Stand-out Web 2.0 Tools

There are two items I am very excited to get using this year. The first is the wiki. I am serious about a Caesar-pedia! I think that will infuse a new level of engagement for the students about who the characters of Shakespeare's play are and how they interact in the drama. Students will have to put an image with each entry and provide important quotations from the play. It is hard for me to wait until it happens. After finishing the class module on wikis, I went straight to my school's Moodle to check if there was a built in wiki tool. Jackpot! I'm already building the structure for it.

The other technology I am developing for instruction is augmented reality. The Aurasma app is a game-changer in the classroom. I showed one of my classes an example today, and the students were very impressed. It seems like a great way to construct stations for round-robin content review and for students to construct presentations to accompany projects. I have already spoken to the head of my school about using Aurasma in our art shows so that visitors can have videos of the student-artists describing their works. Each visitor's mobile device could act as a docent.

RSS on the WWW

Years ago I tried using an RSS feed aggregator inside of Mozilla's Thunderbird. It was great at first. All of the blog posts and new articles on my favorite football teams or from my favorite news sources came right to my email application. I could scan through them quickly to stay abreast of the latest.

Eventually, however, I added too many feeds. Missing a day of checking them off as Read meant that the number of new posts grew to unrealistic amounts. It felt overwhelming, and I started ignoring that part of Thunderbird by marking all new entries as Read. The whole thing became a bit of a waste.

Later, I found out about Mozilla's live bookmarks, and that was exactly what I needed! The browser could hold ten or so of my favorite feeds, and no longer did I feel like I had 50 email inboxes that were filling up. Instead, the feeds were just button I could hold the mouse over to check if anything new had been published. This is the way I still use RSS feeds.

In the classroom, an RSS feed aggregator could greatly aid courses in finding the latest on a topic under study. For example, in an ELA class studying Shakespeare, the class could set up an account for news and publication feeds about Shakespeare and his plays. It could be a weekly part of the curriculum to check the class feeds and summarize news on Shakespeare research or performances.

An class assignment of this type would satisfy numerous Common Core objectives. In particular, this standard really jumps out in my mind:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8
Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

The portions about "using advanced searches effectively" and "assess the usefulness of each source" strike me as particularly relevant.

This activity would apply to ISTE-S (ISTE - Student PDF) in that students would have to "select and use applications effectively and productively" (6.b) and "evaluate and select information sources based on the appropriateness to specific tasks" (3.c).

Learning and Using Wikis

In graduate school, some of my classmates and I had a habit of editing entries on Wikipedia whenever we came across something we found incorrect or poorly written. Also, there is a wiki for college jobs in the field of Classical Studies that an anonymous owner updates annually. Professionals in the market for a position often check it and update it based on job offers and acceptances. Therefore, I was already quite familiar with the nature and function of a wiki.

I have wanted to build my own wiki and learn more about managing a wiki for a couple of years now. It seems like a good way to keep those serving in different ministries of my church informed about ongoing projects. The wiki created for this assignment (http://orderedmusings.pbworks.com) will be a good place to test out how to organize different pages of a wiki. Setting up and editing the first page on PBwiki was easy, but there are several aspects of the layout and widgets that will take me some time to become comfortable using. Also, designing an intuitive page hierarchy in my wiki will require some thought.

If I were to use a wiki in my classroom, it would probably be a place for the students of a class to develop a literary encyclopedia. Each of my classes could create encyclopedia (Wikipedia-style) on a literary work, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example. Each student would be required to generate a page on a character and to correct or add to another character's page. During class time, I could have the students write plot summaries for each scene as we read them. One of the pages would serve as the To-Do list of characters and scenes that need to be entered.

This use of a wiki supports Common Core objectives for ELA in several areas. Of course there are objectives like frequency of writing (ELA-W9-10.10) and production and distribution (ELA-W9-10.4, 5, 6) that are directly fulfilled in an assignment like this. Additionally, this assignment would hit on all six of the domains in the ISTE standards for students.