UCET 2009 presentation

I recently presented at the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology conference, sharing my thoughts on how teachers and students can best present themselves online.

Inquiry composition

I use Google News and Reader in my classroom. We let our inquiry guide our online composition. Here's a video I put together that explains my approach.

blog prep

This week I introduced students to readers and exploring RSS. The teachers I collaborate with at YouthVoices have set up a wiki about using Google Reader in the classroom. The document gives the students a good start to getting relevant research. On the first day they got used to the reader, subscribed to some bundles, and began managing their subscriptions.

On the second day I showed how we can subscribe to various feeds from our local papers, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News. Both sites differed significantly, and what students soon see is that if they're going to subscribe to the information they want, they're going to have to learn to look for it.

And that's also true of navigating the different deep web databases. The information is there, and half the struggle is getting there.

Online research

More reasons to incorporate applications like Google Reader into our curriculum....

The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy reports that although teens spend a lot of time online, they don't spend much of that time following the daily news closely.

Teens get more news from cable news programs than from newspapers or even from the internet, according to the report, yet they watch these programs infrequently compared with older Americans. Teens spend a lot of time online, but not necessarily getting news. About a fifth of teens and young adults cited the internet as their main source for news. The report also suggests that teenagers prefer soft news over hard news, or feature stories to breaking coverage.

Poynter Online

Blogging and researching inquiry

Paul Allison has been doing some thinking about how to use Google Reader in the classroom. There was a Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast about blogging and research this past May, and there's a podcast about RSS scheduled for edtechtalk for this week.

Last year I had success getting students oriented to and enthused about Google Reader; that's the easy part. But this year I'd like to have students use this tool even better, and that means having them research things that matter. Paul has started a wiki about orienting students to Reader more efficiently this year. I like how he frames the next step:

How can we organize this in a curriculum for students? What comes first? How do we do this while also helping students start with their own questions and experiences?

Elgg Plans » Using Google Reader

For me, there's a question I first have to ask myself: where does my own inquiry come from? The answer? My own inquiry comes from my identity. It's where these identities intersect that we find our inquiry. Here's a link to a Google Doc that explains my thinking on this. And here's a link to how this manifested itself on the "Using Google Reader" wiki.