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Powerful Ingredients for Digitally Interactive Learning

Good teaching is similar in many ways to good cooking. Recipes are helpful, but master cooks often modify those to meet different needs and situations. The same is true for teachers. If we extend this analogy of cooking to teaching and learning in a web 2.0 world, what are the best "ingredients" to use as we help both teachers and students learn to be more effective, safe, and powerful communicators in our flat world? In this working session we will focus on six key ingredients: del.icio.us social bookmarks, Flickr photo sharing, VoiceThread digital storytelling, collaborative writing tools, websites for phone recording as well as SMS polling, and videoconferencing. Cooking can be intimidating for novices, but richly rewarding. Let's learn to cook up some gourmet learning with some powerful (and free) web 2.0 tools!

Last updated 7/9/2008 by Wesley Fryer.

Scheduled as the Keynote address at MODLA on 9 July 2008 - Presentation slides are availalbe as a PDF.
Presented at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma on December 28th
Part I of this workshop from December 17, 2007 in Richardson, Texas, is available as an audio-only podcast. (53 min, 5 sec)

Poll for today:

Ingredients

Social bookmarks (my del.icio.us)
Images: Compelling, legally useable digital images (Flickr Creative Commons, my Flickr)
"Minimal click" digital storytelling
Collaborative Writing Tools: Wikis and Google Docs
The Phone: Audio recording, Polling, more
Videoconferencing (H.323 and Skype)

Litmus Tests for 21st Century Educator Professional Development

More workshop time is spent DOING/PRACTICING rather than LISTENING.
Handouts are not printed: Instead a single URL is provided for all resources.
Knowledge products are created by participants.
Opportunties to extend and continue learning online are provided.
Technology ABUSE is avoided: Interactive tools are used interactively (synchronous / non-interactive moments are avoided)

Top Digital Tools?

Blog post question responses (12/17/2007)
Top 100 Tools by Popularity (July/August 2007 - poll by Jane Hart in England’s Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies)

1. del.icio.us social bookmarks

delicious-quickstart.pdf
"Social Bookmarks 101" - TechEdge Article: HTML or PDF
Most basic uses of the web: Locate and share information on websites
"Traditional" (if we can use that term to describe something just a few years old) methods for saving websites included saving bookmarks or favorites to a local computer's hard drive using a web browser. This was great but inherently limited, since those saved websites could ONLY be accessed on ONE COMPUTER with the ONE WEB BROWSER in which they were saved.
In contrast, social bookmarking involves the use of web-based services to save and share Internet bookmarks. Social bookmarks are MUCH MORE POWERFUL because they allow MULTIPLE COMPUTERS to access them, MULTIPLE PEOPLE to access them, and through tagging (adding metadata) lead to the organic creation of folksonomies of web links.
Collections of web links organized by their tags are sometimes called tag clouds. Examples include:
WikiPedia's updated list of social software has a list of over 20 different social bookmarking services.
My favorite (and the tool I've invested in, with over 2800 saved and shared bookmarks to date) is del.icio.us. I like del.icio.us' ease of use, the large user base which makes social sharing / networking / discovery of similar links very powerful, and its support of RSS standards. My del.icio.us network is a dynamic list of links shared by others whose interests are close to mine. It's always easy to find great, new, web resources in my del.icio.us network! :-)
To get started using del.icio.us, register for a free account.
Add the del.icio.us browser buttons to the web browser(s) you use most often to make it easy to add new URLs to your account. This page describes other options for bookmarking with del.icio.us (including a FireFox extension.)
Feel free to add me (wfryer) to your del.icio.us network!