My Thoughts on Mr. November, Part II

“Schools remain cut off from the rest of the world despite web 2.0 technologies. We need to connect them and publicize those connections.”

Alan spoke about the need for us to connect our students to the world at large, about the changing global economy and workforce and the radical shifts that are happening in economies worldwide. Like all else I do, I needed to filter that statement a little before letting it run loose in my own world.

I had an interesting conversation today with a good friend of mine regarding what it’s like being out of the classroom and what we notice now that we are “on the other side” at least for part of the time. My friend said that, being in the classroom for a while, you often feel like you have exhausted every possible angle on a certain unit, a particular lesson, or maybe even a particular grade level. Leaving the classroom for a while and having the opportunity and the time to devote to finding new angles, new strategies, and new learning adventures gives you fresh perspective, and you find yourself trying hard to get back into the classroom to try what you have found. Why is that so often the case? Is it that we have our system structured so that it’s focused less on the quality of instruction and more on the quantity of instruction you can deliver in a set time.

In looking at Alan’s quote from above, and in thinking about this situation of perspective and time, they both are matched perfectly. If we have networked teachers, communities of practice either locally or virtually, sharing knowledge, strategy, and especially their students work, we have solved the problem of time and the problem of stagnation. Change the model of how teachers are developed once they are hired to one where they are networked with others of like and unlike mind. Connecting the students, then follows soon after, as the teachers can begin to see the possibilities and benefits of connected learning. I know there is more to this than this brief post, but I truly think that the key to future professional development has to start with networking teachers. For a more thorough look at what this can be, be sure to check out Sheryl Nussbaum-Beech’s latest post at TechLearning.

A lot of technology, a lack of vision.

What am I doing to help provide the teachers I work with the ability and desire to have vision? Alan’s statement echoes what’s been said by so many lately: we have great tools, but what can we build with them? I looked hard at the courses I have offered over the past year to my staff, and I looked hard at the model I offered them in. Had I not accepted this new position (still holding out on that post), I would have restructured the entire way I offer PD. I don’t think this 2-hour, sit-and-get is the best way to facilitate change, promote innovation, and instill my staff with the confidence they need to start having real vision when it comes to how they can now teach. And who knows, with your help, this slate of classes in November might be the beginning of that shift for my district.

What is my vision for the classrooms I work in? That’s not an easy one, but it’s one that we should get a handle on soon. If you asked me now, I’d go with this:

We are the change that we want to see; it starts with us and how we enable that change in others around us. We want globally connected learners because we may not be all that our learners need us to be. Our classrooms should produce students whose sense of community is not constrained by their geographic location because they never learned that way; the world was always their classroom. Our teachers and students should know audience to be much more than just teacher, or class, or school, but nation, and world beyond that. And our methods will be the subject of debate and critique among our peers.

Flickr Image Credits:
“Be the Change,” from dmal’s photostream
“Do you Believe in Change?” carf’s photostream

Technorati Tags: blc08, alannovember, education, philosopy, professionaldevelopment

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Re-entering the Fray

We haven’t been to the beach as a family yet, as Audrey has not been able to travel much, but now that everything has settled, we were able to get away and spend the week in Cape May. As much as we all praise the ability to get away and recharge, I still have a little bit of Dan Meyer in me in that I sometimes feel that I could work around the clock. Maybe it’s the changing definition of learning that has overtaken me, or that the way I approach learning is so powerfully informal. Regardless, coming back into this arena after taking several days away is intimidating on so many levels.

As this summer began, I had such high hopes for what would come at the start of this year. Now as the summer ends, I am seriously questioning what should be the top priority for me this year: increasing access for teachers in a non-threatening way, embedded technology in curriculum design, pushing through personal learning networks a la Karl Fisch, changing the way teachers approach their role in the classroom, or just trying to keep everyone in sync with all of the recent changes to our district network.

In the limited time that I have spent over the last day or so running through some posts from people like Jen Dorman, there is something to be said for a sequential process for either students or teachers to go through. This next week poses some really enormous challenges for me, both professional and personal, and one thing I want to hammer out before I begin the deluge that is the first week of school, are measurable progress indicators. I want to sit down at certain points, set up before the year begins, and assess what has gone on, and what needs to change. It is all too easy to get caught up in the small details of our work and suddenly find ourselves in December.

