“I can do that without technology” -Actually no you can’t!

Here is the Slideshare.

This was the presentation I first created for BLC08, and I wrote about it here.

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.

And I’ll probably link to this post in my PODs presentation. I first discussed PODs here.

It’s nice to finally be able to share this presentation and as always, I’m offering it with a CC license:

Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

I’m back from a wonderful holiday… in 12 days we visited my sister and family in L.A., and went to San Diego where we visited the Wild Animal Park, Zoo, and SeaWorld (twice). We also went to Disney/California Adventure for 3 days. My kids had a fantastic time, and I found more joy in their enjoyment than my own.

A few days ago I got a flu that went to my sinuses. Yesterday during the flight from L.A. to Seattle I realized that my flu was an infection and the flight home was nothing less than painful! I must thank my wife for doing most of the driving from Seattle to Coquitlam for I was agonizingly useless. Today, I am on antibiotics, Sinutab, a nasal salt water wash, and as of 20 minutes ago, a home remedy ‘tonic’ of a much stronger nature… I received a concussion in a water polo game 25 years ago when my nose was broken by an elbow and I think the pain I feel right now is worse… yet I just looked in the mirror in my washroom and I look no worse for wear than I normally do.

So why am I telling you this?

I wonder how many students come to us with hidden pain… not a sinus infection but pain none-the-less. How many students hide their broken homes, their emotional or physical abuse? How many students feel like they don’t fit in, that they don’t belong? How many students have moments where they want to die or wish they were already dead?

I’ve had students in my class that have dealt with issues I could never imagine. I remember my VP Gary Kern saying to me once, “This job has taught me a new respect for the student I’d never want to be…”, the student whose life experiences make them students of life long before we reach that point.

This is what makes a teacher’s job so tough, we don’t teach ’students’ we teach human beings with real-life issues. We ’see’ a lot, but we miss a lot too!

How many times have you had a parent interview after which you suddenly change your strategy about how you deal with a student? How many times have you made an on-the-spot decision that you believed was great, only to discover later that you should have handled it differently, that you didn’t have enough information to do what was best for the student?

Sometimes it takes feeling a hidden pain to appreciate that others feel pain too.

I’m sure every teacher reading this could share a story like no other. I’m sure every teacher reading this understands exactly what I’m talking about. As I sit here in agony, I salute the teachers of this world who do so much more than teach students the content they are required to teach!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go crawl under a rock until I feel better.

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: 2264 views | 4 comments | 16 favorites | 74 downloads | 26 embeds 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? I will be creating a video version of this for my 3rd presentation at Alan November’s Building Leadership Communities 2008. You can see the influence my blog has within this presentation.

This is the end of my last post on our class Ning network for Planning 10 this term. The first link isn’t really appropriate but my students get my sense of humour by now, and we just finished talking about sex-ed, so I put it in anyway. For reasons I cannot express in this venue at this time, I will really miss these two classes!

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And finally, I will leave you with this:

1. Make smart, realistic goals for yourself… it takes effort to follow through with your goals, so make them SMART and easier to find success with!

2. Figure out who you are and what is important to you. Don’t let media perceptions change you. Be safe, and if you are going to be a role model for others, be a positive one.

3. Remember that the world is getting smaller, and that we are now global citizens… in a new global market… connected in new ways… take care of your neighbours!

Peace.

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Originally posted: January 24th, 2008 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: I found out that I was promoted to Vice Principal by cell phone, driving home on the 23rd and that’s what led to me saying here, a day later, “For reasons I cannot express in this venue at this time, I will really miss these two classes!” I took my new position February 1st. It was easy to let go of the responsibility of these classes since the semester was over, but I had many sleepless nights working and preparing to let go of my Grad Transitions Coordinator position. Now that I have been a VP for almost half a year, I do not regret the opportunity, but still find being out of the classroom tough. Some great teachers have made this transition easier for me.

Kim Cofino writes on Twitter:

Join us in our uStream session: http://ustream.tv/channel/isb-edu-stream Conversations about the Future of Learning in a Networked World.

