"One great tool for creating social reading experiences is Diigo (www.diigo.com), a free online application that allows users to add highlights and comments onscreen to any Web-based text. These comments can be seen by anyone using Diigo and are identified with the commenter's user name. Diigo also enables users to bookmark and "tag" with keywords any online articles that they find fascinating."
"the largest collection of user styles anywhere! User styles let you change the way websites look. Personalize your Facebook, jazz up your Google, rip out useless parts of other web sites... There are tens of thousands of user styles, I'm sure you'll like at least a few."
"An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web."
This study sought to collect data from teens and librarians about their preferences and recommendations for the effective design of physical library spaces for teens. Librarians and teens at twenty-two U.S. public libraries filmed narrated video tours of their young adult (YA) public library spaces. The researchers used qualitative content analysis techniques to analyze the video data and to develop a framework for guiding the design of effective YA public library spaces. In addition to providing specific recommendations for user-centered YA library space design, this study highlights the need for continued user input into the design and maintenance of YA public library spaces as teens' needs evolve and vary across time and from community to community.
Dr. Lodge McCammon is a Specialist in Curriculum and Contemporary Media at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation (www.fi.ncsu.edu). His work in education began in 2003 at Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he taught Civics and AP Economics. He finished a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2008 where his work at The Friday Institute continues to bring innovative practices to students, teachers and schools. He developed a teaching and professional development process called FIZZ which encourages and models best practices in implementing user-generated video and online publishing in the classroom to enhance standards-based lessons. He is also a studio composer who writes standards-based songs, with supporting materials, about advanced curriculum for K-12 classrooms. More information, user-generated videos, and songs can be found at Lodge's website (www.iamlodge.com).
Welcome to the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner Lesson Plan Database, a tool to support school librarians and other educators in teaching the essential learning skills defined in the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.
Users can search the database for lesson plans by learning standards and indicators, content topic, grade-level, resources used, type of lesson or schedule, keyword and much more. In addition, registered users can bookmark lesson plans in a portfolio for future use, rate and comment on lesson plans in the community, print to PDF and socially share lesson plans on the web, and create and publish their own lesson plans in the database.
Submissions to the Lesson Plan Database are vetted by AASL reviewers to ensure lesson plans published are of the highest quality. The lesson plan template was developed using the Action Example Template from Standards for the 21st-Century Learner in Action. All lesson plans published are aligned with AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and are crosswalked with the Common Core Standards.
If you are looking to integrate iPads and iPods into your classroom curriculum, this is the site for you! It has an entire section of apps that work well in the classroom. It also has user guides, pod casts and a user agreement. Another great aspect of this site is that it highlights tips and tricks for use in the classroom.
For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends
typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
ACT ONE : NETWORK EFFECTS
Friendster was designed as to be an online dating site.
MySpace aimed to attract all of those being ejected from Friendster
Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions
And only in 2006, did they open to all.
in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred
college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook
urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace
At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site
the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.
do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users
all fine and well if everyone can get access to the same platform, but when that's not the case, new problems emerge.
ACT TWO : YOUTH VS. ADULTS
showcases the ways in which some tools are used differently by different groups.
For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls
Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena.
Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.
Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no.
many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue
We design social media for an intended audience but aren't always prepared for network effects or the different use cases that emerge when people decide to repurpose their technology.
The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.
you are probably even aware of how inaccurate the public portrait of risk is
ACT THREE : RESHAPING PUBLICS
I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the crux of what makes the phenomena we're seeing so different from unmediated phenomena.
1. Persistence.
The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.
You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it
2. Replicability.
much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.
3. Searchability.
Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips
4. Scalability.
Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school
5. (de)locatability.
This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.
Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics.
1. Invisible Audiences.
lurkers who are present at the moment
visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment
having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience
2. Collapsed Contexts
Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
3. Blurring of Public and Private
As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.
One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem.
Important summary of how social media works for youth and adults, and how five properties and three dynamics have a systematic affect that we all must deal with.
The following post is the first in a new series from Leslie Lees, VP of Content Development from ebrary. Academic Ebooks - The Shifting Landscape will discuss changes that are occurring with ebooks and implications for libraries and their users.
"What it is: IDroo is an educational multi user whiteboard that lets students instantly collaborate online. Everything that is drawn or written on the whiteboard is visible to all participants in real-time. IDroo supports an unlimited number of meeting participants, the only limitations are computer power and internet connection speed. There is a professional math typing tool built-in making it easy to teach or work through math problems collaboratively. Best of all, IDroo can be used with Skype! IDroo is free for non-commercial use. Now for the downfall (and this is a HUGE downfall in my humble opinion), IDroo is currently only available for Windows. I know, disappointment for us Mac lovers. *sigh* If you are using a Windows computer this is a great way to collaborate online!
How to integrate IDroo into the classroom: IDroo would be a great app for collaborating with other classrooms around the world. Students can use the multi user whiteboard space to work together, share ideas, and brainstorm. IDroo would also be fantastic as a way for teachers to tutor students virtually. Set up an "open lab" time once a week online where students can drop in and get extra help. Virtual lab times are especially helpful for elementary students who can't dictate their own schedules and often can't stay after school for extra help.
Tips: Don't forget to allow IDroo to access Skype API after you download!" iLearn Technology
Users forfeit the ownership of their user data to Google.
Google’s purpose was clearly to “provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.
obvious search-related rationale for launching a social network like Google+, since indexing and mining that kind of activity can help the company provide better “social search” results. But the real-name issue has more to do with Google’s other business: namely, advertising.
The growth of Google+ provides a reason for people to create Google profiles, and that data — along with their activity on the network and through +1 buttons — goes into the vast Google cyberplex where it can be crunched and indexed and codified in a hundred different ways
excludes potentially valuable viewpoints that might be expressed by political dissidents and others who prefer to remain anonymous. In effect, Schmidt said Google isn’t interested in changing its policies to accommodate those kinds of users: if people want to remain anonymous, he said, then they shouldn’t use Google+.
the reason Google needs users with real names is that the company sees Google+ as the core of an identity platform it is building that can be used for other things:
n identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information
"Easily organize what you've found on the web. The simple and intuitive interface makes sorting your interests, your passions and your ideas easy. Pearltrees allows you to give a precise meaning to the content you've archived making retrieval and reuse a pleasure.
You can also instantly share the content you've organized. In Pearltrees, everything is public. All other users can see what you've organized and you can see everything that others have collected. This lets you easily find users with common interests and when you do, you can team up with them and curate a topic together.
Pearltrees also lets you discover a web organized by others. Do you like discovering a city with a friend who already lives there? With Pearltrees, you can enjoy a similar though digital experience and learn about a new topic, a newsworthy issue or anything else that captures your attention, all curated by other people just like you."
EZproxy helps provide users with remote access to Web-based licensed content offered by libraries. It is middleware that authenticates library users against local authentication systems and provides remote access to licensed content based on the user's authorization. EZproxy is an easy to setup and maintain program. More than 2,500 institutions in over 60 countries have purchased EZproxy software.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Cathy this is very interesting. While I had known that readers read online content differently than they do print I had never heard of this pattern before. Thank you so much for posting this!
Group items tagged 