This is general and vague, but it is all I can muster after having been out of the loop for a week.

School Supply List

As we move into the throes of another August rush back to school, back to that odd bouquet of spoiled milk that most schools tend to proffer, the preparations begin both on our end and on the end of students and parents everywhere. Never is this more evident than on a trip to Staples.

It’s like Christmas, except the lists aren’t created by the children, but by the teachers and staff in each school, grade and classroom. An odd reversal, if you think about it, as the students then present their bounty for inspection to the teacher as they arrive in school, often for the first grade of the year. Imagine if we did that with Santa? What pressure!

On a recent trip through the office superstore, I came across a kiosk that had supply lists from every school in our surrounding area in neat little piles for the taking. Just for giggles and grins, I took one. This is what was on it:

Grade 6-8 Social studies

• 1 3ring binder
• 1 composition book
• Colored pencils

Grades 6—8 Science

• 1 1-inch three-ring binder and lined paper
• highlighters
• pencils
• paper reinforcements

Grades 6, 7, 8 Language Arts

• 1 4/6 note card case
• 200 4×6 note cards
• 4 multi-colored highlighters
• Dictionary
• Thesaurus
• Pencil case
• Pens
• Pencils
• 5 2-pocket folders
• CD’s, floppy discs or flash drives
• 1 5-subject notebook-college ruled

Grade 6 Language Arts

• Pocket folder
• 1 3-ring binder

Or

• 1 3-subject notebook
• 1 set highlighters
• Erasable pens
• Non-erasable pens
• Pencils
• 1 2-packs of 3/5 index cards
• index card box

I began to think immediately of how this looked different in some of the schools I read about, like, perhaps, 1:1 schools. Are the students still required to procure the standard items like binders, or, my favorite on this list: paper reinforcements (we had another creative name for these when I was working as a field archaeologist)? As we are currently rethinking our school philosophies, do these lists change? What would they look like in your “school of the future?” What does yours currently look like?

The last few days of mine have been spent working with a group of teachers in a workshop we called Research 2.0. One of the first discussions we had was about research methods and tools. Eric Hoefler (from whose work I borrowed heavily) had come up with this quote and list initially, and it generated some great discussion among my group on Thursday:

“These tools and approaches are now “dead” or “almost dead.” If your research plan relies on them, you are probably not adequately preparing your students:

• Floppy Disks
• School computers with extreme filtration
• CD-ROMs
• Note Cards (or other pen-and-paper-only note-taking methods)
• Limiting the number of “online resources”
• Outlawing “citation help” from online services (Who memorizes the MLA handbook, anyway?)
• Basic web searches or school-database-only searches
• Completely independent research methods
• Text-only sources
• Text-only reports

With this in mind, is there a marriage between old method and new method that needs to be created? I am having trouble seeing it right now. Any ideas?

Image Credit: “Back to School Ad” by chishkilauren at Flickr.

Conversations with Really Bright People

I confess, my new favorite thing, besides twitter, is to talk to people much brighter than myself, and do it in a situation that aides more people around me. For example, I started getting the idea to skype people into my workshops, beginning last week with Konrad, Clay, and Carolyn. This week, I did the same, only I was able to get Steve Dembo of Discovery Education to speak about some of the more “Web 2.0-ey” features of United Streaming. Here is the audio, if you want to listen.

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In addition to Steve, I also asked Carolyn back to talk about one of the digital storytelling projects that she worked on regarding the Vietnam War Memorial and the Virtual Wall. If you haven’t seen some of them yet, I highly recommend them to you. One of the most amazing things about the project is that it sneaks up on you. We had just finished our call with Carolyn and were at her blog watching one of the student movies, and we were a wreck afterwards; the movies really touch a chord within you regardless of your age or generation.

In one of the most connected moments I have ever had, Carolyn then skype-chatted us an address to a site where Vietnam Veterans had watched these videos by the students, and took the time to thank them and share more stories about the individuals the students profiled in their videos. As I looked at the site and read the commentary, the vision of school as center of community really began to become clearer. This type of project makes changes happen, forces understanding across generations, and really forges a deeper understanding of community by its members. Bravo Carolyn, and your students too!

