Derek E. Baird :: Barking Robot

NCSS Position Statement: Media Literacy is an Imperative

In February the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) released a position statement on media literacy, social technology and learning in the digital age. Their conclusion?

"These changes in society and the experiences the students bring into the classroom challenge social studies teachers to change both how and what we teach. One reaction is to fear these changes and try to protect our students from things we don’t understand or appreciate. Such an approach is neither helpful nor pedagogically sound.

Another response is to take advantage instructionally of the wealth of experiences that young people have making media choices by respecting those choices when consistent with democratic principles. Whether we like it or not, this media culture is our students’ culture.”

Today's Students Are Experiencing a Different Childhood

• The digital age requires new skills for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating, and distributing messages within a digital, global, and democratic society.

• The ubiquitous and mobile nature of information and communication technologies has resulted in a world far different from that of those of us whose childhood was once surrounded by large box televisions, rotary dial telephones, and transistor radios.

• What was once characterized as a digital divide has transformed into a digital disconnect. Outside of the classroom young people regularly engage with music and videos via MP3 players, constantly text their friends with their mobile phones, check the latest videos on YouTube, and even upload ones themselves. But, upon entering the classroom they are expected to disengage from this interpersonal, producer-oriented, digital world.

Media Literacy

• Canada, Australia, and Great Britain have taught media literacy for several decades, while the US, the world’s leading producer of media, is far behind.

• These changes in society and the experiences the students bring into the classroom challenge social studies teachers to change both how and what we teach.

• Teaching students to think critically about the content and the form of mediated messages is an essential requirement for social studies education in this millennium.

• Media literacy integrates the process of critical inquiry with the creation of media as students examine, create, and disseminate their own alternative images, sounds, and thoughts.

• Media literacy includes the skills of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating, and distributing messages as well as the cultural competencies and social skills associated with a growing participatory culture.

• Media literacy also includes analysis of ideology and power as students learn how media are used to position audiences and frame public opinion.

• In the 21st century, media literacy is an imperative for participatory democracy because new information/communication technologies and a market-based media culture have significantly reshaped the world.

Media Literacy & the Social Studies Classroom

• Teachers need to expand their notion of “legitimate texts” and realize that it includes popular culture, advertising, photographs, maps, text (SMS) messages, Twitter, movies, video games, Internet, all sorts of hand-held devices and information communication technologies (ICTs) as well as print.

• Students should be presenting their research and learning through interactive multimedia presentations, as Internet blogs, videos, podcasts, Facebook, etc.

• The ability to differentiate between primary and secondary sources or distinguish fact from fiction is now intimately connected to the ability to analyze and create media.

• Social studies educators should provide young people with the awareness and abilities to critically question and create new media and technology, and the digital, democratic experiences, necessary to become active participants in the shaping of democracy.

Related Resources

• NCSS Media Literacy Statement
• Learning Styles 2.0: Digital, Social, and Always On
• mobileYouth: 100 Million Mobile Youth in USA
• Making mLearning Work: Gen Y, Learning & Mobile Technologies
• Social Software & Online Learning Design
• Social Media & Digital Learning Styles
• Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy
  

Mashup Edu: Research on K-12 New Media Literacy

I am pleased to announce that the book chapter that I co-authored with Dr. Mercedes Fisher, "Pedagogical Mashup: Gen Y, Social Media, and Digital Learning Styles," has officially been accepted for publication in the Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges, to be published by IGI Global later this year.

Dr. Fisher and I wish to thank the co-editor of the book, Professor Subramaniam at the National Institute of Education at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, for his hard work and direction during the writing and peer-review process.

In addition, we appreciate all the members of the peer-review committee for their feedback, suggestions and collaboration on this chapter. It's been a wonderful experience to work with members of the international education technology/media community.

We've saved the links for all the resources and references cited in the book chapter over on the social bookmarking tool delicious, which you can find here: http://del.icio.us/mashup.edu

Related Publications by Mercedes Fisher & Derek E. Baird

• Making mLearning Work: Gen Y, Learning & Mobile Technologies
• Social Software & Online Learning Design
• Social Media & Digital Learning Styles
• Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level

Teachers.tv: Kids, Online Safety & Social Networks

Teachers.TV, a UK-based professional development site for educators, has a great video on teaching kids about information literacy, social networking and web safety. This is a refreshingly rational analysis and discussion of the issues surrounding kids, web safety and social media.

This video also outlines several classroom activities that teachers can use with their students (and parents) to help them gain a better understanding and awareness of the potential dangers of sharing too much information in social networks.

