With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K-12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerful suite of free communication and collaboration tools like GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Groups, Sites, and others. While many of these productivity-focused apps have helped modernize the classroom toolset, schools have been secretly pining for a tool to help students, teachers, families, and administrators stay in constant contact the way we’re getting used to doing in Facebook. Several small players have offered Facebook-style social classroom apps– tools like Edmodo, Schoology, and HootSuite have grown up to fill the need for a full featured social network for schools. If Google gets this right, the socially linked classroom with be a reality before the year is out! This is exciting for me, as someone who has been looking at enterprise-level microblogging tools like SocialCast and Yammer as a way to make campus communications easier and more free-flowing. I think this type of technology can revolutionize organizations by making it easier for stakeholders to hold sustained, data-informed conversations with asynchronous tools.

Most social classroom apps I’ve seen organize course activities (like commenting on discussion questions or sharing relevant links) into a Facebook-style activity feed where recent events appear near the top of the home screen. Photos, videos, and links to outside websites are automatically previewed inline, making it easy for people to see where they’re being linked to. Users can send private messages or public ones, deciding how they want to communicate and with whom. Discussions can be formed around any kind of posting, from a quick status update to a long-form blog post or multimedia artifact. These conversations can last long after the original posting, only drawing attention to themselves when a new comment is added. Users can form friendships, groups, and organization pages to support the many different types of interactions that people have.

These features will come as no surprise to Facebook users– the social network has so thoroughly revolutionized the way we think of online collaboration that  its influence is felt in every tool in this category. Google Plus is no exception, but it also advances the form in a few key ways:

• It gives simple and precise controls to help users share information only with the people they want to reach. No more accidental overshares.
• It provides an integrated interface where chat, video conferencing, and RSS news reading intermingle with social status updates.
• Google has stated its commitment to integrate its many diverse services into G+, and it will continue to grow into a central hub for communication and collaboration.
• It remains to be seen, but a G+ for Apps could very likely help schools to keep communications inside the school community instead of defaulting to public status. This may allay privacy- and copyright-related concerns caused by the wide-open nature of Twitter and Facebook. This is a prime selling-point of these education-focused social learning apps as well as the enterprise microblogging apps.

Even this week’s announcement of Pearson’s OpenClass Learning Management System may be disrupted by a G+ for Apps, as it looks to be little more than a social “glue” to organize students and teachers into courses so they can share documents in Google’s suite of free services. If G+ provides simple tools for schools to organize students and teachers into courses, cohorts, programs, organizations and the like (maybe by interfacing with Student Information Systems?), it may give the LMS a serious run for its money.

What are your thoughts on Google Plus for Education? Please let us know in the comments.

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• Pearson adds free learning management tools to Google Apps for Education (betanews.com)
• North Carolina A&T State University goes Google (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)
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• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google in Education and Chromebooks (Sept 2011) (speedofcreativity.org)
• Back to School with Google Chromebooks (hackeducation.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many awesome online communication and collaboration tools they provide.

In this talk, I learned that sites like Google and Facebook actually skew your search results to show you different information based on what they think you’ll like. The speaker shows how different people got different Google results when searching for “Egypt” in the wake of the politial protests there this spring. Rather than giving you an accurate view of hits relevant to your search, these sites favor certain sites over others in an attempt to show you content it thinks you’ll like.

Seeing this talk reminded me of the billboard I recently saw near the Bay Bridge in SF, loudly proclaiming:

The Experiment

I decided to go Google-free for a week and use DuckDuckGo for all my searching needs to see how different the search results would be.

I did a very interesting little experiment: I searched “income inequality” in DuckDuckGo vs Google (see links for results). I didn’t see much difference in the search results until I noticed a search result in DDG that I don’t agree with– that Income  Inequality “doesn’t matter“. Anyone who knows me (and who knows me better than Google?) would take it for granted that I think income inequality is a problem. Of all the different things one could say about income inequality– I thought we (as a society) were all on the same page that it’s not a good thing. I probably fit squarely inside some Google framework of a Bay Area, liberal educated white middle-class NPR listener who would be shocked and horrified by such callous libertarian thought. I think this is part of what the speaker in the TED talk was getting at– that internet filtering removes viewpoints that challenge our own. My time with DDG is making me wonder if my search results help reinforce my certainty that my view of reality is the correct one.

This little revelation led me to try the mother of all divisive search terms: “Abortion”.

If I had any uncertainty at all about this important decision, I would rather be looking at search pages that don’t make that decision for me ahead of time, wouldn’t you? Now of course abortion is an extreme example, but the fact that DDG returns such diverse search results gives you an appreciation for how many different perspectives there are on reality, and how that diversity can look in search results.