I click the link to uStream and find that 12 others have also joined her meeting, later there were 17 of us.

Vance Stevens is talking and a participant in the meeting links to the slide show he is showing.

Vance keeps us up to speed with respect to when to advance the slides.

I bookmark one of the links in the slides to my del.icio.us, a great link for new bloggers to check out.

I chat with some ‘familiar’ people, Alec Couros and Kelly Christopherson, and ask them to help me out with a Pro-D session I’ll be running with student teachers on the 25th. Chrissy says to ‘Twitter’ her and she will help out. (She actually says, “Twitter us and we will help”). I don’t follow Chrissy on Twitter so I go to my open Twitter window and request to follow her.

I see that I have a new Gmail message in my inbox so I open another window to find out that it is Kris. She is asking if I had seen her new post, which is titled Web2.0 Compatible.

I’m listening to the meeting, I postpone popping open windows to the links Vance is referring to, or checking the live chat on uStream so that I can read Kris’ post. I notice a small typo in Kris’s second paragraph. I also notice a green dot by her name in Google Chat indicating that she is online. I open a chat box and quote her typo back to her.

Kris replies back minutes later that the typo is fixed, (I hit refresh and it is). Kris’ post is about how ‘her generation’ is totally web2.0 compatible.

I continue following the meeting where a participant is talking about how these new applications are now ‘net’ applications and not ‘pay-for’ software. I realize that other than my computer and Internet connection, all this linking and watching and listening and engaging is free.

The most amazing part to all this: It was almost midnight here and I was ‘chatting’ with a student, reading her writing, and offering (minor) feedback… while ’sitting in’ on a staff meeting at the International School Bangkok, Thailand… ‘talking’ to Kelly in Saskatchewan and Alec in Regina, as well as others in Australia and The UK… and ‘meeting’ Chrissy, a new connection from New Zealand, who has offered to Twitter-in and help demonstrate networking/connectivity at my Pro-D session next week in the suburbs of Vancouver.

All this happened in a shorter time than it took me to write this post!

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Postscript:

While getting links for this post, I discovered that Chrissy also wrote about this experience. Here is a great image she uploaded. Click on it to get to her post.

…and back again moments later. Apparently this was not a staff meeting, but a session in an un-conference. Kim just linked to the conference wiki page via Twitter.

Originally posted: January 16th, 2008 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: This was a very powerful expression of how my learning has shifted from searching for information to seeking interaction. It also speaks of ‘richness’. I want students to know this kind of learning… in school. I want them to be active members in a global learning network. I want them to follow their own interests, to make choices about what information they will choose to pay attention to, what to check later, and what to filter out. I want students to be 21st Century learners.

The first time I saw the term ‘B.G.’ referring to ‘Before Google’ was in Karl Fisch’s ‘Did You Know’ presentation. Tonight that term came to life for me.

Here is an eye-opening statistic I discovered about myself today:

Total Google searches: 3633 (Since April 30th, 2006, and only counting when I have been signed into Google.)

I did some quick number crunching: On average, I use Google about 450 times a month, which also averages to about 15 times a day. I really do have to ask, what did I do B.G. – Before Google?

If you have a Google account you can check out your own history here http://www.google.com/history/

Have a look at my Googling trends: (The secret is out… I am a night owl!)

Above and beyond this chart, there is actually quite a lot here that Google knows about me. Add to this the things I choose to RSS into Google Reader, the things I choose to Star and Share there, the sites I sign up with on Gmail, the people (and information) I e-mail, and basically Google could start to make decisions for me.

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A.G. – After Google

How far away are we from having Google prioritizing items in our e-mail and RSS feeds for us? Or providing us with personalized search results? I wonder how far this could go?

Will there be a truly semantic web? Although Stephen Downes says ‘no’, and makes a very knowledgeable and compelling argument, I wonder if he isn’t looking at it from a paradigm that will change?

