Professional Development Activity, Date, Credits/Hours, Documentation
ACTEM Conference (Presenter), October 06, 8 hours, Certificate
NECC Conference, Atlanta, June 2007, 36 hours, Certificate
ACTEM Conference (Presenter), October 07, 8 hours, Certificate
ACTEM Conference, October 08, 8 hours, Certificate
USM Course: The Read/Write Web, July 07, 3 graduate credits, Transcript
K-12 Online Conference07, 10/07-8/08, 3 graduate credits, Transcript
Yarmouth Writing Course, 07-08, 3 credits, Certificate
NH Tech. Education Conference, 12-08, 20 hours, Certificate

I plan to attend:

NECC Conference, Washington, D.C.,  June 2009, 36 hours, Certificate
ACTEM Conference (Presenter), October 09, 8 hours, Certificate

Also, courses I taught each summer at USM and in the Yarmouth School District.

I took this course because I knew I wanted to view many of the K12Online07 sessions and I had just been introduced to the many possibilities of web 2.0 tools at NECC07. I am completing this course late in the summer of 2008 as the K12Online08 sessions are looming on the horizon.

My responses to the sessions are reflections about how I might use the resources and ideas in my practice. An illness delayed my progress in the course, but now that I have been able to complete it I can say that I have found each session a rich source of new or consolidated learning and I look forward to using what I’ve learned in the upcoming 2008-09 school year.

Final Project

I have worked with learners in K-4 classrooms, computer labs and university courses for teachers for over two decades. My latest title is “Instructional Technology Integrator” in a school district of 1400 students in southern Maine. This year I continue to work with our elementary school students and teachers three days a week and those at the high school two days a week collaborating with Alice Barr.

The goal of the project that I will be taking on to utilize the learning from the K12 Online Conference is to increase the number and effectiveness of our classroom web pages that link to our Yarmouth Elementary School website. Specifically, I want all fifteen classrooms and the specialist teachers to have a web presence, ideally an interactive one. While some teachers have had static web pages for a few years I would like to explore the educational advantages of moving to blogs that are directed toward parents and encourage feedback to students. The focus of the blogs will be to showcase classroom learning and give students a way to share online with family members so they see that others can comment and leave responses to their learning

Teachers at the elementary level have long created weekly newsletters and other ways to send home a digest of learning activities, but there isn’t a connection to students and student work. A print newsletter is a one-way communication that may prompt more questions than it answers for a parent. Every teacher has had an iBook for five years now, it is beyond the time to move from limited email uses to tools that support online interaction.

I viewed several sessions by presenters that specifically addressed classroom blogs (John Pearce, Jeff Utecht, Anne Davis), while other sessions I attended gave tutorials and ideas for podcasts (Cheryl Oakes, Bob Sprankle & Alice Barr) and other student-created media that can be posted to blogs (Clarence Fisher, Brian Crosby, Alan Levine et.al.). Many of the sessions remind us to plan for the pedagogy not just the technology (Sylvia Martinez & Sharon Peters) so that the focus is on increasing learning by changing our practices.

When I viewed Derek Wenmoth’s movie for his session one of the most memorable slides was the graphic included here:

If we are to keep moving along to the “Assimilation” stage of this graphic he has some very clear ideas and suggestions for what needs to change so we can continue on past the “Integration”stage. I see classroom blogs as important in moving in this direction.

I have already met with the elementary school principal about my action research for this year and we have agreed that this goal of teacher interactive web pages will be one that we will support with help sessions during faculty meetings and team meetings. Teachers who have experimented with blogs will be important instructors for those who are just starting. Indeed, just today I had a phone call from a teacher who was exultant in telling me that since I am not at school these days she taught a new teacher how to set up a classroom blog and was thrilled she knew enough to do that!

Teachers who have created classroom blogs (examples) have reported that they have many fewer questions and emails from parents as the blog posts allow them to view student work and access the whole class in a new way. Kathy Cassidy is one example of this at the close of her K12Online06 session. Is it scary and threatening for teachers to “go public” in this way? Indeed I can understand that it is, I felt the same way at one time. Change can be difficult, but given the right reasons for change teachers will move and learn.

Image attribution:

Image: ‘DWenmothK12online07′
http://k12online.wm.edu/K12_Keynote_3web.mov

This session gave me a lot of information about how the hosts came up with the idea of webcasting and what they actually do during the production of the show. Although I have listened to the show some Tuesday nights I learned more from the presentation about the archives and delicious links available online.

I know that when Cheryl Oakes first participated in the Webcast Academy she found the access to international educators and the broadened conversations revolutionized her professional practices. Since then she has assisted many others who have been interns in the academy as well as supporting the development of new shows and encouraging listeners to shows. One of my goals is to find the time to enroll in a Webcast Academy which is usually offered in the summer and the winter of each year. I would like to become comfortable with webcasting so that I could assist students and teachers who want to collaborate with others across geographic distances in this format.

As I consider learning to webcast I am fortunate to have local access to my colleagues Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes and Bob Sprankle who have just begun sharing their “Seedlings Podcast at Bit by Bit” on EdTechtalk on a regular schedule. This has evolved from a regular podcast they have done for over a year. As the presenters say in their title, it’s about “expanding the conversation.”

