Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
To the unshifted: Shift or retire… regardless of your age and number of years experience. We have the means to teach differently, now! It doesn’t start tomorrow, it starts today. Pick one thing you don’t like about your practice and change it. Find one thing that engages your students, and has them take over the learning that happens in the room, and do it. Empower, inspire, engage and be the lead learner in your classroom or your school.
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
To the shifting:Do not go quietly into your classroom. It is an extremely exciting time to be in education. Do not be overwhelmed. A great waterfall begins with a single drop. Information flows too quickly to absorb all that we want to. Things will not flow for you if you try to do too much. If you try a new tool, ask yourself why am I using this? Do not confuse the pointing finger with the moon. What is the learning intention? Stay true to what you want to accomplish and take advantage of tools to help you and your students find your way. Find small successes on your path, let good work and engaged students be your reward.
What we think, we become.
To the shifted: You have an obligation to serve others. The students in your room are a priority, but so too are your colleagues. You are a leader by the default of knowing the way. Nurture your colleagues like you nurture your students in your class. Be the lead learner. Learn with them. Share your enthusiasm and accept your position of leadership with grace and humility.
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
This is a story I think all educators need to hear. The question I wonder is, ‘Am I telling it in a way that they will listen?’
I told this story at BLC09 last week, and I’ll share some of my experience there before getting back to that question.
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The Conference:
It is hard to describe a conference like Alan November’s Building Leadership Communities-BLC09. For me it is about so much more than just a wonderful opportunity to present, (thank you Alan), or going to fantastic sessions by great educational thinkers and leaders. It is more about down-to-earth conversations with great people. And as I share a few conversations, my greatest disappointment was having to leave early and not getting enough time to speak to all the wonderful educators that I wanted to. That said, here are some people that enriched my experience.
Liz B Davis gave me excellent feedback for the POD’s presentation: “I’d like to see concrete examples of POD’s being used in the classroom.” -Great point! That wasn’t the intent of my presentation, but it is something that needs to be shared. This is my second year connecting with Liz and Lisa Thumann in Boston and again they contributed greatly to my conference experience being a success. They are both educational leaders that are committed to helping other educators in countless ways.
At lunch with Darren Kuropatwa, David Jakes and Dennis Richards, during the pre-conference EdubloggerCon, I had a conversation where thoughts and ideas were challenged in meaningful ways. This was my introduction to David Jakes and I have to say that I’d love to spend more time with him. David is a thoughtful listener who asks challenging questions with the intent of having a deep conversation. Where this really showed was his willingness to have is own opinion changed by responses in the conversation. I’d swap any professional development experience for conversations like this.
During that lunch Darren spoke of how, while circulating the room and teaching, an administrator would come in and ask to speak to him. His response of ‘I’m teaching’ would be blown off because he wasn’t on stage at the front of the room… hmmm. I have been going back to the metaphor of teacher as compass a lot recently, and I think that needs to become a story. “Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.” If we are helping to point the way, we may not be at the front of the class, (at the helm), but we are still playing an important role ‘on the ship’.
Another very interesting conversation at the conference was at dinner with Tom Daccord and Angela Maiers. We talked about telling a story… not just any story, but one that speaks to a teacher new to technology. It was an interesting conversation for me because the more I think about it, the more I realize that my Brave New World-Wide-Web video is one that seems to ’speaks to the converted’. How do we tell a story that compels people to understand the need for a shift?
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The Story:
So what is the story that needs to be heard? How do we move from ‘One teacher at a time’ to a full-throttle shift on the educational highway?
I believe that metaphors and stories are compelling teachers and that we need a good story to shift education. “We need to change” is not a story, it is a warning. Warnings and foreshadowing are important within a story, but they are not the story. I think the story is about Responsibility while the current model seems stuck on Accountability. This isn’t my idea, it comes from Andy Hargreaves. I said in a previous post on Hargreave’s 4th Way, “The key here it to recognize that there is a coexistence between the two and that this isn’t a dichotomy, but rather a priority: “Responsibilitybefore Accountability”. This is where schools and school districts have the greatest opportunity to change.” This is actually an easy story to tell because it puts students and teachers first… it recognizes the professionalism of educators and makes change a moral imperative. This is a story we need to adopt and tell well, otherwise the fear that Accountability promotes will prevail.
Both of my presentations at BLC spent time focusing on overcoming FEAR. I think the big difference between a ’shifted’ educator, and one that sits in neutral letting the digital world speed by, is that technology does not scare the shifted.
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The Fear:
What’s to fear? Here are some thoughts, but this list preaches to the converted, it isn’t the story needed.
