Lesson 9 "Cool" Engagments with YouTube: Part 1 and 2

“Cool” Engagments with You Tube: Part 1 and Part 2

Youtube is a useful tube in the classroom. Students and Teachers need to be taught how to use all the tools the website has available to them. The article explains these tools and how to get the most out of them.

Searching may seem to be easy, but one must make sure to search using the correct terms. As the article points out with an example of “Tom Waits” one can yield over 1.000 results if the search is not done efficiently. The article explains the importance of narrowing the topic and examining the video titles for patterns and tags.

My Favourites is another helpful feature of the website. Teachers and students alike can create a My Favourites page. This will help to organize the videos that are useful for certain lessons and that can be used over and over again. The Favourites section also contains a feature called Create Playlist. One can select specific videos from the My Favourites page to create a playlist.

The article also suggests different ways to use YouTube in the classroom. This suggestions are both easy to implement and adapt to various situations. The difficulty will lie in finding the videos and creating the playlist. However, once this is completed, it can be used several times. An English class at my school is currently reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” and I plan to share the lesson suggestion from the article with the teacher. As for posting the You Tube videos, this will have to be done only once parent permission has been granted.


Thanks to the information provided by James Trier in these articles, I have been convinced that You Tube can play a valuable part in the education system.

Lesson 10 Reading Response

There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education


After reading this article, thoughts of the numerous ways in which podcast could be used in the classroom were excitingly, jumping around my brain: Students who were to shy to present in class, could record their podcasts, lessons could be enhanced through the listening of various podcast, assignment instructions could be added to blogs.

At first, the article made it sound like creating a pod cast was not too time consuming or difficult. However, as I read on and the author wrote about bit depths, digital sampling rates etc started to worry me. As the article continues, it talks about the difficulty of producing the podcast. This does not sound like an easy task.

The only way to find out was to try. I decided to record a pod cast about an upcoming project assignment my students needed to complete. With a script in mind, I attempted to record my podcast. After all the creation of the podcast is the easy part- correct? Not for me. I sat down at the computer, ready to record. Things did not go as smoothly as possible. My problems revolved around many different items: mike set up, sound quality, program problems etc. I kept reminding my self, that all it usually takes me hours to complete and “Evidence of Learning” post, but in the end I am triumphant. This help true for the recording of the podcast as well. It did get recorded.

Now that my podcast was recorded, I needed to post it somewhere. I decided to use the website Podomatic for this assignment. I set up my account and then worked on downloading and producing the podcast. Since I do not own an MP3 player, this was all new to me. I have not ever downloaded a song. This was not as painful of a task as I had thought and I was successful!!! After a three day attempt, not only had I created and produced a pod cast, it was also posted on the web.



The article “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education” was the convincing factor for me to create the podcast. As mentioned above, I see this as a valuable tool in the classroom. It will help to make lessons and student work more engaging. However, I did not agree with the entire article. It begins with a descriptive account of a student getting ready for school and listening to various podcast provided by professors. While this situation may work in a University setting, it is not appropriate for all high school settings. If this was the case, why would we need building that house classrooms and teachers. One of the most rewarding parts of teaching, is the personal connections that are made with students. This connections are created by the face to face and day to day work that is accomplished in the classroom.

This being said, podcast will become apart of the lessons that I teach. Like all aspects of teaching, variety is important and one does not use one type of teaching style. I cannot wait to hear my students reaction when they hear my voice on the blog!!!!

Lesson 10: Evidence of Learning Podcast

I have proudly produced my first podcast. It is a recording of assignment criteria for a French 10-12 assignment. You can hear it at

http://mmechmelyk.podOmatic.com/entry/2010-03-18T22_23_42-07_00


Now that it is completed, it all seems so easy. See you can teach an old dog new tricks, you just need to have lots of patience while doing so.

Lesson 10: Mash ups Reading Response

Horizon Report on Mashups

A mashup is a combination of data that is pulled together from a different resources in a single tool. I looked through twittermap and twittervision. Twitter map shows where people who are tweeting live, while twitter vision is a geographical vision of posts. Both sources are maps which show a picture of the person tweeting, their posts and where they are from. You are able to click on their web address and be linked to their post. However, with twittervision, the map moves around while you are watching it. I found that some times it moved before I even finished reading the entire posts. It was interesting to see where people lived and as a language teacher, I found also found it interesting to see all the different languages being used.


