Sharing: The Moral Imperative

I recently watched a video by Dean Shareski all about educators and sharing.  Dean strongly believes that it is absolutely necessary for educators to be sharing with each other as a means to share resources to save time and a way to learn from one another.  He states that it is our ethical responsibility as teachers to be sharing.  Sharing ideas is an excellent form of teaching and learning, and we routinely ask our students to share with each other, so we as teachers need to be sharing as well. Especially when sharing is a way to share resources and ideas to save us time!

Dean commented that the easiest step into sharing is via social bookmarking by using sites such as Diigo.  Personally, this was my first step into educational sharing, and it certainly is an easy and beneficial first step.  Not only do social bookmarking sites allow you to keep track of resourceful websites, but you can share these websites with others and find valuable websites from other’s bookmarks.  More recently I have signed up on Twitter.  To begin with I certainly did not understand all the benefits that could be experienced from using Twitter.  It has certainly proved to be an effective way to connect with other educators (from around the world) and to share resources with each other.

Blogging is another effective means for both teachers and students to share (and another activity that I was unaware of how valuable it could be!).  It is mentioned in the video that blogging is a cheap and risk-free way to invest in your own career.  Blogging can be used as a reflective tool, a way to connect with other educators, a way for you to share ideas and resources and get feedback on, and an excellent way to introduce students to online sharing and learning.

Dean strongly promotes the culture of sharing in the video, and it is easy to see why.  Both we and our students, as well as our schools, can experience direct benefits from us sharing online.  Sharing also needs to happen with the teacher’s right in our schools and divisions, and does not necessarily need to be online in these cases, but online sharing is the most effective form of sharing in a global sense and allows you to connect with the best educators around the globe.  The question really is why isn’t every teacher sharing as much as they can?

The Principal of Change

Last Tuesday our class was fortunate enough to have George Couros Skype in.  George is a principal in Alberta, and in particular is a principal who absolutely embraces technology.   The use of computers and the internet for learning is very prominent within his school-early years students even use blogging as a tool to learn, share, and reflect!  Very impressive if not amazing that this school is so on board with the technological movement and have the support of their parental community.   

George’s presentation to our class was both refreshing and inspiring.  It was so great to hear about a school that is using technology to their advantage and for the benefit of their students.  Too often this is not the case and you hear (and experience) how schools and divisions block many sites that can prove to be beneficial to learning.  At George’s school they prefer to allow students and teachers access to these sites and to focus on teaching students how to appropriately use the internet and social media.  As part of this process students have an online presence and identity, using their first name, last initial and date of birth.  Now many people would automatically think that it is not safe to use your real name online, especially for students.  However this school believes that students need to become responsible digital citizens and need to realize that they can be held accountable for their online actions.  This is fantastic!  Schools spend so much time preparing their students to be good citizens, now with digital age I believe schools should also be preparing their students to be responsible and accountable digital citizens.

Blogging is an activity that the school does whole-heartedly-teachers, students, and even parents become part of the blogging process and the learning that is associated with the blogging.  Students as young as grade three (I believe) participate in blogging for their classes.  With blogging the classroom and learning is suddenly accessible anytime and anywhere. This is ideal for educators, as we want to encourage students to actively participate in their education and especially to participate outside of school hours.

I think it would be wonderful for our students if more schools would embrace technology the way George’s schools has.  Students are using these technologies outside of school so we should using them in school to keep learning relevant and interesting for our students, as well as to prepare them for life outside of school.  The world is becoming increasingly technologically advanced and shows no signs of slowing down its use of technology, so we as educators need to prepare students the best we can to be successful in this ever-changing world of technology.  And to do this we need to be using technology as a means to teach and to reach our students.   

Shape Collage

This week our instructor showed us a bunch of different, useful and cool sites.  He showed us how we could use Evernote, Slideshare, Livebinders, Animoto, BlipFM, and Shape Collage, just to name a few-all free resources available on the web and could easily be incorporated into lessons and assignments or simply for personal use.

I thought Shape Collage looked pretty cool, so I downloaded it.  It saves to your computer and allows you to customize a variety of collages using your own photos.  You can specify how many photos you want in the collage, how large you want the photos, and what shape you would like the collage to be in.  When you are happy with the collage you have created you simply save it to your computer (or wherever you like to save your work!).  I think Shape Collage grabbed my attention because I have a lot of photos that I can play with and I thought it could be an excellent touch to projects or assignments to give students (or yet another great way to procrastinate from doing actual homework...)

