OPLS blog

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.

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.

Tom Hemingway, over in Ankara (though not for much longer, sadly) has begun a wiki to help his successor quickly get to grips with coordinating the IB’s diploma programme in TED Ankara College.

He has very kindly opened this up to the IB community in general, so please take a look.

In his own words:

“This site is designed as a virtual handbook for IBDP coordinators at TED Ankara College, but coordinators
from other schools are welcome to take and use what they like. The site contents are listed on the left, and
are organized according to high school grade. If you’re new to this site, I suggest that you start with the Calendar page. You can follow the links in the calendar to relevant pages that explain the tasks.

This is very much a work in progress, but this project could lead to something of more general benefit to IB
programs in other schools. If you have suggestions for improvement, please click on the Discussion tab on
any page, or click on my icon at the bottom of this screen to send me a message.”

Thanks Tom, and good luck with your move back to the US.

January the 8th saw the very first of our “electronic mailings” to IB World Schools. This means that the IB no longer physically prints and send its main curriculum documentation to schools - no more guides, teacher support materials, specimen papers, coordinator’s notes etc printed and posted. Instead, schools are expected to get their materials from the OCC or from the IB store.

In the early stages of this project we’d planned on having the new OCC in place with the facility for teachers and coordinators to subscribe (by email and RSS) to new additions on the OCC; news, resources, publications and forum postings. However, we have not achieved what we planned to last year and we now have our sights set on mid-2008 for the re-launch of the new OCC, or OCC III as we call it in our office.

In the meantime, to try to help our users with this transition to electronic publication, we created a “latest publications” page - accessible from any subject page on the OCC. It still has a few bugs that need fixing, and it could also benefit from having a search facility, but we think that it works quite well, and hope that it will help our users to find the documents they need and not make the transition to electronic mailings quite so painful.

Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:

Larry Ferlazzo’s best Web 2.0 applications for 2007

Langwitches best web 2.0 applications for elementary school

You are, of course, free to agree or disagree.

Please note that these were shared via the Classroom 2.0 network on Ning.

At a recent dinner with a number of workshop leaders for IB psychology, we discussed the issue of mobile technologies in the classroom and the decision being taken by many schools and districts around the world to ban them. It was quite a vigorous debate (as you can imagine in such company), but a real eye-opener for me was the genuine concern around the table for things like mobile phones, iPods, PDAs etc, being used covertly and overtly in the classroom.

I’ve been reflecting since on what might be driving that concern and suggest the following:

• There is a concern that, if the student is listening to his iPod then he’s not necessarily listening to the teacher or his classmates
• There is a real or perceived threat to academic honesty
• The teacher is apprehensive at best, frightened at worst, by the fact that his students know more about mobile technologies than he does.

Josh Allen, writing in ISTE’s most recent Learning and Leading with Technology, even goes so far as to say, “Nothing that you can do on a cell phone will inspire students as they make their way in the world.” He suggests that investment in laptops would be a far better use of our very limited resources, arguing that, “any monies a school spent on phones and [their accompanying] plans would be much better served with any number of other technologies.”

I do not agree. Although there is a very real concern among teachers that they are being overtaken, perhaps overwhelmed, by these emerging technologies, I do not believe the right course of action is to ban them from the classroom. Equally, I do not agree with the sentiment that phone technologies have no educational use or application. You only need to look on Flickr - of students taking photos with their phones during a field trip, sending them to a class Flickr account and then creating and editing a digital slideshow later - for a myriad of examples.

Liz Kolb, writing in the same Learning and Leading with Technology article, states that “a basic cell phone has the ability to be the students’ Swiss Army knife of technology.” And I think she’s right. They can record audio and video, be digital cameras (with increasingly very high levels of resolution), act as video conferencing devices and blog editing tools, used as assistive technologies in special needs education, and can even been employed for formal assessment purposes (see the Ultralab example summarised by Stephen Heppell).

So, is it not a question of temperance and balance, rather than banning? And furthermore, are we not, as educators, compelled to embrace these technologies rather than ignore them and hope they’ll go away? Because, as we embark upon another year, I wonder if the real issue, and therefore concern for educators, is the fact that these technologies are changing the very nature of teaching and learning, and that we’re just not ready.

As well as coming across Yuuguu at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, I spotted this free online meeting planner, ikordo. ikordo is intelligent. It uses plain English and email to arrange meetings for you on your behalf. You can plan meetings, set up attendees and the ikordo negotiates the most suitable date for a meeting on your behalf. It can interpret plain English email responses and builds up a picture of everyone’s availability. You can also have email and SMS reminders before a meeting beings. Try it. Nothing to download this time