OPLS blog

To all music teachers and musicians out there. Would you or your students like to be part of the world’s first online orchestra?

YouTube are inviting musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Your video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best of you to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.”

A fascinating development. If there is a school district or authority out there that is still preventing access to this extraordinary site, send them the link.

I’ve collected books ever since I was 9 years old and love them. We have more than we can accommodate in the house and yet still we keep acquiring more. There’s a copy of Prideaux’s Histories on the shelves, dating back to 1664, as well as, for some strange reason, the UK Board of Education’s syllabus for physical training in schools 1933 (it contains advertisements in the front for Weetabix and Ovaltine, with an explanation for teachers as to why they should recommend them to parents of “listless children” - deserving of a full blog post in its own right one day, I think). An eclectic collection but, as my old gran used to say, it “furnishes the rooms”, and to see them all on display warms the heart.

It was with some hesitation, then, that I recently purchased the new Sony ebook reader, with its promises of portability and signficant storage capacity (160 books on its internal memory - countless more through SD card slots). If I was to give up both the visceral and cerebral appeal of books, what could it give me in return?

I have to say, having access to a library on one device didn’t really appeal. After all, I rarely have more than two books on the go at any one time. I did, though, think it would be useful to have the IB’s document library accompany me on my travels and so I experimented with the Diploma core guides.

They went on easily enough via the software that came with the device, although I did have to rename them for ease of navigation on the Reader’s menu system. They rendered quite small initially (see below) so the increase font size button came in handy. Page turning was slower than I would have liked (I noticed it was much quicker when just reading one of the pre-supplied books), but the table of contents worked well.

Ebook reader and the IB's Learner Profile

Ultimately, though, I was disappointed with its lack of features. I wanted to annotate and comment on content - I couldn’t do this. Nor could I share these notes with others - it doesn’t even have bluetooth connectivity. I was looking for a device that had real application for teaching and learning. Instead, I simply had convenience. Yes, it stores images, but displays them in black and white only, and yes, you can store your music collection on there too. However, to justify its £200 price tag, Sony really needs to give us a little bit more.

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed.

I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more. To quote from their overview:

Diigo groups are ideal for team research
If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private.

Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks
When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top.

Group sticky notes are great for discussion
When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context.

Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency
The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency.

Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this.

Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

Let us know how you get on.

Update:

Maggie Tsai, one of the founders of Diigo, is running an Elluminate session specifically for educators on 20 November in case you’re interested.  Password link is here and the agenda will consider the following:

1. Quick overview of the bookmarking and annotating features of Diigo - highlighting the Diigolet as an alternative to the Diigo toolbar for districts that prevent teachers from downloading browser extensions
2. How to register for Diigo & convert a regular user account to educator status
3. How to create class groups via Teacher Console
4. Safety and security features for class groups
5. Setting preferences for class groups (tag dictionary, forum, etc.)
6. How to create student accounts and add them to class groups
7. Safety and security features for student accounts
8. Why use Diigo with students?
9. How to integrate Diigo content on class blogs, wikis, etc. / Webslide view / Starting research on Diigo (if time permits)
10. Common FAQs
11. Share Diigo education usecases
12. Open discussions

There’s a discussion on it in Diigo here.  Classroom 2.0 have it as well.

Although it’s been out for a while, we haven’t seen any this side of the Atlantic until quite recently, so it was quite a privilege to be able to play with a Microsoft Surface at the Future of Web Apps conference held in London a couple of weeks ago.

I took a few photos and uploaded them to Flickr with annotations.

While I was having a play, my mind was buzzing with possibilities for how it could be used in teaching in learning. Obviously it would have immediate appeal to spatial learners and those who want to ’show’ what they know or have learned. I could also imagine a small number of students brainstorming together, perhaps using some mind-mapping software and working on individual elements of an issue in ‘their part’ of the display/screen.

There are already some great software and applications written for it (check out the photos on microbiology in the stream above and how it renders 3-D imaging) and the list will only grow as it becomes more mainstream.  What’s really important, though, is the notion that it can receive multiple instructions simultaneously through touch - and that makes it immediately appealing for an educational context; even if the price tag doesn’t at US$15,000.

Here’s Microsoft’s original promo video:

And the inevitable parody

I promised a review of Imagine Teacher for the Nintendo DS, in the vain hope that it would help teachers in some way with their own professional development. Well, the short answer is, it won’t!

I looked for insights into classroom strategies, help with identifying student learning styles, curriculum planning and perhaps learning space design. I think I was being a little optimistic.

The game is as taxing on the brain as watching Celebrity Big Brother, and, to be honest, I shouldn’t have devoted the amount of time I did in getting to know it, hoping against hope that I’d uncover a few nuggets of wisdom somewhere.

You’re better off using the pictochat feature on the DS and collaborating with peers across the staffroom.

Best avoided.

Many of you will probably know the great global issues comparison site, WorldMapper. Well now, many of the maps included on the site have been reproduced in a book entitled: The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

(Clicking on the image will take you to Amazon US)

It contains 366 digitally modified maps, or cartograms, depicting the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects, ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation, to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.

Well worth pointing out to your librarians.

YouTube have just announced the release of a new video uploader which, they claim, enables users to:

• add a video’s metadata (title, description, tags, etc.) while the upload is processing.
• upload multiple files at once, without downloading a plugin.
• take advantage of increased file-size limits for uploads - raised from 100MB to 1GB.

Good news for heavy users and those wishing to upload more than five minutes of footage.

In case you don’t know, wikispaces are giving away an additional 250,000 wikis to teachers and schools (no ads, greater administrative rights etc).

Grab yours from here now.

…And if that wasn’t enough, Google have just launched an audio indexing engine for YouTube. Now you can search a video according to what is said within it and not just on the tags, keywords or title describing it.

It’s in beta at the moment, but will graduate into a fully supported technology soon, I’m sure.

As an update to the previous post, Chad Hurley (the CEO and co-founder of YouTube) has just blogged on the future of online video.

Some key comments:

“Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially.”

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call.”

“In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”

“Over the next decade, people will be at the center of their video and media experience. More and more consumers will become creators.”