Here is a quick collage I created (sticking with the New Zealand theme!)

New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand

The Internet-Making us Smarter or Dumber??

There is an on-going debate about whether the Internet is making us as a society smarter or in fact dumber?  As with every societal issue there are pros and cons to both sides along with some interesting points. 

The Internet provides users with a wealth of instantly accessible information and an abundance of creative freedoms.  Of course a percentage of this information available is rubbish but there is plenty of information and videos accessible via the web that can be very beneficial to learning.  Videos are become ever-more popular, but the majority of information available is still provided through written text.  Users must read the information in order to benefit from reading it.  TV, another popular media, requires minimal, minimal reading and it could be easily argued that the TV has far less benefits than the Internet, but that would be a whole other debate. 

The Internet has also brought a whole new meaning to the word collaboration.  People from all around the world can easily collaborate and work together through the Internet.  A prime example of this is Wikipedia.  People have worked together to create and edit this online encyclopedia that has become a starting point for research in many student projects.  The increasing use of wikis in general for course work and interest, demonstrate ongoing collaboration, people learning from one another.  How can we argue that this is making us stupider when it seems obvious that it is making us smarter?

On the flip side there are the groups who would argue that yes in fact the Internet is making us dumber, and they would argue that they can demonstrate this through research that has been conducted.  They argue that evidence demonstrates that the constant and numerous distractions on webpage’s are turning us into very scattered thinkers.  They also argue that people who frequent the web comprehend less of what they read, that they are less creative and less productive, and have poor concentration skills.

The main argument for the idea that the Internet is making us dumber revolves around attention.  The constant distraction on the internet such as links, advertisements, and trying to multi-task several things, is affecting people’s ability to concentrate and focus their attention in on one thing.

I am not sure if saying a person is more distracted is saying the same as they are becoming dumber.  I believe there are pros and cons to the incredible use of the Internet, but that the pros easily outweigh the cons.  We have instant access to news and information, and an incredible easel with an audience for creativity, and the development of new skills.  However I think it is still beneficial for people to perform tasks that require their undivided attention, as these types of exercises (e.g reading a full book, etc) can be greatly beneficial to the brain. 

Following the lines of this debate, Matthew Nisbit a communications professor discusses if the Internet is making us smarter or dumber, addresses some of the positive changes and as well some of the negative consequences @ http://bigthink.com/ideas/21830

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html?KEYWORDS=internet

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098.html?KEYWORDS=internet

Social Networking and Education

Social Networking holds some enormous potential for education, as Dr. Glen Gatin pointed out in class on Thursday.  Wikis, blogs, Skype, Moodle, virtual worlds, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can all be integrated successfully into the educational system and students can benefit from the use of these tools.

I can clearly see the benefits of using a class wiki – all assignments and homework can be posted, parents and students can remain updated with the class, and students can always have access to course material at any time.  Moodle can provide similar benefits, and I know I certainly enjoy that I can access course material and information at anytime of day through Brandon University’s Moodle site.  I only wish every professor and instructor would use it and post all of the course work and have us students submit all of the course work via Moodle!   I can also clearly see benefits of using class and personal blogs as demonstrated to me through the use of personal blogs in this course.  Our students could experience the same benefits of collaboration and sharing of opinions/thoughts through the use of their own blogs for a class.  Skype is a favorite of mine as it is great for staying in touch with friends and family who live far away, but I think it also has many benefits for education.  It would be so easy to have guest lecturers or presenters through the use of Skype and create more engaging learning environments for our students. 

Now where Dr. Gatin kind of lost me was when he started discussing virtual worlds and the enormous potential that they hold for education.  I certainly have never been exposed to a virtual world such as Second Life except for in Dr. Gatin’s presentation and therefore still do not truly see the benefits that it can have on education.   So I did a quick Google search and came across this article Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning located at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?article=44-1&section=articles.  It certainly gives you some things to think about with using a virtual world as a learning tool.  It discusses Second Life, what people do in virtual worlds, how corporations are already using virtual worlds for their employees learning, and where we are headed with the idea of virtual worlds.  Also interesting was this article - Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World at http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/EducationalFrontiersLearningin/163163 .  This article is written by a Professor of Computer Science at Colorado Technical University and discusses how to successfully incorporate a virtual world as a learning tool and the benefits that these virtual worlds can provide to students.   I am personally not completely sold on the benefits of using a virtual world as a learning tool as I think face-to-face learning has many benefits for students, but I can see the possibilities that these virtual worlds possess.