The critical elements of web 2.0 that Drew thinks are reasons teachers should use web 2.0 include saving teachers time and the capacity to create relevant, effective lessons. Getting a critical mass of teachers to see these two in reality would help move more teachers toward using web 2.0.

Some of the 10 skills Drew suggests we need are organized around exploring & participating, deconstructing & reconstructing, and connecting and creating. Within these three overall areas he creates a progression that could be used to work with teachers and students. Using this progression would help those who have gaps or feel they are novices at the use of web 2.0.

As part of my overall interest in having students see that the technology tools they use everyday (e.g. cell phones) can be learning tools I share Liz’s belief that we can offer that bridge to our students. What if we thought about cell phones as portable microphones attached to recording features that can access web2.0 sites? Even voicethread is now setup to take phone calls for audio content. I learned about evoca, and gabcast in addition to gcast (which I already use) as podcasting options using cell phones. I hadn’t thought about these sites saving directly to a blog, but I learned about many tools that can make the steps of podcasting to a blog much easier for students and teachers.

I wasn’t aware of the conference services like freeconferencepro and talkshoe. These conference calls are not unique to cell phones and they can be saved as mp3 files. I’ll have to explore what the differences are between using these sites and Skype. Teaching students to use jott or similar tools could help students with organization and planning.

One thing that I had heard about that I intend to try is to set my cell phone camera up to go directly to my flickr account. I have used resources like bubbleshare to create slideshows for our school web page and now I think I know how to send the pictures from my cell phone if I add email service to my cell phone account.

This is a very thorough presentation with many “how to” sections if I need help remembering the steps for accessing the resources.

As more of my elementary students want to add audio effects and photos to their research reports I will need to develop a web page for our student resources links that compiles these sites for them. When our younger students copy or insert a photograph from the Internet it seems that they are within the current Fair Use guideline: “Images may be downloaded for student projects and teacher lessons.”

By 4th grade I ask students to place the Internet address of the photo or sound clip they are using with the picture or in a Credits page at the end of a project. We talk about copyright and I think they would enjoy adding their original work to Creative Commons as Karen mentions. Some classes have setup flickr accounts and I have worked with some teachers to show them how to access the millions of photos that are shared under Creative Commons licensing on flickr.

This session is a great resource for questions about current copyright issues and site for open access or clearly licensed posted materials online.

Working at the elementary school level I have asked students to take responsibility for oversight of laptop carts (somehow classes never put them away the right way or make sure they are charging) in classroom wings and more and more I ask them to share learning and teach each other at the projector during classes in the lab. Some of the students who were innovators when I had them in 3rd or 4th grades are now the high school students who help us teach courses to faculty (imagine our surprise when students did all the reading assigned to the teachers!) and who are in the process of forming a student tech team. They are asking the right questions about what student tech team should have as it’s mission. Lately they have wondered if they should be offering a web 2.0 class for their peers as they find that many students don’t seem to be exploring the way they are. These seem to be along the lines of what Sylvia talks about as authentic learning and real life problems.

As I listened this time to the podcast they created for this session it was interesting to reflect on the conversation that is now almost a year old. Bob talks some about our roles of supporting teachers and how the beginning of the year it seems to be all about supporting equipment and not even the tools the equipment can provide. Jeff Utecht references this flurry at the beginning of the year recently on his blog, “As we continue to support teachers using technology tools in their classrooms we need to realize that teachers’ use of technology is not the same as supporting teachers teaching with technology…Although it’s important to support teachers in the use of technology it’s much different then supporting teachers teaching with technology.” Our role as technology support educators is meant to be based on curricular knowledge and staff development skills to increase the learning of our students. The great thing is that we are not alone in this discussion about keeping the learning at the forefront of our work as we can create podcast shows, blogs and ways to keep each other fueled in our professional goals.

The interactive aspect of a blog is the powerful motivator for students, but it seems to be the thing that teachers fear the most. As new teachers have joined our faculty they tend to be younger and more used to technology. I have encouraged them to start a blog as a way to create a classroom web presence and move away from our practice of creating web pages that have content describing the classroom. Although teachers regularly receive email from parents there is an adjustment for them to open up a blog to public comments. For now, some teachers have started blogs, but have not opened them up to comments. Hopefully we can move to opening up that conversation.

In addition to blogs, John also mentions wikis and one of the ideas I hope to pursue this year is for teaches to participate in developing wikis for shared team materials. and resources.

Having used some of the course develepent tools Jeff describes (blackboard, moodles) I have seen many courses that would certainly be fit with Marc Prensky’s line of “old things done in new ways”. This k12online conference is certainly a very different experience than lecture notes and assigments posted to a shared access point. Listening to Jeff I can describe the attributes of an experience like this conference, but it is harder to sit down and write criteria for what a courses would need to have to qualify for graduate credit through our school system.

Starting at NECC07 I began to expand my “personal learning network” to include some communities of learners who are asking some of the same questions I am in my work. Certainly one criteria for an online course should be the access to a community of learners with communication tools that might include written and video interaction with a selected network of colearners. Having the k12online conference posted for anytime learning balances the other collaboration tools l use to look at the most recent sites, thoughts and connections of those in my network. Just tonight I have used my twitter network, listened to and joined a chat at an edtechtalk webcast, and looked at some shared delicious accounts. Certainly there are I times I need to disconnect and pay attention to my family network and time off the computer, but connecting regularly to my online network has changed my practice dramatically in the last fifteen months.