Stephen states:

But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:
- would agree on web standards (hah!)
- would adopt a common vocabulary (you don’t say)
- would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)

But I think of the sophistication of Language Translators today and wonder if standards and vocabulary will have to be stringent? Perhaps there will come a time when it will be enough to have a somewhat common vocabulary (congruent semantics within different languages)… and so ‘loose’ standards become beneficial since if you choose to follow along, you reap greater benefits. Or perhaps the same way Mashups scrape information from multiple sites a semantic web could be built by information scraping?

How many billions of dollars were spent on laying down fiber cables in the few years before wireless access mushroomed?

How many experts thought blogs would fail? Without RSS blogs would never have become so prolific. Blogs came first, but they might have drifted to the fringe without the ability to have feeds go to the reader.

Is a semantic web really doomed to fail or is it inevitable? Web4.0 – your webmodality.

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C.E. -Communal Era

I’m not changing my behavior because I have become aware that ‘Google is watching’ and tracking what I do.

And yet I’m not fully trusting either. How accurately can they pinpoint my interests and focus Google ads towards me? (With a last name of Truss this would be refreshing… Yahoo always shows me Roofing and Bra Support ads.) Furthermore, who else can see my information? Who decides this? How secure is my information? All these things concern me, yet I’m still using Google.

There is an option to ‘pause’ the history tracking and also to ‘remove’ an item in Google History, but do these things actually happen or just disappear from my view? (I recall some issues with Gmail not ‘deleting forever’ after such a request was made.) Yet I’m still using Google.

With OpenID and Corporate ID (Youtube is Google, Flickr is Yahoo) I am going to be sharing my information regardless of how much I chose to ‘pause’ or ‘block’ or ‘remove’ information from the web. My information is communal/shared to a very large extent!

What really concerns me is how this information about me will be used to “help” me? Will “smarter” searches force like-minded ideas on me? Will they stifle my creativity? Will I suffer the ‘Dumbness of Crowds‘?

Will a semantic web shield me from an onslaught of unnecessary information or will it insulate me from possibilities and learning opportunities?

Originally posted: January 8th, 2008 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: When I type something into Google that is misspelled or phrased in an ‘uncommon’ way, it asks me, “Did you mean: ______ ?” and provides me with an alternative, more likely search. I wonder how far away we are from being asked the same thing regarding HTML or CSS on a web page or programming code as it is written? I think that we will see a semantic web, and I think that with it we will see a life-altering shift in how we interface with computers. It seems as thought I have coined a new word: webmodality Wikipedia has an article on Modality (human-computer interaction), but the intent behind webmodality is less about sense/sensory input or output and much more about presence: it is the lack of separation between input and output. Webmodality is the semantic co-relation or interface between humans and their personal intuitive web. I’m thinking of this as Web4.0… the semantic web as an extension of us and our identity, a sensory experience of information that helps to define us. I’m not sure a term like webmodality will stick for any reason, but it did permit me to ‘think big’ for a while.

It’s the old allegory of the cave.

Last Friday I was leaving the school and I popped into my VP’s office. Among other things, Anthony and I often talk about technology in the classroom. One thing led to another and I showed him the YouTube video that was the subject of my last post: iPhone tutorial from a two-year-old. It was shortly after this, while I was saying something, that Anthony interrupted me:

“You can’t go back now, can you?”
“What?”
“You could never be able to go back to teaching without technology, could you?
“No.”

Driving home after our conversation it occurred to me what a transformation my teaching has gone through in the past couple years. Could I go back to a classroom and teach void of blogs, wikis, & online networks? Well, of course I could, but I just wouldn’t want to!

Not only do I never want to go back, but I have become an evangelist.
However I’ve noticed a bit of a backlash among teachers. Comments like “We can do that without technology” miss the point about what students have the potential to do. “Every time I get them in the computer room all they do is Facebook” recognizes that technology is a tool, not an answer, but comments such as these are used as excuses rather than challenges.

In the past few weeks I’ve heard more than one teacher say, “What is Facebook”, and “What is a wiki?”. This I can handle. But then I hear about how technology is evil; about what a distraction it is. Well here is a little news flash… IT ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE!

