Kifi In The Classroom: Filtering Knowledge To Help Students Learn And Save Time
We didn’t design Kifi to be a tool for educational users, but we’ve seen amazing pickup everywhere from college and high school classrooms in California to elementary schools in New Zealand.
Why? Kifi is a filter. It helps people sort out what they don’t need to know and remember what they do. Now, in our Kifi for Teams, we have added many features that allow groups of people to collaborate. The combination of those two qualities means Kifi brings students together around knowledge management.
Of course, we didn’t see that ourselves! We’re engineers, not teachers. We wanted to create something adaptable with Kifi, but we had no idea how well we’d succeed until we talked to people like Dylan Eret.
“The students have the analytical skills, but they have to contend with so many different things,” said Eret, a folklorist and instructor at Berkeley City College. “They’re flooded with information, and they don’t necessarily know how to deal with all of it. Kifi helps with that.”
He is using Kifi with three different humanities courses, about 120 students in all. Eret told us about a library he set up in one of the classes: Students were required to post one article or another piece of content by Sunday nights; many found and kept posts via their mobile phones.
The library, called Monday Morning Controversies, asked them to find a piece that aligned with or countered the work of the author the class was reading, and annotate the piece. “Kifi was a way of streamlining contemporary information and then creating a porous link between the classroom and what they’re doing on their own,” Eret said.
The library changed the course, Eret said, bringing current events — like the Syrian refugee crisis — more prominently into discussions, and enabling students to incorporate personal narratives. For instance, as the class read the book “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is about race in America and recounts some of what life was like growing up in Baltimore.
You can include any kind of web page in Kifi, including pages on Google Docs, in Twitter and on Facebook. Responding to Coates, students highlighted personal narratives on Facebook — stories of being stopped by the police for instance.
Another student used Google Docs to write his own “corrido” — a form of narrative around injustice.
We often talk about the way Kifi saves people time. Students save time when they can easily find and and annotate articles. And Kifi deepens conversations by serving as a conduit for information that otherwise wouldn’t even be on anyone’s mind.
Originally published at blog.kifi.com on October 22, 2015.
