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What really goes into your lesson plan?

Getting learners to think about their writing BEFORE they put pen to paper is a thankless task.  Most seem to prefer the “stream of consciousness” approach, where the words flow ceaselessly out of the brain, down the arm and out, via the pen, onto the page.  I have, in the past, spent months hammering home the point and process of planning a piece of writing – even to the point of insisting my classes include a plan with every piece of writing they submit.  No plan – no grade.

I gave up on that approach after a student came up to me at the end of one lesson and handed me his essay.  ”Teacher, I’m really sorry but I didn’t have much time for my homework.  I wrote the essay for you, but is it OK if I write the plan later?”

For Further Information on What really goes into your lesson plan?

By Teflgeek

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search forbookmarks of resources online. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.

Common features

Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".^[1]

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tagsinstead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.^[2]

History

The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList,^[3] the features of which included public and private bookmarks.^[4] Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market.^[5][6] They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy).^[7] Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks;^[8] Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others^[9] and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites.^[10]Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as thedot-com bubble burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century".^[11] In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."^[12]

Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging^[13] and coined the term social bookmarking. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, similar services Furl and Simpy were released, along with Citeulike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon. In 2006, Ma.gnolia (later renamed to Gnolia), Blue Dot (later renamed to Faves), Mister Wong, and Diigo entered the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007, IBM released its Lotus Connections product.^[14] In 2009, Pinboard launched as a bookmarking service with paid accounts.^[15] As of 2011, Furl, Simpy, Gnolia, and Faves are no longer active services.

Digg was founded in 2004 with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed withReddit in 2005 and Newsvine in 2006.

Folksonomy

Main article: Folksonomy

A simple form of shared vocabularies does emerge in social bookmarking systems (folksonomy). Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics.^[16] Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources have been shown to converge over time to stable power lawdistributions.^[16]. Once such stable distributions form, the correlations between different tags can be examined to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtain a form of community or shared vocabularies.^[17] While such vocabularies suffer from some of the informality problems described below, they can be seen as emerging from the decentralized actions of many users, as a form of crowdsourcing.

From the point of view of search data, there are drawbacks to such tag-based systems: no standard set of keywords (i.e., a folksonomy instead of a controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g., singular vs. plural, capitalization), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchicalrelationships between tags (e.g., a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese).

Uses

For users, social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.^[18]

Enterprise bookmarking

Main article: Enterprise bookmarking

Comparison with search engines

With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders.^[19] Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end-users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it (although both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this).

Abuse

Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion.^[20] Due to its popularity, some people have started considering it as a tool to use along with search engine optimization to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.^[21]

See also

§  List of social bookmarking websites

§  AddThis

§  ShareThis

§  Bookmark manager

§  Models of collaborative tagging

§  Social bookmark link generator

§  Social network service

§  Social software

§  Semantic Web

Delicious

http://delicious.com/ip51187

Motivate and Engage Students with Web 2.0 Teaching Tools

Hook even the most reluctant learners with Web 2.0 teaching tools. Boost your students' academic achievement with these Web 2.0 applications. Revitalize your lessons by integrating these instructional technology tools into your teaching plans.

Web 2.0 sites come and go. Many are not designed as instructional technology. I want to share with you Web 2.0 sites that can be used as teaching tools. These sites are ones that have worked for me, my students, and other teachers. I have discovered that Web 2.0 teaching tools can provide compelling teaching and learning opportunities. 

What is Web 2.0

A simple definition of Web 2.0 is the “Read/Write Web.” Originally, the Internet was a place to locate information - mainly a "Read Only Web." As the Internet slowly changed, web sites were developed that let people "write" and share information. Today’s Web 2.0 sites, like Facebook and Wikipedia, enable people to communicate and collaborate. 

Educational Challenges

Educators face many challenges today. They must adapt to a generation of students who have grown up using the Web.

Teachers must learn and teach information literacy that includes effectively using the Internet. These Web 2.0 applications can help students develop the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century world.

21st Century Skills

We live in a global, knowledge-based economy. Students must master vital 21st century skills to survive in the world beyond the classroom. They must be able to
• research using the Internet,
• assess information,
• work collaboratively,
• communicate effectively,
• think critically and creatively.

I have organized the Web 2.0 sites using some of these 21st century skills. Many of the Web 2.0 applications incorporate more than one skill. These tools can help us realize the different ways critical 21st century skills can be developed in the classroom.