Related Resources

• Digizen: Digital Citizenship
• Connect Safely
• Yahoo! Safely
• BJ Fogg on Web Credibility
• eSchool News: Online Safety Myths

Mash it Up: Internet Explorer & del.icio.us

Earlier today the Yahoo! Search blog announced a new social bookmarks mash up between del.icio.us and Internet Explorer web browser. Here's the scoop:

"The del.icio.us team has announced an early beta release of the del.icio.us bookmarks extension for Internet Explorer.

The extension works on IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 beta for both XP and Vista. Check out the del.icio.us blog for more background.

To download and discuss the Internet Explorer release, head over to the delicious-ie-extension group. The team is eager to hear your feedback, so be sure to share your thoughts."

Related Resources

• Yahoo! Search Blog
• del.icio.us
• Tech Toolbox: Getting Started with del.icio.us
• LearnHub > del.icio.us 101

Atomic Learning & Education 2.0

Atomic Learning is offering its Web 2.0 for Educators workshop free of charge for the month of November. The Web 2.0 workshop discusses blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social networking and other online tools.

The workshop was created by Vicki Davis, a classroom teacher who has been recognized for her innovative use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom and for her Cool Cat Teacher blog. Vicki is a talented and innovative teacher and I know that you will learn a lot from her workshop!

Related Resources

• Atomic Learning > Web 2.0 workshop
• Totally Wired
• Atomic Learning Workshops
• Generation Sputnik, Gen Y & Education

Mashup Edu: A New Digital Pedagogy

Dr. Mercedes Fisher and I just finished a new book chapter titled "Pedagogical Mashup: Social Media, Gen Y and Digital Learning Styles" that will be published early next year. I'll have more details in a future post, but in the meantime I wanted to share the bounty of resources we culled together for the article.

We've saved the links for all the resources and references cited in the book chapter over on the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, which you can find here: http://del.icio.us/mashup.edu

If you have any questions, or know of a great Education 2.0 resource that we should include, let us know!

Related Articles by Mercedes Fisher & Derek E. Baird

• Making mLearning Work: Gen Y, Learning & Mobile Technologies
• Social Software & Online Learning Design
• Social Media & Digital Learning Styles

Digital Learning Styles, Gen Y & Yahoo!

Related Resources

• Yahoo! for Teachers + Slideshare 
• Slideshare Group > Yahoo! for Teachers
• Yahoo! for Teachers
• Learning Styles 2.0: Digital, Social, and Always On

TutorLinker: Connecting Knowledge

Don Hazelwood, one of my Flickr peeps and teacher friends, recently shared a link with me via the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for a company called TutorLinker.

TutorLinker is an interesting concept that connects tutee's and tutors via a zip code Google Maps mash-up. The results are displayed on the map and tutee's can easily locate a tutor to teach them just about anything. The tutors have a profile page that displays their hourly rate and areas of expertise.

Right now the service is currently available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Don't fret, TutorLinker has plans to launch soon in Western Europe. I'm hopeful that the U.K. and Ireland are on the "to be launched" road map soon.

What a fantastic idea.

As far as I can tell, this is a win-win situation. Students in need of some extra help can easily find subject matter experts, and the tutors (many who are professional educators) are able to connect with students who need a little extra help. And the teachers are able to be paid for their expertise. Brilliant!

Tech Toolbox: Getting Started with del.icio.us

 

Yahoo! Teachers 2007: Scenes from the Road

I just thought I'd give you an update on what the Yahoo! Teachers team has been up to the last few hectic weeks!

June 17: We held a Yahoo! Teachers workshop for teachers in the San Jose/Evergreen School District. This was a great event and they were really impressed with Yahoo! Teachers and the Gobbler.

June 22: The entire Yahoo! Teachers team headed to Atlanta to attend NECC 2007! This is the largest educational computing conference in the country and we met teachers from all over the country.

Our booth was jammed packed with teachers wanting to see the Gobbler in action! This was a great week and our first big showing of Yahoo! for Teachers!

We had a great time in Atlanta. Bill's edict is that we "eat local" when we travel. One of the highlights of the trip was our team dinner at Gladys Knight Chicken and Waffles. We were a little tired and slap happy, so this made it even more fun.

We had a great bounty of Southern goodness on our table: fried chicken, waffles, collard greens, mac and cheese, fried corn, oh fresh lima beans and of course sweet tea! Being Yahoos, the moment our food arrived we whipped out our cameras so we could Flickr our food before we ate it!

July 2: Off to the windy city! Our Yahoo! Teachers Chicago workshop was held at the University of Chicago. We had a wonderful group of teachers from around Illinois attend the workshop. We also had several teachers from NECC 2007 come to the workshop. We were hoping for an Obama sighting, but sadly we struck out.

