Searching beyond Google

You don’t (and probably shouldn’t) have to only use Google as your search engine. There are many others and Firefox browser’s search bar at the upper right of your browser allows you to easily select the search engine that meets your needs.

Below is a picture of my search bar and the search engines that are currently available for me to use. All you need to do is click the drop-down arrow next to the G (yeah, for Google) and you will see your search engines. By default I use Google, but when I need to look for Creative Commons licensed images, I can easily select the Creative Commons search engine from the drop-down box. I can also install any number of custom search engines, too.

By clicking the “Manage Search Engines” at the bottom of the drop-down list, you then are offered the choice of getting more search engines. You may find a search engine that really focuses on your content area or you just like better. So, you can add that to this list and even make that the default search engine.

Speaking of the numbers of search engines out there, I would highly recommend taking a look at Ray Schroeder’s blog (no relationship, but he is also from Springfield, Illinois, MY HOME TOWN, and I really need to meet him sometime!): http://alternatesearch.blogspot.com

Ray’s blog on alternate search engines offers a lot of useful information. You might find the search engine that meets your specific needs. Remember, even though we think Google is the ONLY search engine, there are many alternatives out there. Find the one (or several) that suits you.

Wikimedia Commons: Great resource for images

Just last week I was talking with my students about copyright issues and how they apply (or not!) to educators. I have a difficult time with copyright, since the Fair Use laws are so difficult and arbitrary and actual copyright laws are not that interesting or understandable.

The problem is, of course, is that materials of all kinds are now freely available and very easy to insert and yes, copy and paste, such as others’ writing. It’s easier than ever to plagiarize and quite frankly, sometimes students may not even know they are doing it.

How can we help our students use great resources online while helping them learn ethical and legal protocols?

One way we can at least HELP our students avoid using copyrighted materials without knowing is to PROVIDE them with a place to obtain these resources. One very good and comprehensive online resource for finding and using images that are in the public domain is Wikimedia Commons. This site includes images and other resources that can be freely reused. When you go to this website, you’ll see a picture and video of the day and be able to choose pictures from categories or of course, do searches.

Yes, Google images is a great resource, but your students MIGHT find images that demand permissions before being used. For the most part, it appears that Wikimedia Commons has eliminated this issue and can provide a rich resource of materials that can be resused.

How about this image of a micro-fossil?

Mistake in your email? Enable “undo send”

Although I have been an advocate for reducing email, we can’t really live totally without it. (Although that might be a great topic to explore.)

But what happens when you send an email and notice right after you sent it (to your English teacher!) you had several misspelled words? Or, you accidentally selected “reply to all,” but only wanted to reply to one person? Or, you sent an email to the wrong person? Or any number of mistakes that are easy to make with email.

Since the beginning of email, you simply had to live with your embarrassing (or not) mistakes. That is, until now. Those bright people at Google have ingeniously come up with a feature in their Google labs suite of ideas called “undo send.”

Yes, you read this correctly. If you realize you actually did NOT want to send that email, you can have 5 seconds to rescind it. Yeah, I know, don’t you wish you had MORE than 5 seconds to respond? But heah, it’s better than NOT having this feature.

Here’s how you can enable it in your Gmail:

Go to your settings tab in Gmail and click the Labs tab. In here you will see extraordinarily creative things. Scroll down to “Undo Send,” enable it, and click Save changes at the bottom. Then, whenever you send an email, a button that says “Undo” will pop up on your screen for five seconds. If you hit the button within that time, the service will retrieve the e-mail in draft form — allowing you to make changes or cancel the message altogether.

“Sometimes … I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake,” said Michael Leggett, a Gmail Labs designer and the creator of the “Undo Send” feature, in the Gmail blog. “I forget to attach a file, or e-mail the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.”

So, if you are like me and wish that sometimes you could grab and fix that sent email, this feature is for you.

DiRT: Digital Research Tools

Today, I showed my students a GREAT wiki created on a the free pbwiki platform called DiRT: Digital Research Tools Wiki.

