reading/technology

The best tools to keep track of everything on the Internet

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon What do you do with everything you find on the web?

Like, how do you remember the good stuff you’ve read? And how do you organize it and access it later? What if you want to share it with someone, or a group of people, in a few weeks?

Please tell me! — because these questions have taken over my brain over the past month.

(I’m not alone. Over the past year, content curation — the practice of seeking, sifting through, making sense of, and sharing the best of what’s on the Web — has gotten huge. To me, this new phenomenon is the evolution of social bookmarking.)

I’m happy to report that I’m making some progress, but I still find myself doing the same research more than once, clipping an interesting quotation while fending off feelings of déjà vu, convincing myself that the Internet has reshaped my brain into some Silly Putty of distractability.

This post won’t unveil My Epic Online Reading Flow (still in draft form), but I will share some tools that have saved me from online overload.

Aggregating Content: Google Reader and Twitter
Instead of visiting tons of websites to find good articles, I rely on Google Reader to do the discovery for me. To be sure, this practice prevents me from stumbling upon random good stuff, but most of the time, I don’t have the time. My colleagues on Twitter also share high-quality articles, especially about teaching and reading.

Saving content to read later: Pocket
One problem with excellent content is that I don’t always have time to read it. That’s why a read-later service is crucial. There are many excellent ones, including Instapaper and Readability. But my (recent) favorite is Pocket. It’s beautiful, has excellent phone apps, and saves video as well as text.

Pocket is sort of my information headquarters. Most everything goes there for quality inspection and processing. Most articles get deleted, but the lucky few make the cut.

Annotating content: Annotary
“You take notes?” people ask me, “of stuff on the web?” Yes. I do. (Not all the time.)

It all started several years ago when Diigo came out. Diigo took the social bookmarking trend Delicious began and added an annotation feature to the mix. I became a little obsessed. After all, if they’re called web pages, doesn’t it make sense to take notes? I thought so.

Unfortunately, over the past two years, Diigo has become bloated, not very pretty, and not maintained particularly well. But a new annotation tool, Annotary, has filled the gap. Its bookmarking and annotation toolbar incorporates sharing options, too, which is a plus.

Publishing content: Bundlr
After spending time seeking, sifting through, and making sense of tons of information, it’s time to share it. Most items go to individuals through email. Then there are the select few that get shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. My favorite articles, though, deserve to be preserved and published to a wider audience.

As many of you know, I’m pretty excited about Bundlr and Iserotope Extras. There are at least 40 other tools that do the same thing (including Annotary), but Bundlr, in my opinion, does it best. I’m finding that people appreciate reading articles recommended by someone who has read them already and written a blurb to offer some context. That’s why I like Dave Pell‘s NextDraft, an excellent daily newsletter, and that’s why (at least some) people like Iserotope Extras.

Update, December 2012: I now prefer Snip.it over Bundlr!

Archiving and saving content: Evernote
The last step is making sure that I don’t lose anything. Too often, parts of our online lives find themselves in different places. My photos, for example, are backed up on Dropbox, while my important work documents stay on Google Drive.

But for online content, I’ve decided, after years of trying my best to stay away, that Evernote is the best way to go. Click a button from Pocket, and the clipper strips away formatting and saves articles in plain text, all in one step. No, Evernote is not going to display my articles beautifully like other tools, but it’s robust enough to keep everything all in one place.

* * *

Wow, that was a lot — and that’s just the beginning! I’m really interested in hearing how you manage your online lives, find high-quality information, and make sure it’s organized. (It’ll help me stay sane.) Please let me know! favicon

reading

Today’s project: Organizing all my books

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Today I’m organizing all my books using Goodreads.

The first thing I decided, after much thought, was to create two Goodreads accounts to split the books I’ve read from those in my classroom library.

So I’m both iseroma and markisero on Goodreads.

Then I worked a little (but not too much) on organization and cataloging. Goodreads calls categories “shelves.”  It’s important that I know where all my books are, so I made shelves to track whether books are in my home library, on my Kindle, or back at the library. To make sure I maintained sanity, I decided (at least for today) not to organize my books by genre. That would likely spell doom.