So What?

Like me, you may not worry much about the profiles that companies are amassing about you. It does seem to be a small price to pay for the incredibly useful tools like Google Docs, Facebook, and Google search. However, these services are making lots of money collecting and selling your personal data to advertisers– Lifehacker aptly puts it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. While I have (so far) felt ok opening myself to this kind of vulnerability, it gives me pause to think that I’ve been recommending that my students do the same. Is this responsible for teachers to do when the real-world consequences of exposing personal data are not fully understood? Will we one day find ourselves regretting that we gave up so much of our personal data to cloud companies, and when we do, will we feel responsible that our students did it too? Should teachers seeking students’ liberation and empowerment be on the vanguard of software efforts that preserve and enhance user liberty and control such as Diaspora, FreedomBox, LockerProject, and Free/Libre Open Source software?

Aside from privacy issues though, the Orwellian issue of how our experience on the web is distorted has implications for students’ development of critical thinking skills. Central to critical thinking is the idea that reality can be viewed from very different lenses and perspectives. If our search engines and social networks (for many, their web portal on the world) provide us with a distorted view of reality, do we lose the ability and the desire to consider divergent viewpoints from our own? If students’ online experience can be tailored to their tastes like an iTunes Genius playlist, what are they missing out on? Where is the chance to see the unexpected, the infuriating, and the serendipitous? Don’t we have a right to steer them towards experiences that push them out of their comfort zones? And if so, should we be starting with the search engines and software tools that they will depend on after they’ve left our classes?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

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Outputs: Showing What you Know

Not too long ago, I got an appointment with a new doctor, showed up, and was asked to wait in his office for several minutes before he could see me. I noticed that he had many objects in his office that were meant to reassure patients that “he knows his stuff”– his med school diploma and professional awards hung proudly above a bookshelf packed full of thick medical textbooks and antique decorative doctor’s instruments. As I looked closer, I saw that the med school textbooks were dated from the early 1980s and looked like they hadn’t been opened (or dusted) in years. The last of his professional awards was received last century, as the fading ink read 1996 on the yellowing paper. It made me wonder if this doctor was keeping his skills current or if he’s just been going through the motions since the mid- ’90s. Are those antique doctor’s instruments just for decoration or does he still use those?!? I grew more doubtful as my eyes scanned the dinghy artifacts. I realized that even though he had all these symbols of learning, there was no way for me to see what he really knows. I’m just expected to see those items and trust that he learned everything he needed to know to keep me healthy.

Your resume (or your school transcript) isn’t too different from that doctor’s office– they tell others where you got your experience and when, but they don’t show what you really learned from those experiences. This is why many educators are recommending students compile ePortfolios, a culmination of their best work over the course of their educational careers. With an ePortfolio, people can actually look at the very best work you have produced and they can see the quality of thinking for themselves. You can use an ePortfolio to continually develop your ideas over time and engage others in a public discussion about the things you are interested in learning. As you may imagine, this is also good practice for professionals who have left formal education, so they can demonstrate that their understanding of their field is current, complete, and sophisticated. If that doctor had a blog discussing new developments in medicine or showing off the articles he reads, it would have gone a long way towards reassuring me that I would be in good hands under his care.

A personal blog is the perfect tool for an ePortfolio because it allows you to easily post almost any kind of work that you do– writing, videos, audio, photos and more. This gives your readers a clear picture of what you’re working on so they can see for themselves the quality of your work. Blogs also feature tools to help you organize your writing by categories, tags, and pages so your readers can easily find content that interests them. A blog can also be a place where your other outputs– like twitter tweets, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and flickr photos– all come together to demonstrate your many learning pursuits.

Make it Easy

Many of the tools we use for getting new information allow us to create a digital “trail” for others to follow without any extra effort. Google Reader, which we discussed last time, has a Share button that allows you to publish interesting posts to your followers as you read. Articles you share go up onto a special public page (here’s mine) which has its own RSS feed so you can feed your shared links into other tools. MY Google Reader list feeds into a widget on the right hand side of TedCurran.net so people can see what I’ve been reading. I also use the sidebar of my blog to show off my most recent twitter tweet, my Diigo bookmark collection, and the podcasts I listen to. I share these because the people who appreciate my writing would probably also appreciate the other articles I’ve been reading on similar subjects. By reading through and picking out the “best of the best” among my inputs, I’m sharing my perspective on what’s important with my readers without actually doing all that writing and reviewing myself. This helps me provide a valuable experience to my readers in a way that doesn’t add extra work for me.

I recommend this method to small business owners working in competitive fields (I do a little web design on the side) so they can demonstrate their expertise to potential clients. It also becomes a tool to educate your ongoing clients around issues that will help them get more out of the services you provide.

