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TeachersFirst Edge entry: for slightly adventurous technology users. Create collaborative visual and verbal spaces where you can “post” and share ideas, images, snippits of text, sticky-notes, photos, documents, and more using Stixy. The product makes a bulletin board of items, reminders, comments—essentially everything you could throw onto the front of your refrigerator and more. You can share the stixyboard by URL. Here is an example of a Stixyboard created by the TeachersFirst Edge team. At the time of this review, Stixy was testing a calendar feature with a limited test group. Some features of Stixy appear a bit slow, but the tool still says it is in beta testing. Be patient as the pages load. (Watch the little status report in your lower left in Internet Explorer; it will tell you that things are loading.)
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In the Classroom:
Skills needed: Join (free) using an email address. Note that you do not need to access this email to be able to log in right away (handy when some email is blocked at school!). It will help if you forget a password, though. Use your extra, memberships email account (such as Gmail). If you plan to have students create individual accounts with their individual email accounts, check school policies. Another option is to use your teacher Gmail account and set up subaccounts for up to 20 students to register (by code name or number). Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service. If you plan to have students collaborate using a Stixyboard, they will need to be able to log in individually, using either a Gmail subaccount or their own email accounts. To share a board, click Options. You can find the URL for the board there, as well.
Safety/security concerns: Sharing of Stixyboards is completely controlled by the users who create the boards. If students only “share” with those within their group, there is no “contact” with outsiders. Make sure they include you as a shared member on any collaborative project so you can monitor student work. Check school policies (and obtain parent permission, if necessary) before allowing students to post any work to the web. Stixy does not promote public sharing and commenting.
Possible uses: Teachers can use Stixyboards shared by URL to assign or create web-based tasks: directions and tasks to do on the web (with links), collections of writing prompts (images AND text), or calendars. Students –even young ones – will catch on to the tools of Stixy very quickly to create their own Stixyboards. Have students “collect” quotes and images to convey a message or profile a concept or time period: a Stixyboard about the 1960’s, a writer’s journal of ideas for future writings, a collection of images that use LINE as a major design element, a board full of questions on a new curriculum topic -— a visual KWL chart that can be added to, rearranged, and edited as the unit proceeds -- almost a cognitive “journal” as learning proceeds. For example: Thoughts about Macbeth or The Great Depression. As students read a piece of literature or a challenging speech such as the Gettysburg address, they can collect, question, and comment on snippets from the text, including their own “I wonder” or “what if” notes. Have students make a Stixyboard of the water cycle or other processes, including images and notes to explain each step, then “turn in” the URL for their work or share it with others for changes and additions. (Changes are logged as part of the “list” at the left of any board.) For art classes, assign students to collect and annotate images as they prepare to create artworks of their own, just as artists collect materials in design notebooks and sketchbooks.
Some thoughts on giving credit and copyright: Since it is simple to add notes, students can easily keep track of the SOURCES of anything they collect into a Stixyboard, such as images or quotes, simply by copy/pasting URLs into a "Credits" note. Make sure you require them to do this kind of citation, especially if they use any images. Note that a password-protected (see options) Stixyboard CAN use downloaded images from the web under Fair Use, provided you limit access to that board ONLY to members of that class.
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