Connectivity | Tag

After watching Darren Kuropatwa’s #WhileWalking 66 posted by Amy Burvall in Google+, I started thinking about tags as a part of digital literacy. I am not a very good user of tags. I have been struggling with choosing consistent, clear tags since Delicious switched away from stacks.

“Blogging tips” websites indicate that you should do some research to find the most commonly used terms in your field. However, finding a list of keywords or tags for Educational Technology through a Google search is an exercise in futility since all sites include the word “tag”. Instead I did a very haphazard, non-academic search of tags people are using on their blogs to find the most common. Using Tagxedo, I found the top 100 tag words look like this (see below for how this image was made):

Since Tagxedo only uses individual words, the compound word tags are not shown, but this image does give an overview of what we are talking about. As I make my tags in the future, I will endeavour to use these words alone or in combination in addition to my own idiosyncrasies.

Out of curiosity, I fed the ETMOOC blog feed into Wordle and this is the image created. It will be interesting to see what will change as we move into Digital Literacy.

How I made the Tagxedo:

I thought that I would be able to see tags on other people’s blogs. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds since many blogs do not list their tags. Visiting at least 100, I copied the tag lists from 33 blogs into a Word document. To choose the blogs, I started with the current postings (on Feb. 17, 2013) in the ETMOOC blog hub feed. Then I looked through all the blogs from James Dykstra’s (@mrpuffin) Twitter list of Canadian Educational Folk. I also added a few blogs from people I follow. Once I felt I had enough “data”, I copied the full Word document into Tagxedo. The application automatically choose the most frequently used words.

The blogs I used to make this tag cloud of tag cloud words:

http://sharingourblessings.wordpress.com
http://misslwholebrainteaching.blogspot.ca
http://amysmooc.wordpress.com
http://bigreturns.posterous.com/
http://ewithersict.blogspot.ca/
http://jennyluca.com/
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.ca/
http://shawetmooc.wordpress.com
http://danielschristian.com
http://www.peternewbury.org
http://allmoocs.wordpress.com
http://cinisetfavilla.blogspot.ca
http://juliebalen.weebly.com
http://prairieinspiration.wordpress.com
http://adifference.blogspot.ca/
http://dbarker.edublogs.org/
http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/
http://lifelonglearnerrhonda.wordpress.com/
http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/telblog/
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.ca
http://jamespatrickjensen.com
http://abbtechtuesday.edublogs.org
http://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org
http://somewherefromhere.edublogs.org
http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks
http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
http://intedanddevelopment.blogspot.ca
http://openphd.blogspot.ca
http://www.kleinspiration.com/
http://krebs.edublogs.org/
http://margaret-powers.com
http://cpbwsk.edublogs.org/
http://makeitinteresting.blogspot.ca/

MissZita and I recently had the opportunity to work with Student Success Teachers as they explored Web 2.o tools for their classrooms. These are teachers who work with students who are not always being successful in regular classrooms. The students often work independently to complete credits. We wanted to give the teachers a large range of tools that would support differentiation for these students. Student engagement is priority!

We decided to collaborate and build a “Storify” to bring together a large range of links, video tutorials and examples for the teachers. During the workshop, the teachers were able to not only get an overview of all the tools, but also chose two or three to explore further with our guidance.

This was the first time either of us had used this tool, but we are both impressed at how easy it was to use and the highly visual end product. You can access our Storify on Technology Tools in the Classroom at the following link:

http://storify.com/misszita/technology-tools-in-the-classroom