Information Age Education

How-To Squidoo and Educational Lenses

February 26th, 2007

What is Squidoo? Squidoo is a website where people can create their own “lenses.” A lens is your perspective or favorite resources on a topic. For example, I created a lens on Fractions. It includes websites that have clear explanations of fractions, fun math games and practice, educational YouTube videos and books for further individual study. Squidoo lenses have great potential for teachers to aggregate helpful resources for students on a particular topic. I hope that this article inspires you to create your own and become a lensmaster.

You can build a site for free with the easy to use module-based templates. My first lens on integers took me about 3 hours to build. When I created it, I used my del.icio.us account to organize the different sites that I was interested in including. When I posted a site to my del.icio.us account, I tagged it with the lens topic. I’ve continued to add to it over the months and it’s now an excellent resource for both students and teachers. I’m delighted that it was included in the March National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) News Bulletin in the “Web Bytes” section.

There are a variety of modules that you can add to build your lens, including text/write, link list, amazon.com, poll, make a list, YouTube, Google maps and iTunes. The lens can be made more interactive by adding polls. I added a poll to my Ecological Footprint Education site about the size of people’s ecological footprint.

Most of the modules can be made more interactive with the “Plexo” feature. Plexo is a tool that allows your readers to rank or add to the data in your site. For example, on my Vedic math site readers can give feedback on which resources they found most valuable. The feedback automatically rearranges the sites from most to least popular. I’ve just started playing with Plexo modules this week. It feels like a nice way to help your readers sort through data and become an active learner. Plexo is also helpful because people can add other valuable resources to your site.

As the creator of the site, you can moderate how much interactivity you want. You can allow comments or not. You can also require that additions to your site be approved before they are published. So there is an element of quality control. As with most sites that allow rating, people must have a Squidoo account.

So what would you like to share with your students? What topic would you like to be a lensmaster on?

Educational Squidoo lenses to inspire you:
1. My Lensmaster Page, includes links to all of my Squidoo lenses
2. How-to Hoop Dance - my sister’s hooping lens; great for PE teachers (Yep! That’s me dancing in the videos.)
3. CTAP Middle School Math Project
4. 10 Tips for a Successful Parent-Teacher Conference
5. Thanksgiving Activities

Tips on how to create a Squidoo lens:
1. SquidLens: The Official Lens on Squidoo
2. How to add audio to your lens

These lists are just a start. I hope I can add one that you create. If you become a lensmaster, please post a link to your lens.

10 Comments Add your own

1. kailani | March 6th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

Thank you for explaining squidoo. I’ve seen it around on some sites and had no idea what it was.

Here via Five on the Fifth.
2. Rebecca Newburn | March 22nd, 2007 at 6:49 am

For more resources, check out the On-line Education Lowdown carnival, http://www.onlineuniversitylowdown.com/2007/03/carnival_of_onl.html.
3. Gannon Beck | March 29th, 2007 at 4:56 pm

Rebecca,

I was so happy to find your lens on fractions. I think educational applications of Squidoo can be ground breaking if educators like yourself take the time to make quality lenses.

I’ve done a couple of educational ones myself:
http://www.squidoo.com/illustrationandrendering/

http://www.squidoo.com/conandrawing/

And here is one I did on learning lens construction:

http://www.squidoo.com/MakeaLearningLens/

I love how you incorporated YouTube into your lenses. Absolutely wonderful!

Gannon
4. Ken | June 16th, 2007 at 10:49 am

The concept is similar to that of oondi (http://www.oondi.com) except that oondi will pay out 100% of the advertisement profits to the authors. Their hosting costs are covered by clicks which occur on non-author owned pages like the index but I suppose it’s basically a non-profit organization similar to Wikipedia rather than a commercial one like HubPages or Squidoo.
5. Kirsti A. Dyer | June 17th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

I was wondering how/if Squidoo is being used in education.

Do you have more examples or resources?

Not sure if I’d use it with my college students, but it might be interesting for my elementary school daughters to try.
6. Lewis Smile | July 28th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

Hi Rebecca!

Nice post about Squidoo!

And thanks for linking to my lens! I have a few more educational Squidoo Lenses, and I also run SquidooCool.com. It’s my blog helping people be a better lensmaster

- Lewis
7. Ron Passfield | October 15th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

Hi Rebecca - I think the potential of Squidoo for education is endless. I have created a number of education orientated lenses with a focus on online learning:

Here are my education lenses:

http://www.squidoo.com/onlinelearningresources
http://www.squidoo.com/mobilelearning
http://www.squidoo.com/e-assessment
http://www.squidoo.com/e-portfolios
http://www.squidoo.com/educationpodcast
http://www.squidoo.com/digital-storytelling

I have also made some suggestions re the applications of Squidoo for education:
http://www.squidoo.com/onlinelearningresources/#module2654634″
8. LMS | April 16th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

Interesting site you have here. certainly some awesome articles. Just as this. Squidoo is certainly a really awesome site to help students gain more and more knowledge of their particular scope without needing to spend a lot of time looking for relevant subject material. Really awesome.
9. Photo Retouch | May 25th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

Squidoo is really great site. It did help me a lot with my studies and it was simple and easy to find what I needed. unlike when going through books for an example. Thanks for the article.
10. update music | August 18th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

That’s a really awesome article. Squidoo is certainly a really awesome site to help students gain more and more knowledge of their particular scope. That too without needing to spend a lot of time looking for relevant subject material. Great site.