1.”I have too much to teach” – Somehow the curriculum is just too expansive to ‘add this to my plate’ or to what needs to be done with (or should I say ‘to’) my students. ‘I can’t play with technology and be expected to get everything done’. Would the same be said about a pencil? Technology is a tool, not a product.
2. “I don’t get technology” – Do you know exactly how a photocopier works? No? But you use one… and when you get to the photocopier with a great lesson plan and the thing doesn’t work, you don’t say, “That’s it! I’m never using the photocopier again!” And yet, people try out something techie that fails and it is somehow evidence that technology is ‘bad’, or ‘I can’t do it!’
3. FAILURE – “I can’t because I will fail in front of the students”. We need to model humility and learn from our mistakes if we truly want to see that in our students. “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” ~F. Wikzek
4. Control – This is a false sense of security that I don’t really get? Intuitively teachers know that when students take control of the learning, they soar! Yet, the idea of giving up the central teacher-focus in the room seems so scary to many teachers. There are some ingrained (are they learned?) misconceptions that hold a teacher back… a) Every kid needs to be on the same page so that I know that they have at least ‘this much’ understanding of the curriculum, (or stuff that’s on the next standardized test); b) A noisy classroom means that I’m not in control and therefore not a good teacher; c) Criteria is something done to students; d) Assessment is something done to student work.
Who owns the learning in the room? Who should?
5. “I don’t know how?” – A Grade 9 Math student gets over this hurdle even if they have never seen a quadratic equation before… but usually with help. So ask for help! Many tech integrators are tech evangelists. Contact me or any one of the educators I’ve already linked to. If they can’t help you, they’ll find someone that will. What we ‘get’ that people new to tech don’t is that there is no need to take this journey on your own. You have more help than you think, closer and more available than you think.
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The Journey:
As I head off to China in less than two weeks, I’m thankful for people like Dennis and also Jeff Utecht who sincerely offer their assistance ‘any time’. So many more are there to help and I need only ask. What’s interesting about my move is, like Bryan Jackson says with reference to my leaving his school district, I’m “moving halfway around the world (while essentially residing in the same place).” Technology has really made distance and time a moot point in communication and learning. I have so many people to look to for help and inspiration, and I can’t wait to make the jump:
I hope that this new journey brings with it a story that I can share to help others on their journeys.
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The Appreciation:
Thank you so much to everyone who came to my presentations. I hope that you found our hour together worthwhile.
Special thanks to my wife for doing so much to prep us for China while I was preparing for and spending time in Boston.
Thanks to Bob Sprankle for podcasting my presentation… great feedback for me to learn from. If you listen to this, the slideshow above does not include a link to the 5 Minute University that I included in the live presentation. Also, SlideShare editing credit goes to Sharon Elin who has the skill to be an editor for a major newspaper (and I’m talking about one that survives the next 5 years).
Last year John Davitt saved me, handing his computer over to me just before my presentation, this year Seth Bowers went running up to his room to get me speakers as my presentation was about to start.
Thanks to new blogger and twitter-er Mike Slinger for traveling with me to Boston, organizing Red Sox tickets, and taking care of me between my sessions.
And again, thanks so much to Alan November and the November Learning Team. I’m honoured to have been part of the conference for the past two years and for being part of the team in Louisiana.
And thank you to everyone who reads my blog! Your thoughts and feedback are appreciated!
I’ve finally edited it for the web… a tedious task as I tend to use a lot of slide transitions that do not convert well to individual slides. I shared a few presentation notes on this Slideshare, but not too much. This is a great feature I’ll probably use more in the future.
Here again is the Ustream: This version was done for student teachers at Simon Fraser University. As a video, it has a slow start with student teachers discussing a statement, and sharing ideas until about the 13 minute mark. Also, the slides in this video won’t match perfectly to the Slideshare above as I had to explain some of the slides for the stand-alone slide show, but it would be easy to connect the two presentations.
I’ll be using some of this presentation as the intro to one of my BLC09 presentations:
The P.O.D.s are coming!
What are PODS? They are Personally Owned Devices, and they are already infiltrating our schools. For now they get tucked away in lockers and backpacks, but as the saying goes, “If there is an elephant in the room, introduce it!” Students are bringing small machines with huge potential into our schools. It is time to introduce these tools into our classrooms and also to make sure that we have the knowledge and the infrastructure to use them to their fullest potential.
It is indeed an honour to have been nominated for the Edublog Awards in the ‘Best Individual Blog‘ category.
