, as an individual interacts within the World Wide Web we travel picking up blogs, images, websites, tweets, and documents that are of interest to us. Wakelet provides cloud space where we can save these items for future reference and sharing. It is a space that can be easily accessed by any device anywhere. Other popular social bookmarking sites include Diigo, Pearltrees, FlipBoard, Reddit, and Flickr. The advantage of these sites is that you can add “tags” so that they may be easily found by you or anyone in the future. For example, as my daughter neared her 15th birthday I started collecting “Quinceanera” ideas on Pinterest. I saved collections from favorites such as Hairstyles and make-up to venue decorating. 

Why is social bookmarking an emerging technology in education you ask?  Could it be that it provides knowledge sharing solutions and an interactive space for interactions and discussions? Wakelet enables users to collaboratively contribute collections on a particular theme. They can underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text or image.  Instructors are afforded the capability to follow students' progress in real-time. Students are afforded another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries. For my coursework I created an account for Diigo, I searched for “Math” and was immediately rewarded with several great lesson ideas and websites. My only issue with Diigo is that my findings were collections from years past and many of those tags were no longer valid. In contrast to Diigo, Wakelet is gaining popularity. I’m teaching summer school in July and I have started a space to curate lesson ideas for 4th-grade math. The founders of Wakelet are actively involved in updating the platform and it easily integrates with other apps. Here is My Wakelet Collection. I am excited to keep adding to this space and use it in my classroom to design learning experiences for my students.

YouTube and Twitter Adventures

I have teenagers so at this point in my life I am familiar with famous YouTubers like Jenna Marbles, Daniel Howell, and the Try Guys.  It is a rare incident that my kids share their screen with me as they say “Mom, look at this”. I say rare because too many times the video requires more questions from me than they want to deal with. Most of the time its “Why?” They absolutely always share the cute cat and dog videos. So it is not surprising that up until my adventure this week, I only used youtube as an entertainment platform for myself. I listened to music or watched endless videos of cute or grumpy cats. 

This week I learned about setting up playlists! So the way I would describe this is like a file folder on steroids. So many videos in one place about a specific topic. I see value in this as an educator because I could send my students to these playlists if they want to watch different ways of having a topic modeled. For example, how to add or subtract fractions. If “Math Antics”  or “Khan Academy” doesn’t explain it so great they can watch a homemade video by a teacher in Vermont. Storing them on YouTube is a great way to easily access them as needed. I can add to my educator resource bag and share my playlists with colleagues if they are in need of the same topic. 

Currently, I have playlists set up on Web 2.0 tools for learning, math, and science topics. This is a time saver. At any point in designing a lesson, I can access my curated playlist and have an instant mini-lesson or hook available. I can use my time to curate playlists anytime I have a free moment. Also, YouTube is an excellent way to learn how to implement Web 2.0 tools into your lessons and classroom. Many teachers and Web 2.0 developers offer instructional videos. I found an example of how PearDeck might look like in a 3rd-grade classroom uploaded by a teacher in New Jersey. Instructure offers many videos on how to set up Canvas as an LMS. This would come in handy when I set up my own Canvas LMS this school year. 

Educators looking to save time and professional development opportunities would find YouTube an excellent Web 2.0 resource. 

The Twitter adventure continued…#hashtags.

To my surprise, #hashtags are the perfect way to specifically search for what you need on Twitter. If I want to find out about Canvas a simple search for that hashtag including that word will lead you to many tweets with powerful information. My twitter adventure this week has led me to teachers who excel using technology in their classrooms and professors that have researched educational technology for their doctorates. I have placed them in lists and am eager to find some downtime to read more about their work. 

Twitter Adventures

"Great job on your first tweet!", I replied to JMedina@JMedina06822527. Jessica's first tweet reminded me of setting up my account and tweeting my first tweet at the direction of my new employing district five years ago. As part of the new teacher orientation, we were asked to join our district’s students in being 21st-century learners. Boy, my district and twitter have not disappointed.  I have spent countless hours in Professional development during my lunch breaks, conference times, walking down hallways, and at home while cooking dinner. How you may ask? Well, today our cell phones are at an arm’s length away, that beautiful fluttering bird has come to mean I can read and instantly learn something new as I am heating up my lean cuisine spinach pizza in the teacher’s lounge. 

