Classroom Salon

Getting Started

Professor Accounts

Step 1: Enter your email and passwd to login to Classroom Salon

If you don’t have a picture, upload one. Encourage your students to do the same. Salon is all about social networking. Picture is essential. If you have a picture on the web, search on google, right click and save a jpg file on desktop and import. Thumbnail size is the best (80x80)

Step 2. Ask your students to create an account for themselves from http://www.classroomsalon.org (send email to guna@cs.cmu.edu for code) OR select from menu: MEENROLL USERS. You can enter one student at a time (right input box) or bulk enroll (left input boxes. follow format as shown. Do not leave spaces between |). Share the user login information with your students.

Step 3. Create a new Salon. Salon is a special forum for your students and documents. You can create as many Salons as you need for a class. Be sure to name them with a class identifier (eg: course number) so that you and your students can find them easily to enroll. You can make Salons private or public using (Type) dropdown menu. If you make your Salon private (you need to authorize users) and if it is public (anyone can join w/o authorization). Ask the students to join your group after they login by (My GROUPJOIN A GROUP) and select from a group list that appear on left. Since group structure is flat (at the moment) in Salon, your students must know the name of your salon. They can use the alphabetical listings or search by name.

Step 4. Accept your Students/users

If your Salon is private, then you must accept users before they can participate.Click on MY GROUPS MANAGE GROUPS Accept

Once you see the following menu, select users from ADD group and approve. They will appear in the users currently approved group.

You will also get an email when a student/user wants to join a private Salon. Follow the instructions in Step 4, Select the users who are waiting and ADD. As the Salon administrator, at any time, you can move a user from approved list to ADD list (they will no longer see the salon, but you can add them back anytime if you’d like. This will allow you to invite only some to comment on some documents but not all)

Step 5. Add a Document. This version of Salon supports simple word files in doc or docx formats (use import Text) or just cut and paste from any document or type. Inserting images are tricky and are discouraged (future version will support all document formats including pdf). For now, Salon is ideal for text only papers, fiction, case studies, pretty much any document that has no images. After all Salon is all about interpreting text

Be sure to assign this document to a Salon (choose from menu: Share Document to Salon. You can also do this later).

Note that you can also add tags and questions to the document and set the slider scales to anything you want (like/dislike, important/not important (default), agree/disagree etc.). A document can have only one slider, but can have multiple custom tags for labeling annotations.

IMPORTANT BEFORE SAVING: Salon document text, once saved cannot be changed. Make sure document text is final before saving. You can always delete the document and upload a new one, but you may lose all annotations in the old document as a result.

Step 6. After Saving, but before your users annotate: Make sure all options (adding tags, questions, assigning the document to salon, changing the title, setting time limits for annotations and view) are considered (otherwise default values will apply). You can also change these while the document is being annotated. By clicking the My textsManage Current Texts edit menu (a document manager pop up as shown below right) you can do all the changes (except changing the text of the document).

You can add new questions, new tags, assign the document to any salon, modify the title and set access date/time for document view and participation. This is ideal for controlling time to annotate and time to view. For example, you may want the class to annotate before they can view.

Classroom Salon

Getting Your Students to Annotate

How Students/users will annotate the document

Step 1: Students login and go to MY GROUPS and select a group they are part of. If they are not in the group, they need to request to join your group and you need to approve. The documents in the group will appear left. Select any document and users have two choices, participate (annotate/respond) or view (look what the community has annotated).

Step 2: Ask the students/users to annotate by selecting and highlighting. Choose the tags (topics) to label annotations. Select tone from scales. Manage annotations from the right side of the screen. You can associate one comment with multiple highlights. Simply highlight the text and click on + sign in any comment to add a second highlight.

Step 3: Ask the students to respond to questions. Click on respond button (if there are any global questions). Respond to the questions and highlight places in the text to corroborate the response. Save you answers (lower right). The breadcrumbs allow users to indicate which part of the text was helpful in responding to the questions.

