Educators new to twitter, here is a little walk down memory lane…

Remember your first days of university? You weren’t sure what to expect and you had to put yourself ‘out there’ to connect to new people?

Do you remember going to a class and not knowing anyone?

Imagine for a moment that you enter, for the first time, a small class and the teacher is trying to start a conversation. When you say something in that class you aren’t really sure who is paying attention… (That’s a Tweet). Someone says something and you respond… (that’s an @reply). The person next to you likes what you said and leans over to quietly tell you so… (that’s a Direct Message). Soon you have the confidence to share your ideas in a bigger classroom… (that’s how you build a following).

You jumped into a new learning environment and made it interesting. You can do that on Twitter too, but just like your new experience at university, you’ve got to put yourself out there, you’ve got to be willing to meet new people, and you’ve got to put some time into making new relationships that can be lasting and meaningful.

It doesn’t work if you don’t try.

It doesn’t work if you aren’t doing it for the right reasons.

But if you are willing to make the effort, you are going to find a community of learners that want to connect to you, and learn from you, and give you more than you could possibly give back.

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A little over a month ago, a few of us started a conversation and it grew into Gr8Tweets. For the month of March, we would promote the use of a hashtag (#gr8t) in order to collectively share some of our favourite Tweets in one place. When we came across something we considered GREAT, we would retweet it with #gr8t.

I really enjoyed planning and launching this with Laura Deacs, Darren Kuropatwa, Sue Waters, Liz B. Davis, Heidi Hass Gable and Bud Hunt. Special thanks as well goes to the many wonderful -people - who - jumped - on - board - with - blog - posts - to – help - promote - the - idea. And even more thank you’s to those that contributed Tweets to #gr8t.

I think this was a great way to synthesize some of the links and ideas that people share on Twitter every day, and for me it highlighted why Twitter has become such a special part of my PLN. I plan to continue using the hashtag when I find something really worth sharing.

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So for those of you that may still be struggling to ‘get’ twitter, check out the resource page on the Gr8tweets wiki. And remember your first days of university. Remember that it takes work and effort to build a meaningful community of friends… and when you decide to join in, put yourself ‘out there’ and give it a fair chance. Once things get rolling, the effort fades and the benefits soar!

For the month of March, a group of educators and lifelong learners will be picking a

“Tweet of the day”

and Re-Tweeting it with the tag: #gr8t

Hopefully, you will join us in doing this too! (If you aren’t sure about what twitter is all about, start here.)

There are a number of reasons why you might want to participate:

• To share what you value about twitter.
• To see what others value about twitter.
• To celebrate the power and wisdom of your Personal Learning Network.
• To find interesting people to follow on Twitter.
• To commit to trying out twitter for a month.

My personal choice for what to retweet with #gr8t will be a Tweet that I find interesting, or insightful, or humorous. It might link to something I enjoyed reading, or it might have something profound or even fortune-cookie-like that appeals to me, like these tweets that I’ve ’stared’ as favourites:

There aren’t really any rules to participate: Simply find a tweet you value, and share it!

For Example, here is a Tweet I’d like to share:

And so I retweet it with #gr8t:

Then this new tweet shows up on the Gr8Tweets wiki and on twitter searches for others to see and share.

I’m looking forward to sharing the Gr8tweets that I find, at least one daily for the month of March, and I’m hoping you will join me and share what you find.
Feel free to follow Gr8tweets on Twitter and Gr8tweets will follow you back, (this part is totally optional).

Even if you aren’t on twitter or you don’t want to participate, be sure to check out the Gr8Tweets wiki and see some of the reasons why so many educators are finding Twitter a valuable tool!

(Here is the story behind this all)

Questions?

Ask us: @datruss, @deacs84, @lizbdavis, @hhg, @suewaters, @dkuropatwa, @budtheteacher

For the last couple Mondays I have presented to two of Betty Gilgoff’s TLITE Classes, (TLITE- Teaching and Learning in an Information Technology Environment). I did two different presentations one based loosely on Learning Conversations and the other on This My Blog has Taught Me. Both presentations asked for teachers to contribute to a VoiceThread and to join a cohort diigo group.