There are times I just want to put my head down, improve what I am doing as a teacher, and forget that there is ‘work to be done’. I can’t. Not only can’t I return to life in Plato’s cave, but I am also compelled to ’share the true light’. I now realize that at times I am destined to be seen as ‘blinded’, such will be the lot in life for many of us.

Can you go back now?

Originally posted: December 17th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: I’ll let the comments on the original post speak for me. No David, we can’t go back. We have come too far along the road and know too much about what is out there to go back. We are willing to take the good with the bad and suffer some of the things that come along with knowing – like sleepless nights, frustration of things not working, having to re-explain to students, losing things in cyberspace, etc. We are willing to go through these because we have experienced the joy and fun and exhilaration and…. when something happens. It’s so constructivist that we cannot understand how others don’t see how great it could be. But, just like Darwin argued for changes in education over a 100 years ago with little change, we need to change much more than just the tools we use. We need to change the way people view learning. Keep up it up! We’ll get there! Kelly Christopherson on Monday, 17 December 2007, 23:18 CET  Hi Dave, your post is very inspiring, and for me in many dimensions. In the first glance it seems to be the expression of skeptical view of all ongoing development. The sort of skepticism we may all know. (Won’t Work, etc.)  But this vibes in me in sustainability.   It seems to me now that this should be a good point growing and going in concrete. Yes – i also would answer, that i couldn’t go back teaching my university students being creatively – expressive… poetaster’s group host. Getting organized – … And its is the effect of the new technology as an crystallisation point of all those affords and their solutions. But – and this has been deeply grown for me now: There is a lot of work to transport our learning experiences – observations – effects – because they are complex to observe and more than than complex to transport – especially to those who want to access it theoretically. Maybe – and this would be my answer: “I cannot go back – because I’ve seen the glance in the eyes of the students. I cannot go back, because they have implemented my top level aim: They changed the verbing from :”I am podcaster at University-Koblence” to “I have to do something for my podcast”) This are the points you cannot explain to somebody who hasn’t got infected . Best greetings from the icy-cold Germany – and forgive the typos – my English @ school has been a long time ago Andreas Auwärter on Thursday, 20 December 2007, 10:16 CET  Kelly, Constructivist indeed! That’s the challenge for those looking from the outside trying to understand. Andreas, Thank you for looking beyond your first glance, and seeing beyond an expression of the skeptical view. My intent was NOT to say, “Oh no, I can’t go back!”, but rather to identify that what lies ahead is much too exciting to go back again… and I can tell that you saw that! The transformation that you see in your students is an excellent example of why so many of us are, as you say, ‘infected’ – (a brilliant choice of words that only arises from a second language speaker:-) Your students are fortunate to have you guide them. I am sorry that I do not speak German and the English translation of your Podcasting for Learning does not do justice to your writing, as your comment demonstrates. Thank you both for your comments! Dave. David Truss on Thursday, 20 December 2007, 18:40 CET  David, I love this post!  I can’t go back and I don’t think kids can go back either–and we all need to remember that. It is discouraging sometimes to feel like the one shouting in the wilderness.   I’m eager for the day when many of the research studies going on will show the value of what we know/feel to be true! Thanks for the post! Carolyn Foote on Tuesday, 08 January 2008, 20:58 CET

Have you ever spent hours working on something and then looked at the final product only to wonder where the time and effort went? That’s how I feel about the rubric I have been working on for the Graduation Transitions Program (for which I am the coordinator at our school).

Last year, under the old program, the ‘Final Presentation’ was about showing evidence and meeting criteria. This year the ‘Exit Interview’ is more about the journey…

So how do you create a rubric to give feedback to students about their journey? I decided on a few things first:

1. Reflection is important and needs to be valued.
2. This is a big transition… some forward planning also needs to be valued.
3. This is NOT a grade! (The program is not graded, you just need to meet the requirements.)
4. It needs to be ‘different’ enough that the many different teachers doing the interview won’t fall into ‘grading’ mode.