This wiki is EXCELLENT, and of course, since it’s a wiki, you can also sign up and contribute. The types of tools are listed by what the user might want to do. For instance, you might wat to “analyze statistics” or “blog” or “brainstorm.” From those needs arises a number of great tools to choose from. For instance, if you click “Create a mashup” you get these tools:

Tools:

• Google Mashup Editor (in beta; limited access)
• Microsoft Popfly
• Mozilla Ubiquity: ”a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” Currently requires some programming knowledge.  (in beta; free; cross-platform)
• SEASR – tools & frameworks for sharing data and research (including mashups) in virtual work environments
• Yahoo Pipes

Resources

• Brian Lamb, “Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix,” Educause Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (July/August 2007): 12–25
• Mashup Awards
• Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (Google Books), Franco Moretti. Published 2005.
• Programmable Web

I’m having my students investigate at least 10 digital tools from this resource that they might use in their content area (these are pre-service teachers). Then, they are putting these resources in a database that’s super-duper easy to use with Google Sites, the “list” format. (But that’s a discussion for another post.) They also need to provide information and critique the tools they’ve selected. The DiRT site lists some very helpful criteria to consider when investigating and deciding whether or not to use a certain digital tool:

• Determine your needs.  What do you need the software to do? Why? What desired features are most important?
• Features: Does the tool do what you need it to do? How well? What does it not do?  How important is that?
• Performance: Is the software buggy? Sluggish? Does it make you more or less efficient?
• Cost: How much does the tool cost?  Are there ongoing maintenance fees?  Is it worth it? How is it priced in comparison to its competitors?
• Support: How good is the user support?  Are there active user forums? Are training materials available?
• User community: Have a lot of people adopted the tool? How enthusiastic are they? What do reviewers say about the tool?
• Sustainability: Web 2.0 tools come and go.  The developers could end support, or change their business model and splash ads for diet pills all over your pages hosted on their site. Is there reason to believe that this tool will be around for a while–for instance, is it associated with a  healthy company or research group?  Have a lot of folks adopted the tool?
• Export/import: Can you easily get data into and out of the tool in standard formats such as plain text and XML? If the tool is no longer supported by its developer, will you be stuck?

Check out the DiRT site and some of the tools. But I must WARN YOU, you will find a new tool and then get side-tracked. That’s what happened to me. I’m in the process of looking at WebSlides, a way of creating slideshows from web feeds. Sounds interesting, huh? Yeah, that’s me . . . I get distracted pretty easily.

Twitter for Educators

There are many ways you can use Twitter to engage students, improve communication, collaboration, and community in the classroom, and promote writing. I’ve listed 10 ways you can use Twitter in your class, from a simple Twitter group you create that students follow and the group follows.

Before I get started, here’s  a short refresher on Twitter:

Twitter uses the SMS protocol to deliver short (140 characters or less) messages to your phone; your IM account; your Twitter home or m.twitter.com (accessible when logged in); or a Twitter application. You decide where you want to read your “tweets,” the name for each short message.

The Twitter service is free; messages sent to your cellphone may or may not be depending upon your cell phone plan. Begin with the web-based service and then try out some of the many Twitter applications, which you can find on http://m.twitter.com/downloads (again, you need to be logged in to view this page).

I am still learning HOW to send messages in different ways, but here are two essential shortcuts I’m using:

• @username + message
  

directs a twitter at another person, and causes your twitter to save in their “replies” tab.
Example: @meangrape I love that song too!

• D username + message

sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.
Example: d krissy want to pick a Jamba Juice for me while you’re there?

So how might you use Twitter in your classroom?

First, everyone will need to know what Twitter is, how to use it, and have a Twitter account. That part is fairly easy. Many students will have cell phones with text-messaging enabled, so that will be a big part of Twitter’s use and possible popularity (if you consider sending reminders of homework assignments popular!)

Next, you’ll need to create a Class Twitter Group

Here’s how you do this:

1. Have students create individual Twitter accounts. (These accounts can be private, so that their messages do NOT show up on the public timeline, which might be a good thing for younger students.)
2. Create a Twitter group for your class (you’ll need to use a different email address than the one from your personal Twitter account.)
3. Require class members to follow the group and the group follow them, so all messages are posted to the group and individual members also receive the messages.
4. If you want the group messages to be private, that is NOT viewable on the public timeline, then register with GroupTweet. Instructions on how to do this are easy and included on the website.
5. Show students how to enable tweets on mobile devices, which is probably the best way to contact students.

