Ready to put on your inquiry “goggles” and share something (somewhere else) online?

Hello everyone.

What interesting threads of conversations have been surfacing here throughout the past two weeks. From introducing ourselves to sharing resources to digging into annotation, curation and "paying attention" to our students in a way that surfaces what it means to teach and learn today. Nice job everyone.

So now in our final week we wanted to invite you to share one thing beyond P2PU and post or create something for the larger world and community some of your inquiry or thinking. It can be small … it can also be big! But we want to encourage taking an inquiry approach – putting on those reflective and thought-provoking inquiry goggles – and post something in the flow of a other conversations that you are thinking about from this work we’ve done together.

Here are a few ideas:

As Janet pointed out, there has been an active discussion happening on twitter now related to thinking about textbooks and the possibilities. You can start at Bud Hunt’s blog post on this subject -- Not #beyondthetextbook. #betterthetextbook -- or following the twitter chat that has been going strong since this weekend, #beyondthetextbook.
As demonstrated by a few people here, popular tools like Pinterest, Themeefy can be used to pull together a range of resources around a topic or inquiry of interest. Want to try your hand at starting one today if you haven’t used one of these forums yet?
Annotation has been an interesting topic this week too -- maybe go and digitally annotate something and then come back here and share?
You can also take a lead from Tellio and post a reflective blog to share something that stood out for you.
Is your passion and inquiry around digital literacy? Well then we recommend you post a blog post at Digital Is! Join/login to the site and click on “create a blog” in the dashboard to begin. ... Want to start to draft a longer resource in DI? If so, submit a request here.
Other ideas, recommendations and suggestions?

We would love to hear where your inquiries take you too.

And because it's beautiful, here's a first grade project called Dragonflies in Our Backyard shared by teacher who learned how to use it while attending a California Writing Project event ... It was created with the help of another interesting tool called Animoto. (And curated in a Pinterest board for a panel discussion about composition here!)

Christina, Katherine and Troy

Task Discussion

KevinHodgson March 22, 2012, 6:26 a.m.

This is related to my inquiry question around authentic student digital composing (not just in school) and how to value that kind of writing in the classroom. I taught an entire unit, for the first time, around digital citizenship with my sixth graders. We used the CommonSense site as our springboard, but also went off in a lot of different directions. The final project was a digital poster that I am still looking at. But I was impressed with what they learned, and the kinds of discussion we had, and I realized just how important it is for us to have those kinds of conversations in school (since they are clearly not going on much at home).

What I was trying to do was connect their digital lives outside of the school confines with skills we are teaching inside the school (around inquiry, and process, and informational writing, and digital composition). I still have improvements I need to do (more research-based lessons) for next year, but I found it to be an exciting unit.

Here is a link to some of the Digital Life posters (on Glogster).

http://edu.glogster.com/presentation/glog-flow/7757938?

Once I finish assessing and "reading" the posters, I will add some more reflections.

Kevin
Christina Cantrill March 21, 2012, 6:14 p.m.

Okay ... Just to say, even when I'm not saying too much, I still find it kind of nerve-wracking to post in big open public spaces online. Crazy, I realize, given how much I do online, but I do still feel that gut level nervousness when I don't know the community well. For example, today I posted just a brief shared link to an article and I had this same feeling before hitting submit. So I thought I would share that in case others feel that way. And I thought I'd share too because the article is about curation with Pinterest so I thought you all would appreciate it ... and you might want to post some of your work too!

See: Mind/Shift for How Educators Use Pinterest for Curation
Christina Cantrill March 21, 2012, 2:10 p.m.

Another opportunity I wanted to let folks associated with this study group is an upcoming series of weekly webinars organized by Howard Reingold and the folks at the MacArthur Connected Learning Research Hub. These webinars focus on a range of topics that connect in various ways to topics you all surface over these last two weeks: from interest-driven learning, to rethinking resources like school libraries, to supporting participatory cultures and practices in the classroom and beyond.

Several people who are members of the Digital Is community have been signing up to blog about one of these webinars as they happen -- and we would like to open up this opportunity to you too. The webinars happen weekly and there are a range of topics, so if one of them seems of interest to you, we would encourage you to attend and/or listen to the archive and the blog about it in Digital Is to share what surfaced for you with the larger community.
Christina Cantrill March 20, 2012, 3:40 p.m.

Btw, here is another conversation Paul Allison is trying to start in Google+ related to annotation that might be of interest to some of you: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113993022447291199374/posts/ZKy27q5uaYM

(Note that I think this post is more about annotation that it is about the KONY video, although someone did respond about the video .... I think, however, you would be welcome to pick up the annotation thread if you so choose!)