Media 21 Students Use Google Docs Discussions for Networked Learning During Presearch

Last Thursday, I showed our Media 21 students the new “discussions” feature in Google Docs since we’ve been using Google Docs extensively for collaborative writing and document sharing since last August.  After I introduced our presearching graphic organizer at the beginning of class today, one of our students decided to use the discussions feature with two of her classmates during presearch time today to share and discuss resources they were finding through the research pathfinder (accessible from our Media 21 Symbaloo webmixthat students have pulled into their Symbaloo information dashboards).  Sydney and her two classmates were demonstrating AASL Standard for 21st Century Learners 3.1.2, “Participate and collaborate as members of a social and intellectual network of learners” as they not only shared information sources, but also as they also used the discussion feature in their shared Google Document to have a conversation about the information they were finding in their sources.

I was so impressed by how Sydney applied the sharing skill in a new information seeking context that I asked her to share with others how she went about this task, and she graciously agreed to tell us about her brainstorm!

Rev Up Your Web Browser with Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar via kwout

As we work with you, our students, to harness the power of RSS and to explore options for sharing web resources with classmates, we have found the Google toolbar to be a powerful tool to support these endeavors.   While the Google toolbar has many features we like, we especially love how the Google toolbar allows you to have an easier option for subscribing to a RSS feed either to your iGoogle page or your Google Reader account.  Although the Google toolbar is sadly not available yet for Google Chrome (yes, we are scratching our heads over that one, too), you can get it for Internet Explorer or Firefox.  You can also learn more by watching these videos:

You can also read more about the sharing features in this blog post from Google:

Official Google Blog: Share any web page from your Toolbar (and more) via kwout