Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

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Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) continue to get a lot of attention as new models of Professional Development for learning.  I’ve been part of formal PLC’s for about 6 years. In the new school district I work for, many of our teachers and schools are new to PLC’s and are discovering their power.  Some of these teachers come from small, rural schools where they teach mulitple grades and classes and only at the end of the day can they come up to breathe. Some have had very little support and have learned to operate in isolation.

What they have experienced in their PLC’s is a feeling of support and access to resources and ideas that have lightened the load and made teaching manageable and more fun. Initially, groups needed time simply to get comfortable with the idea of social learning and sharing. Initially it might be described as “collaboration lite”;sharing units and tips but avoiding the real tough questions.  The goal is to get teachers to work together to examine the hard questions of teaching and learning and begin to work to improve student learning. Working together with people of like mind. This seems pretty straightforward and natural but classrooms and teachers have been designed to be isolated. Most of our classrooms still do not have a phone and sharing has not been a part of the culture of education.  Many teachers welcome collaboration and sharing but haven’t experienced it all that much and are having to learn what that really means. Transparency and candidness take trust and time.  Fortunately, this is developing among our staff.

We all know many teachers who prefer isolation. These have not seen PLC’s as very effective and truthfully, many are not functioning as effectively as they could. It’s easier just to do it themselves. Collaboration is just too hard and messy. I usually challenge this group by stating, “if you’re working on something that’s easier to do by yourself, you need to change your focus”. The power of collaboration comes in wrestling with ideas and issues you can’t handle all on your own. I can’t think of many who haven’t had the need for support.

My friend Ewan, loves PLC’s. He loves to go to local pubs and socialize and learn. His teach/meet sessions take place in local pubs, coffee shops and maybe even in schools. Learning is social and fun.  For some classrooms the words “social” and “fun” are rarely used or actualized.

I believe that in the not too distant future, students will be able to complete their entire education online and never attend a traditional school. It probably could be done today. In the light of this I’ve asked principals, “What will your school offer that would cause a student to choose to attend when they have access to better courses, experts and learning online?”  The answer to me, lies in social learning. Learning can be fun. I’m sorry if that offends some but it’s true. Social learning is what I experience everyday. While I’d love for all teachers and students to experience the type of learning and fun I’ve had both online and in person, I understand that their is some work to do before they get it. But they can begin with building social networks within their classrooms first. Once that happens, the inclusion of online social networks will only add value to learning.

Clarence Fisher is going to be doing a very cool experiment this year with Lucy Martin. Their classrooms will be a true and living version of face to face and online learning. You can read about it here. These teachers understand how important it is for kids to have access to other kids at anytime from anywhere. PLC’s begin to get at this notion and if teachers get that, maybe, just maybe they realize how critical it is for kids to experience this as well.

[tags]sociallearning,professionallearningcommunities,plc,ewanmcintosh,lucymartin,clarencefisher[/tags]

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Every high school English teacher should show this to their class and they’ll never have to justify why students need to learn to write, read and give speeches. Yikes!

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StumbleUpon was something I played with over 2 years ago.  I really like they way it seemed to bring a greater sense of serendipity to my learning. I discovered some really cool things. Not sure why I left it but I rediscovered it a few days ago and have already found some neat stuff.  Here’s a sampling:

• Four Hands Guitar….I thought of Darren and Ewan and some of their presentations…I might use it as well.
• 52 Influential Photographs
• Death Clock…good thing I’m an optimistic…I’ll live till I’m 94.
• SkreemR.…The World’s Greatest Audio Search

The second old friend returning is ScribeFire, formally known as Performancing. ScribeFire is a blog editor built right into your browser. The reason I’m using it is because of my frustrations in finding a suitable WYSIWYG editor for WordPress that allows embedding of video and won’t conflict with other plugins.  So for fun I’m going to embed the youtube version of the four hands guitar video.

[tags]scribefire,stumbleupon,serendipity[/tags]

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Taking a page out of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation, I considered my news reader habits. I think they mirror Mann’s suggestion for getting your inbox to zero. Okay, I realize email is harder to get to zero. Feeds aren’t usually addressed to you and don’t ever require a response or action. However, I take my feeds personally in that while I don’t ever have to respond, I usually have some type of response. I either:

• have no interest
• find it interesting and compelling and need to comment
• am inspired enough to write my own blog post
• think others would benefit and I either share or email the post to them
• consider it interesting but know that it will require more time to process

So given these responses I:

• skim over and it’s automatically marked as read (some consider this deleting)
• head over to the blog and make a comment
• link to it in a blog post
• hit the share button or email button
• star it and read it later

I also try to read my feeds 2 or 3 times a day. I remember a certain blogger (initials W.R.) who showed his reader in a presentation only to have  oodles of unread posts appear from a fellow blogger in the audience. He was admittedly embarrassed.

