#etec527

After delving into the world of web 2.0 tools, some advantages to using these tools within a learning environment or specific activities have become quite apparent. First, collaboration is a core concept in web 2.0 tools. Study after study shows the effectiveness of collaboration in student achievement and the advantages in the area of student engagement are obvious to teachers who implement collaborative activities. When I think about the type of classroom I want to be in, whether it be in the role of teacher or learner, I want it to have an element of community that makes collaboration essential. Web 2.0 tools are also malleable and can be used to fit the scale and scope of different classes and lessons. As an instructional technology specialist, I have many disciplines and contexts that I assist with, so having a tool that is flexible is very appealing. I’d rather know fewer tools very well than hundreds tenuously.      

Web 2.0 tools are also very good at creating a context for active learning. Active learning affords the possibility for student independence. Differentiation and extension are also possible with these types of tools. With active learning and the structure of these tools, students develop via inquiry based activities which afford a context for exploration. A feeling of openness and choice gives students intrinsic motivation to participate in active learning activities.   

With this in mind, in the future, I would seek out and focus on tools that afford a balance of clarity in operation, but flexibility in application. For example, a tool like Padlet.com only has a few options for actions that users can take, but there is a huge variety of media and organization that makes the tool usable in many contexts. I am still looking for a tool that could take users entirely through  the process of brainstorming to publishing a final product. Many will work well for collaboration and gathering of content, but fall short when users try to use content in a finished or polished context. I tried this with Miro.com and they tend to nickle and dime the user for file quality. It is just frustrating.   

Now, web 2.0 tools are not all sunshine and roses. They take a lot of preparation for students to use them to their full capacity. Sometimes these tools have so much information that students can freeze up. It can be hard for students who have not had this much freedom within their learning environment to get started when they don’t have explicit instructions or direct guidance. It can take a little extra time to get them started and feeling comfortable with their new independence. Also, as a high school teacher my mind always goes to discipline. Asking students to collaborate and contribute will inevitably lead to inappropriate posts that will require moderation and draw the instructor’s attention away from the learning activity. Preparing for this ahead of time and having a plan to deal with discipline issues can help minimize those distractions.  

Ok, so I have been working in the web 2.0 world for 6 weeks now doing everything I can to expand my digital footprint, and it kind of ticked me off to search Lowell Gabbert and the first result on Google was an obituary for William Lowell Gabbert. What the _ ? All that work for nothing. ;) My lacrosse website is still up at the top of the results, so mcla.us must do some serious SEO work. 

As far as additions to my digital presence go, my YouTube channel has finally made an appearance due to the materials I created for my Web 2.0 tools class. Most of the videos I kept unlisted, but a few from the beginning when I didn’t know the difference are still public. Also, my newly created Twitter page came in at number four on my top search results. 

The biggest surprise of my initial Lowell Gabbert search was a pinterest page. If you follow the link, you see that there isn’t anything posted to it, and to be honest, I had no idea I even created one. I think this was associated with my old Google Plus account. That’s kind of scary to think you can be creating accounts and widening your digital presence without even knowing.   

After feedback from my professor and classmates, I did take the advice to expand my search parameters to see what results would be included by adding my middle name Lowell Gaines Gabbert to my search. Instantcheckmate.com showed a wealth of personal information including current and previous addresses, close relatives, and an old phone number. Thankfully, there wasn’t much else turning up with that search term. Adding my place of employment to my name did not add any results to my search. 

As an educator, my expanding footprint has implications for the way students, parents, and current/potential employers view my educational philosophy and how they judge my capability to be an effective teacher. Whether we like it or not, school is not taught in a vacuum. I would like to believe that I can say whatever I want on the web and still be able to teach my students effectively, but perception shapes how much someone will let you in, how much they trust you. Whether it be the pictures I post on Facebook or the videos I create and make public on YouTube, I must carefully curate my content to make sure that I am presenting the right brand. I also think of my digital presence within the edtech industry. Blogs, social media, and video channels are analogous to  industry publications in other disciplines, so it is important to develop a brand that shows awareness of current trends to gain credibility amongst peers and colleagues. 