I’m really impressed with this SFU program and the teachers who have signed up for it. The TLITE program offers teachers an entry point into engaging students with technology. Both classes have students with very wide ranges of digital competence, but all with a willingness to learn within a community of other learners.

Check out some of the comments these teachers contributed to our VoiceThreads. The first Voicethread was created for my Learning Conversations presentation, but I didn’t encorporate any time within the presentation for participants to use it and as a result it wasn’t really used -lesson learned there! The second one I put together just for the TLITE class. Please feel free to add you own voice.

See ‘Learning Conversations’ on VoiceThread

See ‘This My Blog…’ on VoiceThread

I wanted to introduce a tool that would be easy to sign up for and easy to see value for in classrooms, and so that’s why I chose VoiceThread. And I also wanted to help these teachers learn from each other and that’s why I chose diigo groups. The first session felt rushed when we got to diigo whereas the second session was given more time. In the second session I talked a bit about the potential for using diigo in the classroom… what a great opportunity for educators to use this tool with students!

Thanks to Betty and to the two TLITE cohorts for inviting me into their classes. It excites me to see teachers in learning communities engaging with new tools.

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.

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.

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.

Start Your Own Blog on Edublogs Wiki on Wikispaces

& a blog post with instructions on how to hyperlink, embed images and videos, as well as tag a post on edublogs,

Making a Splash with Your First Post

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.

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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!

• Cool Cat Teacher Vicki Davis for 10 Habbits of bloggers that win and How to comment like a king (or queen)… both great posts!

• 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.

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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. Tonight I commented on Darren Draper’s post: The Future of the Future of Professional Development. I actually participated in the first session of Darren’s OpenPD and spoke over Skype about my Science Alive Wiki (this was a live invite to share, not a planned talk). I also mentioned this in my Brave New World-Wide-Web slide show as part of being a networked teacher. 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.

What happens when you:

Allow students to determine what they need to learn, and then enable students to manage their own learning activities?

I recently started a wiki space for my Grade 8 Science classes called Science Alive!

The concept is to let students choose their own topic to explore, and then demonstrate learning on all the levels of Blooms Revised Taxonomy.

It has been exciting starting this project… and scary too!

I have been developing a rather critical blog post, looking at my own attempt at creating and using this wiki in my class. I have told myself time and again that I have bitten off more than I can chew, and that I am expecting too much from my Grade 8’s.

I asked my students to ’start’ looking into their chosen subjects this weekend. Before dinner tonight (Sunday Night) I checked the ‘Recent History’ of Science Alive and saw no changes for the weekend other than one on Friday afternoon. I have to admit to being disappointed.

Well I just came back (at 9pm) and I got to meet Joyce.

So, what happens when you:

Allow students to determine what they need to learn, and then enable students to manage their own learning activities?**

Have a look at what Katie and Sara did this weekend: Meet Joyce.

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(**See the Instructional Stategy Development section in this Bonnie Skaalid paper.)

