Finding Common Ground

Back in June, I began a new venture. It’s now nearing the end of November and I’m finishing the end of course two. After completing the second, completely online, course of the School Administration and Supervision program (a partnership between Johns Hopkins and ISTE), I have determined that eLearning is for me. It might not work for everyone, but it is working well for me.

A big revelation for me has been the lack of reliance on physical textbooks. To date, I have purchased 3 texts for the classes, but many of the readings are provided in pdf format or are web based. When it comes time to write a paper or refer to texts from class, I have been very aware that the electronic resources are much more user friendly. The physical texts do not lend themselves well to referencing, even with sidebar notes and endless post-it tabs.

There are two advantages to electronic texts, in my opinion. The first is the ability to highlight pdf resources and annotate web sites using Diigo. Obviously, highlighting is possible with physical texts and is nothing new when reading course content. However, when annotations are done electronically and then combined with search and find, the physical texts fall far short.

Highlights with Diigo

This leads to the second big advantage electronic resources have over physical texts and that is the ability to search a pdf file and websites for a term that is being discussed in the assigned work. Any website can be searched for a term using ctrl+f. This searching ability is important, and the fact that it so easily done makes it invaluable.  While working on an assignment, I was also able to use the search feature in Preview to locate a term in the pdf reading. In addition to locating the term, Preview also gave me a count of the times that term was in the file. I used the Next button to scan for each incidence of the term and could easily use that information in my assignment. In this case, the sentence read something like, ‘the author mentions the term standards 12 times in the article.’ To be able to note this type of detail when using a physical text would be too time consuming and most likely avoided.

Highlights in Preview

I bring up these points because I wonder if our schools are thinking along these lines as we teach today’s learners. Today’s student has many electronic resources at their fingertips – who is guiding them in their use of these resources and sharing techniques for effective reading?

Filed under: JHU/ISTE, Resource Materials, Sharing..., Thinking... and tagged diigo, elearning, jhu, jhu_iste, pdf