Now I’m adding books! Goodreads has an excellent phone app that lets you scan books that automatically get shelved. The scanner doesn’t work every time, but it’s pretty reliable and saves a lot of time. The only problem is that Goodreads merges identical items, so it might be hard to keep track of multiple copies of books.

Will I be able to finish this project today? Unlikely, but I’m hoping. Once everything is accounted for in Goodreads, I can proceed with my next step: figuring out which teacher(s)  I want to partner with this year to share my classroom library and to promote independent reading. favicon

reading/teaching

There must be more reading in schools

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Most high schools don’t include very much reading in their curriculum. Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard:

1. Students don’t read very well. We have to find different ways for students to access the content.

2. Students don’t like to read. In this Internet age, let’s use more technology.

3. There isn’t enough time. If we devoted our classes to reading, we wouldn’t be able to meet all the standards.

Although these claims have flaws, I won’t try to prove them wrong. After all, even if they’re true, they don’t help students become better readers. And I don’t think anyone would argue that reading is an unnecessary skill.

Most people think that the best way to get good at something is through practice. That’s what Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers: The Story of Success. And that’s what reading experts Stephen Krashen and Kelly Gallagher and Nancie Atwell all say.

But the problem is that young people are not reading very much at all. According to To Read or Not to Read, a 2011 study from the National Endowment for the Arts, 15- to 24-year-olds read an average of seven minutes per day.

You read that right: Seven minutes per day — vs. about 2 1/2 hours per day of television.

(When students tell me they’d prefer watching the movie over reading the book, I respond, “Of course you would. You’re good at watching TV. You’ve had so much practice.”)

So if young people aren’t reading, and practice is the best way to get better at something, that means that schools must aggressively increase the amount of reading that students do.

It’s not easy, but it must be done.

The first step is to encourage all teachers — not just English teachers — to include reading in their lesson plans every day. Reading is different in each discipline, and students need to know how reading a science text is different from reading a math problem.

The next step is for schools to commit to an independent reading program — and to make it a source of pride for the school community. Most schools rely on the English teachers to carry out independent reading, but it must be a school-wide effort. Students must choose books they like, have time to read them, and talk about what they’ve read.

(Amazing things can be done: Principal Ramón González of M.S. 223 in the Bronx spent $200,000 last year to purchase books students would like. He also hosts a principal’s book club.)

The final step is for English teachers to figure out how best to distribute the study of fiction, nonfiction, and independent reading in their classes and across the school. Right now, most English teachers teach novels, short stories, and poetry, which excludes the majority of text that people read. (No, I’m not making an argument here for Common Core.) There should be a shift away from fiction as the pretty-much-only genre in English classes.

But whatever happens, the key thing is that there just has to be much more reading. Educators like to talk about 21st century skills and how students need to learn how to collaborate and analyze various electronic media and be able to assess bias and credibility in sources. That is all true.

But to do that, students need to read a lot and learn how to read at a much higher level. And if that’s going to happen, high schools must make the teaching of reading a priority. favicon

everything else

Iserotope Extras is now featured on the front page of Bundlr

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Less than a week after its launch, Iserotope Extras is now featured on the front page of Bundlr. (Update: Extras is now The Highlighter.)

Here’s the email I got:

Hello, Mark Isero. We have great news!

Your bundle ISEROTOPE extras (Education & Science) is being featured in our homepage!

Thank you for taking the time to create this awesome collection and for making Bundlr a better place 🙂

Go check the homepage and find your bundle.

Congratulations,
the Bundlr team

I am very pleased by the news. What I thought was simply an extra feature may now bring more people to the blog and may build the Iserotope community.

After all, Bundlr is an excellent content curation tool that more people, especially teachers, will discover soon. (And yes, it’s better than Pinterest and Scoop.it.)

If you’d like to recommend articles for Extras, email me at mark at iserotope dot com. favicon