Live Content in Canvas: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, more

So, after a bumpy start (Canvas rejects Twitter widgets), I finally got a good set of dynamic content pages set up in my practice Canvas course. I made it public, so this link will take you there: Growth Mindset Playground. I found a hack to make the Twitter work after all (weird, but functional), plus it's easy to do YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, Blogger, and (my personal favorite!) Inoreader.

I don't really have any interest in using Canvas for a "course," and I don't have any interest in creating content in there, but these live content pages are different. Instead of creating content inside Canvas (I far prefer other publishing platforms), I am creating and curating content in real spaces on the Internet, and that content is then automatically displayed in Canvas. I don't have to do anything: it's automatic!

So, when I use Twitter, the tweets show up in Canvas. When I add a new video to the YouTube playlist, the playlist is updated. When I add new images to the Flickr album, they show up in Canvas. When I bookmark with Diigo, it's in Canvas. New Blogger blog post? It's in Canvas. New RSS items? Inoreader will display them in Canvas, along with other social network content, including Google+ and Facebook.

Some other formats I tried did not work because Canvas rejects javascript. That is frustrating (one of the main reasons I like Blogger is that it is very javascript-friendly), but I'm still very pleased with the live content sources that do work! And, of course, I am very happy that I can make the course pages public so that everybody can see how it works and decide what might be useful for their own Canvas courses.

Why live content?

To me, live content is something extremely important to include in an online course. Using live pages, you give the students a steady stream of new content to explore. This might be content that the instructor(s) create/curate, or you can have the students also participate in creating and/or curating the content as well. It all depends on the goals you have for your course!

In future posts, I'll have more to say about these specific content sources and also about content creation and curation. For now, though, I am really happy that I was able to get all this live content up and running. Even better: I am so glad to be able to share the pages with everybody... that was never possible in D2L!

Connecting with Inoreader: Using Diigo to keep track of subscriptions

Now, I will confess that one of the things that is frustrating about the Inoreader Chrome extension is that if you subscribe to something you are already subscribed to, it does not alert you. So I was thinking, what is the best way for me to not turn into that problem? Then I realized I could use Diigo, because Diigo has that very handy little feature that the Diigo Chrome extension icon gets a little red bookmark over it when you have bookmarked something...

Perfect!

So what I did was to quickly Diigo the Twitter feeds I am subscribed to in Inoreader right now (limit is 60, so I stayed just a little bit short of that). So now when I go to someone's Twitter page, I can instantly see if I am subscribed to them in Inoreader or not. Quite a few of these people are folks I have met in Connected Courses over the past several weeks!

This will also come in handy when I need to curate more carefully, removing some people from my Inoreader Twitter subscription (right now, I have some people in there with whom I actually do interact pretty regularly at Google+ also, so I don't really need their Twitter in the same way I do for people who are not G+ users) ... with Diigo, I can just change the Twitter Inoreader tags to be something like Twitter InoreaderRetired. That way, I'll have a record of Twitter feeds that I did enjoy having in Inoreader, and if Inoreader lifts the cap or I decide to revisit those feeds, Diigo will have a list for me.

I really do appreciate the power of Diigo... but I do not use it as much as I should. I wish I could figure out what the strange emotional disconnect is that I have with Diigo. I loved Delicious. It just made me HAPPY to do anything with Delicious. My happy factor with Diigo is about zero. As a result, it really took some urging from my Google+ buddies even to get used to using Diigo. I do use it, but it is not FUN.

What's up with that, I wonder? Inoreader, on the other hand, is fun AND powerful. I would rate Twitter as lots of fun, but low on power. I would rate Diigo as high on power, but low on fun.

Anyway, I am glad I figured out this solution. As part of my Connected Courses project for the next weeks, I will review that Twitter selection at Inoreader and see if I am making good use of it.