Special thanks goes out to Liz B. Davis for nominating me. There is a reason why Liz showed up ‘in my neighbourhood’ more than anyone alse when I created my Brave New World Wide Web video. She is a true educator who helps to make my digital network incredible!
If you are a regular reader of this blog… thank you! If you are new here, please check out some of my more popular posts linked to in the right-hand sidebar. I appreciate your comments and contributions to my learning.
What I have enjoyed about the Edublog Awards in the past has been the opportunity to be exposed to many amazing bloggers doing wonderful things. I just made a short visit to the 34 other blogs nominated in this category and I’m looking forward to exploring them further!
There are a few familiar faces on this list, like Sue Waters (x2), Kim Cofino, John Connell, Steve Dembo, and the very missed student voice of Arthus. There are also a few more blogs on this list that I’ve visited before, and then a full two-dozen that are new to me… and that is just in the Best Individual Blog category!
There is so much to explore within the 2008 Edublog Awards. Take a little time and check out some of the great resources that have been shared. This isn’t really a competation as much as it is a learning opportunity!
And here is the chat transcript. I couldn’t get onto EdtechTalk at school and rushed home minutes before we started, so that added a few kinks for me. One of the kinks was that my laptop at home should have been restarted first and so just opening a window sometimes took 10 seconds, and so I spent very little time paying attention to the chat as I tried opening links to share. Another kink was that I had these links open and ready to go at work… so it really was too bad I had to rush home.
Feedback? Questions? Please share them with me!
Alice, Cheryl and Bob were great hosts and the hour together disappeared. We started the conversation talking about how easy it is to connect with our digital neighbors when we meet them face-to-face, and that is something I really learned at BLC08 this year.
Thanks to these three wonderful educators! They deserve some kudos for working on Seedlings and also for offering support to new educators at their Seedlings Ning site. I’d love the opportunity to chat with them again, on or off the air.
I wish people would stop trying to compare old ways with new ways and started asking, “What can we do with this amazing new tool?” or “How can I use this to engage learners?” or better yet, “How can this empower students to pursue their own learning?”
And we had better start doing this soon!
Why?
PODs. We are about 5 years away from most of our students bringing PODs to school, Personally Owned Devices. I’m talking about pervasive access to laptops and iPhone-like devices in our schools. Every kid coming to school with more capability in their pockets and hands than most teachers have on their desk right now.
So now a big question comes to mind. At the pace we are going now… Will we be ready to utilize these amazing tools that will be brought into our classrooms?
I say no!
So, new questions arise: What do we need to do to be ready? What needs to change? How do we maximize what we can do now? Who makes this happen?
No it’s not about the technology… you don’t need technology to promote inquiry and a love of learning in students. It is not about preparing our students for the future… it is about preparing our teachers for the future. It is about asking ourselves the right questions and promoting a spirit of inquiry with our teachers. And finally, it is about leadership.
But traditional leadership alone won’t work. It is YOUR leadership that we need. Do not go quietly into your classroom. Do not go quietly into your schools. Do not wait for PODs to arrive. You are the one that can make a difference… ask yourself, “How can I prepare my colleagues for the future of education?”
I’ve asked a lot of questions, and I’ll provide an answer to one of them now:
Well the concept of neighbourhood has really changed for me. I showed this movie in Powerpoint format at one of my presentations at BLC08 this summer. Afterwards, I think it was one of 3 people, (Liz Davis, Laura Deisley, or Maria Knee), that asked me how many people from my network did I think were in the presentation? I had no idea? Tonight I thought I’d start the search.
See the video on this blip.tv link or click below for it to open in a new window.
That’s 30 people, some appearing more than once. Other than intentionally using items from Alec and Jeff, each one of these ’sightings’ are incidental… but significant. Beyond these connections I also have Jabiz Raisdana, Dave Matheson (one of just 3 local connections from my district), Sue Waters, Karen Janowski, and Claudia Ceraso commenting on my post introducing the video.
Claudia didn’t just comment on my post, she wrote a response post that has challenged my thinking. When I’m done here I’m going to her blog to respond… to continue the conversation, and the learning. Claudia may live and work in Argentina, but she has influence over me. Geography and physical proximity no longer matter. (Case-in-point: Sue’s comment offers me advice from Austrialia.)
My digital neighbourhood spans the globe! But this is more than an issue of geography, it is also about influence and significance. Some of these connections are ‘loose’, like the local bus driver on Sesame Street, but others have greater meaning to me.
I may never meet some of these people, but they are my teachers, mentors and friends. This is my network, not my neighbourhood… and networks are fundamentally different than groups/(neighbours). It truly is a brave new world-wide-web, and if we aren’t engaging in the opportunities it provides us then we are missing out… and the same could be said for our students.