Here is what I came up with… (Link to a larger view)

At this point I can’t decide if this achieves what I want it to, or if I wasted my time… feedback is really appreciated… I have to present this to students on Monday.

Originally posted: December 6th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: The final rubric included the symbolic metaphor of birds hatching, (click the image for a larger view). The Phoenix on the left is the school mascot and an ideal symbol for success. I did two things that I think made this process rather unique: 1. The rubric progresses from right-to-left rather than left-to-right. I wanted students to see this in a different light than traditional rubrics. As I said in the presentation I made to the Grade 12’s, “A rubric that is for feedback… not a grade!” 2. Because this was not for a grade, (Grad Transitions is a Pass/Fail), I also decided that students should evaluate themselves on this rubric. The people that students present to for their exit interview could give feedback and suggestions, for example: “I think you are too hard on yourself,” or “perhaps you have more to think about in that area,” but the end choice would ultimately be the student’s. The only way that a student could be overridden is if they were “Developing” as an “Overall Snapshot” in the opinion of the adults being presented to… (Bottom-right square on the rubric). If the student did not show any sign of meaningful reflection and they showed very limited or no thought towards what their future held, then the adults being presented to could determine that another interview was in order. I had made every attempt to change all of the required assignments to make them more meaningful to the student. And so, I also saw it as fitting that they should ultimately reflect and determine where they fit on the exit interview rubric… It is more about metacognition than it is about a measure on some sort of success scale. Is one student better off than another because they think, at 17 or 18 years old that they have all the answers about what their future holds? Or is it more important for them to consider where they are in that process, and where they need to go, or what they need to think about next? - – - – - It was hard to leave this position when I got promoted in February. I felt as thought I was abandoning a commitment and was quite honestly surprised that my district would consider moving me. That said, my replacement Dino has done an amazing job continuing the program on, and actually making it better! He held a full day interview session with every teacher in the school becoming involved… something I don’t think I could have pulled off! I’m very happy to see the program evolve and grow. - – - – - Comment on the original post: If I understand this correctly, Mastering is the level they all want to obtain, but the level they are assigned is how the teacher will be grading them. So, they may think that they are at the mastering level, but in reality, and according to the teacher, they are at the learning level. I like how this goes. It is very interesting, and I think that students should respond well to the rubric. I think it is great how it gives them words to use to describe where they are at. If/when they spend time thinking about it, they will have to start understanding that “In 5 years I will be…” is much different and more advanced than “this is my plan…”. I don’t know how to critique it to make it better. I looked at the site you linked to and looked at the PDF that explains the program. It seems to me that there is a leap the students will need to make from the two sources that I looked at. I think that is a good thing…it makes them think about how they will do things to achieve their requirements. Good luck. Jethro Jones on Friday, 07 December 2007, 03:17 CET

We are influenced by so many things in our lives. Identifying what has a significant influence on us can be difficult. Here are two things that I believe can be categorized as most influential… and they both happened Monday.

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1. Fifteen year old Kristine wrote a very influential blog post last May. It coincided with a lesson I was doing in my class for our school’s Renaissance Fair. The post, “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci“, has made the finals for the Edublog Awards ‘Most Influential Post ‘. She is the only student to make the finals in this category. Furthermore, the post has had an impact on me, and many teachers that I have shared it with. Thinking back now, as I write this, I realize that Kris has influenced my blog posts, time and again. (The student as teacher, or at least as an influential node in my learning network:-)

As I told Kris in my comment months ago: “You are, and always will be, a lifelong learner who engages in a quest to meaningfully exploring your world, (dare I say like da Vinci)… I guess one would argue despite your education rather than because of it… so there is hope, and there is potential for us to find our next da Vinci… perhaps SHE is within our midst today:-)”

As edubloggers I think that it is great to recognize students like Kris who deserve more recognition than they usually get at school. We should also recognize that although we strive to give students the best possible experience in our classrooms, Kris’ message holds more truths than most would like to admit. May her blog influence many learning discussions in the months to come.