Oh, I did something fun with the Twitter folder over at Inoreader: I wrote a rule to exclude replies, so that it emulates the Twitter experience better. If a tweet does not start with @ it gets a tag called "Twitter Original," which is probably most of what I will be reading when I scan the Twitter stuff at Inoreader. I also played around with writing regular expressions for rules in Inoreader.

SO GEEKY.

SO COOL.

Post-Janux, 10 weeks till summer

Well, this blog took a bit of a hiatus, at first because I decided to participate in an open History of Science course offered by my university on their Janux platform, so my "free time" (note scare quotes, ha ha) was going to be dedicated to that course. After a few weeks, though, I realized that the poor quality of the software used for the course platform made it impossible for me to participate in the class; it just was not a good use of my time (details here). Last weekend, I got back into the groove of working on new materials for my students and thinking about better ways to use technology in my own courses. THAT is something exciting, unlike the Janux debacle.  So, I'm ready to start using this blog again as a way to record and reflect on those good technology adventures that are happening in my classes.

In this post, I'll provide an overview about the different kinds of stuff that I've got going on right now that I'm excited about. I'll do that in terms of the tools because those are the easiest to write about, but the reason I have chosen these tools is because I am thinking about curation and sharing a lot. I want to do a better job of curation and sharing in teaching my classes, and I also want to do a better job of helping my students see curation and sharing as a big part of what they can/should be doing as online learners.

• Pinterest. I continue to get more and more excited about how I can make Pinterest an important part of my classes. I'll save the details for a separate post, but last weekend I had a real breakthrough about using Pinterest as a kind of portfolio/diary tool for my classes, and I've started keeping a Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and an Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio myself, while offering the Portfolio as an optional Tech Tip for my students this semester. My hope is to work on this over the summer and make Pinterest an integral part of my classes starting next fall. 
• Blogger. I've started the process of writing up Blogger Tech Tips now that will provide the core of student support materials as I transition from Ning to Blogger as the blogging platform for class next year. That is another huge change for my classes, but I am really getting excited about it because of the ways students will be able to customize their blogs, turning them into spaces of their own design, reflecting their own interests while also offering them a chance to develop their technical skills. I am glad that Blogger is javascript-friendly, which allows for good integration with other tools, like embedding Pinterest in a blog or embedding Twitter. 
• Diigo. My efforts to make better use of Diigo to facilitate exploration of the student archive of past projects has really paid off! I rewrote all my Week 2 and Week 3 project planning assignments to integrate more Diigo-tagged student projects from past classes, and also more Diigo-tagged online resources. The results were very positive! Overall, the project Introductions that students turned in for Week 4 were improved over past semesters. So, I now have a big incentive to make even better use of Diigo in the future. I used to keep a really clean, highly structured set of Delicious links; I got started using Diigo in a more haphazard way, but I can not see it is definitely worth my time to work on my Diigo library and be more systematic in my tagging. That will be a big part of my summer.
• Twitter. I continue to learn more about Twitter, and I am glad to discover that many of my students are already active Twitter users. I'm also learning that they are not necessarily adventurous Twitter users (they don't use lists, widgets, etc.), so I'm hoping that I can build some class activities that will both help students get started using Twitter as well as expanding the repertoire of students who are already using Twitter. So far, it appears that they are not using Twitter for school and do not think of it as an educational tool. I wonder if I will be able to change that...? Since my own uses for Twitter are educational and professional, I am hoping I can expand my students' use of Twitter into those realms also.

There's lots more I could write about, but I would say those are the big headers that describe what I have been up to over the past couple of weeks and which I am ready to start writing about again in this blog. 

It's funny: I was briefly paralyzed when I realized that the Ning would be gone next year, but thinking about how to adapt to that change has gotten me so energized! I spend most of my good "thinking time" right now (which, truth be told, is shower time for me - I get almost all my good ideas while taking a shower) thinking about what new things I might do with my classes next year! Exciting!