One of the most amazing new Yahoo! Teachers drove all the way from Alabama to attend the workshop. Karon and I were floored and honored that she would make that long drive to learn more about Yahoo! for Teachers. Again, we had some terrific projects come out of this workshop.

July 11: The Big Apple welcomed Yahoo! Teachers and we held two workshops at the NYC Yahoo! HQ. This was an amazing cadre of educators from all over the region. Teachers came from Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

We met several educators who are blogging about technology in the classroom and using social media in interesting and innovative ways to support learning in the classroom.

We were also thrilled to have Sue Wright and Greg Crum join us at our NYC workshops. They were great advocates for Yahoo! Teachers and they had a great time meeting colleagues from the other side of the country! Thanks Greg and Sue!

July 13: After a whirlwind couple of days in NYC, Karon and I headed off to Washington D.C. to present Yahoo! for Teachers to the American Federation of Teachers. Our group of teachers hailed from Minnesota, Montana, DC, Virginia and New York.

In fact, we had standing room only and left with a long list of teachers who want to sign up as alpha teachers. We were thrilled to have such a positive reception from the AFT community.

Speaking of the AFT, they have a lot of great resources on their site, including resources to help educators teach about the crisis in Darfur.

July 16: Karon and I headed to San Francisco to attend the YPulse Mashup. This is a conference that focuses around how tweens and teens use technology.

We were thrilled to share Yahoo! Teachers with the Mashup crowd and show how educators can use Yahoo! Teachers to connect with other teachers and gain the skills and confidence they need to use 21st century tools in their classrooms.

We had the honor to meet with Lisa and Pearl from the Schwab Learning Foundation. This is a wonderful organization that provides information and resources to teachers/kids/parents on learning difficulties (LD).

They have a wonderful site, including an online library, full of articles, research and other information to help students with learning difficulties. They have a special site for kids called, SparkTop, where kids with LD can come and connect with other kids

We also presented Ben Wilkoff, a teacher from Denver, Colorado, with the first Yahoo! Teachers/Edutopia Totally Wired Teacher Award. Congrats to Ben!

July 17: Hey Austin! Here we come.......Wendy Heller, Karon and I headed off to Austin to hold a workshop at the University of Texas @ Austin. Wow. Talk about totally wired! The teachers at the Austin workshop were very tech savvy and caught the vision of Yahoo! Teachers in a big, big way.

Then again, everything--including vision--is big in Texas!

All work and no play? No way. While in Austin we checked out the Story of Texas state history museum and tracked down the best BBQ join in Austin. Where? That would be Iron Works. Yum. Yum. Yum.

Where next? That would be San Diego! On Saturday we will be holding our final summer workshop at the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.

We come off this workshop and conference tour with a new found appreciation for all the wonderful educators out there who are striving every day in the classroom to help their students acquire the knowledge and skills they will need to be contributing members of society.
Stay tuned, we are just getting started.......

Cheers!

Derek, Karon and the entire Yahoo! Teachers team

Related Resources

• Yahoo! Teachers + Flickr
• Yahoo! Teachers > Get an Invite
• Yahoo! Teachers + Upcoming
• Yahoo! Teachers + del.icio.us
• Yahoo! Teachers + Jumpcut

Teacher Hacks: Share What You Know

Teacher Hacks is a wonderful blog written by Jackie, a middle school science teacher and learning consultant. In addition, she is also a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescent Science. Jackie recently attended the Yahoo! Teachers NYC Workshop and is a brilliant, insightful and bleeding edge educator.

Reading blogs is an easy way to "tap into" others knowledge and share what you know. This process-–known as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)—moves the newcomer deeper into a community of practice leading them closer to acquiring the knowledge and skills required to be an expert.

If you're not already reading Teacher Hacks, why not start?

Social Media + Gen Y Learning

The use of current and emerging social media technology is clearly moving us in the education community closer towards Tim Berners-Lee’s ideal of using the web as "an information space through which people can communicate…by sharing their knowledge in a pool.”

In this world of increased web-based social interaction, meeting the unique needs of Gen Y learning styles is the bottom line.  In the 21 Century classroom, the ‘always on,’ student will control the how, what, and when a task is completed.

Gen Y students expect interactive, engaging content and course material that motivates them to learn through challenging pedagogy, conceptual review, and learning style adaptation. This approach offers Gen Y learners flexible, self-paced, customizable content available on-demand (via RSS feeds or Pipes).