Join me in exploring the Web 2.0 teaching tools and resources on this site. The ready-to-use teaching resources will help you get started. If you are hesitant, don’t be. I’ve taught for over 25 years and am not a technology expert. If I can do it, you can do it.

Here’s a little tip:
Think about a lesson or unit that you teach that bores you or your students. Look for a Web 2.0 teaching tool that you can use with that lesson. It could be just the thing to excite you and your students while making the learning more enjoyable (and meaningful) for everyone!

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys. Our newest tool, TCast, allows teachers to record and place audio or video files anywhere in a lesson--in 3 easy steps. Each of these tools really opens up the scope and sequence of lessons centered around spoken language tasks.

Creating media-rich lessons in ANVILL is simple and straightforward. There are templates for audio, video, and image tasks; there are also tools for text-based discussions like blogs and forums. Whether you're linking to existing web content, or uploading your own texts or media files, ANVILL simplifies the process.

ANVILL is aimed at both teachers in traditional face-to-face situations as well as at those who are doing distance or hybrid courses. Its course management tools provide a simple means of enrolling and communicating with students and making curriculum web-accessible. We think you'll find that ANVILL is quite flexible, and permits the kind of extra listening and speaking practice that language students need so much.

ANVILL is a research project of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon. The software is currently in use at UO and many other sites around the US. Thanks to our National Foreign Language Resource Center partners at CASLS, we are able to offer ANVILL to educators at no cost. Here is an overview of its features. If you think it would be helpful to you and your students, sign up for an account (at right). We're looking for language teachers at all levels to use it and tell us what they think. (Teachers sign up for accounts, and then register their own students.)

It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com.

What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks?

There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.

10 Delicious.com Alternatives

(in alphabetical order)

Blinklist: Blinklist has some of the same features that Delicious has, like quick bookmarking and sharing with others. Pages can be read offline, as well. But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.

Connotea: The site advertises itself as a service for “researchers, clinicians, and scientists.” And many of the features are specifically designed for academic users. But it acts in much the same way Delicious does: find a web page, add it to your “library,” add keywords for later retrieval, and so forth.

Diigo: Diigo lets you save web page bookmarks, files, images, and much more. It bills itself as a personal information management service. You can bookmark web pages via a Diigo toolbar and/or a bookmarklet in your web browser.

Evernote: Like Diigo, Evernote isn’t just for bookmarking web pages — but that’s one of the things you can do, and I know a few fellow search marketers who are already using Evernote instead of Delicious. You can save URLs or just text clippings from a web page.

Faves.com: This is not a pure bookmarking site, but a site that acts as a combination of, say, Delicious and Google Reader. When you register, Faves.com installs its toolbar in your browser and that’s how you save content. Your Faves.com home page includes the links that friends have saved (if you choose to connect to others who use the site), making it as much about content discovery as saving.

Google Bookmarks: You may already be using this without even knowing it. If you’ve ever starred a search result on Google.com or starred a place in Google Maps/Places, it’s already been saved into Google Bookmarks. You can also add sites to Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar. In fact, here’s a list of the various ways to add pages to Google Bookmarks. And yes, it supports importing bookmarks.

Historio.us: This bookmarking site even has a .us TLD like Delicious.com used to have. Histori.us offers one-click saving, makes snapshots of web pages when you save them, offers tagging and full-text search. It does support importing bookmarks from other sites. There’s a limited free account option, but if you have more than 300 bookmarks, you’ll need to use one of the paid accounts.

Instapaper: If you’re a heavy Delicious.com user, this one’s probably not for you. Instapaper allows you to save web pages for reading at a later time, but creator Marco Ament warns that it’s not “optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found.”

Pinboard.in: This is not a free service. It offers a basic service for about $7 (one-time fee) or an archival service for $25 a year. The archival service stores copies of your bookmarks and provides full-text searching. Conveniently, you can see a Pinboard vs. Delicious comparison to help you decide if this is the right service for you.

Zootool: Like some of the others above, Zootool isn’t just for URLs; you can save images, documents, and other web-based content. Saving is done via a bookmarklet and, unlike Delicious.com’s blue links, Zootool saves your content as thumbnails. It offers organizing tools like tagging, too.

How to Export Delicious.com Bookmarks

You’ll probably want/need to export your Delicious.com bookmarks in order to get the most out of any of the services above. I’ve mentioned cases where importing is or isn’t available, at least based on the sites’ help pages.

Fortunately, exporting Delicious bookmarks is easy:

1. Login to Delicious and go to your “Settings” page.

2. Under the “Bookmarks” heading, look for the “Export / Backup Bookmarks” link.

Delicious will save your bookmarks as an HTML file, and you have the option to include your existing tags and/or notes.