The Horizon Report states that “Data mashups are powerful tools for navigating and visualizing datasets; understanding connections
between different dimensions such as time, distance, and location; juxtaposing data from different sources to reveal new relationships; and other purposes.” Wikipedia provides this definition “In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that uses or combines data or functionality from two or many more external sources to create a new service. “

I looked through the Yahoo! Pipes site and found some library mashups that I Teacher- Librarians could use. I will post the screen shot in a separate post.

Mashups would be great to create presentations to classes or for pro.d For example, if I was doing a lesson on Paris, I might be able to combine blogs and pictures to create a lesson. Students to could use mashups for end of unit presentations.

Darlene Fichter has compiled a list of mashups for Teacher Librarian in “Mashups and Libraries: Resources, Article and Links. She also lists sites to help you create a mashup. This article is an excellent starting point for people, like me, who are just beginning their mashup adventure.

Lesson 10: Yahoo! Pipes

Below is a screen shot of a Yahoo! Pipes mashup titled "Library-N-Tech". I searched through the mash ups and found this one that I think would be usefule to Teacher- Librians.



In this pipe you can find information about library technology. This includes information on mashups, digital library software and Web 2.0 You can also set the date for infomration freshness.

Lesson 9 Evidence of Learning.

Here is the link to my You Tube Video. The video is a sample video collage. I made this so that my students could see what I expected from them for their art video collage assignment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B-BJRN3cZQ

Lesson 9 Videos to use in a classroom

For this assignment, I have included some videos that have to do with libraries as well as one that I have used in my classroom.

I hope that you find them useful.

Here is a video on the Stanford Library of the future. This will be a digital library.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMus6tZifGY&feature=related

This is a video featuring Brewster Kahl’s thoughts on building a digital library
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html

This is a video on the importance of foreign languages. I have used this in class when discussing why students should continue their studies of a second language.

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=13054&title=Importance_of_Foreign_Languages

Reading Response for Lesson 8

Taxonomy Directed Folksonomies
Intergrating use tagging and controlled vocabularies for Australian education networks.
by Sarah Hayman and Nick Lothian

This article taught me quite a bit about tagging and folksonomies. Before reading this, I did not understand the term folksonomy and thought tagging was simply naming pictures or articles. After reading the article, I understand folksonomy and have learned about different tagging terms such tag clouds, machine tagging etc. The following is a resume of the what I learned in the article.

Definitions:
Tagging- adding keywords to a digital object such as a website, videoclip etc. to catogorize it.

Folksonomy- a collection of user tags created by an individual for personal use. The word is a combination of the words fold and taxonomy.

Taxonomy-

This paper discusses the challenges faced in using controlled vocabularies in the Web 2.0 world. The question discussed is: “ Can people balance folksonomies and controlled vocabularies to help communities of users find and share information and resources most relevant to them?”

I agree with Education Network Australia recognition that formal thesaurus cannot keep pace with user needs. Technology is for ever changing and therefore vocabulary associated with technology is also always changing.
For this reason the ENA is interested in exploiting the power of folksonomies.

The ENA has created a concept project using Taxonomy-Directed Folksonomy. This would be a taxonomy from the Austraina education sector where terms for taggins can be suggested. The folksonomy will show gaps in coverage and help monitor new terms and usage to improve and develop formal taxonomies.



TAGGING
Although tagging is not a new concept to librarians, it is new to the general public and are now made public and shared. Tagging is done differently at different website. Some examples of internet sites that I use that use tagging are: Delicious, Librarything, and Flikr. When tagging on these sites, users use their own words. Users can also add their own tags to already tagged resources. Then one can use these words as indexes to find their posted items. It is up to the person posting the information to decide if it will be public or private. If the indexes are public, then the tags can be searched by all users and thus a folksonomy is created.

Sometimes tagging is not done by users, but by experts. If this is the case the result will be displayed as a tag cloud. Surf the News.com is an example of a site that uses such an approach. The data is shown for the last 30 days of the story and the most assigned topics are large and read; those least used are small and gray. This, however is not folksonomy.