Originally posted: April 2nd, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: From my post: “I have told myself time and again that I have bitten off more than I can chew, and that I am expecting too much from my Grade 8’s.” Yesterday I got to hear Alan November speak again. I couldn’t make his early session, but arrived just at the end of it, then sat with him for a few minutes before his afternoon session. He seemed inspired by some of the really great projects that teachers were doing. One interesting comment that he made was that, during their sharing session, time-and-again yet another teacher would come up to share what they were doing with their classes and two key ideas would emerge: 1. Teachers felt like their projects were not good enough, or that they could have/should have done more with it. (The subject of a future post.) 2. Teachers were surprised by what students were capable of, or what they accomplished. The afternoon session catered mostly to teachers that had not seen him before, and although I really enjoyed it, what struck a chord with me were these two points Alan and I talked about for all of 2-3 minutes. Do we set the bar too low for our students? If we are continually surprised by what our students are capable of when we empower them with dynamic ways to demonstrate their learning, then isn’t that an indication that we should be expecting more? I can’t help but think that we should expect more… and that perhaps this is a motivation issue. I don’t mean that “kids today aren’t motivated”! I think that we just don’t motivate them enough, we don’t offer them opportunities to feel empowered about learning, we don’t let them learn for the love of learning. Instead we teach them things that will fit on a test, things that will ‘prepare them for the next grade’. - – - For a real-life example, I need not look any further than my own motivation in school. My university marks looked like this: I loved the course: A I liked the course and the prof was engaging: A I liked the course: B The prof was engaging: B I disliked any of the above, and the course was easy: C Any other conditions: C- to B, but mostly in the C’s! Translation… If I was engaged/motivated, I met and even exceeded expectations; If I wasn’t engaged, I did what I needed to do in order to pass. In my classes with lower marks, I’m fairly certain that I would have looked like someone not really capable of doing more. Or else I may have been a classic examples of a student who gets those wonderful report card comments, ‘Not meeting his potential’, or ‘Capable of better marks if effort improves’. I may not be brilliant, but I can’t think of a single course I took in university that I wasn’t capable of getting an ‘A’ in. So why didn’t my report cards show a plethora of A’s? Here is the crux: The content or the learning experiences weren’t interesting enough for me! In fact, I often broke the criteria for projects and assignments. I would do what I wanted and ‘take the hit’ on my marks. (I have a perfect example of this that I’ll share at another time.) Or, I simply felt bored and didn’t bother putting an effort in. I’m not proud of this, but it is not an exaggeration to say that I probably handed in more than a third of my assignments late, simply because I didn’t want to do them in the first place. - – - If we engage our students in interactive, social, dynamic learning opportunities that are meaningful to them, then what are they capable of?

Originally posted: February 21st, 2007 [Update: Fieldfindr on Ning-October 3rd, 2007]

Here is an idea that has been brewing in my mind for a while:

The site could be sort of a combination of Warlick’s HitchHikr and MySpace or Facebook. (In a way it is more of a matchmaker site.)
You can sign up and log in as a teacher, or as a willing contributer (Volunteer) in you field of interest.

Basically Volunteers create a profile listing talents and skills. Then they set up a time-line of when they would be interested in helping with, or presenting to, a class. Then teachers can contact volunteers who have profiles of interest.

There could be an opportunity for volunteers to contact teachers too, but I think this should be done through a contact page like this, rather than by direct e-mail.

Here is a mock-up wiki that I built to give you an idea of what I mean. (Yes, I know the profile pictures are a bit big, but they were easy to format that way.)

Below the mock-up profiles, I created a space where interested contributors to a classroom could actually post their information. Teachers can find prospective volunteers by searching a particular field/subject.

However, I believe that there is a need for a fully committed portal site that is dedicated to:
CONNECTING TEACHERS TO GLOBAL CITIZENS THAT ARE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR TALENTS WITH A CLASS.

At a dedicated portal:
Tag searches could easily be set-up. (See my ‘Super Tags’ post [coming soon])
Teachers could find other teachers to help them.
Positive relationships between business and education can be formed.
Success stories could inspire teachers hesitant to explore web2.0
Retired teachers or field experts can be tapped into.
There is so much opportunity for collaboration! (I came up with this list in about 3-4 minutes… and I’m sure you could add to it:-)

Once the site is set up, the opportunities and possibilities are endless!
Again, just off the top of my head, here are some kinds of volunteers we can easily tap into…Especially if we had a portal to help us do so.

• A musician or poet who is willing to judge a performance or contest.
• A Researcher willing to share new ideas in their field.
• A Math tutor who offers after school assistance on a forum. (Time differences could actually be an advantage here.)
• A dance instructor could teach ballroom dancing at a local high school.
• A retired teacher giving a video tour of a Boreal Forest or a desert he lives close to.
• An art gallery tour from half-way around the world…

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A similar idea originally came to me a few years ago after seeing this award winning Timebank Commercial.