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2. Two good friends, Dave Sands and Gary Kern came to my school Monday night and did a presentation with me on: Technology, Your Child, and You. Twenty seven parents braved the threat of the first snowfall of the year to participate in the presentation. On a personal note, I felt a little like a rookie called up to the majors to help out with this presentation. Dave and Gary have given it many times, and they had a ‘flow’ about them that I lacked. Overall I think it was great to be part of the presentation and it was fun to see my Batman/Borg metaphor being used (though they use the more recognized Terminator rather than the Borg).

Dave was very impressed with the parent’s involvement and interest. The most vocal of them wanted answers about what to do about Facebook and all the screen time kids have. This presentation however was much more about asking questions than giving answers.

The presentation delivers a number of key ideas: Technology feeds student needs. Technology isn’t going away. Parents need to figure out what they value, and they need to understand and engage with the technology their kids are using. If parents want influence with their children, they are far more likely to get it engaging from the inside rather than policing from the outside.

A simple example: a kid that won’t phone a parent from a friend’s house to say they are changing locations, might not think twice about texting a parent while in the back seat of a car heading to the new location… if text is a mode of communication that the kid already uses with their parent.

The presentation is very well designed and parent feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with several of them wishing more parents showed up, “Parents need to hear this!”

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It was a most influential Monday!

Originally posted: November 29th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: A look at some amazing students and teachers. Kris is now my blog-hosting techie, I provide her with free hosting (Bluehost gives me more space than I’ll ever use), and I get step-by-step help with things like upgrading to the newest Wordpress version. She has also been invited to post on Students 2oh, although she hasn’t done so yet. Another student, Raj, got wind of the fact that our computer teacher, Mr. Yuen, and I were going to create a Wiimote smartboard and he took the idea and ran with it! He also took this programming passion into his classroom and is co-creating this page in Mr. Mak’s 1-1 room. Mr. Mak was the second of two teachers at our school to get the computers for his 1-1 class, so he had to wait until late February to have them passed on to his students. I arrived at the school in February, showed Mr. Mak Wikispaces and gave him some suggestions about how he could use it. Since then he has blown me away with his fearlessness. Check out Mr. Mak’s Class Novel or his ToonDoo Anti-Bullying cartoons (note that Raj helped with the instructions), or his Career Research assignment (where 1 person from each of 3 different classes shares a page). Discussions get posted by students late at night, and I see students in the computer room at lunch working on their wikipages. This isn’t a wiki, it is a learning hub! Also, our computer teacher, Mr. Yuen, jumped onto wikispaces too! His students aren’t just using wiki’s, they are also using tools like: Slideshare, Screencast-o-matic, Dvolver, Jing, Flickr and Audacity, (links to these are on his wiki’s navigation bar). This is a teacher who asked me “What is a wiki?” when I got to the school! Since then he has leaped into the world of web2.0 and has not looked back. I’ve had skype conversations with him well past midnight: I suggest some tools and links and then he shows me some fantastic things he has tried out. Next year Mr. Yuen will be our afternoon librarian and we are revamping the Library’s outdated computer lab. I can’t wait to see how influential this amazing teacher will be when he starts collaborating with teachers coming to the library to do projects! So there you have it: Two amazing students and two amazing teachers that are lifelong learners. Four ‘most influential’ people that inspire me with their passion for learning and sharing with others. - – - – - Comment from the original post: David, what a way to start the week! I just finished reading Kristine’s post, and I absolutely agree! I think every educator needs to read and talk about this post. We have young DaVinci’s sitting in our classrooms ready to be developed. Let’s hope her well deserved recognition for this post will influence many! Angela Maiers on Thursday, 29 November 2007, 23:58 CET

After my last post I went to hear Alan November speak at an afternoon Pro-D session. I then read Brian Kuhn’s blog post and added a comment, which I have edited slightly and included below. In the process of writing this comment I realized a valuable lesson, which I will discuss below the comment:

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The afternoon session With Alan November was great!