As the curated list of web 2.0 tools from vastly more experienced Education Technologists begins to come to an end for me, I have started to think of ways to keep up with the current pace of the education technology sector. Within my role as an Instructional Technology Specialist I find myself focussing on the tools that are currently available and endorsed by my district and campus; however, I find more and more that solutions to common classroom problems are already in existence and all it takes is someone with a little time and ambition to seek those solutions out. At this moment in my career this drive to find solutions makes my own professional development with web tools an interconnected piece of the work I do on a daily basis, but this reactionary model is not sustainable due to the number of faculty that do not reach out for assistance and either wallow in broken systems or completely disregard campus and district technology initiatives. For me to be truly effective in my role, I need to be seeking out solutions and offering those solutions whether solicited or not.  

While I do not want to solely be reactionary to colleagues requests, I do want to utilize their experience in a proactive way. Many teachers I talk to on a daily basis have a new tool they have discovered or a different way of using a familiar tool that addresses a certain need. Proactively seeking out teachers’ suggestions can help focus my exploration into certain web tools. I have come to realize that there is no chance of me knowing every tool, app, or extension that exists, especially if I am not in the classroom, on the front-lines, every day. I must continually prod at the faculty to draw out the creativity and innovation that is already at work to see how I can help spread and build upon it. 

While my own learning community is a great resource for finding innovations easily, the hard work still must be done to see what other learning communities and experts in EdTech have to add to the conversation. I am lucky enough to live in Austin, Texas which is a technology hub. Yearly, I attend SXSW, and Texas Computer Educators Associations’ conferences to gather intelligence to use in the coming year. While the knowledge gleaned from sessions, workshops, and walking the conference room floors at the conferences is cutting-edge and invaluable, I get just as much out of the regular newsletters and additional webinars that are offered throughout the year to attendees. I have made a commitment to not only attend these professional development conferences each year, but to also review and analyze the articles and newsletters these associations put out to evaluate the usefulness of the publication from month to month. Many times an update to Google Classroom announced on the TCEA newsletter has sparked investigation into tools that this update could now utilize.  

Along with these annual conferences and their associated publications, I set a personal goal to pursue certifications offered for web tools, by the companies themselves. My mother is a nurse, and growing up we always used to laugh at the long list of letters after her name (ie. PNP, LVN, CNP, etc.). The list was quite extensive, but it showed to everyone she worked with her commitment to the field and her breadth of knowledge. I see these tool certifications the same way. Last year I finished my courses to become a Vocabulary.com Certified Educator, and this year I am looking at completing my edpuzzle.com coach certification. Eventually, I would like to become a Google Certified Educator and eventually work my way up to be a certified innovator. My favorite part about these certifications is the authentic learning and application to my day-to-day work. The University of Texas also offers courses in blended learning and education technology that I have found helpful in the past and plan to pursue in the future.    

This week's adventure in social bookmarking brought me to Diigo.com. With this site users are able to store and share links, pictures, pdfs, and notes. When posting a resource to Diigo, users can tag the resource or share it to a group. Posts are easily searchable and popular tags are listed on the user’s homepage. Users are also able to create an outline page of selected resources and share those resources via a web link.  

The first step I took with social bookmarking using Diigo was cleaning up my bookmarks bar. I have folders of spreadsheets and articles that make a rather complicated drop-down tree. Remembering what folder each resource is housed in often wastes more time that the original intent of bookmarking was intended to lessen. I started with a very general tag of #classroomresources, but as your library grows you realize the need for more specificity in your tagging. I then progressed to areas that are hot topics of conversation such as #engagement, #proximity, and #readingonline. I found it much easier remembering a tag than figuring out what folder this resource was nested under.  

