Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

Clay Shirky‘s TED talk deserves 13 minutes of your time.

Cool Online Tools

Next week I facilitate a workshop designed to assist Year 11 students find some useful online tools to support their learning, especially research, collaboration, organisation, study and presentation.

my original wordle

There will be a very, very brief presentation and overview of each tool and then students will be free to experiment, exploring the tools of use/interest to them.

Do you mind checking out this list and suggesting some more tools?

Also, are any of the below best avoided by Year 11?

Why?

 

Here’s the list

 

Tame the web

RSS feeds: point website updates towards your reader (watch the video here)

Google Reader: is a place to read all your RSS feed (watch the video here)

Instapaper: a read later bookmarking service

Readability: remove the clutter around the webpage you’re reading

bit.ly: shorten your links

 

Sharing & Collaboration

Delicious: a social bookmarking site (watch the video here)

Diigo: another social bookmarking tool

Google Docs: collaborate on documents with peers online at home

 

Creative Commons for Images and Sound

Creative Commons (Australia): understand licenses

Flickr: the largest photo sharing site

Flickr ‘The Commons’: search the great public photographic collections

Soundzabound: royalty free music for schools

 

Organisation

mindmeister: free mindmapping tool

bubbl.us: organise brainstorms

Evernote: synch files with all your devices

Dropbox: free online storage

Livebinders: collect and share resources (here’s the video)

Netvibes: dashboard everything

 

Customise

iGoogle: customise your homepage with a variety of widgets

Wetpaint: free site where you create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks

 

Mashups

Wordle: generate word clouds

GAPMINDER: unveils the beauty of statistics while revealing trends

Newsmap.jp - a mashup of headlines that shows new patterns

 

Research & Answers

Google Alerts: keep up to date with topics of interest

Wolfram Alpha: enter what you want to calculate

Project Gutenburg (Australia): free ebooks

bibme: a free automatic bibliography generator

Noodletools: guides you through the research process

 

Memory Tools

Anki: makes it easier to study and remember (iPhone app here)

BRAINFLIPS: online flashcards

10 more Mindmapping tools: + what’s best for mindmapping anyway?

 

Presentation

Slideshare: converts your PowerPoints and other documents + saves them online to share (take the tour)

Prezi: astonishing presentations

updated wordle

The Empathic Civilisation

Tim Kastelle posted this video talk by Jeremy Rifkin which I repost here and am sure you will enjoy.

more about “RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilisation“, posted with vodpod

 

I like the point Tim’s emphasises, that when, “you develop…deep connections with the people you serve, the ideas that you give them are more likely to spread. We are naturally empathic.”

Relationships with students and colleagues are important for a range of very human reasons. Increasingly neuroscience is revealing, what we already know, that we are softwired to belong.

‘Empathy is the invisible hand’ which allows us to civilise and develop.

When we observe someone else have a feeling, it spreads. We empathise. We imitate what we experience. This can be a positive or negative thing.

Listen closely to the last-minute of this video. The message, we need to rethink the human narrative and how that has led to the evolution of our institutions and ideas on parenting, education and potential.

We need to think as an extended family.

Your thoughts? How could our students and colleagues benefit from this thinking?

The first people I followed on twitter…

I have been tweeting for two years.

I know many of you have been on twitter for much longer but it is amazing to think how fundamental to my day social media, especially twitter, has become in this relatively short period of time.

The first person I followed was @mpesce who presented an interesting talk at an education.au conference and was very convincing about the potential of this newish microblogging site.

I came home and joined, telling Kelli McGraw, a NSW DET and ETA colleague about twitter. Kelli joined and became the second person I followed.

Some of the other firsts included Barack Obama, Tom Massarella my brilliant techie colleague from school, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Jimmy Wales, Mike Wesch, Ward Cunningham & Steven Johnson. I admire all of these people greatly and feel more closely connected to their ideas and work because of twitter.

I found it terribly exciting to start finding people admired for their books, innovations, educational brilliance and significance to our online, hyperconnected world. I bet it was the same for you. I still find it amazing that colleagues from work, friends and teachers mingle with so many (international) others who are all striving and sharing.

In the weeks that followed my first tweets, so many of the people who I hear from daily came into my life via there tweetstreams and blogs. Nowadays, many of my NSW DET colleagues are on twitter too, sharing and collaborating.

What was your experience? How were you introduced to microblogging?

Who were the first people you followed on twitter?

Collaborate and Prevail

I found this 4-minute video at Jane Hart’s site and recommend you watch it.

It is advertising for the Internet Time Alliance but explores many of the most important concepts relating to social media, particularly networked economies. Note the reference to Darwin’s theories and that those who learn to collaborate most effectively, prevail.

Social networks and social learning are changing how we work and grow our knowledge. Networks and trust are critical. It is important that we assist colleagues to participate for the health and relevance of our workplaces.

The presentation is not dynamic but the intellectual understanding of our new times is deep. I particularly liked the use of Marshall McCluhan’s theories in the presentation.

McCluhan's laws of media are useful for reflecting on our networked era

 

Google Docs

I have been encouraging colleagues to participate and collaborate using Google Docs for a number of reasons. Schools are busy places and often, all the stakeholders are not involved in every conversation about the future direction of the school or even more mundane issues that would benefit from more input by staff.

Collaborating with Google Docs will help us to have an open dialogue without having to hold as many expensive meetings.

These short videos will help you to conceptualise what the tool can be used for in our professional lives.

 more about “Google Docs in Plain English“, posted with vodpod

 

more about “Teachers and Principals Talk about Go…“, posted with vodpod

 

Hat tip to Wesley Fryer for the above video.