Developing an application that will take RSS feeds and create tag clouds out of keywords in the feeds is another approach to tagging. RSS feeds from the Washington Post website are built into tag clouds from keywords on NewsCloud. This is revered to as machine tagging.

ZoomColuds allows people to create tag clouds. A website owner can put tags on a website and provide users to figure out what are mentioned in the website more often. These tags can also be made public or private. Some people, like me, make their tags public, but choose private words that only a select few will know them and use them. For me, my tags are designed to be shared by only people that I know. According to this article, this is the same in many cases. This is a folksonomy, but only for a restricted group.


FOLKSONOMY
This is a collection of tags made by the user. Tags may be reused many times. The writers of this study were keen to see what terms users chose, how they are used and organized, as well as what new vocabularies or taxonomies will be invented.

Many benefits to tagging and folksonomies exist:
They are multidimensional, users can use words and concepts that have meanings and importance to them, they can be shared, they are quick and simple to do, social tagging develops communities, they help people stay organized.
I have found all of these advantages to be true, however when one begins to tag, it is not always fast and simple. It does become easier to do the more tagging you do.

Along with advantages, everything has disadvantages. This is the same for folksonomies:
Different words can be used for the same tag, or the same word can be used for different concepts.
Tags with personal meaning are not used often and can be of no use to others.
Tags can change as new trends evolve. For example, weblog, blogging etc.
Tags can be a mixture of forms, formats, etc.
Tags may need to be only a single word and spelling rules do not apply.
Some tagging systems can be spammed.
Tags may represent a dominant view and discourage usage of less popular concepts.
Tagging is not controlled and no formal system exists.


As a Teacher-Librarian, the University of Pennsylvania’s system that allows students to tag catalogue items is intriguing. Teachers and students could benefit from being able to organize books into tags according to units, essay topics, research projects etc. Although a social networking system such as Ann Arbor District Library’s SOPAC sounds useful, it does sound like quite a bit of work and rate, review and comment on collections on a Library Wiki or Blog. At this point in time, that would be what I would do for building a social networking system seems like more than I can handle.

The paper also describes education.au’s myedna, a service where resources can be shared, customized and managed. It will aim to “make the best use of collaborative technologies and philosophies.”

This is a fantastic idea. It is like a place shopping stop for educators. This would be extremely helpful as one will be able to easily find Web 2.0 uses in the educational system.

The program will also have users enter their own tags for resources. While typing a tag, a thesaurus will be available to suggest terms that match the term the person has entered.

Although it is still in the developmental stage, the creators hope to collate the tags and then produce a tag cloud. The collection of tags will be a
“folksonomy that has been directed by a taxonomy.” The creators would also develop a way of giving users information about the tags that they are thinking of choosing so that they can see related tags, notes or guidelines of usage.

The folksonomy created would provide information about the tags, the items tagged and the peopled doing the tagging. This is valuable information because people would like to use useful terms for their tags. What is the use of writing a tag that is not useful? Knowing which items are of value it also an important piece of information. People like to read articles, or search through lesson plans that they find of value to them. Just like people like to read certain authors or watch movies by a particular director, educators like to follow lesson suggestions created by certain people. Thus, providing information about the people doing the tagging will be important.

Web 2.0 concepts are still new to many of the educators on my staff. If there was a website that provided them with information on using new concepts in their classrooms, they may be more willing to try some of the new items. Myedna seems to be trying to fulfill this need, and will be an invaluable resource to them.

Photosynth: Evidence of Learning Lesson 8

Wow!!! This site is amazing. I think that many teachers would love to use the pictures with their classes. As a language teacher I would show the pictures of Europe. My husband is an art teacher and he cannot wait to play with the site.
I have added some Olympic cauldron pictures. I did not take very many, but have 3 on their as an experiment. There are better posts then mine, but I know that I created mine all on my own.

Flikr account; Lesson 8

Here is a screen shot of some of the pictures on my Flickr account. The screen shot only shows the photos from the Mint Building in downtown Vancouver. The building was open during The Winter Olympics. I have sent the link to all of the pictures to our professor. Is anyone else is intersted in viewing the pictures, let me know and I will add you to the site.