The Excitement of Web 2.0

Web 2.0

I feel like a kid who has just opened Pandora’s box and then I thought that even with a background in Greek and Roman mythology, it’s been a long, really long time and I better check the facts because I’m excited about all that this Web 2.0 has to offer.

So, glad that I refreshed my memory of Pandora and her actions, I want to bring forward to the educational setting the curiosity of Pandora that made her open the box. May we always be curious ourselves as educators and channel the curiosity of our students into productive paths, and promote the life long learner. May we constantly be aware of what the Internet has to offer in a positive environment and dispel any evils that Pandora unleashed. We have to educate the administrators to the positive value of these tools. We have to inform the parents. Negativism, lack of knowledge, and fear seems to move and expand its tentacles more rapidly than all that is positive. I call it the exploitation of the media to sensationalize the news.

What we must pull from the box, Pandora’s box, and what she left shut inside, is hope: hope that we as educators will grab the brass ring, any and all clichés that we can gather, to take these exciting tools to the educational setting to add excitement to the learning process.

And so from this website, http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/greek-mythology.php?deity=PANDORA, as I checked on Pandora, I will leave you with this quote, “PANDORA might be blamed for all the world’s problems, but without her daughter PYRRHA the human race would be extinct. So try to think outside the box.”

Sharing Photos

Shortly after we explored Flickr in this class, my husband came in from his photography club meeting and asked me if I knew about Picasa. I was able to say yes, having learned about it as one of the Web 2.0 tools. Thus we proceeded to access some pictures a fellow photo club member posted and I helped him post several of his pictures. Now he thinks he has invented a new way to slice bread.
He thought that was so great that he decided he would share a large group of photos with some family members. Technology is not his expertise. He has learned how to use IPhoto successfully, but new platforms remain a challenge.
I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say that my training as teacher and my DPa degree (Doctorate in Patience) were fully tested. I finally convinced him to use Flickr because his version of IPhoto has a built in interface for Flickr. We set up his account and he is now off and publishing. Everyone at the Thanksgiving gathering had to hear about Flickr.
I get a chuckle listening to him tell his story. It gives me another reason to be excited about all I have learned in this class.

In the loop.

Some things are happening out there with open source software.

 

Over Thanksgiving I pumped my technology friends for information.  One was touting Web 3.0 and what it is offering, so next we have to have a class on this new Web.

I was told Sesame Street uses open source software when at all possible.

A headmaster that also teaches some classes uses Moodle to create a discussion board for his high school students.

At least I knew what they were talking about and felt like I was somewhat in the loop. I must keep learning.

Social Bookmarking

I explored Delicious and opened an account. The help section and tutorials were helpful.
Delicious actually added a menu item to the Firefox menu bar that I can also display as a sidebar while using Delicious plus several icons in a top menu bar that allow easy navigation. Safari didn’t seem to have these add on tools that Firefox has created.

I took me a little time to get use to searching for sites by tags being the library media specialist and trained to used Boolean search terms and phrases. I finally became a little more comfortable exploring by entering several tag words, adding a tag to a series of tags, removing a tag from the series to see how it affected the search results.

My professional experience has been completely in the K-5 area and I’m not yet comfortable with using social bookmarking with this level students. My concerns about security and protection from inappropriate sites have not been answered as to how to maintain a safe environment for the students. I certainly would be a proponent for staff development training for the teachers working at this level to organizing their own resources.

I also opened an account in edutagger. I really liked the concentration and selection of sites that edutagger displayed. I certainly would recommend this to other educators.

Both sites were fairly easy to use. I just need to raise my comfort level to move beyond my entry explorations. Being retired, I’ve not had a great need to bookmark many sites.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I had a discussion with two persons who are much younger and use technology extensively. One who is involved in the film industry, used Delicious to file movie reviews professionally and recipes for his personal cooking file. The other works for Sesame Street in NYC and has used Delicious but says she actually uses Twitter and just searches different archives. I really didn’t comprehend how that would be as efficient as having your own tags and bookmarks on one of the social bookmarking sites.

Creating a Goggle Docs Presentation.

Creating a Goggle Docs Presentation.

The assignment was to create a small slide show presentation using a web-based tool. I’m familiar with PowerPoint. I created a presentation in another COPR class with the collaboration of a class partner using the Goggle Docs presentation tool. After getting our basis information completed and outlined, I found it very easy to create the slides and share them with my partner for editing and adding new slides. Having just one document rather that emailing versions back and forth worked very well and we were able to transfer the document to PowerPoint and post for class viewing rather than give them access to our Goggle account.