Fun Begins with the View ModeView mode is where all salon explorations begin. User annotations build a community of users and show the tone of the community, hot spots and where any group of users have similar or different tones. It shows content similarities among annotations among many things. Through annotations users build a community with their peers and the Learning begins.

Monitor Activities: Students can monitor activities of other students. Find out whom they share the same hotspot with.

Find the Buzz: The following document has 35 users. But we could not find more than 11 on the same hotspot. These sections are critical. It got the attention of 11 users (out of 35)

Relaxing the criteria: (using hot spot tag) exposes more and more hot spots. Hot spots are still rare at where 6 or more users annotated. But hot spots also show what part of the document gets most attention. Note that there are many places in the document highlighted by 3 or more users

Compare two or more user annotations: Sometimes students/users want to compare their annotation with someone else’s. Click Filter by users hide all and then choose the users you want to compare. In the example below, first two users are selected (check mark). Others move to the back of list (gray shaded and annotations not shown). Red indicates the overlapping annotations for just these two users.

Compare student responses to the same question: By looking at the student breadcrumbs (places they highlighted to corroborate the responses), find places of overlapped highlightsand compare their responses.

Salon finds common perspectives and automatically group users

Salon combines social media and social learning (Facebook plug-in coming soon). Publish your best annotations to social media walls. Share your knowledge with your friends. There is much more to Salon. Stay tuned.

Using Salon in your classroom – Traditional or Distant LearningSalon is a generic platform designed for forming social groups around document annotations. So far, Salon has been used in many ways and in many disciplines. We invite you to use Salon in a creative way and share your best use of Salon with our user community. Here are some uses of Salon.

1. Salon in writing courses – Students/instructor upload their writing to Salon and other students comment. Long before classroom discussion, students have already annotated, discussed and formed groups. Classroom is a continuation of this discussion.

2. Salon in STEM courses - instructor wants to see if the students understand a concept right. Instructor will ask the students to identify places of importance, incompleteness or inaccuracy. Once all students annotate, in the view mode, filter by tags and find places where students identify facts or missed. Use this data to tailor instructions in the classroom.

3. Salon as a prior knowledge detection tool - Finding prior knowledge of students is key to teaching new material and connecting them to student’s existing knowledge. This is hard, but Salon can help. Upload a document(s) that carefully summarizes important facts students should be familiar with. Ask the students to select text from different places in the document and write comments to indicate how they relate (or not). Export the data to a semantic map tool and graph. Measure the strength of the graph using a graph analysis tool.

4. Salon as a writer’s tool – Writers now can use Salon to upload the early versions of their writing and invite people to comment. Use the comments to refine the writing. (Note: Salon is not a production tool, but Salon provides location based comment summaries to improve writing).

5. Salon as a research paper review tool – Use Salon to upload the research papers and invite community to comment. See places of interest (hot spots) and understand the exact interpretation of the findings of the paper.

6. Salon as a research paper writing tool – Before writing a research paper, students post questions to Salon, receive responses and write the paper. Paper is then uploaded to get further feedback. This improves the writing process tremendously.

7. Salon as a social ebook platform – Use Salon to form virtual “book clubs”. Users form communities around books, comments and compare notes to see which parts of the book get attention. Which parts need to be interpreted better? Learn from each other no matter where you are.

8. Salon as an exam review tool – Post a sample test to Salon and ask the students to respond to questions. All student answers appear as a list by the question. Ask the students to compare their answers to that of the group. Do they agree with the majority? If not why? Learn from others, a key to Salon success in classroom. Salon supports social learning.

9. Salon as a speech writing tool – Write an important speech, but post to Salon to get feedback early. If people are not paying attention to particular places, remove or edit those places.

10. We can list here only the few of the best practices – What about you? How would you use Salon? Share with us your experience.

SalonA Document Management, Annotation

Authoring and Visualization tool

Salon is created from Both Sides of the Brain

Collaboration of English and Computer Science

A new kind of Social Media

Infinite potential

Copyright @ 2010 Carnegie Mellon University, Patents pending