I did this as a classroom teacher too– I used a tool called Google Notebook (RIP) to clip little snippets of information that I would find as I was researching new lessons or units for my students. Sometimes I would clip articles expressly for them to read as assignments, but other times I would just add interesting readings to the feed for them to explore independently. Often they were readings that had informed my understanding of our projects but that I couldn’t find a way to work into the flow of our daily assignments. (If you’re interested in this sort of workflow, I’d recommend using Diigo for Educators nowadays).

Using these little tricks means that showing what you know does not require doing a lot of extra work– if you can’t find the time to write periodic blog posts, think about just sharing a steady stream of interesting articles with your chosen audience. Next, I’ll talk about another tool that helps make showing what you know easy.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a great little browser plugin for most major browsers that makes it easy to share webpages on almost any social network you can think of. If you’re like me you have different types of friends on each social network– professional contacts on LinkedIn, close friends and family on Facebook, work colleagues on Diigo, and those people who still only do email– and Shareaholic makes it easy to share content on whichever “output” works for you. This way, you can create several different “channels” of information that can be customized to the different audiences and social networks that make up your Personal Learning Network.

Engaging with Your Networks

One mistake that many people make with social media is that they try to use it as  a megaphone– to post in as many different social networks as possible in the hopes of reaching more people.  Tools like Shareaholic and another favorite, Ping.fm, make it easy to blast your tweets into every social network at the same time, but I was surprised to find that this doesn’t translate into increased traffic. The same way you shouldn’t trust SEO gurus who will promise to get you to the top of Google searches in a week, you simply can’t game social networks to promote your content. The Internet has a way of rewarding content that is actually relevant and useful to people, so you have to put in the work to find out how your ideas fit into the larger conversation.
The best way to get people to pay attention to your blog is to genuinely engage in conversations with other people. Most of the traffic that comes into my blog now comes from comments I’ve made on other people’s posts– posts that are on the same topic as mine, where my blog can serve as part of the larger conversation on this topic. Finding like-minded people who are writing and tweeting about your topics of interest and asking questions, sharing ideas, and moving ideas forward is at the heart of building your Personal Learning Network. It has the added benefit of driving web traffic towards your work– traffic that you can then figure out how to turn into dollars and cents.

Please Share Back Your Experiences!

I have been very heartened and grateful at the way Part I of this post has spread across Twitter and the personal blogs of many of my own heroes on this subject. I’d love to hear your reactions as you try these techniques or compare my ideas to your own ways of managing your PLN. Feel free to use the comments below (which can cross-post to your favorite social networks as well).

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• Teaching and Learning with Technology Blog: E-portfolios for Learning (teachlearntechblog.blogspot.com)
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When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this excellent work in my own work. My favorite search engine for this task is Yahoo Image search because they have access to the whole Flickr.com library (probably the biggest repository of Creative Commons images in the world).

Searching this treasure trove of images usually involves several steps of setting up an Advanced Image search, selecting all the options I need, and finally searching away.

Thanks to this great tutorial from MakeUseOf.com, I learned how to dial in my ideal Creative Commons Image Search and save it as a simple keyword, so I can invoke it quickly. I just type “YI” and My Chrome Omnibar becomes a Yahoo Image Search for Large and Wallpaper sized Creative Commons photos. AWESOME!

Follow the directions in the MakeUseOf article to make your ideal custom image search (or whatever you need!)

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If you’re new to screen capture, the idea is simple– these tools allow you to take a snapshot of your desktop and save it as an image file that can be emailed or posted to the web. You can type text directions onto the screenshot and/or draw arrows and shapes to help your viewers understand how to work with a piece of software.

When I was teaching in a Mac ecosystem, I used Skitch for this purpose, but Snagit is the dominant tool in my new Windows-based world.

I recently made the switch from the very capable Snagit to an open source alternative called ZScreen. I like supporting the open source alternative whenever it can effectively fit my workflow, and this definitely has the chops. It features a staggering array of options that allow you to customize

• The hotkeys you use to invoke it
• The free image hosting services or FTP server you want to upload to
• Characteristics of the screenshots like their file type, watermark, and cursor visibility
• whether you would like to save a copy to File, Clipboard, a hosting service, or multiple locations
• If you’d like to auto-open the screenshot in an image editor once it’s created
• and more more more that I haven’t delved into yet.

Though I was overwhelmed by all the options at first, I waded through them and was able to craft an awesome workflow that fits my needs. I made it so ZScreen invokes with a keystroke, allows me to draw a capture window on my screen, then opens my new file in Paint.net for editing before saving it to file.