What can you do with your Class Twitter Group?

Here are 10 ideas:

1. Class Business/Notices: Send messages to the Twitter Class Group, such as class being canceled, updated homework instructions, new due dates, anything you want your students to know right away.
2. Research: Use the group as a way to collect and share resources on a class project.
3. Personal/News: Stay in touch with students and vice-versa, where everyone can write what they are doing, where they are going, plans, etc, using Twitter in a more personal genre.
4. Micro-Blogging: Post links to blogs or even do a “reverse-twitter” by having your twitters posted to a blog: http://www.loudtwitter.com
5. Brainstorming: Students can post their ideas for solving a problem, topics they are considering writing about, anything they are brainstorming.
6. Networking: Class group can follow other Twitter feeds that have direct relevance to class work, such as news feeds and other organizations.
7. Writing Assignments: Students can create a fictitious Twitter account for a person they are researching, creating a diary of posts. (For an idea, see the DarthVader Twitter account: http://twitter.com/darthvader)
8. Field Trips: Use mobile devices to keep track of people on a field trip, have students take notes about the field trip using Twitter.
9. Photo Sharing: Use Twitpic to share photos for a collaborative photo album or other assignment.
10. Mobile Technologies: Have students create Twitter mashups using Twitter and other APIs. This would be an advanced mobile learning technology assignment!

I know there are many other ideas/ways you can use Twitter in the classroom. Let me know your ideas and/or how you use Twitter in your classroom, the pros/cons, the difficulties, questions, whatever! I’d love to hear from you.

GroupTweet

I’m continuing my series on using Twitter, with the intent of coming up with some original and creative ways to use Twitter in the classroom. Before I get to that, however, I’m going to tell you how I solved creating a Twitter group for our department, so we could easily tweet to our group. I thought it would be easy through Twitter, but I actually found and used a service called GroupTweet: http://www.grouptweet.com

Here’s how GroupTweet describes itself:

Problem: Malcolm, Zoe, Kaylee, Simon, and River all work together on the same web development team. They are avid Twitter users and want a similar way to broadcast quick messages and updates to everyone on their team. Since these messages may contain confidential information, the team doesn’t want them published to their public Twitter timelines or to any followers who are not part of the team.

Solution: GroupTweet allows Malcolm and the gang to send messages via Twitter that are instantly broadcasted privately to only the team members.

I thought this solution would work for our department, with the exception that we actually want our posts to be public, so that students and the world could see what we were interested in, what we were doing, and anything else of interest in our field of educational technology.

It’s working out quite well.

I followed the instructions on the GroupTweet home page, created a new Twitter account, asked people to follow the group and set up the group to follow those same people. When I want to post a message from my Twitter account to the group, all I need to do is put ‘D edtechbsu (that’s the name of our group) and the message after that and send it. It shows up on our edtechbsu Twitter group and the people who are following the group can also see it.

Already I have discovered that one of my colleagues presented today at a virtual conference and the presentations could be viewed and commented on through VoiceThread (which I thought was pretty cool), and I was able to tell everyone that my publicity promotion on a closed circuit TV for an upcoming workshop seemed to be working.

Tomorrow, a post about using Twitter in the classroom.

Twitter Tools to Post With

Yeah, Twitter is a great service, fast (if their servers aren’t overloaded!) and pretty easy to use. But you won’t twitter as much if you have to go to a website to do that. That’s where Twitter posting tools can come in handy. If you can post a tweet with simply typing in text and hitting a button, you’ll do it!

So, think about it . . . you are online and have Firefox open, right? (If you are NOT using Firefox, you need to download it at http://getfirefox.com and install it. You won’t regret it.)

One of the easiest and simplest tools I’ve found to send tweets is TwitterBar, a Firefox add-on. It resides within your Firefox browser, so it’s there when you are online. Go to this site https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 and install TwitterBar. As with most Firefox add-ons, you’ll need to restart your browser for new stuff to be installed.

Twitterbar makes is super-duper easy to send tweets. Simply type your tweet in the address bar of your browser and then click the little Twitter icon. It will ask you if you want to post to Twitter, you say yes, and your tweet is on its way. It’s simple, easy, and doesn’t require any additional boxes or anything to be open.

