EDTC 6431 - Critical Thinking & Problem Solving (ISTE 4)

ISTE 4 - “Collect and analyze data to identify solutions and/or make informed decisions."

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

EDTC 6431 - Cultural Understanding & Global Awareness (ISTE 2)

ISTE 2 - Communication & Collaboration: "Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.”

My Module 2 Trigger Question: "What are the best online resources to introduce global awareness and facilitate community and dialogue between my students and their international peers?"

This week offered an exploration of some exciting resources that will provide the basis for substantial declarative knowledge-building where global perspectives and awareness are concerned. And, additionally, I found some powerful resources for collaboration and community on an international scale for my students to experience just how small and interconnected their world is.

On the declarative knowledge and global perspectives front...As I began to do my investigation, I encountered a resource and organization that played a major role in my online media literacy course in DC: the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Their mission so closely parallels my pursuit of journalism and history helping to give a "voice to the voiceless." They have dedicated resources to teaching journalism, global perspectives and driving experiential learning by bringing in journalists to classrooms all over the United States. Across the 3 years I worked with them in DC, we had on average 3 journalist presenters a semester that came into present and have workshops with my students or my US Government mentor teacher's classes. Our student loved the immediacy and purpose of the detailed and embedded journalism of the Pulitzer Center's journalists.

Also a substantial resource they provide are the CCSS-aligned lesson plans found on their website and the long-form narrative multimedia journalism that their grantees have created. I have used many of these multimedia projects in my class that investigate deep and off the beaten path issues that include: the millennials who live underground in China, the millions of people will live and work in the defunct garbage dump in Dandora, Kenya and the First Nation Residential Schools of Canada. Each of these topics in more in depth journalism and personal narrative storytelling that most students and adults are frankly familiar with. I have often described their work to people as Vice News with heart. Their work will continue to be a stellar resource for powerful global perspective and informing on issues that few people are paying attention to.

I am also intrigued by the focus on global perspective-taking using the resources and lessons produced by National Geographic which explores: The Debate Over Globalization. The National Geographic incorporates its compelling visual media and powerful storytelling to create this focused one hour lesson plan and materials geared toward middle and high school students to investigate the perspectives and arguments with substantial evidence

Lastly, the resource I am most excited about is one completely new to me that the US Department of Education created. They have compiled a list of international lesson plans and collaborative projects with teachers all across the work. Two that really caught my eye and I can already think of important connection to my courses are: "Helping Hands "- about student research to inform and advocate on behalf of homeless and hungry children. Also, the "Learning Democracy through International Collaboration" where students from multiple countries share a collaborative online classroom to teach each other about little known issues of fighting for democracy in their respective home country. This is a resource I am excited to spend some time digging into and developing some connection with international colleagues committed to this work.

My conclusions are that my simultaneous interest in student declarative knowledge about global awareness and perspective can unfold simultaneously with the resources (apps and projects) that enable international student collaboration.


Resources
Hunter, N (2016). National Geographic: Education. The Debate Over Globalization: What are the pros and cons? Retrieved from: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/the-debate-over-globalization/ 

Pulitzer Center (2017). Pulitzer Center Lesson Builder. [Community] & [Model Lessons] Retrieved from: http://pulitzercenter.org/builder/dashboard/0

US Department of Education (2009). Teachers Improve Student Performance: Teacher's Guided to International Collaboration on the Internet - Social Studies Project Examples. Retrieved from: https://www2.ed.gov/teachers/how/tech/international/guide_pg9.html#social