So, grant it, email may be harder but for some people, their aggregator has become a challenge and almost as taxing as email. It shouldn’t be but if we’re interested in deep learning, it means spending a lot of time in the aggregator. For many of us, our aggregator is more important than email.

PS. my inbox is at 11.

[tags]merlinmann,inboxzero,43folders,rss[/tags]

Not sure if the prompting of Christian Long (sorry I can’t find the exact link) precipated this interview but regardless, it’s great to see a non-educator like Robert Scoble get close and personal with a personality like Eliot Soloway. The two sit down and talk about the future of education, the power of mobile computer, women in technology and access. Soloway does a nice job of expressing in a very positive way why things are changing and his vision for schools in the next five years. He’s a realist and provides some nice insights.

[tags]robertscoble,eliotsoloway,cellphones,christianlong[/tags]

I’ve made some gains in my quest to improve my commenting. (See this post from January for background)

My commpost rating in January was 0.71. Since then I’ve written 107 posts and commented 155 times.

155/107=1.45

As well I’ve likely commented at least 50 more times that I did not use cocomment for whatever reason. Ewan Mcintosh and D’arcy Norman continue to be all star commenters at 246 and 163 since January as well. I’d like to track more people on cocomment so please let me know if you use this service. I had some of my students this year use this and it was great to be able to track the contributions they made on other blogs.

I know the recent changes in cocomment have made some people less than enamored but it works okay for me.

So my question is, what is your commpost rating and also if you don’t use something like cocomment to track your comments, what do you use?

[tags]comments,cocomment,ewanmcintosh,darcynorman[/tags]

I’ve had a great experience teaching undergrads at the University of Regina.  It’s been a great way to try out some ideas and try and build on George Siemens’ idea of connectivism as well as everything else I’ve learned from my network.

I’ve spent a great deal of time over the past number of years studying and leading changes in assessment in our school division. So after leading workshops and discussion with teachers, it was an opportunity to practice the beliefs and strategies I held firmly.

We have set these seven principles to guide assessment practices in our division:

1. Students are the key assessment users.

2. A balance of assessment for and of learning should be used.

3. Assessment should be constructive; it should focus on achievement and progress.

4. Assessment and instruction are interdependent.

5. Good quality assessments must be followed by effective  communication.

6. Assessment expectations and curricular outcomes should be communicated clearly to students from the beginning.

7. Meaningful and appropriate assessments should include evidence about student achievement in the areas of content, process and product.

So how did I do? Well I hoped that my students felt they were part of the assessment. Their blogs served as their personal reflection tool and they did an outstanding job at analyzing their beliefs and sharing their frustrations and challenges.  In this way, they led much of their own learning.  Concepts of “assessment for” and “assessment of” learning were both in action. I tried to guide and provide feedback throughout their endeavors and was also able to send out a mid-term report that included a grade and evaluation of their progress.  I certainly tried to build on achievement and progress. Using assessment to change instruction is one area I’m not sure I was able to achieve. The idea that assessment changes instruction is very powerful. Certainly I will take student feedback and learning to change instruction for next time, but the short time frame of the class made this very difficult. Between emails and blog comments, I tried to provide each of my 14 students will regular input. An online class can be very isolated and requires special attention. As the course progressed, students began doing this for each other;  that was great to see.  The expectations for this class was to experience that:

• Learning is social and connected
• Learning is personal and self-directed
• Learning is shared and transparent
• Learning is rich in content and diversity

These ideas are difficult to assess and grade.  Student’s post demonstrate their understanding of these ideas and I have to trust that they did experience this in varying degrees.  How important is it to break down each of the ideas into measurable data? Perhaps I could have broken these idea down further.  Evidence of their learning was demonstrated in their blog posts, weekly assignments and synchronous sessions.

You’ll notice our principles say nothing about grades. I hate grades, especially using a 100 point scale. They’re fake. I have a hard time telling one student they received a 89 and another a 84. I’m not smart enough to tell the difference. We continue to perpetuate the use of grades to rank students. I hope my students leave this class with having experienced the ideas I’ve outlined and not a grade. Anyways, I digress.

So overall I’d give myself  84 . Let’s just say I got most of it right but will work on a few other things.

[tags]uregina,assessment, prairiesouth,grades[/tags]