It was wonderful to hear Alan November again. His webcast for the district was one of the things that lit a fire under me and encouraged my to explore technology as a means for students to learn ‘new things in new ways’.
This weekend I was listening to some of his podcasts and I wrote a blog post about them : Looking back at it, my reflections were somewhat sarcastic and negative… A product of feeling like things just haven’t been moving fast enough.

Tuesday afternoon changed that for me. There are a lot of great teachers out there doing wonderful things, and there are many more teachers out there feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn, who are still willing to take the next step forward. On a more personal note, the world of web2.0 has given me wings , but I realized that I too have a long way to go before I am doing all the things that I can to give my students wings too!

Thanks to Jill Reid for the invitation, to all the leaders who helped make a day like today possible, and to Alan November… I am refueled and ready to continue my journey of learning along with my students.

Here are some notes about today e-mailed to me from Joni, a true leader in our school. She may not be tech savvy (yet), but teachers like her who offer their leadership, guidance and support are what will help ‘us’ move forward using technology ‘for learning’ rather than just using technology to teach!

Great tool: webcast site ‘Jingproject‘.

Suggestions: Kid jobs for the class

1) Answer questions from class. This kid needs to answer all questions, if he can’t, he needs to find the answer on the web, then post the answer.
2) Continuous researcher through class
3) Official scribe: takes notes for the class every day. Post them to the site.
4) Create a Wiki site. Allows children make a contribution to the world. wikipedia, or your own space like www.wikispaces.com [My attempt - ScienceAlive.]
5) Contributing any source that they find on he web to the class: use a social networking site. eg. www.diigo.com create a diigo account for the class or every student has their own account and then “share to group”. [I used delicious and am now moving to diigo]

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Reflect and Learn

Here is the sentence from above that has hit home with me over the past few days, “the world of web2.0 has given me wings , but I realized that I too have a long way to go before I am doing all the things that I can to give my students wings too!”

I currently have a private Ning network for my students, but it is really driven by me! The blog posts, the groups, the forums… all initiated by me! Yesterday I read a post by Konrad Glogowski. The post, “Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers – The Set Curriculum“, was about just that, ‘the set curriculum’ (something I have written about a few times) but a specific section struck a chord with me:

“It seemed logical to me that my responsibility as an educator was to prepare a collection of texts, resources, diagnostic and assessment/evaluation tools in order to achieve specific learning outcomes. I saw myself as a subject expert whose primary responsibility in the classroom was to teach a very specific set of skills and competencies. I saw myself as someone who possessed knowledge and perceived my students as individuals who needed to acquire it.”

I am new to teaching planning 10, and I am trying to launch a specific program, YPI , that I am learning about with the students. So, I did what many teachers do when they are unfamiliar with the curriculum… I teach to it.

In the last little while my posts have been peppered with negative undertones about things not moving fast enough and technology limitations that I have found frustrating. Well, although those things are legitimate concerns, they are things that are for the most part beyond my control. What I can do is create an engaging classroom environment that actually gives my students wings.

Another thoughtful lesson inspired by Alan November , and realized through my blogging/web2.0 experience.

Originally posted: November 23rd, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: After reading Konrad’s post, I went into my classroom and wrote a forum post for my ning networks titled, “You lead the way“, and this is what it said: Here is your chance to be the teacher today. What do you want to learn more about? What questions do you have? What interests you? This can be about Planning 10 or anything else. It can be questions that you often wonder about or just a thought in your head. You have 2 choices. 1. Respond to this forum 2. Create your own forum discussion Feel free to link to other websites. It can be really small ideas or really big ideas. Then I would like you to read what others have written and join in the conversation. Some of the student discussion choices were (in my opinion) silly. Others good, and still others were heated, including a thoughtful discussion on the Death Penalty, where I had to bite my digital tongue…and sure enough a student came up with a perspective that I thought needed to be shared. These ‘free’ conversations gave the students some ownership of the site and encouraged a greater amount of online conversations afterwards.