This is an article by Audrey Watters for Edutopia. It is a great overview & guide for teachers on the fence about using wikis with their students.

• Why Wikis Still Matter | Edutopia

  Wiki is a Hawai’ian word meaning “fast” or “quick.” As a technology platform, Ward Cunningham installed the very first wiki on the Web in 1995. That was two years before the word “weblog” was coined (and four years before that term was shortened to “blog”). Wikis predate Facebook and Twitter by roughly a decade. At sixteen years old, the wiki predates almost every other social media tool (other than email, of course, which historians of technology say turns 40 this year). Why then, in the face of rapidly changing technology — all the new bells and whistles and Web 2.0 tools — should we still use wikis?

  tags: article wikis edutopia edtech

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Just want to let you know that I appreciate being allowed to talk at your staff meeting. And again, if you think I can help out with tech integration in your classroom don’t hesitate to email me. We’ll always have YouWho.

Here’s a link to my Diigo account, specifically the tag Education. That long list of blogging educators, Support Blogging, is in there.

Even on vacation I’m able to keep up with what some of the leading tech educators are thinking and doing – via Twitter. The video above, from the always great CommonCraft, is a great explanation of a difficult topic. (And if you follow back to ‘Twitter in Plain English’ on the CommonCraft site you’ll see the power of comments at work too.)

Educators, if you are timid, don’t be – there are a ton of us out here & we all want to connect. Just watch for awhile, then jump in. See you all next week.

Links:

Twitter
CommonCraft
Twitter in Plain English – main entry

I was in a meeting today (IIC! – get it?) and Principal Swanson said he had a link that he would email all of us. I saw my chance & I took it. You see, John has blog – but John doesn’t have a Delicious.com account. I said (piped in, really) that if John had a delicious.com account he could just tag the link he intended to email us & we’d have instant access to the information.

This is pertinent to us. Everyone in district has been calling for both better communication & more time to get our work done. There are a ton of Web2.0 sites that help automate our everyday tasks to save us time, stress, et cetera.

Delicious is a social networking site for bookmarks. Instead of saving them on your machine you save them  in an online account. That is one advantage. The bigger advantage is the social thing. Your account is public so you can share it. You can see other people’s Delicious account. You can network with like minded people quickly & find resources you never would have time to find on your own.

But back to John – I said you can share bookmarks on Delicious, but it’s elegance with which you can share information that I think is the site’s real power. Delicious takes full advantage of both ‘Tags’ & ‘RSS’.

Tags are a Web2.0 concept that works as sort of a method to catalog information. On blogs authors ‘Tag’ their own post & following conventions of the Read/Write web to help people find their stuff. For instance, I’ll tag this post with the following words: delicious, edtech, web2.0, collaboration. I know that other ed bloggers use those same tags & since we want to spread these concepts we use tags to make our information easier to find.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication. It’s what allows all these sites to work together, to pull in content, to share information, even to send your podcast to iTunes – for free! As an example I have set up an RSS feed to a tag from my Delicious account. If you go to the left navigation & scroll down just past the badge for Classroom2.0 you’ll see an RSS feed for Web2.0. Click on it. All that comes from my Delicious account. The beautiful thing is that I set it up once and from now on when I tag something ‘web2.0′ in Delicious it will automatically be feed to this spot here at ElasTECHlearning.

Link: Delicious

Just a quick note thinking back to my first meeting with the North Cook Tech Directors on Friday. A couple of colleagues will not answer tech questions, even from central admin or principals, that can be solved using a web search (Google) or various kinds of web tools (forums, blogs, Twitter?). I’m new here and don’t think I have that kind of courage…yet.

Anyone else able to work like this?

I’m going to be talking today about blogging in education to the CCSD 62 Instructional Services team. I thought I would write a new post to them, then low & behold I see that one of my current favorite bloggers, Jeff Utecht, just wrote about this same topic! Jeff is the Technology Specialist for the Shanghai American School. He is also a very clear & concise writer.

In Jeff’s most recent post, Communicating from the Classroom, he talks about teachers starting off using blogs as a simple classroom website. The allure here is the ease of use afforded by (most) blogging platforms. Posting homework, files, & reminders are all super simple. But there is a transformation to be made.

Now, before I go any further I say they “use blogs” but that doesn’t mean they are blogging. I do believe there is a difference. Teachers find the ease of which you can setup a web site and post new content using a blogging program simple and straight forward.

This is also an idea that Will Richardson writes about a lot.

When I post to my blog, it not only has a chance to be read by a billion people, it also lives on in the Google-able and Technorati-able world of content. It also gets linked to by other people having other conversations. And it also creates a real sense of ownership of the ideas and the membership in the community.

I know this transformation is hard to get your head around. Don’t I just want to connect with my students? My parents? My community?

If you look at the Illinois State Standards, or the NETS Standards for that matter,  you can start to see the power of blogging. The ability for us to communicate with our students, connect to outside experts, primary sources, fact checkers, or just other frames of reference allow us to revisit & revise or argue & authenticate!

Other educators are asking the same questions we are: How do I teach this? How can I invigorate learning in my class? How can I possibly help get my school off the AYP watch list?

