Blogging in the school library

This writing will review three online social networking tools and their use in the classroom. Each year, schools spend tens of thousands of dollars on software for student use in producing, editing, and displaying their work. Although the use of the Internet can create safety problems, the educational community is finding ways to secure online tools and offer the students the best of social networking to produce and share their work without great cost to the school district. Furthermore, the district IT department no longer has to contend with timely and costly updates. These tasks are performed by the online service.

The first program that will be reviewed in this writing is Wikispaces.com. What is a wiki? Wikipedia.org defines a wiki as “…a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages.” The most obvious use of a wiki in the classroom is as a tool for student group collaboration and authoring of documents. The teacher presents an assignment to which the students contribute, edit, and publish the information as it pertains to the assigned task. The students learn to: publish content; use collaborative skills; negotiate with others on correctness, meaning and relevance; and (in some cases) to teach each other. Using a wiki, the students must learn to support their ideas and justify them to the group and the audience at large. These are skills that the student can take into further educational settings and the workplace.

Online security is always a concern for educators both legally (COPA, CIPA, and TEACH) and ethically. Wikispace.com has a service that allows the educator a secure site in which the users must be invited to join the teacher’s wiki. This is an attractive plus for using Wikispace.com as it narrows the possibility of inappropriate content being posted to the students’ wikis. (Check this site out for an example of a classroom wiki chosen by Wikispace.com as the Wikispace of the month).

Another tool that can be used as an educational enhancement to the curriculum and student learning is Gliffy.com. Most educators have used a diagramming program such as Inspiration in the school setting to assign student work such as outlining, diagramming, and creating webs of ideas and concepts. Gliffy.com is an application that lets you share these student-generated works for free over the web. Gliffy.com online information states the following: “Since Gliffy Online runs in your web browser, there is no need to download any additional software to use it. By leveraging new web technologies, Gliffy Online brings you a familiar desktop application feel in a web browser.”

A problem that teachers and students often run into when using software on site is that the student does not have access to the software at home on his/her own computer and therefore is limited to using the program at school. This is a detriment to adding the diagramming and outlining as homework and in some cases does not address the needs of learners with special needs. With Gliffy.com, the student can produce and submit his or her work from any computer with Internet access. (Check this site out for an example of a Gliffy diagram).

An additional feature that Gliffy.com adds is a tie-in to Yahoo images. The student can do a quick image search and add the picture into his/her document. The student can use actual images that apply to the topic that he or she is diagramming, outlining, or webbing to enhance the presentation and clarify the text. Clearly, Gliffy.com can add a fun, educational, and creative enrichment to the student learning experience.

TeacherTube.com is the final tool that is examined in this writing. TeacherTube.com describes its goals as “…to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.” While YouTube.com provides a venue to upload and show videos, it is not censured in most cases for inappropriate videos. TeacherTube.com is designed for educators to present appropriate educational videos.

TeacherTube.com can serve to fill a gap in the educational setting. If a district subscribes to online video services such as Unitedstreaming, the teacher of such disciplines as Language Arts usually finds that there is little content in the videos offered that pertains to his/her content area. TeacherTube.com can be used to share information, lesson plans, teacher-created content videos, student-created content videos, and other pertinent information in video format to augment the curriculum.

Videos on this site can be made public or private. This service offers the educator the ability to secure a site that can be accessed by invitation only. Another nice feature of this site is that it allows the site members to make “…constructive comments and use the rating system to show appreciation for videos of value….” Users also have the ability to flag inappropriate sites that are then moderated by the TeacherTube.com staff. (Check TeacherTube.com for examples of teacher and student generated videos.)