This is the last post that I have to move and so I thought I would put my reflection first.
I actually posted this after I went back to the beginning of my blog and started the reposting process. There is only one other time that I interjected a new post during this reflect and repost process, and I did that because the issue was time sensitive. That said, many reflections have been posts within posts with new ideas developed and shared.
So here now is my final post reflection in this format… I have now officially moved my blog completely over to this new feed.
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Audience does matter… and so does authority. Even in some of these reflections I have seen a shift in my tone on this blog. To be honest, it has been a healthy shift. I still rant, as the first link above demonstrates, but I think I have found a much more positive spin on things thanks to my change in position as well as the choice to put this blog at an address with my name on it.
Every e-mail I send out has the Zoroastrian quote, “Think Good Thoughts, Say Good Words, Do Good Deeds”, and in fact, so do most of my online profiles. Yet, my frustration with the slow process of tearing down archaic institutional walls that hinder the use of transformational technologies in schools has left me frustrated, if not outright bitter, at times. But who are my audience? What does a somewhat negative tone tell them about blogging or working with technology?
As I say below:
We need to be empowered learners if we want to lead other learners.
Anger and frustration may spur the desire to learn, but these ‘hot’ emotions do not encourage a positive learning environment, they do not enhance a learning experience, they do not empower us to be leaders.
You’ll still see me rant, and I’ll still show my frustration at times, but I hope to keep the tone positive and I hope to keep my very own personal learning environment, my learning hub, a place where my thoughts, words and deeds are inherently good.
Thanks to inspiration by Alec, I ended up staying up well past my bedtime (again) and writing a Forum Post in an online Dialogue for our Building Leadership Capacity group. This is a group of teachers interested in Leadership within the District, they meet for 3 session and the discussion forum is designed to keep the conversation going between sessions, (it is just getting started). It is interesting being one of the facilitators after being a teacher-participant for a few years. Regular readers will see that my comments are tempered with a slightly different tone as I figure out my voice as an Administrator. We tell students, “Audience Matters!” But now I am experiencing that first-hand. Here is my discussion forum post:
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Here is an interesting video.Schools as institutions are so slow to change. I think if we really want to be leaders we must prepare our students with the tools of today and tomorrow, not yesterday!
From Alec Couros’ Letting Go “…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.”
Harsh words, but as our own district ramps up its’ online learning and districts like West Vancouver do the same, we must ask ourselves how best to meet the needs of our students in schools? On the topic of technology use, I created this slideshow to show to SFU Student Teachers at a pro-d session earlier this year: Brave New World-Wide-Web. Towards the end, it highlights some of the tools that students used to empower their own learning.
And that brings us back to the idea of leadership. We need to be empowered learners if we want to lead other learners. We need to create an environment that fosters doing new things in new ways, like many cutting edge organizations do. However, this isn’t a complaint about what we need and don’t have. I read a lot of blogs by teachers across the globe. Here in Canada, and in the US, there are countless districts where not every classroom has a computer, or where draconian online censorship by the district limits what a teacher can do. Compared to most school districts, we are actually leaders on the technology integration curve, especially with respect to our ideology of openness and what we have with the My43 portal.
So as leaders, how do we harness this advantage? If we want to build capacityand empower the leaders in our district, what is it that needs to happen to foster a culture that thrives on challenge
and change? What do we need to do to nurture our own learning? How can WE become educational leaders that prepare our students for an age of prolific technological advancement?
I spent Friday morning with 22 student teachers and a couple teachers from my school. My goal was to introduce them to the world of web2.0, wikis, and del.icio.us. Well 2 out of 3 ain’t bad- I didn’t really get into delicious beyond an introduction. That aside, I think this group of future teachers really understood my point that education is changing and our teaching needs to change too!
The slideshare was my main introduction, and here is the wiki we used. I gave them each a page to play with and used video’s to convey many of the ideas I wanted to get across. I’d like to thank SFU Faculty Advisor and friend John Stockdale for the opportunity.
I’d love to be able to give this message to every student teacher!
Originally posted: January 28th, 2008
Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting:
I haven’t gone to the slideshare version of this slide show in a while. I just went there to get the embed code to repost and saw the stats since uploading this presentation four months ago:
The stat that surprises me the most is the number of downloads. I would love to see some of the adaptations made to those downloads and I’d also love to know how they have been used?
Here is the write-up for the 2 hour Professional Development seminar that I ran today for 9 dedicated teachers who showed up on a sunny Saturday, after a full day of Pro-D on Friday.
