Summer Institute in Digital Literacy

This July I attended the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island.  If you want to learn more about the conference there is a wiki page (http://dliuri2014.wikispaces.com/)  that includes notes from all the sessions offered and descriptions of all the projects participants worked on during the institute.  I'm listing my top 5 takeaways here:

1. Google Custom Search Engines https://www.google.com/cse/docs/: Do you want to your scaffold your students' research experience?  Try creating a Google custom search engine.  This allows you to pre-select webpages that you want your students to use and then creates a search box that will only search those sites.  Do you have a student research project coming up?  I'd be happy to help curate and create a custom search engine for you!
2. Mozilla Popcorn Maker https://popcorn.webmaker.org/en-US/editor/: This is an excellent media literacy tool and surprisingly easy to use.  Take a video from YouTube and add commentary using pop-up boxes.  Your students can use it to critique commercials or other types of videos and flex their critical thinking muscles.  Find out more about it at the Cool Tools page from the conference: http://dliuri2014.wikispaces.com/CTMonday1
3. Blendspace https://www.blendspace.com/: This site creates easy to use and beautiful to look at collections of links, images, videos, and more that can be used to flip instruction.  Just drag and drop items into your Blendspace and students can easily follow along.  Optional classroom features even allow you to see which students have completed all the steps and answered quiz questions along the way.  Find out more about Blendspace and see some examples here: http://dliuri2014.wikispaces.com/CTMonday3
4. Symbaloo http://www.symbaloo.com/: When I found out about Symbaloo, I started using it immediately.  Symbaloo is basically a grid with little squares that each contain an image and a link to a site.  You can use it to keep sites that you regularly visit in one handy place or to collect resources for students.  Collections are easy to share and nice to look at.  The organizers of the conference used it to collect contact info for all of the participants linked to their pictures https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/digiuri2014  Find out more about Symbaloo here:  http://dliuri2014.wikispaces.com/CTThursday6
5. Joyce Valenza on Curation:  http://www.slideshare.net/joycevalenza/curationeducon: I was excited to hear Joyce Valenza give a keynote on curation.  She argues in favor of pointing students to curated resources instead of just having them comb through the flood of information on Google themselves. Having students create their own curated information sources and sharing them in turn can encourage leadership and critical thinking.  You can see her whole presentation at the link above.  

If you would like to try out any of these tools, I would be glad to show them to you one-on-one and help you integrate them into your classes!
-Erica Bretall