Future Vision project and Reflection

I appreciated this course for its professional learning network.  I started out this course with concerns of my first-time use of Prezi in a grade 6/7 class.  Initially the review of literature for my blog (Jan 19^th and 24th) supported my idea that Prezi would assist in student learning.  The encouragement from my course colleagues, that my student’s would enjoy using Prezi and they would be able to navigate the site easily, helped to reduce my anxiety of introducing a new program.  Tips on how to have students sign-in, and how to see their work in progress were very useful.  Learning that Prezi can be built collaboratively by students when students share access to a Prezi, opens the possibly for me to use different teaching formats in the future.  Right now (or at least in a few moments when I finish this post), I am marking some wonderful inquiry research projects on extreme environments that my students created on Prezi!

I have clearly heard that my experience with finding and selecting French language

resources for immersion schools, and the feedback from my teachers on their appropriateness would be useful to share to create a larger PLN for myself.  When I review the hits on my blog, they are mostly 10 to 20, but the one on “Sources of reviews of French language resources” (Feb 6, 2014) has over 130 hits.  I know a lot of this traffic was encouraged by Aaron’s retweet.  By looking at hits, I have also learned that sharing my knowledge is a combination of Twitter and Blogging.  As Aaron said “one is the River” of streaming knowledge and the other is "the shore” of socially created knowledge that readers can return to.  The importance of Twitter in sharing and learning was re-emphasized by a recent Twitter post by Jon Campbell (@MrCampbell57, Apr 4) “Twitter might be the second biggest source of Pro-d info I have after my colleagues in the prep room, #edfling”.  I see this as my post-course challenge to develop a larger PLN than my School District, by reaching out with Twitter and Blogging.

 

http://www.inuksite.com
 

I was very pleased that I could do a final project that met course requirements, but also met the needs of teachers of French immersion community in my School District.  Here is my final vision,  a list of recommended websites appropriate for kindergarten and primary French immersion students.  I have curated my recommended websites on Delicious.  Or I should say the “first draft of my final vision” as I continue to receive teacher feedback and hear of new websites to include.  As usual, I appreciated that we did background research before starting our project.  One quote that I found, that kept been repeated in my mind as I curated these websites (blog March 4) was “activities should provide context to help the students create meaning of the vocabulary, which brain research, has shown helps students learn and retain information” (Characteristics of Young Learners 2009).  To finalize this project, I will add these sites to our school website to assist students in accessing and using these resources.    

I loved the collegiality of this course!  I think using Google+  for chats and being able to visually meet my colleagues really helped me build my PLN.  I look forward to meeting you in person at future Teacher-Librarian or Teacher conferences.  Thanks for your energy!

References:

Characteristics of Young Learners.  2009.  Pearson Education.  Retrieved March 12, 2014 from http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205535488.pdf

Jon Campbell.  April 4, 2014.  Twitter post retrieved from https://twitter.com/MrCampbell57 .

Technology and other considerations

So my idea was to curate websites. I read an interesting article on content curation that challenged teacher librarians to provide value-added curating rather than just collecting (White 2012).  To add value, a clear list of sorting objectives is required, I used the ones that I had outlined in my vision post (March 9, 2014).

I then looked at different ways to curate these resources, one of my PLN members suggested Jog the Web (2014). Before I started using this resource, I checked online to see what other resources are available for this task.  Well, I found out the list was endless (Ragan2013) and many tools seemed to be more for aggregation of personally selected information, for example of Twitter, newsfeeds, etc. rather than curation of content in a more traditional library sense.  Some, like Pearltrees, seemed to just collect the website link, visually, but not allow for commentary; or at least the examples I looked at.

So I started entering my data in my old standby Excel spreadsheet, and then I transferred it into Jog the Web.  It definitely was more time consuming to have 2 steps, but the advantage of the columns in Excel was it clearly allowed me to list my selection criteria (oral instructions, grade levels, content, cost, etc) and thus reminded me to evaluate each resource for all these features.  It also helped when I moved the information into Jog the Web, as I had clarified my summary format in my mind, and settled on recommended and not recommended.  I also had a clearer idea of the variety of websites and realized that sites which had only some features that I was looking for I did not need to recommend since there were many better websites.  Then I found out that Jog the Web has to create second pages after 20 items are entered, making the process more cumbersome. Also my limited bandwidth made the saving of information slow.  A good feature is that I could order my best choices at the top with the ordering tool on Job the Web

Next I tried Aaron’s suggestion of Delicious, to see if I could speed up the entry process.  And now I am back to tagging, which isn’t the kind of sorting I wanted, but I could definitely add a tag for recommended or not recommended.  My intention was to create a short list for my teachers to review and put selected ones on my school website.  I wanted the complete list so I knew if I had already rated the website.  However when I share my Delicious links I would have to tell the evaluating teachers that they need to sort the links by the recommended tag, a bit fussy when I am asking for help.  So on Delicious I just put the short list.  However, I must have been tired when trying to share Delicious as it appeared I could only share it with Delicious members.  So to actually send the project out for some feedback I sent it out with the easy to find hyperlink in Jog the Web version which has the preferred websites listed as the top 16.

So my challenge will be to get feedback, even if I had started earlier it wouldn’t be much different since my school was on a 2 week spring break.  I will wait a couple of days and if nothing comes I will share my recommended list with the class and have our school website designer add them all to our school website, which is sorted into primary/intermediate.  Thanks to Jane, I do have some valuable feedback. 

References:

Delicious. Retrieved April 2, 2014 from https://delicious.com/
Jog the web. March 31, 2014. http://www.jogtheweb.com/
Ragan. 2013. 15 top –notch content curation tools.  Retrieved March 31, 2014 from http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/15_topnotch_content_curation_tools_15378.aspx
White, Nancy. July 2012.   Understanding content curation.  Reviewed March 30, 2014 on http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/