Once I felt comfortable using Diigo myself, I introduced it to my colleague as a way for us to share resources between the two of us. This is where tags had to start being standardized. For instance, i used the tag readingonline and she post to onlinereading. Between us we had to come to an agreement about what tags we were going to use, because it became very obvious that we would lose resources as we built out our library. The two of us had been using Google Classroom to disseminate information and resources to faculty members, but we found the searchable interface to be easier to operate. Granted, you can use control+F for searching Google Classroom, but not all of our faculty is aware of this feature. 

I created a campus group to utilize Diigo at an organizational level with some positive results. As with any technology some faculty members latched on to the collaborative nature of the platform sharing related articles on topics that were created in the group, but the surprising use that we didn’t foresee was using Diigo for a running library of unblocked YouTube resources. Like most districts we have a content filter called GoGuardian. In the past when we approved a site for use and it was unblocked in the filter, we added it to a spreadsheet. This sheet got pretty huge over the years and it became more difficult to go back and update the spreadsheet with more specific searchable items (ie. course, topic, etc.). Simply adding the #unblocked to a Youtube video that was shared with our campus group started an easy way to update these resources and allowed teachers to pull from resources their colleagues had already found. Then, teachers were able to go and add their own tags where they could add the course, unit, or grade level they were using the resource in (ie. algebra1, thegildedage, 12thgrade). 

On the surface, hyperdocs look like an online worksheet that is typical in classrooms especially in hybrid and 1:1 settings, and that is because by literal definition a hyperdoc is a document with links to other resources and activities. However, as is my experience with most web tools, the way in which you plan and implement hyperdocs dictates whether the lesson is a differentiated, engaging learning experience or just another worksheet. 

What is Essential to a Hyperdoc?

Most teachers are familiar with the typical lesson pattern: engage, explore, explain, apply, share, reflect, extend. Because hyperdocs are usually meant to be done independently, a hyperdoc lesson missing one of the aforementioned elements can feel empty and leave students missing important pieces of content. The nice thing about the hyperdoc format is that it is a product that is very close to the initial planning stage most teachers do individually or within a PLC. What I mean by close to planning is that other than aesthetically a hyperdoc is essentially the same document as a lesson plan or unit outline. You explicitly list the parts of the lesson, list out instructions, house all of the resources that will be used, and then link to the assignments and web tools that you will use.  

As I mentioned before hyperdocs are meant to be done asynchronously, so students can work at their own pace, but that does not mean that hyperdocs contain students thinking to their own brains. Collaboration is a key element in a hyperdocs lesson. Usually students are asked to share what they learned in the exploring section of the lesson. This common practice of students teaching each other is reminiscent of the popular jigsaw method. The web tool I have seen used to facilitate collaboration in this way with the most frequency through my exploration of hyperdocs is Padlet. I have to admit as I looked to design a hyperdocs lesson, I also went with Padlet because it is a very simple tool that allows for the posting of various types of media on a particular topic. Students can share, comment, and like each others’ contributions.  

Traditional lessons would feature a direct teaching method when introducing a new topic where new vocabulary and background information are covered largely through lecture. A hyperdocs lesson replaces this with an independent student exploration followed up by teacher explanation. This simple adjustment from teachers providing knowledge to students finding knowledge immediately ups the academic rigor and encourages students to evaluate the resources to determine what information is essential or even intriguing. Most students will find something interesting within a lesson if specific knowledge is not dictated to them.

Application

While a hyperdoc lesson fits nicely into any content area or lesson type, I feel it works especially well for a novel study. Maybe that is because I am an ex-English teacher, or maybe because the workflow of a novel study mirrors that of a hyperdoc: students start out exploring and reading independently, then discuss collaboratively, the teacher clarifies (either as a whole group or individually), and then students reflect individually. Here’s an example of a particularly well done hyperdoc for To Kill a Mockingbird. The hyperdoc helps students and teachers slow down and make sure that they are hitting each part of the 7-part lesson I mentioned before. This ensures reflection time, etc. since it is so typical to get thrown off course while in the midst of a novel study because the teacher or her students get so engrossed in discussion or even the literature itself. 

