A couple of weeks ago, I went out for dinner and drinks with some friends. This wasn’t any ordinary gathering, though. When I went to our appointed meeting place, I knew who I was looking for, but I didn’t know what they looked like. I knew their names (I was pretty sure), but I definitely knew their avatars and their Twitter IDs. I was meeting this group of people for the first time, and once I finally figured out who they were and where they were sitting, it was like I had known them for a very long time. This was my first face-to-face meeting with some of the planners of EdCamp Omaha, and it was amazing to me that the depth of relationships could be there without ever having met before.

For those of you who may not know, EdCamp is a grass roots movement of passionate teachers taking responsibility for their own professional development. EdCamp follows the BarCamp model of participatory conferences. Attendees at an EdCamp are invited to prepare and attend sessions that are of interest to them and others. You can be sure that an EdCamp will provide a relevant, meaningful, and interesting professional development…

This article is the first in a series of articles about collaborative practices in the classroom. In this first article, I develop some background and research about collaboration and its importance in the classroom.

What is Collaboration?

The yellow section of the rainbow deals with Learning and Innovation Skills. One of the key skills in the Learning and Innovation Skills strand is collaboration.

To be brief, collaboration is the ability to work with other people to complete a shared goal. This collaboration can be something as simple as an oral response to a question or an immense project like building a skyscraper or developing video game. When people work collaboratively, the individual contributions of each member are incorporated so that the sum of the finished work is greater

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Ever since I wrote a post a little while ago telling about the differences between Diigo and Delicious (read it here), I have been getting a lot of questions about social bookmarking and how to get started. If you need to know why you should use a bookmarking service, check out this post about why I like Diigo. Here is my attempt to help guide newbies just getting started with social bookmarking. As you might already know, I am an entrenched Diigo user. However, these tips are meant to be general and apply to all services. In the end, the best service is the one that works for your usage! Look for future posts about tips and tricks for using Diigo.

Step 1 – Choose a Service

In my experience, this is the hardest step because there are so many awesome resources out there. Delicious.com is probably the most popular, but there is also Diigo, SimplyBox, Connotea, Google Notebook, and countless others. Each service has a different set of features that make it a little different than the others. Take a look at the features of several, ask the advice of people you trust,…