For the Web 2.0 assignment I wanted to explore other web-based tools and view their potentials.

My slide show involves a series of photographs that I took of my grandson and his father playing in the park together, thus I titled it “An Afternoon in the Park with Daddy”.

In one of out previous assignments we explored Picnik.com to edit photos. I had about 50 photos that I wanted to consider for the slideshow. I loaded the pictures to picnik and played with adding captions. The captions were fine as far as placing a comment on the picture, but not a little cumbersome and took a lot of time.
I also want to explore Flickr and see how the Picnik files interfaced with each other. It was a very easy process. I could have created a slideshow in Flickr but it does not afford me the privacy I need with these photographs. I did explore Flickr was thus able to help my husband with a photography project, but that’s another whole blog.

I looked at 280slide and found it would do very nicely as presentation tool, but I didn’t like the security level there either. The same held true for me and my situation with SlideShare.net

I was determined to use the open source tools for the project, and settled on Google Docs which was easy because I already had an account and experience with it.

I tried dragging the pictures from Flickr to a slide in Google Docs which worked, but I was not happy with the resolution of the pictures and decided not to spend a lot of time trouble shooting the issue.

So from my IPhoto on my Mac I emailed all the pictures that I wanted to use to myself formatting them for faster downloading all at once. This worked perfectly. Otherwise, I would need to export each picture, changing the format size to my desktop. That’s changing 40 plus pictures individually. I wonder if I could do this in batch. Anyway my email method worked.

After completing my storyboard, I started creating my Goggle Docs presentation, adding one picture and caption to each slide. From the Goggle Docs page I could insert a picture from my desktop, the folder where I had stored the emailed photos, to the slide. The process was very smooth and I was delighted with the results. Again I saved the document also to PowerPoint and have it on my desktop as well as stored in Google Docs.

I had thought that I would burn it to a disc and give it to my son-in-law for
Christmas, but now I think I will make a photo album and present him with the hardcopy. The hard work is done because the photos are organized and the captions are finished. I like to use Shutterfly.com to make my albums.

I wasted a lot of time because I failed to follow the basic first rule of creating a presentation, design your storyboard first.

Goggle Docs is a great tool, available freely to anyone who has a computer and Internet connectivity, plus it provides a seamless transition to the Office products. The greatest advantage of this tool is the ability for a team to work on the document from any computer and share the work back and forth.

Wikis

Wikis have tremendous potential for collaboration in the educational setting. To propose using a wiki with you students you must do your homework.
• Create a project that supports you educational goals.
• Find a wiki that offers security to the students.
• Have all your info together, in a simple written format, to present to the administration.
• Inform your parents and get permission for the each student to participate.
• Create a contract with the student concerning proper wiki netiquette.
Getting past these hurdles sets the stage for a successful wiki experience.

Wikis also offer a great opportunity for cross curricula collaboration. For example, teach writing and critical thinking skills within a social studies platform. The active learning that will be occurring is going to keep the students interest far more that teacher delivered instructions as well as provide for more learning.

Some of the wikis that I looked at were simple and easy to follow. Some were cluttered and I needed time to discover how to navigate. These pages seemed to be cluttered and not easy deciphered, which makes me think that the focus and overall of design of the wiki needs to be carefully considered.

Wikipedia is not a reliable resource for documenting research. It is though a very good place to start. Basic information is available. From this, the students can learn the process of finding other sources to verify information. From the library media background, three distinctly different sources are usually considered a reliable documentation of validity. The Internet in itself in not a reliable source of information and the validity of any website or information posted on the web must be questioned.

The fact that graphics, pictures, videos, multimedia, etc. can be integrated into a wiki just keeps adding to the credit of making it a fantastic choice for use in the classroom.
Tip. If you are going to post a picture on the wiki page, format it for the web so it won’t take so long to load.

Copyright and Fair Use in Education

Copyright issues become easier to violate with the development of the Internet and the easy access to digital media. One common sense rule to follow is to always credit your sources and to continue to teach students about plagiarism. Remember anything printed, be it hard copy or digital is copyrighted, whether it is officially filed with the copyright office or not.