Any topic can be searched, for example, after my reading of “A Conceptual Framework for Using and Evaluating Web-Based Learning Resources in School Education” of interest to me was the subject about cultural responsiveness in using technology.  This is something that I wanted to expand on and learn more about. I opened up my twitter account and at the top right I conducted a search for “cultural responsiveness”. I found this blog post How Digital Content Can Make Classrooms Culturally Responsive and I found according to Geneva Gay, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, CRT rests on six main dimensions: I tweeted the 6th dimension - Liberating from Oppressive Educational Policies. One thing I saw I could implement in my classroom this fall is to create a “student spotlight.” Focus on one student at a time, and ask them to share their family stories with the rest of the class. Encourage them to take pride in their culture. That was the first time I tweeted a blog post. I was finally engaging in a way that would contribute to someone else’s learning. This was different than a retweet or a like.  I had sought this topic out and it had spoken to me and I wanted to share it. I wondered what kind of response I would get. On my Twitter adventure this week I made my first list! I placed all my Etec 527 classmates on it. I found that I could see their tweets here all together and I could respond to them, like their tweet or click on articles they had shared. I also bookmarked my first tweets.  No more wondering what happened to articles or Professional Development opportunities. I could just bookmark and return when I could spend more time reading. I recently volunteered to help advertise a local math Edcamp. I will be using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to spread the word about this conference. I just discovered that Hootsuite allows me to schedule posts in the future and often. What a time saver!

What place does Twitter have in my world as an educator and learner? Let me count some of the ways, 1. Get important educational resources 2.Subscribe to relevant hashtags.3. Sync Twitter with relevant blogs.4. Organize and get the word out about PD. 5. Have twitter chats with students. There is so much more to learn about this Web 2.0 tool and I plan on pursuing the benefits of this communication tool. 

Vanity Search

“Mrs. Rainey, Mrs. Rainey! You’re on the internet”. Half curious and half mortified I answered back calmly “I am?” This was my first experience with my digital footprint. My 5th graders finding a picture of me after winning a drawing at my school.  I had told them to search for my school website since I had attached helpful links there. Under google images there I was smiling from ear to ear with my Chick-Fil-A gift card.  I was so glad that was the image they had found and I wondered what else was out there?

For this week’s adventure, I did just what my 5th graders did last year after being prompted to find my website.  On the google browser, I typed “ America Rainey”. There at the top of the list was my linkedin.com account. At first look, I am very impressed with myself. It shows I am attending grad school and where I have worked since the beginning of my work. But then I get a little weary, everybody can see this. Could someone other than a future employer use all this information against me? I keep going down the list and I see that I am a homeowner as property taxes are public record and it shows on a map exactly where the house is. Yikes! This means my students or anybody can find me at any time. Further down the list, I see a hair salon. I left them a really nice review.  The review makes me look like a caring person with a positive attitude. My journey continues with evidence of me replying to several blogs and my enrollment in TCCA  Edcamp, a professional development I attended last October. I did also run into an unfinished portfolio I had started on as part of this coursework. I do not like it at all, I will have to take that down. It makes me look like an amateur at Webdesign. My journey continues and I find my Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.  A Pinterest post about word walls, a Facebook post about women empowerment, and my last tweet was a response to “What is your favorite multiplication times table?”  It was a math teacher father asking on behalf of his 15-year-old daughter.  I said 6 * 8 = 48 because it rhymes and he had given me a like.  I went through eleven pages of Google results. I am 49 years old and the earliest record I found as I dug through historical records and family trees was my marriage at age 27. I did not discover much about my military service.  Since watching week 1 video Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us, I learned that WE are the internet and we are the ones that make the connections. So, I suppose I need to go create those connections. Overall, the way I use the web is in an educational and public records way.  From Blogposts to the images posted I am represented with dignity and I will continue to strive to come across as a life long learner that supports others positively.