Youth can upload any one of these:

—one image or one document from their computers
—one link to a YouTube or a Vimeo video or a link to a Website (or anything else that has a link, such as a comment on hypothes.is or NowComment or a Google Document)
—one paragraph that can include links. Youth can upload about ten lines of text here.

These limitations and the lack of a place here for students to reflect on the work that they are posting pushed me to use Google Docs as the main submission tool.

I ask students to write about their work and their learning in a Google Document, making as many links and including as many images as they want to. We also have been developing guides for this reflective writing.

Students also need to learn how to make their Docs public before they add a link to the LRNG Show and Prove posts. I made a short screencast for this that’s up at YouTube: https://youtu.be/jxZWoDm9CKM and Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/185374485

When youth use the “Webpage” option (it should really say “Link”) in a Show and Prove post, they can add more reflective writing around the artifacts they are submitting, and they maintain control over them because they (and we) can continue to edit the Google Document.

The downside of this is that later for the badge assessor or opportunity-giver, it takes one more click away from the badge to find the youth’s work.

Still, I’d recommend Show and Prove instructions like the one here: https://goo.gl/nKLgy9

One workaround that I’ve been using is to leave a draft of my work in drafts. This almost works. One problem is that links to resources doesn’t copy when you make a duplicate. Still if I duplicate my draft before I publish it, when I find that I’ve made a spelling error or some other small thing, it’s easier to delete the published XP, Playlist, or Badge, and replace it with the drafts that I had left behind.

I don’t always do this. Sometimes I’m rushing, and it will make for a more confusing set of items in our commonly held list of work.

The real solution that will allow us to make small changes after something is published is coming soon, LRNG promises.

So, one example might be that in LRNG we ask students to respond to the events in Syria over the past two weeks. At the end of that prompt we can ask them to use videos from news organizations, newspaper articles, NPR stories, analysis articles from magazines and journals… and we can ask them to choose from and to annotate the sources that we have collected for them on a “Updates from Syria” page that we have created at Youth Voices. Any of the above media can be embedded here.

What’s possible here also is to have a collection of media and texts that are easy for youth to annotate, comment on, and discuss using hypothes.is and NowComment.

Worth pointing out for the Show and Prove section: Each annotations in hypothes.is and comment in NowComment has a unique URL that a youth can list in a reflective letter. For example: “Here are my five best annotations on what took place in Syria in early November 2016.”

We will also make an open Google Drive folder where we will collect images for others to use.

E-mail Paul Allison [email protected], and I will be happy to design the graphic part of your badge for you. I’ll just do it, and put it in place. You should complete the other boxes on the badge creation tool, however. We’re all happy to help with those matters too, but we’d rather see you spending time on getting the competencies right for your badge than on graphic design (unless you love it!).

You’ll also have to do all of this with a Playlist that is published as well. It’s not so hard: Duplicate (This creates a draft with a name that includes the date); Archive published Playlist; Re-title the draft Playlist using the original title. And by the way, this ability to use the same title is new — only since late-November, I think.

What do you think? This is a way for youth to start a page that collects other youths’ posts about a research project. They just need to write an introduction, set up the page with a good question and a tag, then invite others to post to their research page with that tag. And we (teachers an editors) can collect these pages onto a “Our Research Questions” page where youth can find each others questions. See if you can put your head around this: http://www.youthvoices.live/research/

As for adding content. There’s a new space on LRNG that will allow us create educator-facing playlists. Let’s put our uploads there.