This week’s adventure took me into familiar territory, Youtube.com. I’ve always used videos from YouTube to enhance my classroom lessons, create extension activities, add supplementary resources to make lessons accessible to different types of learners, and even learn how to do things myself outside of the classroom. It is amazing to me how little the platform has changed over time, but still is one of the most widely used across all demographics. While I had always looked to YouTube videos for easily accessible information, I had never considered that both my students and educators were using it as anyone would a typical search engine. Even though I use YouTube as a go-to for information in both my personal AND professional life,  I have never really seen it as a research tool, and I would bet that most of my colleagues in education have a similar view of the platform. So this week I used YouTube to do a little research on a topic that is still fairly foreign to me… Twitter. 

I stated before my distaste for Twitter, but I’m willing to admit some of the malice I am experiencing still may be due to my lack of knowledge on the platform. So, I used YouTube to research how to use Twitter more effectively. Maybe that will help remedy the problem. I went down the proverbial rabbit hole of Twitter Basics videos which led me to all different types of strategies for posting times and days. Then, I came across Syd Lance who had some content posted about using Twitter analytics to increase your followers. I totally understand the irony of a guy with just over 700 followers on YouTube giving advice about social media marketing, but he had some pretty interesting suggestions for manicuring your online presence. I won’t give away all of his suggestions, but he did mention the necessity of using an outside platform like Hootsuite to manage posting times. This seems to be the biggest theme I’ve recognized throughout Twitter is catching users at the right time. The most valuable lesson I learned from this portion of my YouTube research was to meet your audience where they are, and this is completely transferable to the classroom. The whole reason we are bringing tools like Twitter and YouTube into the classroom is to engage students. As social media turns engagement into a science, teachers need to understand these strategies to push back with engaging content of their own on platforms that students use for leisure to blend content with non-academic media. This makes it easier for students to engage with the content and enables students to interact with it for reasons other than purely academic where the stakes are not as high and students are more willing to take risks. 

As an Instructional Technology Specialist, all of this talk about engaging students with Twitter took my thoughts back to engaging teachers through the use of Twitter. Admittedly, Twitter is not as widely used among some (shall we say) more experienced educational circles, but a good chunk of teachers do engage with the platform to score ideas from EdTech or curriculum experts. Younger teachers are more likely to use Twitter to search for articles and resources related to instruction, but older teachers like myself are still stuck to Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. This variety of use necessitates some sort of multi-platform publishing program like the aforementioned Hootsuite. As I began to discuss with my colleagues when teachers engaged with social media, most reported lunch time as a ubiquitous catch up period for social media scrolling. If I want to catch more teachers at a time when they are looking for resources and information about lessons, activities, etc. during the week after 7 would also be a perfect time to post for those social media brain breaks that are all too common during grading/planning sessions. I would also be able to catch that Pre-Monday panic by posting Sunday afternoon when most teachers are planning for the week ahead. After seeing how much I can learn about Twitter from using YouTube, I had some ideas about using YouTube in the classroom for things other than supplemental or engaging videos. 

   When opening a unit on research or even just a new concept, rather than curating the content that students will interact with when introducing a concept, a teacher can use YouTube by having students search for a research topic or concept. Students mostly encounter general information that is very comparable to a typical lecture during a hearty round of YouTube searching. Since most YouTube content is secondary information, students can compare similarities and differences from the videos they watched while exploring the topic. Then, students should determine which information they learned is most important to the topic or concept being introduced. Most likely the information that is shared and repeated in the most YouTube content will be the most important information pertaining to the given concept. 

Any good content creator will list the references they used to create their content. Students can take this YouTube exploration one step further by finding the referenced sources provided in the YouTube videos to try and get closer to the source materials. Teachers can help students identify important figures and thinkers related to the research topic or concept that is being taught by identifying and tracing the reference sources to their originators. 

One major issue to consider when trying to use YouTube in the classroom is that it is so popular with teachers, students, parents, and everyone else that it is typically highly restricted within school networks. Make sure potential research terms or typical tags are added to your campus/district’s allowed list, and do this ahead of time. There’s nothing that derails student engagement with a topic faster than legitimate searching being blocked because an algorithm can’t differentiate academic searching from off-task searching.   