Here's a fun infographic on how teachers use Pinterest that someone shared over at Google+. For a full-sized view, see the EducatorsTechnology.com post:

Digital Content and Flexible Learning Pathways

I've written before about using blogs for class content, and one of my main reasons for using the blog platform for content is the ease of development AND the ease of revision. I spent most of yesterday revising the blog post pages that make up a crucial assignment in my Indian Epics class: the project topics pages that help students as they begin defining their projects already in second week of the semester.

• Topic Brainstorming assignment
• Project Topic pages

In this class (unlike in my Mythology class), students are often starting from square one, not having any prior knowledge at all of the subject matter of the course and, in some cases, no real interest in the subject matter either. It's a Gen. Ed. class that can be used for a graduation requirement and, being online, it fits anyone's schedule, so students end up in the class for reasons of convenience, very different from a class students are taking in their major, where you can assume some connection with the class content.

As a result, this assignment is really important for all kinds of reasons - the students will be working on the project all semester, so they need to choose something that will sustain and reward their interest. That means they need to do some independent research to make sure the topics they are considering really are of interest, but they may have no assumptions or expectations about the subject area to start off with. In turn, that means I really need to support them in doing that research, making it fun and productive to explore the possible topics. I had not tinkered with these pages for a couple of years, but now having access to the Diigo links for the past student projects, I was able to do some serious revision of these pages, giving students more and better access to past projects, in addition to links to Wikipedia and other online resources (I'm very lucky that Wikipedia is consistently an excellent resource for this class).

So, thanks to the ease of publishing content on these blog pages, I was able to work through all the material yesterday, making revisions to every page. It was fun, and I think it is going to prove to have been a good investment of my time. I cannot imagine teaching a class like this without the flexibility of digital content! This allows me to prepare an abundance, even a superabundance, of content, knowing that students will choose their own paths as they explore. I can see how different those paths are when they turn in their brainstorming assignment - everyone goes in different directions. As a result, responding to their proposals is one of my favorite tasks all semester long because I get to see what their interests are and provide more research recommendations based on what they are already thinking about.

Call it what you want - personalized pathways, student-center learning, differentiated instruction... whatever! I just love the way that by preparing digital content I can keep on improving what I offer to the students and letting them choose their own paths through that content. I had a lot of fun revising those topic pages yesterday, and I really hope that the students will have a better experience as they begin planning their projects when the new semester starts up in January.

One of the things I did different this time was to put "random images" in as a prompt for topics (I built this image widget last semester); for some students, I think the images can do more than my words ever can to excite their curiosity. The widget displays an image at random when the page reloads; all of the images have a link to the image source at Wikipedia, and the Ramayana-related images also have a link to an actual Wikipedia article. I'm really excited to see if students mention that their interest in a topic was prompted by an image! Here is the widget in action:

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Google Sites, Diigo, and the Storybook Archive

I just finished one of my very favorite tasks that happens at the end of each semester: I added the links of the Storybooks from this semester to the LONG lists of links for my Myth-Folklore Storybook archive and my Indian Epics archive. Then, I also updated the randomizing widget which shows some great Storybooks at random for each class separately (you see that widget at the top of each list) and which can also show Storybooks at random which you can see from both classes, as on the homepage of my wiki. All told, the process takes several hours, but it is a pure pleasure from start to finish.

This screenshot below shows a Storybook newly added from the Fall semester of Myth-Folklore:

And this screenshot happens to show a Storybook from Indian Epics year before last:

Given that I have now made Diigo a regular part of my content management process, I have also bookmarked all the Storybooks in Diigo and plan to start using tags there to sort and label them by both content and style. That is my next big project in fact! Diigo does handily let me know that I have over 500 Storybooks bookmarked there. That's a really good feeling; almost all the students do leave their projects online for future students to consult, and I am so grateful to them for sharing their work after the class is over.

It's an especially good feeling having all these Storybooks in the archive since it was about three years ago that my school's IT department deleted, without warning, almost all the Storybook websites that my students had built at students.ou.edu (the IT-provided web hosting I relied on, woe is me). At that time, I had over 1000 Storybooks in the archive, seven years' worth of student work - all thrown into the digital trash can by my school just a few days before the start of the school year. That was the worst day ever in my career as an online instructor!

