"Dear Web User, Please Upgrade Your Browser."

I just wrote a post of my own about customising your web browser.  This link here goes into far more eloquent detail than I could attempt to rehash.  Lots of great tips about extensions & how to make them work for you.

Dear Web User: Please Upgrade Your Browser

Customised Technology Part II - Your Browser

I wrote a post last week on some web-based tools to help you tie a digital learning environment together and provide some structure and continuity to the things you can do in your classroom with technology.

Today we're going to look at getting the web browser on your computer set up so that it works like your digital butler, not like a fast-food drive-thru attendant.
By that, I mean your browser should remember the things you like, where you like to store things, and how to get you where you need to go, rather than being there simply to serve you in quick grabs.  Continuity, personalisation.

To get yourself started, I'd recommend picking a browser, and sticking with it.  If you're using Windows, Firefox or Chrome are both fast, reliable, secure, and have active collections of extensions to give you some extra tricks.  If you're using a Mac, Safari's an option for that list too.  I've missed Internet Explorer from that list because it simply doesn't measure up.

Personalise It!

Bookmarks & Shortcuts
Use the Bookmarks or Favourites Toolbar at the top of the browser!  If you've got it always visible, it can be a simple quick launch to the things you might need to visit regularly.  Things like your DoE Portal, YouTube, your online account spaces (if you're using something like Padlet, Canva, or an online bookmarking site like Bitly, Diigo, Delicious, or Annotary) all belong here, because you want to access them instantly and easily.  They're your online spaces.  Carve yourself a shortcut to them.

Buttons
Sometimes those shortcuts and links on your bookmarks toolbar can serve a functional purpose as well.  The online bookmarking tools all have toolbar buttons to help you add websites to your collection with one click.

An incredibly useful one is Viewpure's "Purify" button.  Drag it from Viewpure to your toolbar, open a video on YouTube then click the button.  It'll show your video without ads or related videos.

Leave it OPEN

Always Online.  A new tab is like clean window on the world, and you don't lose where you've been.

Ultimately, your tech should work for you, rather than the other way around.  Taking control & customising it helps you to really take the reins, turning it into a powerful digital assistant.

Launching a Class Blog

It sounds like a big deal, but it's not.

It sounds like it'll require a ton of new skills to learn, but it won't.

Every class I walk past is already doing a pile of things that could very easily move on to a class blog, meaning the habits & behaviours to support it already exist.

The key things to remember before you even begin to think about the tools & techniques are the simple ones that come naturally to us as educators.

People, and communication.

With that as our focus, where to begin?  The platform's easy - both major blog platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) work more or less the same way, and they're free to join.  If you've ever written text on a computer before, you've already learned the controls.  We can catch up after school early in the term and lock it down in a few minutes.  We'll look at organisation in a minute, but let's look at the more important part first.

People.

This blog can become the online extension of your classroom.  It has the power to eliminate that single most frustrating conversation between children and their parents - "what did you do at school today?" "...nothing."
It's a place where you can document classroom activity, and share ideas & resources with your students.  It's also (and probably more importantly) somewhere to allow students to interact online.  This is important because they are going to interact online anyway.  If their first experience of it is lying about their age around Year 4 to create a Facebook account, we've all seen how well that usually turns out.
What if their first experience of it was documenting a science project in Kindy?  A wise voice guiding how they word their posts together?  An actual face-to-face conversation about how to choose photos to accompany the post?  Photos that show what they'd created, rather than just what the kids themselves look like?  Opportunities to share their own little voices, but in a supervised, moderated way that contributes to an online community that's very deliberately positive, constructive, and purposeful?  How are those children going to approach independent online activity as they get older?  Will they be as hot-headed and haphazard as the first group of kids I described?

This is where they need structure and guidance.  Being social and interactive in electronic places is 99.9% ethics, critical thinking & social skills.  What's left is the technology.  Ignore it, it gets easier to use all the time.  This post here by educator Kim Cofino when she was the Digital Literacies Facilitator at the International School of Bangkok is a brilliant starting point for some guidelines for blog use in schools - both for posting and commenting.  Take it, share it, tip your hat to Kim, and modify it to best suit your school and your class.

Communication.

Think about the amount of communication you do daily.  Communication with your students - verbally, visually, and through sharing.  Communication with parents.  Pragmatic stuff, purpose-driven stuff, interesting stuff, fun stuff.  Why not bring that all to one central channel?  Organise what you post into little categories to keep it neat, but otherwise it's a one-stop shop.  It'll time and date stamp everything for you, which makes record keeping much easier.

