Pinterest and Diigo

This week, I will be comparing two social bookmarking websites: Diigo and Pinterest. I had opened a Pinterest account a long time ago, but I did not quite figure out how it works, so I deactivated my account. This week, I have watched a few tutorials on how Pinterest works, and actually it turned out to be pretty straightforward. Diigo, on the other hand, is a little bit confusing for me. Both Diigo and Pinterest have their own advantages and limitations.

You create a library in Diigo, where you save websites. You can download a Diigo extension on Chrome, which I found very useful. When you save a website in Diigo, you can go back to it and highlight parts. You can even insert comments. You can follow others, send them messages, or you can create groups in Diigo. While you are saving a website in Diigo, you can enter a description and multiple tags. You can also see other people’s tags and websites that they have saved.  

You create boards on Pinterest and save your websites on these boards. Link to your saved websites are found right below the images you saved on your boards, so you can click on it and read further. You can follow other people and their boards. You can repin something that someone has pinned. You can send messages to others and leave comments under their saved images. Pinterest offers you suggestions based on your pins and boards.

Diigo has a more academic feeling, while Pinterest is much more fun. I will definitely continue to use Pinterest. I will create more boards and discover new things. I also like checking out other people’s boards and see what they have. You get a lot of ideas while doing this. I will use Pinterest to save classroom ideas and come back to these as needed. I also love the website design of Pinterest. You can spend hours on Pinterest. There is a lot to discover! I think I will use Diigo when I work on a research paper. In the past, I used to bookmark the websites that I wanted to go back to, but it was not very well organized, and it was not enough. I can save websites in my Diigo library, highlight parts of the text, insert comments and tags. It is a perfect platform for this purpose.

Technology: Embrace It

I remember the old days when I tried to memorize the phone book to impress my parents. Those were the days when landlines were still around, and they were actually very popular. Now, I know only my phone number by heart as all I need is saved on my phone. It is no news that technology has been improving at a rapid rate for the last 20 years. It is changing our lives drastically. The way people eat, fall in love/out of love, get information, read, study, buy tickets, book holidays, decide on which restaurant to go, live their lives and many other things have changed and are still changing.

According to Social Media Revolution 2011, fifty percent of the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. If you are not on Facebook, it is almost like you don’t exist. We use social media for a lot of things. We write about what is going on with our lives, share our adventures, form groups, organize events, invite people to events, share recipes, complain about bad customer service, look people up on Facebook when we meet them offline, etc. It is one click away, and it is so easy as you can log in on your laptop, tablet, smartphone, and even smart TV. Social media is real. It is happening. There is no escape. Our students will be highly likely into social media like everyone else, which means they will spend a lot of time on it. The question is how we can incorporate it into our classrooms.

Educational Change Challenge is quite thought-provoking. What struck me most while watching it was “If you put a doctor of 100 years ago in today's operating room, she would be lost, yet if you placed a teacher of 100 years ago into one of today's classrooms she wouldn't skip a beat". When you enter any classroom in Turkey these days, you will see students looking at their smart phones. When you write on the board, instead of taking notes, they take a picture of the board. Many classrooms today do not reflect the real world students live in outside of school.

Students’ learning environment should be relevant to their life outside of school.  Technology is in the center of our lives. Why not make the best use of it in education? It will enable students to get information faster, create learning communities, and probably make things easier to for them understand and practice. But first, educators must be well trained on how to make this happen. Most teachers today are not digital native, and using technology for education is not a compulsory component in higher education. If we are not up-to-date on technology, we will lose relevance, which can make us lose connection, and make our students lose interest.

While I was teaching English two years ago, I did not spend too much time thinking about how I could use technology in my classrooms. We had to cover a lot in our classes, and the classroom time was barely enough to catch up with the schedule. We also assigned a lot of homework to students on a daily basis. I am questioning these all now. Teachers definitely need school administration's cooperation on using technology in classes. It is not realistic to think otherwise.  

Blogging in Language Classes

Internet and technology have become such inseparable parts of our lives that we would not know how to survive without them. They have obviously transformed the way we live and do things. They have also changed teaching practices in many ways.

We can easily use blogs in our reading classes. In my experience, students read and work on at least three-four texts in a reading class a week. They typically read a text, answer questions based on the text, have a discussion on it, work on new vocabulary items (depends on how you prefer teaching vocabulary-implicitly vs. explicitly), and do various exercises based on the text. After we complete all the reading texts that week, we can come up with a few controversial questions on each text (say 3 questions per text), and have students respond to/reflect on at least two of them. These questions should be prepared in such a way that students will be able to comment on them, reflect on them, relate to them, talk about their experiences/opinions, etc. We should ask students to respond to at least two other friends’ post so that they will be interacting with each other. As a warm up for this big blogging project, we can start with simply asking students which reading text they liked most that week and their reasons, things they learnt that they didn’t know before, their favorite quote from the text and why, if they would recommend it to a friend and why, etc. Some students are too shy to speak in front of others in a classroom. Blogging will give them a chance to express themselves. As also mentioned in Blogging in Language Learning, it will be empowering, and we will get a chance to learn about our students. Students will also be curious about how their friends will be commenting on their posts, so it will be a nice platform for interaction. We should keep this platform a welcoming and friendly one for everyone, and not let it be hostile in any way. Performance indicator that best fits this situation is ESL.C.9-12.4.1.5: Students explain actions, choices, and decisions in social and academic situations. Here you can see more details about learning standards.

We can also have our students create a blog that they will use as a diary. We can have them write once a week on how that week has been going, how their assignments are going, their social life and school life. They can post a picture that they have taken that week and talk about it, etc. In my experience, all students have one thing in common: they love complaining. They love complaining about school, teachers, classes, assignments, etc., so this activity can go out of hand and demoralize other students, but we can take all the necessary precautions to make it a friendly atmosphere where students are keeping an online diary of their life in a happy and encouraging way. We can have them ask questions to each other under their posts. They will be interested in reading each other’s post. Performance indicator that best fits this situation is ESL.C.9-12.4.1.1: Students use a variety of oral, print, and electronic forms for social communication and for writing to or for self, applying the conventions of social writing. You can also see the learning standards here.

Teachers can use blogs for professional development. I like talking about my classroom struggles and usually ask my colleagues how they would handle it. By writing about it on my blog, I can have a bigger network of teachers. There will be teachers having similar struggles, and there will be others who can recommend way(s) to deal with that problem. It will give us a chance to create a big network where we can help each other. It will also feel good to see that we are not the only ones having those problems.