[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzkwwTUlI0&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
Last summer, Los Angeles Unified School District canceled summer school for K-8, leaving tens of thousands of children without, among other things, guided instruction. Of course, wealthy Westsiders had their pick of summer programs. Those with a little less, had to make do as they could. Students in my Writing 340: Advanced Writing course decided they could help using the dual techniques of social bookmarking and content aggregation. The result: SOS Classroom
Let me back up for a moment.
Social Bookmarking refers to the practice of publishing and sharing the Web pages you want to remember. Most people store their bookmarks in their browser. Social bookmarking allows you to store your bookmarks online. How many times have you said to someone, “Hey, have you ever seen that one site?” Sometimes I think we are only as smart as our bookmarks.
Well, there are some fairly smart bookmarking systems out there that you can easily find on the Web. Del.icio.us seems to be the widest used one right now, though I tend to prefer Diigo, which allows users to bookmark pages AND annotate them with little sticky notes. Other cites cater to more academic crowds, and more and more social networking tools, from Facebook to Twitter, facilitate some form of link sharing.
Key to this use of technology is the idea that other people might benefit from the sites you tag. No doubt, del.icio.us serves as a good starting point for research on a topic. More to the point, your tagging can become a kind of curation or, more importantly, the source of a larger discussion on a topic.
The second technology used here is aggregation, and in many ways, it is the flip side of social bookmarking. If Diigo sends your annotations out to the world, aggregation is the process of pulling information to you. The standardization of Web content has given birth to the RSS feeds that stream off every blog and many other sites. Users can choose from their favorite place to aggregate from Blog readers to more multimedia content aggregators, such as pageflakes or netvibes.
Saving Our Summer
Having learned about these two technologies and the plight of LAUSD students, my USC class decided to create a site where they could aggregate educational content for Math and Language Arts. We sent out notice to educators, parents, and other interested parties and tapped into the networks of our Advisory Board, including Bill Tierney and several other folks deeply invested in education reform.
Before we knew it, we had hundreds of websites, including games, videos, and other instructional materials, all free and ready to be used by students.
At some point, I became worried that this site would disproportionately help those students who already had the privilege of technology. Did those socio-economically disadvantaged students have access to these online materials? I consulted with John Newsom, former Green Dot principal and now one of Villaraigosa’s liaisons to public schools. He assured me that despite the other material possessions these poorer students lacked, the majority of them had at least some access to the Internet.
What became apparent through conversations with educators and parents was that Internet access did not mean Internet use. The students I spoke with at our pilot program at the Champions summer camp confirmed that though they had access to the Internet, their parents would not let them go online because they did not know where the good resources were.
SOS Classroom is an attempt to put Web 2.0 to work in the midst of an education crisis. All we ask is that contributors tag their pages and links sosclassroom. They can use del.icio.us or diigo. They can use Twitter (hashtag #sosclassroom or @sosclassroom). [See our Twitter feed here] They can even email us sites. That extremely low bar to entry was meant to encourage anyone to send sites our way.
At the same time, we had to abandon our initial plan to use pageflakes to merely aggregate the sites. Our advisers, such as Kevin Schaaf of UTLA, convinced us that parents were primarily concerned with protecting their children. These needed to be vetted sites. So, the students went about the task of evaluating and organizing each site that came our way. The result is a web resource that features reliable educational content, not just whatever comes our way. (This might be a Web 1.0-2.0 hybrid — part About.com page, part Wikipedia).
The students, both the ones in our pilot program and those in my class, learned a lot from the site. LAUSD seemed happy, too, as they featured us on their resources page. In the process, we also discovered the community of activists working throughout Los Angeles to develop solutions to the many problems that face the second largest school district in the country.
I learned how amazing service project driven learning can be.
My current students have taken on 3 new projects. One of the sections is expanding SOS Classroom into the realm of music instruction, an area very hard hit by budget cuts. More to come on that. Till then, keep sending the links our way.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W48aCu13HIY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