The best place to begin is to decide on how you want the people around you to communicate.  Pick something that you can do by habit.  Maybe you'll post your class plan for the following day with relevant materials linked every afternoon so kids and parents can be prepared every day.  Maybe you'll take some time at the end of every week to reflect on what you've learned as a class.  Maybe you'll share & follow an important news story each week, and open it to discussion.
Also pick a project to document.  Something that can evolve over time, and that will benefit from being visible.  Growing something in science?  Building something in Art?  Shaping & forming narrative?

At the end of the day, what this can do for you is make the learning in your class visible, enable communication & collaboration, and save you time.  The trick is using it to replace things you're already doing, rather than add them on top.

Customised Technology

Having a few tools up your sleeve that let you make something useful or set something up to use in your classroom with very little effort & fuss makes learning tech integration a much more rewarding experience.  The Internet is also getting better at this by the day.
The best thing about this is that you're no longer limited to the amount of software you can have installed on your computer.

Shared Digital Pinup Board

Padlet allows you to set up a board online that can be as private or as open as you like.  It's also easy to switch editing access off and on if you want to run class contributions to a time limit.  It'll take text, images, and links.  Really nice way to brainstorm & gather ideas quickly.

Easy Graphic Design Studio

Borders & clipart as we know them in Word & Publisher simply do not exist in the contemporary graphic design we see everywhere outside of the classroom.
Canva is a brilliant simple solution.  Copyright free image search, beautiful templates, classy contemporary fonts, and an extensive library of shapes & elements to help you make classroom resources that look like they have a design budget.
There's also the Canva Design School blog - practical, bite-sized lessons on how to set up, organise & lay out your own designs.

Today's Always Up-to-Date Atlas

Google has recently made their pro version of Google Earth free (it used to be $400!).  It allows you to  mark up, bookmark, and annotate a perpetually updated globe that works from solar system scale all the way down to building-level maps.

Searching the Web Effectively

Kids are universally terrible at searching the web.

Terrible.

It's my favourite argument against the idea that kids innately understand how to use technology.  It's also based on a simple misconception, and it's something that with a bit of teamwork and critical thinking, it's easy to overcome.

The misconception is simply that Google is smart.  Google Knows Everything.

This is rubbish, and kids need it proven to them.  Google's excellent at search.  It knows where everything is, but that just makes it a world-wide neat freak.
It can't draw inference.  It can't follow conversation (yet).  It can't assume context.  It can't think for you, which means it can't understand a question.  All it works with is the words someone puts into the search box.
Correcting widespread use of search engines needs to begin with changing the way we approach knowledge & non-fiction.  Questions that have definitive answers, out.  Opportunities to explain how things work or tell stories of how things went down, in.  If the mentality of the kids is "I need to find the answer," they're going to keep asking the questions.

Now, you'll need a pretty simple toolkit to kick this change off.  3 things.

1. Bookmarks.  A collection of reliable sources of information online.
2. Google Advanced Search.  Controlled, knowledge-centric search.
3. A reference guide to help evaluate an information source.

Bookmarks

If the kids don't get a handle on what a reliable, valid source of information looks like today, they'll keep believing everything they read.  This is where your fully-formed adult sense of critical thinking comes in to play.  When you find something useful, take a record of it.  Bookmarking it in Bitly makes it easy to catalogue and share.  This will save you a lot of time, over time.

This video walks you through the how and why of collecting online resources to Bitly.

Advanced Search

This lets you break your search down into words & terms you definitely want (like the core of the topic itself), words and terms you think might be relevant (like an "and/or" list of related concepts), and words, terms, or websites you definitely don't want (like those question/answer sites like ask.com, or to filter unrelated concepts that may share a name or keywords with what you're actually researching).
You can also filter results by reading level, or use it to find copyright-free media to use in projects.

Try it out here, and if you want a runthrough either by yourself or with your class, let me know.

A Reference Guide

How do you decide whether a site is worth your while or not?  How do you develop that evaluation process in your students?  Trust It or Trash It is a really good resource.  Each of the three stages of the process has a set of focus questions along with it.  Brilliant to give kids guidance, also brilliant to hand over to them to use independently.  Best case, do both.

Using these three in combination, and making a habit of it will begin to turn the ship around with regards to how kids approach the Internet - we want them to do it in a very conscious, deliberate, and intelligent way.