Slowly but surely, though, the archive has recovered, and I have more confidence in Google Sites than I ever will in a service provided by my school, based on that terrible experience of losing my archive without warning. I know that Google Sites is not forever, but when the time comes to migrate and/or rebuild my archive, I am ready to do that again, hopeful that Google will give me more warning than my school did. More importantly, I am confident that there is ALWAYS wonderful work that my students are creating, if I can just find a way to capture and preserve that somehow. It's the single best thing I know of for inspiring future students to aim just as high, or higher! Unlike Rebecca Schuman (see her delightfully provocative article in Slate: The End of the College Essay), I love reading my students' writing, and the Storybook archive is a source of nothing but pride and joy for me, year after year after year.

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Postscriptum: I just sat here for a few minutes, banging away on the widget and watching the brand-new Storybooks from this semester pop up at random together with Storybooks from last year and the year before (it's a javascript widget built with RotateContent.com). Time moves on - and yes, this Fall semester is now really over and receding into the past . . . but with a wonderful new semester to come, and I'm already excited about what new Storybooks will take shape then!

Class Content Development: From Diigo to Blog

I thought I would say something today about a specific way I use Diigo in developing and managing class resources. Until I started using Diigo, I had a terrible time keeping track of things like that, but here is the process that works for me:

Diigo: I created a Diigo account a couple years ago, and I've got a nice Diigo extension installed in Chrome which makes it really easy to bookmark things quickly and easily on the fly. The place I most often find content I want to share with my students is Google+, so I make sure to bookmark with Diigo anything I want to find again later. Google+ is great, but its search features are really (REALLY) bad. If I don't bookmark stuff I want to use later, the odds of ever finding it there again are low. When I want to share something with my students, I bookmark it with the Diigo tag "announcements."

Class Content Blog: As I've explained before, I have a big class content blog where I keep things I want to share with my students; I use a blog for that because it is fast and easy to manage. So, periodically I write up the content that I have bookmarked in Diigo, backdating the posts so that they are available for me to link to at any time. To make that easier, I use various blog labels to keep track of these posts. So, for example, I have a series of posts labeled "writing tips," etc. I use a blog like this in order to provide some commentary to help the students see just why I am sharing these items with them, how they connect up with the work they are doing in class, etc.

From Diigo to Blog: So here's the trick I use to make this process work. I tag things in Diigo as "announcements" that need to go into the class announcements blog, and when I have written up the blog post, I add the tag "blogged." To find out what I have not blogged yet, all I have to do is search my Diigo bookmarks for "announcements NOT blogged" and I can see right away what's I might want to write up that I have not written up yet. I always have more resources available than I can keep up with, and Diigo patiently keeps track of all of that for me.

I use the same process for the "Tech Tips" that I create for the students; these are actual extra credit assignments so they are part of my class wiki rather than the class announcements blog. So, as I learn about free browser-based tools that I might want to recommend to my students, I bookmark them in Diigo with the tag "techtip" and then I review them in detail later, deciding which ones to recommend to my students. That is a more time-consuming process, and I usually only have time to create new tech tips over winter break or summer break. Diigo is very patient, though - those items tagged "techtip" can sit and wait until I am able to get to them.

The "announcements" items, on the other hand, are quick to write up as blog posts, so that are something I work on periodically during the semester - in fact, I will probably do some today because it is a fun and easy task.

I used to be a very dedicated Delicious user and it was really hard for me to get used to using another service. Even though Diigo is a lot like Delicious, it took me several tries to really get into the habit of using it, but now I use it for lots of different purposes and projects; I'll try to write up some blog posts later about other ways I am using Diigo.

Meanwhile, I cannot imagine trying to manage useful class resources without a tool like this, and one of my resolutions for next year is to find even more/better ways to take advantage of what Diigo has to offer!