In business classes we call this a barrier to entry - in education I’ll just call it insane. Let’s start at the beginning, though. I’m absolutely addicted to using the del.icio.us browser button on my home laptop - since finding this tool I’ve been able to research so much more efficiently and effectively (although my tagging technique definitely needs some work). However, at school (on the MANY computers I use throughout the district) I find myself pretty much crippled without the magic button. I would even be willing to take the time to install the buttons on every computer I use, but NO! STOP! You will NOT download ANYTHING, regardless of educational value or how useful the tool is. (Note: I’m in no way saying this is unique to my district and I do understand that there are valid reasons for the restrictions - school filters and download prohibitions are standard at most K-12 institutions in this country. I do believe, however, with all due respect to the powers that be, that restrictions for students and staff should be different.)
So, I started thinking about the futility of spreading the “2.0 word” as I was trying to convince my teacher-friend (via email) to start using del.icio.us so we could share links and told her that she NEEDS the button, as del.icio.us is pretty useless and annoying to use without it - reminds me too much of my ikeepbookmarks days. What’s her reply after attempting? “What do I do if my school won’t let me download the buttons?“ What to do, indeed. Unfortunately, my reply wasn’t entirely positive, but ended with this: try diigo. I don’t want to spend this whole post lecturing about diigo, because I honestly haven’t explored it a ton (but am thinking of switching over) - let’s just say that’s it’s “The best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere“, according to diigo itself. The reason I suggested it (and thanks to Ellen Paxton for sharing it with ME!) is that it doesn’t require a button download. You just save the diigo-let to your favorites menu (in Internet Explorer, which most schools around here use), just like Kwout or TwitThis.
But I digress. The point is - how useful ARE these tools if we can’t access them where we work? I was also raving about Audacity and Jing - again, how can you use these without download capabilities? I know, I know, possibly you could ask your IT people to do the download for you, as I ended up doing with Itunes. This is NOT practical, though - can you just imagine all the IT departments across the country if all of the teachers were each asking for different programs to be downloaded on a daily basis? Not happening. What do most of us do? Well, lots of us (in my PLN) do a LOT of our internet work at home - that’s where I do pretty much ALL of mine. This just won’t cut it if we’re trying to bring the excitement of these tools to educators as a whole. Many teachers aren’t extremely tech-savvy and to be honest, most just aren’t as geeky as I am. Most teachers have different interests and don’t have the time or inclination (and shouldn’t be required!) to spend every free waking moment on their home computer (paid for out of their own pocket) doing education-related research. This isn’t to say that educators aren’t doing schoolwork at home - they’re already busy with grading, supervising, parent contact, etc, and when they’re AT school, they’re teaching (or not being allowed to download something).
So what’s the solution? Honestly, I’m not sure. School districts aren’t going to open the gates to completely open downloads and teachers aren’t going to agree to do all of their work at home, unpaid. Perhaps it could just become standard for all school computers to have certain applications like del.icio.us, audacity, (twhirl, please?), jing, and others automatically downloaded on all machines. Any techies out there have a much better solution? With the knowledge-base of my readers, there has to be something!
Until then, I’ll just go back to 1999 and email myself links when I’m at school………………
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Ahhh! about 8 years ago, I remember fighting with our building tech guy about installing Flash. He wouldn’t do it on the teacher “station” in my room because, “students might play games.” I had to bring in my own computer.
Yesterday, I went to play a video on my presentation computer in my university classroom….Flash player wasn’t installed (new computer) & I couldn’t do it myself. I had to bring in my laptop from my office…
Things like that almost drive me to go back to an overhead (not really, but it is frustrating)!
Yes, many of these social bookmarking tools are extremely helpful for students and teachers. It’s a shame when school IT departments restrict access. I’m a grad student, and I’ve been wanting to participate in scholar.com - a social bookmarking site restricted to students. Unfortunately, my university doesn’t allow us access to this great network. It makes research that much more tough - and much more time consuming.
Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) automatically updates my del-icio.us links. It’s a great win-win!
As an observation, NOT recommendation, savvy students continue to use easily available tools and online resources to bypass filters. AIM or MySpace anyone?
Good news, you don’t need to go on emailing links home anymore. Even before the great downloadable buttons were avaliable, del.icio.us published bookmarklets just as the ones you mentioned for Diigo. You can find them here: http://del.icio.us/help/buttons or here: http://del.icio.us/help/savebuttons . This last one offers a JavaScript based bookmarklet opening a new window just the same as the downloadable button does.
Hope you find this helpful. And tell your friend! del.icio.us is not just the best bookmarking system I know, is also the most social (which adds quite a lot of value to me).
After years of “discussions” with IT, we now include handy/essential apps like Audacity (w/lame library) and the del.icou.us button on all our machines. The problem is that kids still have to sign in-out of delicious, and with a PC you have to locate LAME on every PC you log into to (what a pain). Factor in Google Notebook, Zotero, etc and you have a real headache. This lack of “customization” was one of the driving points for our decision to go 1:1; kids (and teachers) need to be able to make the computer they use a PERSONAL learning tool.
Yeah, what Miren said should work… http://del.icio.us/help/buttons just have to drag the bookmark to your favorites bar, be logged into delicious and it should work without any downloading. I like delicious the most out of the services I have tried that are similar. It is the cleanest to use, and easy to use, especially for sharing sets of links with others. I use it on our web page to display curriculum-related links, without having to update the actual page, just an rss feed embedded. The links that appear are associated with certain tags in my delicious account.
http://www.camdenstation.com/science_links.htm
Really like your blog and ideas. Keep it up.
Thanks James. I also use embedded links from del.icio.us in some of our pages for class, then just add something to del.icio.us with the appropriate tag to make it appear instantly in the page. It makes my life so much easier.
Eric -
Ah yes, the overhead. As we discussed, you’d need some refresher training on that “technology”! Wish it were better at the university level, I like to think it’s just k-12.
Patrick -
1:1 is a dream, but a FAR off one for me :-) Our school is amazing in that we have laptop carts for at least each grade level, but of course that’s STILL not enough, and they aren’t able to be personalised. I like hearing about how you deal with 1:1, though, as that has its own unique challenges.
All -
Thanks so much for all of the suggestions! I’ll do a follow-up post outlining the options for those of us not able to download the buttons at work :-)
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