My Module 4 Triggering Question" What digital tools are available for high school students to begin to build a "life curiosities" portfolio and their own personal online repository of essential links and resources?
As I've continued in this week of chimerical research, I have begun to realize that the tool I am envisioning for my students - and all life-long learners - does not yet exist. This makes for a disappointing end to a summer filled with exciting research discoveries vis-a-vis education technology integration. Nevertheless, what follows is a sketch of my ideas for this app - I am building in my mind - and if some web developer out there reads this and wants to run with this idea... awesome! Just hit me up so I can weigh in on some of the functionality and design ideas.
The gist of this app is a personalized encyclopedia where students could store, share, annotate and journal about ALL the essential web resources, links and personal work that they amass over the years. It could be called encycUpedia. It's not perfect, but it's getting there. I originally thought of APPademic, but that is already the name of a web developer in Australia...nothing new under the sun.
I believe that encycUpedia could exist for three primary functions: 1) a microblogger (think Tumblr/Blogger) - sharing academic and professionally related ideas with the your networks; 2) note-taking, annotating, organizing and journaling (think Evernote); 3) building a library (private) and profile (public) that students could leverage for future academic and/or professional endeavors ambitions (think LinkedIn-ish).
EncycUpedia would offer both public social media integration (for SAVING & ORGANIZING links and resources) as well as for public posting and connecting. Additionally, it would have a private posting and journaling function where people could process their own personal, half-baked thoughts and work through ideas before vomiting them out in their perfunctory, respective echo chambers (*tear - remember when we didn't feel compelled to share our every thought we have online?!).
Students could save personal work digital files and links as well as uploads (pics, video, scans) of analog work as well. Basically, this online repository would become each student's personalized, annotated and integrated encyclopedia. Such a tool could aid in the efficiency of keeping track of past work and valued resources for future work. Students could have a folder with all of their favorite TED Talks and the annotations and notes.
Everything, I mean everything would be tagged with a label - much like the label function with Blogger or a #hastag on social media. The critical difference however is that these labels would all be private and local to your own personal encycUpedia library. How much time do we all waste RE-researching things online!?! This app's ability to search and sort by personal labels could change the way we cross-reference and refer back to previous ideas and relevant work.
I like the on-the-go toolbars that Evernote and Tumblr offer for multimedia microblogging (social) and note-taking or journaling (private).
Tumblr Toolbar (for the social/public functions)
Evernote Toolbar (note-taking/journals private functions)
Criticisms of Tumblr & Evernote
Tumblr has however, become so niche and despite what this article explains about private posts, its primary functionality is sharing and liking and sharing cutesy and frivolous musings.
There are some outstanding functions within Evernote that would be worthwhile teaching and showing to my students. Here are two I especially dig:
Yet, after Evernote changed their business model last year, they've effectively priced themselves out of students being the target audience. I have serious doubts about how accessible Evernote will be for students. It is too expensive ($$$).
A Basic (free) membership limits users to 60MB of data uploaded to their account per month. This is miniscule. For context, 60 seconds of video recorded on your iPhone (before any compression) is roughly 130MB. That effectively restricts a basic user to text and maybe some audio file uploading.
But the "PLUS" membership is not much better. For $35/year you are still limited to 1GB upload/month. This is ridiculous.
And despite my excitement about the WEB CLIPPER tool that Evernote touts as "replacing the need to bookmark websites" (we'll see about that). I just don't think Evernote is quite what I envision encycUpedia could be.
References
Evernote Plus (2017). Membership Details and Functionality. Retrieved from: https://evernote.com/plus
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