To be completely transparent, I’m not a fan of Twitter. The layout seems cluttered and messy, and I do believe that the short form writing associated with the platform is killing students’ ability to build complex sentences. BUT I will also acknowledge my bias. I am in my early 30’s, and I’m a Facebook kid through and through. I created my FB account when I went to college because back then you had to have a college email to be able to join. Oh, those were the days :). Ever since, I’ve largely been a one social media platform kind of guy. However, I am not naïve enough to think that there is no value in this uber popular platform, so I put on my EdTech pants and gave Twitter a spin. For research, of course. 

   The first thing I noticed is that my feed was completely empty. It took me a few clicks to realize that you had to search for things and then follow them to start seeing information associated with those topics. I started professionally with a class hashtag #etec527. I made my obligatory posts related to web 2.0 tools and then expanded to #edtech, #blendedlearning, #gamesbasedlearning. Then, I started to follow edtech companies and programs that I’m familiar with ie. @nearpod, @Flipgrid, and @GetKahoot. I stayed in the edtech realm for a good 12 hours before the people that I replied to and followed connected with me in other areas of mutual interest. I soon branched out from edtech to gadgets and tech and then progressed to sports and entertainment. Before I knew it, I had become a full fledged Twitter user looking at my Twitter feed more often than my Facebook feed. I like to think this is partially due to a dedication to my research.

To take my research a step further I began to use Flipboard in conjunction with my Twitter and Facebook profiles. Flipboard is a news curation app that allows users to post stories directly to their linked social media pages. I found a better news feed format in this application which allows users to block ads while reading (huge plus) and compile saved content into magazines that can be shared through a link. My mind immediately ran wild with the possibility of collecting articles on the topics of pedagogy or instructional technology and sharing the collection with our faculty in an easy-to-read format. I could also see students collecting initial sources for research papers or projects here while they are ironing out a thesis. This companion app is a great addition, but I came here for Twitter, so I’m gonna talk about Twitter. 

Most of us in the EdTech field have experienced conferences that use Twitter as a back-channel conversation where attendees share their experiences, questions/answers, and discoveries. This application of Twitter leads me to this question: what other events/activities/institutions could benefit from a convenient back-channel forum to share, debate, pose questions, and gather resources? From a campus level, I can see administrators, counselors, and instructional coaches using Twitter to pose questions and concerns in order to receive feedback from faculty. Too often teachers aren’t consulted when decisions are made, but a campus Twitter account managed by a tech-savvy administrator or Instructional Technologist could gather feedback from faculty more efficiently than through email, or Google Forms. This avenue of application can also add a layer of engagement to those oh so enjoyable campus professional development days when used to prompt discussion with faculty. If school leadership were bold enough, they could even expand this idea to school-wide student use. If responsiveness to student needs is a priority for your campus, then Twitter would be a great way to gather opinions and ideas from students for ways to motivate, engage, and structure student routines. 

Teachers are asked more and more to expand their online presence, be more accessible, give better feedback, and it better be immediate and up to date. Embedding Twitter within an LMS or class website allows for teachers to more easily post progress, answer questions, and disseminate information. Updating web pages does need to happen from time to time. Outdated information in either an LMS course or website can cause teachers to lose credibility, but the process can be time-consuming and cumbersome. Embedding Twitter into this pre-existing structure gives teachers freedom to update their students, parents, and administrators without the need to reorganize their digital classroom. Utilizing Twitter in this context can also help teachers gather media shared by students, administrators, parents, ect. to enrich their own digital classroom content. In my own classrooms, I have often implored students to take videos and pictures of field trips, experiments, and events and share them with me. Twitter is the ideal platform to facilitate this sharing. A grass-roots network of contributors from the learning community can help create an authentic tone to a digital environment.

What apps do you have installed on your phones, tablets and computers that can be used with Twitter?