More Workshop Reactions

As of tomorrow morning, I will be nearly halfway through my summer workshops, and as I have been inspired by the kick-web2.0-in-the-shins-punk-teacherman Dan Meyer, the data on each of the classes is coming back and I need to put it out there for posterity sake. Beginning with the Connective Writing class, which I thought was capped off nicely by a great skype conversation between Konrad, Clay and Carolyn (I pretty much just listened), the feedback has been steadily positive. Here are some examples from the Connective class:

1. I felt the the community of learning theme was hit by skyping with all of the bloggers. It was very worthwhile, we were exposed to so many difefrent applications and began to make our blogs.
2. This course was very good. I would like to have had more time to actually set up the blog accounts. I felt a little rushed.
3. Although I do not consider myself tech savvy I am going to implement blogs for my students this year, slowly at first, I feel it will provide a larger outlet for my students to express themselves.
4. Patrick is very knowledgeable and made the course easy to understand, and easy to relate to. It opened my eyes to the many possibilities that technology can bring to the classroom.
5. It was a lot of information to take in but was well worth the time. I can use it all in my classroom. Blogging, Wikispaces and their uses as well as ways to incorporate writing through the technology available to us.
6. I felt that this helped me feel less intimidated about using the technology and better understand ways I can use these tools in my class.

Now, those answers were in response to a request for an overall summary of the class. When asked if they planned on implementing what they learned, the same people (numbers indicate the respondent)

1. I will start a professional blog for myself and a book blog for my students in September.
2. I will set up a blog for the first novel that we read in September.
3. I will start with a basic class blog page and grow from there!
4. I will set up a class blog for my students to communicate with each other in a different way than routine class discussions. I also plan on setting up a professional blog to communicate with teachers all over the world, instead of just the ones down the hall. I’m excited to get started!
5. I would like to include book chats and classroom discussions with the blogging sites as well as use the Wikispaces to promote more research and discussions.
6. I will try to blog with my students and encourage them to share their thoughts and reflect in a productive way. I also hope to not only read various blogs, but jump in from time to time.

It was truly a great group of teachers to work with, but what strikes me most is that they saw the value in it. I have to confess that as I prepared the class, I wondered if that would come across. The echo chamber of the edublogosphere tends to shield us from the trepidation that exists in the hallways, faculty rooms, and classrooms of the buildings that work in. My mindset going in was really centered on trying to show the the need for doing this with students, not necessarily being that techno-evangelist. As Christian’s recent post about Twitter indicated, I think we are all reaching a saturation point with analyzing each and every application for its educational merit.

More to come regarding workshop reactions, and a hearty welcome to all of the new subscribers from the workshops!

Gearing for a great stretch

I have spent most of today’s not child-care related moments banging these keys and scouring my connections for resources and inspiration. These next two weeks hold the following: two-day workshop on wikis, one day workshop on social bookmarking, two-day workshop on web 2.0 teaching strategies, two-day workshop on Google Apps, and a two-day workshop on research 2.0. Needless to say, all my summer slacking is beginning to haunt me and steal my sleep.

In actuality, I can’t tell you how “geeked up” I am about running these workshops. Most are near full or over-capacity (15 teachers for us), so there is interest. There was so much talk about how to get teachers into these classes, and during the school year that problem haunted me, but I took marketing to several shameless levels at the end of the year. It paid off in the attendance numbers. Now, for the content….

Last week, in the Connective Writing/blogging workshop I ran, the skype-in session with Clay, Konrad, and Carolyn was a huge hit and all participants seemed to enjoy it, and if you listen to the event, I spoke of using guests to expand the knowledge base in these workshops. I wasn’t kidding. So, here I go again, asking if anyone would be interested in a skype session with a group of about 10 teachers on Thursday morning, August 2nd, around 10:00am EST (GST-4, currently) for a discussion of how to use the tools of Web 2.0 within your classroom. The focus here is going to be on seamlessness, whereby we make the technology a transparent issue in the teaching. Here is a brief description of the class, and I look forward to hearing from anyone that is around:

How many times have you marveled at the things your students can do on the Internet? How do you harness that ability and focus it in a targeted direction? Where the Internet used to be about gaining access to information and researching, today’s Internet, dubbed “Web 2.0,” is all about creating content and using services.