Your turn: If there are other Delicious.com alternatives that I’ve missed above, or if you have experience with any of the sites above (good or bad), let us know in the comments so that all readers can benefit.

Postscript (December 17, 2010)

See our new post indicating Delicious.com may not be closing down: Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All.

Related Topics: Features: General | Top News | Yahoo: Delicious

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About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

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What is a Wiki? Article By Nathan Matias

In this article, we can see the purpose behind the Emerson of Wiki. Wiki is also known as Hypertext and Relational Database. Wiki was first designed by Ward Cunningham and Bo Leuf in1995 and it was a website where “anyone can contribute”. It is this quality has made it the purest form of Hypertext and larges encyclopedia available on the web today. Moreover, according to the author of this article the most important plus point of Wiki is that it does not need any Installation. Wiki was usually used to keep track of our brain. Ted Nelson named Wiki as Hypertext because it was used to preserve every ideas and thoughts for a long time or forever. In this article, we can know how Wiki exactly works and ends our every false notion of Wiki. In addition, Notebook is the best give example of how wiki works and it is a personal wiki. I am very surprised to know that Wikipedia has become that largest knowledge base non-profitable organisation. There are many different wiki software like Meatball wiki, Green cheese where people communicate online and share their links and information  Wiki is very used by many companies and universities to create collaboration among employees or students. British telecom, Colorado state university, Disney, Motorola, Wind river all use wiki or some other wiki software according to their purpose. However, the only thing is that as wiki is editable there is a fear of vandalism. Nevertheless, wiki is working to avoid this threat. 

            Further, if I get chance to use Wiki in my classroom than I will use it for the benefit of those students who are introvert and who are not very sharp and shy. In this way they can get the benefit of the all notes and activity done in the classroom. With the help of Wiki I can tell students to post their H.W on the wiki page. Learning through Wiki can help distance learners or online learners.

Summary of the video “WIKI IN PLAIN ENGLISH"

Summary of the video “WIKI IN PLAIN ENGLISH"

The video mainly talks about Importance of the wikis and how it can be used to promote collaborative learning. Further it also provides an example of four friends going for a trip and finding difficulty in the co-ordination and organization of the things to carry. As it is the key to plan and plan well and coordinating, they could not accomplish the organization and coordination of their group input by using E-mail. And the speaker then tells us the Importance of a wiki website as a user-friendly and easy to use, as it allows one to edit, save, create, and link different pages.

Then, in the video, Mary sign up for a wiki site and create two lists for campaigning entitled 1)‘what we have' and 2)'what we need'. She then finishes the process and saves it. Respectively John, Henry and Frank edit the page according to their plans and make successful arrangements.

What is WIKI???

The article is all about a wiki which is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions. The first wiki “WikiWikiWeb” was designed by Cunningham and Bo Leuf in 1995 as an open collaborative community website where anyone can contribute.

It can be used for a large variety of tasks for a large variety of tasks from personal to collaborative tasks. The possibilities might make wikis seem like a daunting system, but commitment to simplicity makes wiki tools a breeze. Some of the advantages of using wikis are 1) wikis simplify editing your websites by using simple markup language 2) it also records document histories 3) it is simple to create a link by just putting the title in brackets or a new page 4) and finally it keep a track of all the stuff. It encourages people to create a website collaboratively and provides knowledge bases and direct access to the website. The most popular wiki is Wikipedia (an extensive online editable encyclopedia).

To conclude we can state that wikis are hypertext tools that allow managing the content / editing and creating a static websites.

How it could be used for language learning???

In context of language wikis can bring wonders for the learners of language, as it is an open forum enhancing learners’ autonomy and language is learnt in a free environment only. It provides the students with such a communicative or conducive environment for grasping the best knowledge from the greatest source (internet) itself.

There might be different objectives that can be achieved such as, developing the writing skills, developing academic writing, problem solving through collaboration and many more. One of the tasks that come to my mind is to enhance writing and communication skills of the students.

In order to develop the writing skills of the learners the tutor can ask the students to write anything authentic (after a small research) and create a wiki on the same. For example, if the topic is the Anglo-Saxon Age and their life style, the students can refer to resources/references and write something on the wikis which could be edited by other students and once they feel the topic is complete the tutor or any other researcher can authenticate the post or wiki. And in a way the students have come up with an authentic web page on the topic.

This way the learner can communicate and develop their writing skills.