Summer Technology for Teachers

The school district I work in offers a three credit course to teachers each summer with a follow up in the fall. This June we started with 16 teachers. It was a great test run for our Google Education domain. Thanks to our student helpers who are indespensible!

Summertime and your Personal Learning Network

http://www.flickr.com/photos/erinoconnor/2674778539/

Wow! Thanks to everyone who joined Bob, Cheryl, and I on June 2 for the PBS Teacher and Classroom 2.0 Webinar. It was so much fun to see old friends and make some new ones! If, however, you didn’t have a chance to come by, the session will be archived at PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 soon. Thanks so much to Steve Hargadon and Jenny Bradbury for hosting.

You can alo join us at at this companion website, the SEEDlings Ning, or Thursday nights at Ed Tech Talk. As always, we look forward to the conversation and learning with you!

Update: Here are the links to the various archives

• Elluminate session
• Audio
• Chat
• Portable Video

Using Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture for Staff Development

Henry Jenkins at MIT May, 2009

This post is long overdue, but it’s an important one for me.

Last summer, during our technology class, Bob Sprankle told me about the article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry Jenkins. The premise of the paper is that “digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, think, socialize, and participate in civic life.” (p9). so, if we have handed the technology to our students, then how are we leveraging that in our classrooms? How are teachers understanding the new technologies and their impact on the student in their classroom?

I work in 1:1 laptop environment and have seen the exciting learning that has been going on, but something has been missing. I was so excited about the white paper, I thought it would be a great way for the staff in the high school to begin to think about other literacies and their impact on student engagement. The quote from the authors  on page 9 particularly stood out for me “Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate.”  I shared it with my fellow learning area team member, and she agreed. We decided to use our scheduled staff technology time to read and discuss the white paper. 78 pages was too long, so we decided to break the paper down in to two activity periods.

Period 1: Three Levels of Text Protocol (Article: ConfrontingActivity1)

Purpose: To deepen understanding of a text and explore implications for participants’ work.
Facilitation: Stick to the time limits.  Each round takes up to 5 minutes per person in a group.  Emphasize the need to watch air time during the brief “group response” segment
Roles: Facilitator/timekeeper (who also participates); participants
Process:

1. The facilitator will be the timekeeper.
2. Participants read/skim the text and identify passages (and a couple of back-ups) that they feel may have important implications for their work.
3. Take about 15 minutes to read.
4. 3. Begin the discussion following these steps:

• One person uses up to 3 minutes to address three levels:

• LEVEL 1: Read aloud the passage she/he has selected
• LEVEL 2: Say what she/he thinks about the passage (interpretation, connection to past experiences, etc.)
• LEVEL 3: Say what she/he sees as the implications for his/her work.

• The group responds (for a TOTAL of up to 2 minutes) to what has been said.
5. After all members have gone, the group will develop 2 – 3 questions and 2 – 3 insights from the reading that seem the most important.
6. Please email your group’s questions and insights to Alice. We will consolidate all responses and post them on the  Leadership blog.

Period 2: Questions and Insights (Article: RethinkLiteracy). Each teacher chose 1 of 4 skills (Play, Appropriation, Collective Intelligence, and Networking) that they wanted to learn more about. Each discussion group was based around a skill and each skill had 2 – 3 pages of reading. We were most interested in the “what might be done” section as suggestions for classroom activities.

Purpose: To deepen understanding of a text and explore implications for participants’ work.
Facilitation: Stick to the time limits.  Each round takes up to 5 minutes per person in a group.  Emphasize the need to watch air time during the brief “group response” segment
Roles: Facilitator/timekeeper (who also participates); participants
Process:

1. The facilitator will be the timekeeper.
2. Participants read/skim the text. Take about 15 minutes to read.
3. Participants read the skill. Take about 10 minutes to read.
4. Begin the discussion following these steps:

One person uses up to 5 minutes to address three levels:

• LEVEL 1: Come up with 2 questions and 1 insight about the article.
• LEVEL 2: Come up with 1 insights and 2 questions about your skill .
• LEVEL 3: Narrow your questions and insights down to a list of 3. Post these on the leadership blog.
• LEVEL 4: Decide if there should be any next steps based on your list.

I was also lucky enough to attend the May conference on New Media Literacy at MIT. The Learning Library and a community of practice has been started. I look forward to participating in these and learning more.

Shrinking the Technology Gap

Maine Principals’ Association’s Drive In Conference
Thursday, March 26, 2009

The Digital Student in the 21st Century

Wiki Materials

Read Educational Leadership this month

Especially if you lead any professional development. The title is Literacy 2.0 and I think just about every article has relevance in our practice. The librarian and I have been looking for some reading to educate teachers on more meaningful online reading and plagiarism. I think we have found some great information in this issue in the articles The Importance of Deep Reading and Plagiarism in the Internet Age. I am also thinking about ways to use the articles about Let’s Talk 2.0 and Becoming Network Wise for our summer teacher technology course. I hope you get a chance to read this publication too. Please et me know if you are using these readings for professional development sessions. I would love to hear what others are doing. Enjoy!

