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Cross posted on Virtually Social Learning.

Today I was supposed to get stuck right back into planning for Term 1, but alas, I was found to be procrastinating. Not entirely a waste of time though as it saw me doing something I’ve been planning to do for ages - tidying up the tags I use for bookmarking sites in Diigo. The reason I wanted to do this was because I had several tags for the one thing, for example: socialnetworking and social_networking and ‘social networking.’ I know, I could tag each site that I wanted to use this tag on three different ways, but I really am in favour of keeping things as simple as possible and so wanted to use just one version. Which one though? Does it matter?I actually like the social_networking version best because it separates the words making them easier to read but keeps the whole phrase clearly together. But, I didn’t choose to go with that version because after looking around a bit at what other people were doing, most people use the version without spaces - socialnetworking.

On the edit tags page on Diigo it tells me how many times I’ve used a particular tag as well as telling me how many times that tag has been used throughout Diigo. For example, you can see here that I have used the tag google_earth 6 times, but it has been used throughout the Diigo community 1251 times to tag different websites.

If I change that tag to googleearth as one word then let’s see what happens:

Ah! Now I see this variation has been used 4378 times throughout the community.

So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, it’s a few points:

• There are a few different tagging variations used
• Most people tag by not putting spaces between the words
• It doesn’t matter which variation I use, so I’ll stick with one to keep things simple for myself
• When searching by using tags it’s important to make sure I try a few variations of the tag to maximse search results.

Here are a few questions I’ve had about tagging for a while:

• When we tag things should we think that we tagging for ourselves to find it later, or for others? Of course we are doing both in reality and tagging things so others can find them is the social part of ’social bookmarking’!
• How should this effect the tags we use, as in the number of tags per bookmark, or the detail? Does it matter? Advice I’ve read in the past says to use as many tags as possible per bookmark/item. I guess that makes sense as giving something a tag in effect puts it into a ‘folder’ of other items with that tag. People will look in different ‘folders’ for the same thing, so as many tags as a practicable makes sense.
• Should we use variations of the same tag on each bookmark?
• Does anyone have a system they use when tagging? For example, do you use words from the title, then words from the first paragraph, and then look at the overall article?

Tagging is something I have found confusing in the past and a while to get used to so if you’ve got some great advice, I’d love to hear it!

Tags: diigo, socialbookmarking, tagging, tags

At the end of November I presented a session at the VITTA (Victoria Information Teachers Technology Association) Conference on how I had used mobile technologies (iPods and phones) with my Year 8 class. I showed what I did for my project and talked about a few other things, then I got the people in my session to have a go at making an audio or video recording on their phones and bluetoothing it to me. I wanted them to record any ideas they had for how they might use mobile phones in their classrooms. This is what they sent:

(The guy in the first video is Jarrod Robinson who has done quite a bit of stuff with phones. It’s definitely worth checking out his blog - P.E Geek)

Tags: bluetooth, cell phones, iPods, Mobile Phones

This post is also appears on my other blog Learning, Teaching, Thinking, Playing which is where I will be writing more often next year. Hopefully I will be able to put together a technoLanguages Team of writers and get more regular and varied articles happening on this blog - and more voices other than mine to add. But, I digress! The reason I’m here now is to share this with you:

I wrote recently about a project I did with iPods, mobile phones and Year 8. It wasn’t an entirely successful venture, but not a complete failure either. My main aim was to engage Year 8 more with their Chinese language learning, and I don’t think that happened. They liked using the iPods and phones, but that didn’t get them to create any more or any better quality work. This has really made me think about what I’m doing and why.

It is becoming a bit of a cliche, but I’ll say it anyway - the technology is only a tool. We really need to be thinking much more deeply about the quality of the content we are working on with the kids. The content is paramount to motivation and no matter how fun the technology is, the kids will still get bored if they aren’t interested in the content. Introducing technology will not magically engage kids – well, it might for the first couple of classes, but the novelty will wear off and they will see through it all!

I have found that students still want lots of teacher direction, but they are still very quick to criticise when something is boring. Sometimes that is a bit confusing as to what they really want, and I have had the impression from a couple of my classes this year that no matter what is put in front of them, or what they get to choose, they still aren’t going to be interested. Admittedly, the two classes I have in mind have not only been difficult for me, but other teachers as well. Our Year 7 class has turned their noses up at many things – complaining about having to do Voicethreads and big deal about a video conference with Manila. A few of them even asked their English if they should be learning how to read and write more!

I think the big thing for me to realise is that it is not only the staff who often need to be ‘convinced’ that this technology is great and can have huge impact on our students, but the kids need to be shown explicitly what the benefits are for them too.

Tags: engagement, iPods, students

On the LOTE Games page of this blog, Jenny Ryan left this game description. I think it sounds like a great game so I’ve posted the description here as well:

Jenny writes:

I got this game at a PD in London and found that it works really well with all levels of ability and motivation!  It’s called Poker Testing and can be used to reinforce vocabulary or introduce it.
1. Give the class a list of 10 words that will be used for the Poker Test. Put this list on the board.  Give them 1 min to study the list (optional).
2. Get rid of the list and replace it with the numbers 1-10 down the board. Get the students to write the same down a sheet of paper, or piece of scrap.
3. Begin by asking a question about one of the words - it could be meaning, spelling, gender (if applicable), anything appropriate.  Students must not call the answer out!
4. Tell the students to put up their hand if they think they know the anwer.  Anyone who doesn’t put up their hand is to put a cross next to No.1 on their piece of paper - they cannot get a point for this question.
5. Next, choose one person to anwer.  If that person gets the anwer right, everyone with their hands up gets a point and puts a tick next to No.1.  If that person gets it wrong, they put a cross next to No.1 and you keep asking until someone gets it right.
6. It’s simple on the first question, but gets riskier from there.  After the first question, if anyone gets the anwer wrong, they lose all of their points.  They can start accumulating points again from the next question.  Only the person who answered incorrectly loses their points.
7. Keep going in this manner until you have asked 10 questions.  The student(s) with the most ticks, win(s).
8. Things to take into consideration:
* It’s best to ask easier questions towards the end, to encourage students to attempt to answer.
* Try not to make it too obvious that you won’t ask the same person twice to anwer - except if you run out of volunteers.
* Decide if you want to be nasty or nice - do you want to pick someone you know won’t know the answer, and who will lose all their points, to prevent them from winning?!
* You might want to point out to the class that they should all be putting up their hands for the first question - they have no points yet, so cannot lose any! - or you might let them work that out for themselves.
I’ve found that most students really enjoy this game, as they don’t always have to know the answers to win.  I usually get 100% involvement.

If anyone else has any games they love using in their languages classroom, please leave a comment on this blog post or on the LOTE Games page, we’d love to hear from you!

Tags: engagement, LOTE Games

I ran this blog through Wordle and this is what I got. I’m glad to be reminded that my students are the centre of what I do - even if some days I get caught up in so much other stuff!

Tags: blogging blog wordle