How does it work?

The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies’ Collaborative went live for beta testing February 4, 2010. (Go to: http://saltychip.com)

This blog is an area where further information will be posted as the network unfolds.

The network has been designed for students and teachers to collaborate and develop their multiliteracies skills as they work at making meaning through various textual practices. The Salty Chip serves as both an exchange of ideas and an inspiration for ideas. We cannot have global conversations if we only participate in our individual local contexts.

Students and teachers produce and exchange multimodal uses of text at home or at school (sound, print, images, video or combinations). Novices can learn from those that have more experience with particular technologies, and integrate their multiliteracies’ activities into their curricular designs. The network has been designed to ease novices into a simplified social networking system.

Well considered tags and categories allow users to design, upload, download, modify, and redesign their multiliteracy ‘ activities-in-use’. As the user community ‘upvotes’ the best, they support ongoing improvement and refinement of knowledge and use of multiliteracies and their possibilities. Student demonstrations of multiliteracies’ practices can serve to generate further pedagogical decisions and refinement of plans.
Contribute!
We all have lesson plans or units that we have developed in isolation, sitting in our own personal storage files. What would happen if we were to submit our favourite lessons to a community of teachers with the permission and encouragement to use the resources, further develop them by adapting them for their own community of learners and building on their strengths and then re-sharing the modified plans back into the community? What would happen if we adapted the lessons with input from our students to find new ways of making meaning through multiple texts? Let’s find out together. The Salty Chip offers you a community, an audience for your work and an opportunity to learn together in the best interests of our students.

CHIP IT

As you review the various ‘chips’ that have been submitted, you can ‘chip’ those that you find to be particularly useful or relevant to your needs. By clicking on the ‘chip it’ button in the left column, you are ‘upvoting’ the resource in a way that will send that resource up a level in the display. That way, you can see three different strings of information: New displays chips according to what was added most recently. Popular displays chips according to what has been chipped the most in the past two weeks. Trending displays newer chips that are getting the most attention recently.

In addition, by separating chips upvoted by teachers and those upvoted by students, we make visible the similarities and difference between responses in our educational community.

COMMENT

As the author or contributor of a chip, you are encouraged to include sufficient information in the description to allow others to understand a little about its use. As a viewer of the chips, you are welcome to submit comments about additional ways that you might use or have used the resource in your context. Similarly, when you download a chip, modify/adapt or redesign it for your multiliteracies practice, you are encouraged to upload the modified chip and add comments about how you changed it to suit your educational context.

TAGGING

Tagging your work clearly will help others find it easily through a number of different means. Obvious tags such as grade level and subject area or media type are included as categories on the right and serve as a first level process for sorting. Consider other tags that best describe the resource, and as you key those in, they become part of the tag database, and make it more likely that your item will appear in a search.

Communities that want to easily find their collaborative work may simply include a distinct tag that identifies them. For example, ISENGLISH 9580 can be added to pull up all items included by a particular class.

SEARCH

You can search for items in a variety of ways. By clicking on the categories on the right, you create a ‘filter’ to locate resources particular to file type, or grade or subject area. You can also type key words into the search window to locate resources. Be sure to remove filters from a previous search (click on the blue ‘view all’ box on the right) in order to start fresh.

FOLLOW

You can follow updates on the Salty Chip by following us on Twitter (@Salty_Chip).
Similarly, if you are particularly interested in the chips contributed by particular individuals or groups, you can click on their hyperlinked name on their submission. This will display the contributor’s profile, and all of the chips that that individual has submitted and those that they have ‘chipped’.

REPORT

If an offending chip or comment has been submitted, you can easily ‘report’ it, simply by clicking on the ‘report’ button indicated with the red x. Reporting automatically generates a notice sent to the administrator to review. Offending chips or comments will be removed immediately. Depending upon the nature of the offense, administrators may remove the participant from the community permanently.