It came to me again a few months ago when I read this David Warlick Post where David is talking about Will Richardson’s session at MASSCUE:

I finally had to get this idea out after reading these Wesley Fryer and Vicki A Davis posts over the weekend.

Feedback?

Originally posted: February 21st, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: So, in reflecting on my blog posts I move from an unsuccessful book club to an unsuccessful portal… they would be disappointing if they weren’t so enlightening! To this day, failures are looked upon as negative as opposed to opportunities for learning. It seems conditioned into us at such a young age… this is a comment on our society as much as it is a comment on schools. This is still a great idea… but it was DOOMED TO FAIL! Why? 1. Because it is geared to educators, not to those who would be willing to contribute. My audience and the target audience are not the same. Also the structures to build a sortable ‘bank’ of volunteers are not available for those interested in signing up, (see #3). 2. Formal measures around safety need to be hammered out. Note Kelly’s Comment on the original post: Dave, I like this idea. I think that it has great potential. Now, the administrator comes out in me but how do we ensure that: a. The person is an expert in what they say they are b. They are safe c. There is not “inappropriate” contact between people and the students. I think this is wonderful and we have this type of thing going on in our school with some of our local people. The big difference is that we are in a small community, people who are vounteering must do a criminal records check and any outside school projects are to be okayed by the parents. Precautions. I think that this would be an incredible way to get people from different sectors involved in the education system. This would also allow teachers to have references for their projects or assignments – would give validity to what we do in schools. That would increase the “price of stock” for educators in all areas. 3. Both Wikispaces and Ning are the wrong venues, I simply don’t have the required tech savvy-ness or financial resources (or for that matter time) to create what is needed. - – - That said, I can see a University really taking this on as a project. They can start with one department, say Music or Science, and promote the interests of their instructors/Masters Students/PhD students with teachers that may be interested in their skills as either mentors or experts or judges or… There is significant need and opportunity for such a portal and I challenge anyone with the knowledge and resources to make it happen!

Kelly Christopherson has put out an invitation to join a book club. For those of you who have not visited Kelly yet, his blog Educational Discourse is a blog from the trenches. He is a Principal who also teaches and coaches. Kelly’s blog posts are not only thoughtful and insightful, they are written with a personal touch… they have heart.

Kelly has suggested a wiki or a forum, or skype as examples of places we can meet and ‘chat’… who knows we could even meet in Second Life. These are only suggestions, we invite other ideas. The simple goal of this Book Club is to create a space where participants can get together and have a meaningful, enjoyable learning conversation.

As an example of how a Book Club can enrich the reading experience, A Whole New Mind introduces Six Senses, each with a working Portfolio. These portfolios all have website links to follow… wouldn’t it be great if 6 (or more) people each collected the links from just one chapter, explored them, and provided them on a wiki with comments as to what they thought about the sites they visited? I’d be far more likely to interact with others contributing this way, than to go to all these links on my own.

Let one of us know if you are interested.

Originally posted: February 19th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: We decided on a wiki, Kelly got it set up and I played with setting up the chapters for discussion. A few things happened, or rather didn’t happen, to make this far less successful that it could have been. I think the biggest flaw was that we never set any specific deadlines. Specifically we didn’t plan a live (online) discussion, or even an ‘end’ date to have things completed by. Essentially we didn’t build in the scaffolding and expectations that, as teachers, we all know is necessary to get a good project from students. Yes we are all adults, but we all have busy lives and I know that my commitment to the ‘project’ would have been far greater if I had specific deadlines to meet. The more time I spend with web2.0 tools, and the more mainstream they become, it becomes blatantly obvious that good pedagogy and the creation of meaningful assignments that build on caring relationships is what really matters. The tool doesn’t matter… using it well does!