Start Your Own Blog A practical session that will introduce you to blogging.
You will see how others use their blogs and you will get a chance to create your own blog.
You will also learn just how easy it is to create links, add pictures and even movies to your blog.
Also, you will learn a bit about web2.0 and very easy to use tools that make your time on the web faster and friendlier.
I did my best to make these resources that could be: a) used by others to structure their own Pro-D sessions; and b) used as a self help tutorial.
… any feedback would be appreciated.
The session went very well with the teacher participants asking great questions and showing enthusiasm. Overall, I spent too much time talking about the tools, and didn’t get onto creating their blogs until we were rushing against time. Feedback from one participant was that we should build the blog first, then talk about the tools- an excellent idea, and I will change the wiki sometime soon (well, not too soon, I’ve spent enough of my life collecting resources and building these tools over the last couple weeks!)
The power of WE: Special thanks goes to a few people who saved me hours of time by helping me out, and by having great resources already built, so that I didn’t have to create them myself.
• Kris (Wandering Ink) for helping me find worthy links for my example page: A variety of bloggers, blogging mostly about blogs and blogging. Kris also edited my ‘Making a Splash‘ post. I hadn’t published it yet so I threw it into a Google Document, where she edited it. We chatted on MSN throughout and then I cut-and-pasted the edited sections back into my post. It was easy to do – especially with our dialogue via chat. A teacher and a former student collaborating, (late on a Friday night), to create a tool for teachers, in a way that was impossible not too long ago… very cool!
• Mike Temple for his blog Edublog Tutorials. This blog linked to another great resource: MSU (Michigan State University) video tutorial. Mike has done a great job with this blog!
Thank you to these people, and all the wonderful people that I linked to in on the wiki.
Personal Reflections:
-This was the first time I tried to do technology based professional development, beyond introducing a few tools to my staff, and I am happy with how things went.
-We only had about 1:45 minutes and this would be a great 3 hour Pro-D. A typical teacher blunder when trying something out of your comfort zone… pack too much in!
-As a mac user, I need to be a little more familiar with a pc lab.
-I really should have them make their blogs first, as was suggested.
-I only got the e-mail address of 4 of the participants and none of their new blog addresses- I’ll have to hunt these down for a feed I created. I think this is a good idea to offer support and community for new bloggers, and I should make the collection of this information more formal.
* I invite feedback on the Start Your Own Blog tools… and I hope that others will find them useful!
Thanks,
Dave.
Originally posted: April 22nd, 2007
Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting:
Why on earth did I do a Pro-D on ’start your own blog’ instead of on ’start blogging with your students’? Of the participants, one started a blog with her students in an elementary school (in the interior of BC… I offered her some help last year, but have lost touch this year. I don’t think any of them maintain their own personal blog.
In the post Darren asks a few questions including:
How do we transform OpenPD so as to attract the kinds of teachers that aren’t the most technologically savvy?
How do we garner the participation of additional groups of teachers? Sure, individual participation from wherever you may be is fantastic, but a class of multiple classes would be ideal.
Here, in my comment, is one possible direction I could see Pro-D going if we want more people to engage meaningfully with technology:
If you want to capture a ‘new’ crowd then you need to offer them low-hanging fruit. Twitter has a difficult introductory stage. RSS takes time to develop… why not just have a few educators sharing with Google Reader on a resource wiki and let that be an initial introduction to RSS… challenge participants to add to the resource page.
I think wiki’s are a great entry point. They are easy to use AND when students begin to learn from their peers, or take responsibility for their own learning on a wiki that excites the teachers to want more!
Give them a project with easy-to-find success within reach. For example, a fully developed 2-3 week student project with rubrics they help develop (with your help too) – something with a start, and a finish, and a lot of opportunity to build student buy-in, to get support and to find success.
It is a fallacy to say that a networked teacher does less, or has an easier time engaging students… that takes hard work and good teaching. So, don’t pump-it-up as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Instead, provide an opportunity for teachers to see and experience the transformative nature of these tools on LEARNING (as opposed to ‘teaching’). Once this happens it is difficult for a teacher to go back into their pre-technology cave of shadows… they’ll be hooked and they will seek out the new tools, and take the time to develop their own network.
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Two Wolves Which wolf will you feed? A Remembrance Day Post
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My blog is my PhD I have given myself a Blogtorate of Philosophy.
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Bubble Wrap What we are doing is creating a facade of security, nothing more than an illusion of bubble wrap. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Who are the People in Your Neighbourhood? My (digital) neighbourhood spans the globe. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Personal Reflections:
Background