Using a blog as your daily planner of classroom activity is a great idea. So is connecting to other people and engaging in reflective conversation, using new tools for learning in class (nod to John Davitt!), and enhancing everyone’s understanding of information literacy.

At Extended Council today we talked about the problem of communication within the district. We can solve a lot of these problems if we can cultivate a vibrant blogging community in CCSD 62. A large communication problem seems to exist with the amount of district wide email is sent, requiring teachers, administrators and other staff to use their email inbox as a sort of digital filing cabinet. And I agree, that’s a poor way to manage information – after a day that information is buried under a mountain of new information.

I suggest that if you can write an email message, you can post the same information in a blog. The important difference being that the information you post on a blog now exists on the web and can be referenced much more easily. Further, it can be borrowed, forwarded, elaborated on, revisted, re-used, refuted…just a thought!

I just talked to the CCSD principals today about blogs, and since nobody kicked me out of the meeting I’m feeling pretty good. Since we will be working together to become comfortable with this I thought I’d post CommonCraft’s Blogs in Plain English video here. CommonCraft have great intructional videos explaining these modern web technologies, but it is up to educational communities to adapt them for our specific purposes.

In the hands of skilled teachers blogs become powerful tools for authentic writing, but they are also great touchstones to build relationships with other experts, which helps us connect to primary sources, vet information, or work collaboratively. Think about the abaility to publish your work or you class’ work to a worldwide audience; what can you do with this work that you couldn’t without the use of technology?

This post is directed to CCSD 62 LMC Specialists & Assistants.

I am still learning the ins & outs of the district, so I didn’t realize the number of building meetings Monday. At first it seemed like a good time for us all to meet, for me to get to know you, but now it seems like there are too many conflicts. I think you have a regularly scheduled meeting September15 – if I could attend that…

By way of introduction – if you’d like to have a face-to-face meeting now or anytime, do this – download Skype & create an account. Once you do that add me to your Skype contacts. You can search for Seth Bowers & I’m the one in Chicago. Or just add me. My account/Skype name is ssbowers. Also, I have a link to my Skype Status in the left navigation of this page. For the uninitiated, Skype is a free, VOIP service. It allows you to call, videochat, or text chat from computer to computer. You can record calls to create podcasts and collaborate with others around the world. For a small fee, $25-$30 I think, you can also get a real phone number that regular phones can call, call regular phones, have voice mail, have your phones forward calls to your Skype account, et cetera. Pretty cool. I still just use the free version though. So call me.

Getting down to business, the district did not purchase a library automation system (Alexandria) over the summer. Let’s approach this as an opportunity. We’ve been given the go ahead from Susan to proceed & get a tool in place, and I have agreed to incorporate textbook inventory as well. I think that if we can get a handle on what percent of total books we have to replace district wide the new tool will pay for itself by the second year.

To that end we have Bob Cook from Follet coming in to do a demo on September 11. If you are interested in attending please let me know. I am also working with Dave Stephens of Alexandria to demo their product – but Dave is out of town at the moment so more information on that later. You’ll be invited to that too.

What I would like to see happen is to get a solution in place by the end of September, give them approximately three months to work on importing our database, and then get some college kids in over the holiday break to start on textbook inventory. By the end of the year we should be able to conduct inventories of the LMCs in a reasonable amount of time. Did I mention we plan on getting the good scanners with on-board memory?

Moving right along, thanks for visiting my blog! This is my preferred method of delivering content on the web. It is easy, lithe, and fast, and lets educators get in, create content, and get out. This blog (ElasTECHlearning.com) is owned by CCSD 62 but housed by Edublogs. We have it for the whole district. If you are interested, head to our home page to launch your blog. If you would like a personal assistant to get started all you have to do is call (Skype, phone, email, Twitter!) and I’ll come running.  I see this as the platform for educators to communicate & collaborate. We will start linking district blogs to www.d62.org, probably under the email link on the individual schools staff list entries. Mine will probably best fit under Services > Technology, but I am open to redirection. I think we can make a case for placing a principal’s blog & and LMC blog on the home page of each school – but we can work through this together.

If you are interested in reading some assorted blogs of other educators peruse some of the links I have in my blogroll. That’s the name of the list of links on the right side of this page – the one that starts with Alan November.  By the way, I also serve as a consultant for Alan. If you head to his homepage NovemberLearning.com (different than his blog on the right) you can find me under Our Services > NL Team Consultants.

This is already obnoxiously long. I apologize! Leave me a Comment below if you like (I would like!) and launch your blog if you’re ready – or just give a jingle. Sorry about Canceling the Monday meeting – but a lot of you have conflicts. If you have Monday afternoon open I’m happy to come to your building.  -S

Youtube can be a great resource. It can also be a scary place to direct students. But a lot of people don’t know that you can post Youtube videos and disallow the direct connection to Youtube. Below I’ve posted one of my favorite videos. When posting it, instead of grabbing the embed code right off the main site I clicked Customize. There you have the option not to include related videos, plus you can play around with the color scheme.

The video is called The Machine Is Us/ing Us or sometimes Web2.0 in Just Under 5 Minutes. It’s by Mike Wesch who is an A.P. of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Visit his site here: MediatedCultures.

Enjoy the video, it’s worth repeated watching & reflecting.