This workshop will focus on using the web to produce dynamic content for yourself and your students. We will use two types of data visualizers to take authentic research and statistics, either from your classroom or from a different source, and produce various types of data manipulations that you can use to help your students see the data in meaningful ways. Because of the shift away from a one-way flow of information on the web, we are all now able to access experts in fields like never before. We will examine ways to bring content experts into your classroom via Skype, a free Internet telephone service, producing podcasts, screencasts, and slidecasts, and co-blogging with other teachers, experts, or members of the community.

Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have a host of resources that they can take away from the class and apply in their own professional practice.

Teacher Reactions to Connective Writing

In an effort to be as transparent as possible, I would like to post the reactions to the Connective Writing Class that just concluded yesterday. Here they are:

Overall Summary:

I felt the the community of learning theme was hit by skyping with all of the bloggers. It was very worthwhile, we were exposed to so many different applications and began to make our blogs.

This course was very good. I would like to have had more time to actually set up the blog accounts. I felt a little rushed.

Although I do not consider myself tech savvy I am going to implement blogs for my students this year, slowly at first, I feel it will provide a larger outlet for my students to express themselves.

Patrick is very knowledgeable and made the course easy to understand, and easy to relate to. It opened my eyes to the many possibilities that technology can bring to the classroom.

It was a lot of information to take in but was well worth the time. I can use it all in my classroom. Blogging, Wikispaces and their uses as well as ways to incorporate writing through the technology available to us.

I felt that this helped me feel less intimidated about using the technology and better understand ways I can use these tools in my class.

How will you apply what you learned?

I will start a professional blog for myself and a book blog for my students in September.

I will set up a blog for the first novel that we read in September.

I will start with a basic class blog page and grow from there!

I will set up a class blog for my students to communicate with each other in a different way than routine class discussions. I also plan on setting up a professional blog to communicate with teachers all over the world, instead of just the ones down the hall. I’m excited to get started!

I would like to include book chats and classroom discussions with the blogging sites as well as use the Wikispaces to promote more research and discussions.

I will try to blog with my students and encourage them to share their thoughts and reflect in a productive way. I also hope to not only read various blogs, but jump in from time to time.

My question to myself right off the bat is mostly about why I didn’t push the issue of personal professional development more? Will’s post regarding his intentions and the reactions he gets rings similarly to what I felt as I talked about using blogs as personal learning tools. However, this was a great first step taken by a great group of teachers. It’s easy for most of us to simply forget how hard it is for many teachers, especially those that are further removed in age from the students they teach to embrace the changes that these technologies bring.

These teachers worked very hard to assimilate blogging into their own framework, and I am excited to see where it goes.

An Epiphanous Moment

Aha! moments are rare in our lives, and although we anticipate them sometimes they don’t materialize. Today was rife with them. Today was day two of my Connective Writing workshop where we had the privilege of including some great minds in our class. Midway through the morning, Clay Burell, Seoul, South Korea, Konrad Glogowski from Toronto, and Carolyn Foote from Austin, Texas, skyped in to talk with the group of teachers I was working with.

What ensued was a rolling conversation about blogging as a reflective tool for professional development and the logistics and pedagogical advantages of blogging with students. I was giddy listening to the three of them field questions and expound on their own practice.

Needless to say, the teachers I was working with were unbelievably impressed with what they heard and saw. As Konrad was speaking to the group of us about his blogging policy with his students, Clay came in to let everyone know that he had just edited our wiki to include his own parental notification letter and some guidelines that his students follow while blogging in class. Truly a connected moment and one that crystallized something for me that had been a long time coming: I have many teachers.

I hope to listen to the podcast again today or tomorrow to fully glean what we spoke about, but it truly changed the dynamic of our workshop and our learning.

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Using Data to Initiate Change

I know this might sound simple to some of you, but I have recently started trying to visualize some of the data that pertains to what I do here.

In a nutshell, what these pictures do for me is provide a measuring stick to judge against for next year. Also, when I really begin to analyze what I need to do for next year and plan to build consensus, these numbers tell me where to start, and who to build on.