Group items tagged

create a list for your topic. This list will be used to manage all your bookmarks and highlights.

install the Diigo bookmarklet, or diigolet, in your favorite web browser

If you’re working on a group research project, Diigo can be used for the same purpose. Simply create a group for which everyone can bookmark sources to.

Our LMS had a built-in functionality for users to submit links and tag them, but other options include setting up a class Diigo account with one class username and password. If the majority of participants are already on Facebook and Twitter, other options include creating a dedicated course Facebook group to share content, or setting up a class hashtag (ex. #AU1234) for Twitter to categorize and easily reference all class tweets. (Read further ProfHacker reflections on teaching with social media.)

This course was just the beginning of our attempt at TechChange to go beyond what industry leaders like Blackboard and others currently provide to find and implement the most effective technologies and platforms to support dynamic learning. The feedback from the participants was remarkably positive, and the model is something that can easily scale with the right tools and training.

reflect on the teacher's role in the writing workshop, and the technology available to organize the writing workshop.

Create a Self-Editing checklist that is actually a GoogleForm or the Questionnaire Module in Moodle so you can quickly see class progress in graphs. Students complete this information via a web-based form that allows you to quantitatively track progress in class. Create a bank of online mini-lessons that students can watch and listen to again and again in an archive. Build that in your GoogleSites Wiki or Moodle. Facilitate sharing using recording tools in a discussion forum or Sites wiki. When doing the Group Share during a Writing Workshop, you can either play the students' presentation of the audio (which they recorded when they were ready) or record the feedback students get so that it can be added to the written piece/recording shared. That way, students can come back and reflect on the advice provided by their peers.

Using a Moodle or wiki, you can create a reference point that can house your mini-lesson content, including audio and/or video recordings.

VoiceThread.com - Enables teachers to create an enhanced podcast about the MiniLesson content, but also allow students to contribute audio, text, or video content as comments. This enables many to many interactions.

GoogleDocs Presentation Tool - Enables teachers to create a slideshow that students can participate in chat, as well as contribute slides to.

As wonderful as a writing workshop teacher may be, s/he cannot offer the feedback that ALL students may need. However, online discussion forums through Moodle, attached to wikis, or with blog postings and comments CAN facilitate student to student interaction independent of the teacher. While many fear these kinds of interactions, in online learning, these interactions make or break an online course...or a face to face one.

Collaborative word processors can also serve as a way for students in groups to interact with ONE text online.

Shelly Blake-Pollock, the teacher and author of the TeachPaperless blog (http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com), encourages his students to publish online. Beyond that step, though, he offers feedback on their writing online as well via screencasts, or video recording of his computer screen. Screencasts, or "JingCrits," that he creates are short, less than 5-minute video clips where he highlights student work on screen and offers feedback (View an example - http://bit.ly/bsgVQQ).

In this way, document forms both old (like the newspaper) and relatively new (like the television program) have underwritten a sense of community among a disparate and dispersed group of people.

In offering an alternative to the notion that documents deliver meaning, both arguments instead suggest connection between the creation of communities and the creation of meaning, for communities seem to create meaning for themselves.

Providing a shared context for constructing meaning, documents are the beginning rather than the end of the process of negotiation.

Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts. The thin trickle of original text overflowing a vast dam of commentary, the long introduction, and the separate subject entry in a library catalog offer clear indications that a particular text is socially and culturally valued.

Hypertext software, however, has revived the immediacy of intertextual links.

The interpretation of a document always depends on community standards. Nonetheless, documents can and do play important roles in negotiating differences and coordinating practices between communities.