Top 100 Edu Tweeters

I am honored to be on the list of 100 Edu Tweeters. Thank you to Kelly Sonora and the folks at Online Degree World for including me in their work. Along with some other interesting people to follow, there are some institutions and groups that you can follow. I chose to follow some that post information on current research and reading. What a great way to get work out to people to evaluate and analyze. I continue to marvel at how much current, professional, relevant information I have access to using Twitter.

Week 1 of 2009 and already some amazing learning!

Friday Jan 2: I started at Radio CJOB in Manitoba, CANADA. They carried a live broadcast of Darren Kuropatwa joined by a former student, Marc.  There were call ins by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Wes Fryer, and Dean Shareski , who, along with Darren, are conveners of the K12 Online Conference. Darren also set up a back channel in Chatterous where people could discuss the program.

It was a good idea to have the back channel because there were long series of ads on the radio show, so it was great to bat around ideas with other folks!  A few years ago I was on a local radio show about why students should have access to technology. While I can understand the need for structure, it was agonizing waiting during the ads. I wonder what the local listeners thought about this show. (I wondered the same thing when I was on and never heard a thing!) There were some good phone in questions, but one has to wonder what people think about these supposedly radical ways of teaching! Great job Darren. It was also great to meet and connect with new folks to my PLN in the chat room.

Then is was on to two sessions: Classroom 2.0 End of the Year show  and an impromptu discussion about literacy and 21st century skills. This was an interesting mix because while I wasn’t 100% focused on both chats, Classroom 2.0 involved practice while the Literacy discussion was theory. Classroom 2.0 had tons of tools and suggestions for teachers. There were over 100 people in the chat room and zillions of links flying by. Peggy George, Steve Hargadon and Kim Caise did a great job moderating. I think this is a fantastic way for teachers to get support when trying to figure out what tools will work in their classroom.

The literacy discussion group was really trying to determine if the what we need to teach students is a new kind of literacy or skills. These “skills” have been coined “21st Century Skills” and they seem to be a new set of strategies designed to cope with changes, mainly driven by technology and its impact on the student. The problem, as I see it, is that teachers have no experience with these skills and therefore don’t know how to implement them in their work with students. One part of the discussion that was fascinating to see was those folks who say school worked for them and those that it didn’t work for and how they were able to cope. Today, we are probably much more cognisant that this phenomenon is happening in the classroom.

Jan 3: I joined an online conversation at the Global Collaborative Ning. This was hosted by Lucy Gray and involved educators from all over the world taking part in the Session. It was really fun to hear where everyone was from and what they were doing with students in their classsrooms. I look forward to more discussion here.

Jan 7: I joined an Elluminate Dinner Club session for Google Certified Teachers hosted by Cindy Lane

Jan 8: was our Weekly SEEDlings Show with Jeff and dan from the Wicked Decent Podcast

Jan 11: I Started the Images4Education Class hosted by the Electronic Village Online.

All of these sessions are mainly about connecting and learning with others. I just can’t understand why some people don’t see the advantage to this kind of learning! And all this in 1 week! Can’t wait to see what the next 51 weeks of 2009 bring!

A great learning opportunity

Welcome to the Electronic Village Online 2009

A professional development project and virtual extension of the TESOL Convention.

For six weeks , participants can engage with ESOL experts in collaborative, online discussion sessions or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. These sessions will bring together participants for a longer period of time than is permitted by the four-day land-based TESOL convention and will allow a fuller development of ideas and themes of the convention or of professional interest in general.

The sessions are free and open to all interested parties. You do not need to be a TESOL member to participate.

To view the 2009 EVO sessions, go to Call for Participation 09.

You may join sessions after January 2nd.

Keynoting at K-12 Online Conference

I am very excited to be part of the team keynoting the “Getting Started” strand at the K-12 Online Conference this year. It is such an honor to be part of this terrific line up. If you haven’t ever taken part, this is a great opportunity to take part in professional development that is timely and appropriate for your classroom. It is structured so that you can take the sessions whenever you want.

And, if you are thinking of proposing a session, you still have time. The due date is July 11th.

I hope to see you online at the sessions!

Professional Development Meme

Mike Richards has tagged me for this one, and as Mike mentioned, professional development is close to my heart as well.

Here are the directions:

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2008 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

Here are the rules:

1. Pick 3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/01/08).
3. Post the above directions along with your 3 goals on your blog.
4. Title your post Professional Development Meme and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/353.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme.
6. Tag 8 others to participate in the meme.
7. Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
8. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

Here are my goals:

1. Attend EduBloggerCon East and Building Learning Communities
2. As I prepare to facilitate summer classes at the University of Southern Maine, I find I learn a great deal as I prep for the courses and I learn even more from the students in the classes.
3. I am hoping to finally read Wikinomics this summer. It’s been on my bookshelf for a year, so maybe publicly declaring that I want to read it will make me do so! I also want to read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody

I tag:

• Catie Wooten
• Cathy Wolinsky
• Crystal Priest
• David Trask
• Deb Barrows
• Ernie Easter
• Kern Kelley
• Sharon Betts