Then enters the issue of fair use and copyright. A website that explains these murky issues fairly well is http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/copypol2.htm
Possibly a most helpful section from this website, relative to fair use, discusses what they call the “Four Factors Fair Use Test”, while still not giving specific guidelines but certainly something that can help you gauge the use of the work. The four questions listed below have qualifying characteristic under each question are from this listed website.

These four factors are:
1.What is the character of the use?
Example: If it is nonprofit or educational then it tends to fall in the realms of fair use. If it is for critical review you need to consider would you be doing this in an educational setting or in a commercial setting? If it is for commercial purposes then fair use would not apply and you should obtain permission to use the work.

2. What is the nature of the work to be used?
Example: Is it fact? Then fair use would be applicable. Is it a mixture of fact and imagination? Then how much is fiction? The fiction is created by someone and thus copyrighted. So which way do you go with this. If it is fiction, then the item is someone’s intellectual property.

3. How much of the work will you use?
Example: A small amount is often considered fair. Whereas a large amount would not be allowed. There are even guidelines that suggest a 10% rule (Baird & Hallett, 1999) such as 10 percent of 1000 words which ever is less.

4. What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread?
Example: If the first three answers tip towards fair use then I would consider using it under the appropriate amounts guideline. If the original were out of print and other wise unavailable I would use it if it tipped toward the fair use considerations. But if it could take away from the sales of the original the fair use is not applicable.

What you can use in the online classes versus face to face becomes more questionable because you don’t have complete control of your audience.

An advantage of the Internet is that you can reference any website, pointing your students to the material without violating any copyright issues.

In summary, be mindful of copyrights and fair use. Give credit where credit is due. Be as knowledgeable as possible. Consider if it were your material that was being distributed, what would you want to happen? If in doubt don’t use it.

Other articles to reference:
“Copyright Concerns in the Age of Distance Education.”
ERIC Digest.
Such non-print works can be reproduced for the purposes of distance education, but Baird & Hallett (1999) direct faculty to the Fair Use Guidelines created
www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/copyright.htm

“Fair Use Guidelines For Educational Multimedia”
www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/ccmcguid.htm

Google Docs Again

My group partner in COPR 1114 and I have been collaborating on our project using Google Docs. It is far more efficient working on just one document than shuttling different versions of the same document back and forth via email, wondering which is the latest or final version. Upon completing an assignment, we were able to save the document into Word format, add to our files in WebCT and attach the file to the assignment for the facilitator. I wonder if it would work as easily for the facilitator to access it through Google Docs?
The presentation tool was easy to use and interfaced completely with Microsoft PowerPoint. I checked it out for comparison. Having this tool available for free on the web is almost unbelievable.
I set up a template; added the information to each slide; found a few graphics to support our theme and available for free use in respect to copyright permissions, adding them to the presentation.
I need to see how to share this presentation without giving access to my Google Docs account. I will have to embark on another technology exploration.

Using Mindmeister

Initially Mindmeister had a mind of its own. I could not even get the site to load. After creating an account I was able to explore the program. Of course, I jumped right in with out reading any instructions, which is not always the best idea. The screen video tutorial on the help page is 4:30 minutes and was helpful. There is a well-developed list of help topics to support your efforts.

Tony Parr and I collaborated on a map. We actually were talking on the phone as we discussed the tool and how to add various components, experimenting with entering and editing simultaneously. We discovered that you can save the map to your computer thus you could add the map to a document or presentation program.

I had worked with a similar tool a number of years ago called Inspiration and the elementary version called Kidspiration. Inspiration had the capability to make an outline from the map. That is a neat feature but you have to purchase the program. I don’t know if you could work on it collaboratively.

Having Mindmeister available freely to use from any computer and to work collaboratively makes this a powerful tool. It is great for what we called word-webbing or brainstorming.

My New Skills

My security guard is doing a good job. He kept Murphy out of my latest posting party on my blog site.
I signed in to Google Docs and created my post. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered that I could post via email so I thought that I would try to do that. Hey, you know the help menu is pretty good. It didn’t take me long to find out how to use this venue. I created my special email account that allows me to post via of email and voila, it happened just like I wanted it to happen.
Dr. Smith said that I needed to add categories to my post and he could send me a tutorial. I like help and I am very visual, so now my post have titles and categories. Thanks Dr. Smith.
I can create my document in Google Docs and save a copy there.
I can post to my blog via of email.
I can edit my post to give them a title and assign them to a category.
I am learning.
I will share my knowledge with all who will listen.