Interactive and engaging content motivates students to learn through the course materials and apply them according to their own intrinsic needs and learning goals.

However, educators should be careful not to use social networking for the sake of using social media, rather they should keep in mind how the use of any type of technology element can support student learning--individually and as a collective group.

Social media engages the user in the content and allows them to be included as an active participant as they construct a learning landscape rooted in social interaction, knowledge exchange, and optimum cognitive development with their peers.

Teaching Toolbox: del.icio.us

This is a fantastic tutorial on using del.icio.us in the classroom! Social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us are a great and easy way to find those hidden threads of community knowledge. Give it a try--soon you'll wonder how you lived on the web with out it!

Video originally uploaded on YouTube by jutecht on March 8, 2006.

mynoteIT: Social Notetaking

mynoteIT is an extremely powerful social search utility for students. Since mynoteIT is web-based, you can store all your class notes and other information in one place, and access it anywhere in the world instantly. It's like del.ic.ious for your notes.

One of the coolest features of mynoteIT are the Workspace Utilities which "allow you to lookup the definition of a word, and translate words or sentences between languages, all in real-time while taking or editing notes." How slick is that? And a time saver too!

mynoteIT also provides a way for students to search and share your notes with friends and/or other members of their collegiate community. You can e-mail your notes, send them through mynoteIT, or use an unique URL link to your notes. Some other cool mynoteIT features include:

• Upcoming assignment reminder
• mynoteIT Groups
• Track comments on notes
• Make notes private or public
• To-do lists
• Grade Tracker

All in all mynoteIT is a fantastic new social search learning tool and one that I'm sure a lot of students--both in high school and college--will be taking advantage of this school year. It would be great to see mynoteIT's social notetaking application mashed-up with a student social networking site like Facebook, Univillage , or StudentFace.

It's important to note (no pun intended) that mynoteIT is still in beta and is subject to tweaks, bugs, and changes. It looks like the mynoteIT team and their social notetaking service is off to a fast start, and undoubtedly will find many friends and admirers in the education community.

RSS 101: Using RSS in Education

What the heck is RSS?

Rich Site Summary (RSS) technology is an XML based format that provides the backbone for the distribution of weblog, podcasting, and other content.

RSS allows users to easily syndicate or publish their content for use by others. And conversely, it provides a way for users to easily subscribe and read content (blogs, podcasts, news, photos) published by other people or organizations.

And these days, most social media applications provide users with an RSS feed to publish their content on the web. This includes most blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking, and photo sharing social networks and communities.

After a user subscribes to a RSS feed, the content (blogs, websites, online community groups) automatically updates and is displayed in a RSS feed reader. There are several free news readers (also called aggregator) available, including Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and Rojo. The new Yahoo! Mail allows you to read RSS feeds right in your Yahoo! mailbox.

How do I use RSS to support instruction?

A key benefit is the users ability to pick and choose (subscribe) to a particular RSS feed and then have the content updated in real time. In this manner, RSS is an important educational media tool to facilitate and support the “always on” learning styles of millennials.

RSS readers allow students to self-publish and share their content feed with members of their learning community. The use of RSS further supports millennial learning styles by allowing the user to select which content is relevant and then have it delivered directly to them for "on demand" viewing at their convenience.

As an assessment tool, RSS feeds provide teachers with several benefits. For example, instructors can subscribe to each students RSS feed and have their homework delivered directly into their aggregator, saving them the time consuming task of entering each student’s URL in order to view their e-portfolio or blog.

A Modest Proposal: RSS @ University of Oklahoma

In her recent blog post, RSS and a Modest Proposal for OU, Laura Gibbs threw out a challenge to the academic community at the University of Oklahoma to fully embrace the use of blogs and RSS technology in the classroom.

While some OU departments are already using RSS technology to distribute and share information, for the most part the academic ecosystem at OU hasn't readily embraced RSS, blogs or other types of social media.

At the core of her her modest proposal, Laura feels that "every college on campus should have a blog with an RSS feed. That way we could all subscribe to news and actually know what is going on here at OU, something more than just football. Personally, I think every tenured faculty member should be required to keep a blog..."

Amen Laura. I couldn't agree more!

So as a new school year begins to unfold, why not follow Laura's example and issue a modest RSS and blogging proposal to your community of practice?

If you haven't already, go ahead and set up a class blog and RSS feed. Then help others in your department or school do the same. It may not seem like much, but it's a start...

RSS Resources

• University of Oklahoma Library + RSS
• Wikipedia > RSS
• Feed 101
• Bloglines: A Quick Tour of Bloglines
• Ed Media Lab + RSS