Some apps I have on my phone are GoodReads, Spotify, Tumblr, Amazon, and Yelp (after checking in on my phone apps!). I found it interesting that I don’t really use anything besides the Twitter website on my computer in order to access this site, but I am working with TweetDeck currently and love it! It seems like Twitter is a lot bigger of a face on my phone than on any tablet or computer. I’m thinking this has something to do with my age and with my personal familiarity with tech use on my phone. When I tweet from my classroom, I like to add pictures of what we are working on so that people can see and my phone makes that easiest.

What websites do you frequent that have a button that allows you to easily post a Tweet from that page?

A lot of websites I use have a button that links to Twitter, including most notably, YouTube. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of poetry slam videos as warm-ups for my students during our poetry unit, and a lot of students ask for the links (which I try to post on Twitter). Another is GoodReads, which I’ve been using to update on my reading goal progress from 2018 and now, 2019. I like sharing this information on Twitter so that both friends and students can keep up with my reading goals! I also like sending Tumblr posts to Twitter, though I haven’t done it with this blog yet. I’ll have to start forwarding my posts from Tumblr to Twitter. I know they interface easily.

As you start to explore, you will begin to see the power of Twitter and how it as a Web 2.0 tool links with so many other tools. Your blog post for this adventure should detail your adventure in Twitter this week and its possible place in your world as an educator and learner.

I’m happy to report that I have been pretty familiar with Twitter due to a push from my district to start posting more often. We recently got a new superintendent who is very fond of Twitter, so she created a hashtag called #Allin4Aldine that she encourages us to use. I try to use that and tag her (and other ELA teachers/skills specialists/program directors) when I do, so that we can promote our district and our school. Also, since my school is newly opened this year and requires students to apply to certain programs within it, our admin team encourages us to tweet and retweet each other’s posts so we can promote our school. For these purposes, I try to get on Twitter at least once a week to either post something, myself, or to retweet others from my school and district.

As for my week thus far, I’ve been checking up on the #etec527 to try and interact with other people. Sometimes, I just comment on another person’s tweet, but other times I try to retweet with comment in order to make the hashtag more robust. I love having conversations over Twitter with other educators! I really learn a lot. I’ve used it in the past to promote my own Donor’s Choose page with a lot of success as well! 

I ended up spending a lot of time on TweetDeck at the beginning of the week. I had only ever used the main Twitter site, which seems so constricting now. Here’s what I’m loving about it currently:

I can look at my notifications, home screen, trending hashtags, and (best of all) a specific searched term ALL AT ONCE! This is amazing! 

In addition to looking at these pages all at once, you can post from this site and retweet! 

I’ve kept this page open with some search terms like “poetry” or our hashtag for this course in order to keep up with posts. It’s helped immensely with our current poetry unit in class!

I noticed this week that there are some teachers on my campus doing a book study group together via Twitter! They all post about the book called “Educated: a Memoir” by Tara Westover and respond to each other. I’m really interested in trying this in the future!

I noticed a lot of posts from the author of “The Hate U Give” whose name is Angie Thomas. She is very active on Twitter and I’ve started talking to students about how they can communicate with their favorite authors over Twitter. They got really excited by that!

I remembered that I used Twitter not too long ago to participate in a daily hashtag on promoting mentoring of newer teachers by posting some reflections. I got my Skills Specialist to participate with me and was able to tweet with one of my favorite educator websites, Eduphoria! What a great connection to make!

I also remembered that, this past year, students from my last campus tweeted with artist, Travis Scott, and ended up getting him to allow use of his album cover for free for their class t-shirts. He also donated the shirts, themselves!

I hope to continue use of Twitter both personally and for educational use. I know that I’d like to continue use of it as I go from teacher to librarian for sure, especially as librarians tend to be more isolated in the library. I realized that I don’t really use Twitter much for personal use, but that I’d like to do so. I want to stay aware of the fact that teachers and students and parents will be looking at my Twitter and judging my effectiveness based on the content on it. I keep that in mind when I post always. It is, of course, great that Twitter links with so many other websites, but I think its greatest strength is in linking people together.