This break I found myself pondering the question of a digital life. OK, that's not quite the concept, but it will have to do. I am wondering about just how much ownership, awareness, and organization students and teachers give their online life. Sure they understand and manage their Facebook identities, but what about all of their work and leisure online?
I would like to help teachers and students learn to manage or balance their digital needs easily. What are those needs. Here is my list of essential digital needs;
- File Storage - a place to keep everything
- photos - flikr or picasa, or ?
- video - youtube.com
- documents - dropbox.com or box.net or MS Skydrive or Google docs or ?
- Sharepoint
- Moodle ePortfolio
- Authoring Applications
- Google Docs
- Zoho.com
- Sharepoint
- Communication
- Gmail
- Windows live
- Zoho.com
- Moodle
- Sharepoint
- Organize
- Google calander
- Windows Live
- Zoho.com
- Sharepoint
- toodledo
The last piece to the puzzle is how are the students and teachers creating a PLN. For students this is most likely to be on Facebook, but teachers should consider using that for personal interaction and using something like Twitter for professional chatter.
This is a large topic and deserves much more than this short introduction. However, I am tired of students and teachers blaming others for why they are not using the digital tools we now have. They should not be able to blame the school for poor file access or organization or communication. They are expected to bring paper, pencils, binders, calculators, and such to class and to have these at home. Why not digital tools?
3 comments:
The first Digital ID I give people is an email address. Then, before they can figure out how to use the interface they sign up for facebook and start getting spammed from facebook. Pretty soon their inbox is so full they give up on managing their digital email contacts. Any closed system like facebook sure makes it hard on newbies. Using google which allows you can move your contacts in and out of different programs is better than facebook.
My biggest problem is that my online life starts to look as disorganized as my desk. I can't recall where I filed that link! And then the school division insists that we keep school stuff on their sharepoint. Yeesh. Any advice?
Tough to give good advice at this point. These tools are evolving so we'll see major change over the next two years.
I've settled in to using dropbox for everything (Until my district demands the same as yours!). The reason for that is it's a caching technology, not a "cloud only" technology.
This way every computer I touch (including my ipod), regardless of location or OS, has the latest version of what I'm working on.
As for content creation. I do all my collaborative docs in Google (yes the own too much of me, but their tools are great and free!), but I still do a lot of local work in Word or OpenOffice. Then save to the Dropbox folder for auto sync everywhere.
Do you have any tricks?
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