But what if you also want to view your friends and other’s tweets? Again, I like clean, simple, easy, which happens to be ANOTHER Firefox add-on called TwitterFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 This add-on shows up as a little twitter “t” icon at the bottom right of your browser, which you can click to view in expanded form. You can set how often it pops up with tweets and you DON’T  have to have it make any sounds (which can be distracting).

The main reason I like these two tools is that you don’t have to THINK about opening another program, since you already have Firefox open when you are online anyway. Whoever thought of Firefox and adding extensions was certainly a genius.

Tomorrow I’ll write about how you can create a Twitter group and post comments to that group. Again, stay tuned!

Twitter for Educators: New Series!

I  have been using Twitter off and on now for about a year, but recently it is getting my attention (and use) again. I think that’s because more and more people are using it. After all, it’s tough to send messages when no one is reading them! By using Twitter and getting to know its capabilities, I’m thinking of many ways it can be used in education. So, I’m starting a new series of posts on Twitter with links to helpful resources and articles, along with daily ideas on how educators can make the best use of this powerful communication tool.

To get started with Twitter, you’ll need an account.

1. Go to http://twitter.com and sign up.
2. See if anyone you know is using Twitter (you can do a search on Twitter) and click the “Follow” button to view all of their tweets.
3. Then, take a big breath and write your first tweet. (And don’t worry, because you can delete your own messages!)

Tomorrow, I’ll provide information and tools you can use to almost effortlessly post to your Twitter account. Stay tuned. Oh, and if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, my username is “boisebarbara.” You can also follow our EDTECH@Boise State department tweets (edtechbsu).

Knols: Google’s tool for small bits of knowledge

I have been playing around . . . um . . . working with Google Apps and Google tools in general, always amazed at what I find out I can do. I honestly can’t remember how this happened, but I stumbled across a way to communicate information to others in small chunks, which Google calls “knols.” If you’ve worked with Google Sites, the format will look VERY familiar to you, so it’s fairly intuitive to use. But just what ARE knols? Here’s what Google tells us:

Knols offer:

• Ease of use
  All you need is an account, a name and a desire to write and we’ll take care of the rest.
• Control
  You specify the level of collaboration you want with the community. Your knol, your voice.
• Community
  You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge.
• Visibility
  We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine.
• Growth
  Sharing your knowledge with the world is rewarding for everyone.

Google has a list of good knols, and of course, you can search for knols. I experimented yesterday and wrote a knol about something new I learned to do with getting an flv file off of a web page and sharing it in an Adobe Connect Meeting. You can read my knol here.

Can knols be used for teaching? Heck YES! Teachers can create individual knols like chapters in a book or a series of study guides or lectures or just about anything that they want students to access. The neat thing about knols is that they can be edited (as the knol owner, you can decide if you want editing open to all or want to moderate the edits), so your students/readers could read and correct/add to content.

But here’s a great idea: How about students writing individual knols that would fit into a certain category you create? The category could be a class book on a certain topic, for instance. Knols seem to be able to create more interaction and commenting, but I haven’t worked with them long enough to know. But heck, I’m sure I’ll learn something new today and need to write that to a new knol.

To get started writing a knol, go to http://knol.google.com/k, sign in with  your Google account, and start writing. It’s that easy.

What Would Google Do?

During spring break (which is ending tomorrow, BTW) I read the book What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis is an avid technologist, authoring his blog buzzmachine.com and also teaches digital journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism in New York City (that’s a mouthful). Check out the CUNY website, it is way cool.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading this book. Many of his ideas are things I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, such as bringing student voices into the design of courses. His insights into how Google operates and how it is and will continue to change our world (if we would just let it!) are engaging, energizing, and enlightening. Here’s what I’d like him to do in his next go-around:

1. Include an appendix with a list and annotation of all of his recommended web sites. As I was reading the book, I knew I should have highlighted the sites when he wrote about them, but I was too lazy to get up from my chair.
2. Include an online, searchable version of the book along with hyperlinks. I really like to be able to search and also link easily to the sites.

Thanks, Jeff, for a great book to read during spring break. Now I need to investigate some of those sites and market my house which is currently for sale!

P.S. You can tell Jeff is from England, as he writes “internet” in lower-case. In the U.S. we seem to use the upper-case convention.