The open source image editor Paint.net handles all the annotation functions I need while remaining light and snappy on my system. It works so well, I’m looking at the open source CamStudio as an alternative to our regular video screencast software, Jing. Updates to come….

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Did you know you can save time and effort by starting a Frequently Asked Questions Discussion Board in your course?

Do you get tired of answering the same student questions over and over? Save time and effort by starting a Frequent Asked Questions forum in your course! It is a public way for students to share questions and answers about technical problems they’re having, questions about deadlines, or even clarifying course readings. The more activity in your discussion boards, the more you can build a lasting knowledge base that addresses any question students might encounter. It won’t be long before you can simply say “Go check the FAQ” instead of staying up on Sunday night answering redundant emails from frantic students.

You can incentivize participation by letting students know they can get extra course points for participating in the help forums (either by asking or answering questions). By giving helpers and “helpees” equal points for using the forums, you remove the stigma of asking for help while motivating classmates to spend their precious time and energy being good Samaritans.

I gave students clear guidelines for the quality of questions and answers I was willing to reward, and which ones were obvious ploys for some free points. Then I quietly smirked to myself as they frantically gave and received help on a range of topics so they could get that “free” 5% in my course.

Technologically, you might look into using Google Groups or even Edmodo.com as tools to serve as a discussion board.

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This is a presentation I made to help my Beast Bloggers’ Support Group create a Content Plan for their blogs. I wanted them to take a broad view of their objectives and strengths as they develop their blogging identities. I had them list out their objectives, brainstorm a few general topics their blog would cover (for focus) and then list potential post titles. The presentation slideshow is here:

We had each previously pledged to complete 10 blog posts by the New Year, so I guided them to brainstorm topics and titles fo these posts so they could create a roadmap. I showed them my own Content Plan as an example, explained why I did certain things, and let them develop their own.

Blogger s Support Group: Example Content Plan

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Even in the upper grades, students are struggling to make the transition from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”. Give a struggling reader a context-reduced novel written in old, antiquated language and you will realize that students need as much life-like context as we can provide. One way to help students access texts is to provide audio versions that they can use alongside– or even instead of– reading the text.

A great tool in this endeavor is Librivox.org, a collection of free audiobooks of classic texts created by a dedicated community of volunteers. These are mostly works that have passed into the Public Domain and are now the intellectual property of the world, so they can be used freely without fear of copyright reprisal. You can think of it as Project Gutenberg for audiobooks.

As an English teacher teaching Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, I wanted to make it easy for my 9th and 10th graders (a high percentage of whom received Special Ed. or 504 services) to access the text. I went to LibriVox and searched for the book, and found this useful menu:

Podcasting the Book: What it Looked Like in Class

I added links to the full text, the MP3 files, and the iTunes RSS feed to my own class website so students had a choice of how they would access the texts. I taught them how to add the sound files to their iPods and told them they had absolutely no excuses for not reading along with the class.

Many students used these resources, and in many different ways. Some would listen as they read, gaining contextual cues (such as emphasis and tone from the reader’s vocal inflection) as well as learning the proper pronunciation of words. Some students reported they could read the book while meeting responsibilities that would normally interfere with homework time, such as caring for younger siblings or after-school jobs. Students were listening to Frankenstein on the walk home or while mountain biking around Marin county’s enticing trails.

This allowed students to engage in the Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) exercises we were doing in class, irrespective of their level of literacy mastery. While this may sound backwards to those “back-to-basics’ers” who believe students should “walk before they can run”, in fact the opposite is true. Students can (and MUST!) develop their critical thinking skills, even as their literacy skills are catching up to their age-appropriate mental development.

Making audiotexts available to kids is so easy that a teacher with ANY level of tech savvy can do it. It was especially easy given that the text we were using was already in the Public Domain and was clearly legal to distribute to kids. Less legal (and much less easy) was our purchasing and sharing of CD and Audible.com audiobooks for the newer, copyrighted titles we were teaching in class. For these, I would usually crack the DRM, post the files into my school server space, and link to them from my class website. I ask you– what heartless jerk would sue a teacher for letting Special Ed. kids listen to an audiobook he legally bought? Oh yeah– the RIAA. Tread cautiously, friends.

Do you know of other great resources for audiobooks? Have you used tech to help students access texts? Please discuss in the comments!

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You have to structure the assignment so students are required to write out their answers first– not just improvise an answer. I did this by A) using this technique on a high-stakes assignment, and B) giving students a list of specific questions I expected them to answer.

Audacity is a free, open source audio recording and editing program that students can download and use from home or at school. There is very little learning curve, and kids can easily record, edit, and export an MP3 (provided they have the LameLib, a file required for MP3 output), then send it to you via email. They can also easily post MP3s to a blog using Posterous.com.

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