It's del.icio.us!

Del.icio.us was the first social bookmarking web application I ever used. As a teacher, I thought, "Wow! I could really teach my students to paraphrase with this tool!" Yes, I love the online bookmarking part of del.icio.us, and I love the sharing, the social networking part of this bookmarking system.

Unfortunately, the research part of writing; the paraphrasing, the note-taking, the quoting of sources, can be a tremendous stumbling block for students in middle and high school. As soon as I was introduced to del.icio.us, I knew I could teach this to students and they could use it effectively to learn and practice these skills. Since I am always on the lookout for web applications for use with effective instructional strategies that will greatly boost student achievement, I knew del.icio.us fit the bill.

Over the years, I realized that my students could write fairly well, and I credit that to the commitment Kansas has made using the 6 Traits of Writing in a systemic immersion from Kindergarten to high school. Parents, teachers and students know it is a good system. I can depend on students knowing the basics of writing because of it.

Often, students believe this idea, or misconception really, that someone else's words are better than their own. In its pure form, I have to admire that idea, because it means that students honor authors, books and reading. The misconception lies in the idea that THEY can't really learn how to research and write well, but they can. Once students learn to take notes and paraphrase, their writing always takes a great boost in quality.

Another problem for me, as a teacher, was helping each student stay organized throughout the research/writing process. In a way, it seems rather odd that writing or looking for sources is not the beginning writer's downfall, the difficult part is keeping lists of resources, notes, and quotations throughout the writing process. As soon as I saw how del.icio.us worked, I knew it was the solution for this developmental milestone. The wonderful folks at CommonCraft do also, and here is their excellent video, Social Bookmarking in Plain English.



All the organizational problems are solved with del.icio.us and other social bookmarking networks. Students can bookmark their sources and take notes as they find them. First impressions are always helpful to remember. The writer can easily edit, yet it is often difficult to remember just what attracted you to a particular resource. Using del.icio.us, a student can quote, paraphrase or note future areas of research.

As a teacher, I can access all the students bookmarks because I put them into my class network, a social educational network. I can use del.icio.us to check student organization, progress, quality and reliability of resources on the fly. This makes it easier to give timely feedback which encourages students and increases their overall achievement in writing.

That is the beauty of social bookmarking. It's del.icio.us!

Relevance and Rigor: An Ongoing Struggle in Education

This is my response to an excellent blog posting I read earlier today. The topic of technology in education and our present level of acceptance in and out of schools has been on many people's minds lately. It seems to me that part of the human condition includes the urge to look for ways to improve productivity and make life "better".

I caught this train of thought and responded to a recent posting on Tom March's Ozblog: "Intriguing Ourselves to Death" by Tom March, presently in Australia, who is the co-developer of the WebQuest strategy with Professor Bernie Dodge.

My comment on Tom's blog posting:

IMHO, you are on target that there are many voices, ideas and models for education in a technological world, and I agree to help. Your goal is similar to my own.

Many people that you may not even know have been blogging about philosophical content similar to that you describe, so all we have to do is join the 1's and 0's into coherence.

Here are some related threads on a few other blog postings:
Walk a Mile
Support Is Everything
Learning to Share: Part 1
Sneaking Suspicion

Better Schools and Classrooms

We all admire Better Schools and Classrooms. Why? For inspiration, confirmation and professional development because each of us wants a better school and classroom. We're teachers! We're achievers!

In pursuit of this excellent achievement, there is one book, Classroom Instruction that Works, that you can use and make Better Schools and Classrooms. Read it one day and use the ideas in your class with great success the very next day. Many of the ideas may be familiar, yet even the most experienced teacher should find this meta-analysis helpful for improved practice....for Better Schools and Classrooms.

Research in education has been vastly under reported in our American media, even the educational media. To remedy that, many educational research leaders began to perform a particular type of research called meta-analysis. While some research can summarize a single researcher's lifetime of accomplishments, such as Vygotsky, Art Costa or Howard Gardner, meta-analysis is compilation of combined research of many people on ONE TOPIC like the research that encompasses theEffective Schools Research or Classroom Instruction that Works.

While the Effective Schools meta-analyses is more of an umbrella covering a multitude of effective educational methods, categorized within the Seven Correlates of Effective Schools, Classroom Instruction that Works may be considered by some to be a specific category within the Effective Schools movement.

No matter the case, Robert Marzano et al picked an excellent topic and performed a very extensive meta-analysis of educational research that relates to this topic of Classroom Instruction that Works. One of the most appealing qualities of this meta-analysis is that one teacher doesn't have to practice all the instructional strategies to improve their classroom instruction. Each teacher can pick one or more of instructional methodologies that fit in their own toolbox.

Any teacher can improve their own skills by reading this research summary. Entire schools, districts or states can definitely increase student achievement by improving their skills in the practice of the tenets driven by the meta-analytic research of Classroom Instruction that Works.