Learning, Teaching & Technology

This session is just what I needed as I take on the adventure of working two days a week as an Instructional Technology Integrator at our high school for the first time. Our 7-12 students all have 1-1 laptops and there is a need and interest in more support for learning with technology at grades 9-12. I am concerned about one of the initial points that Sylvia makes that students want the “socially connected experiences” that they engage in outside of school; teachers need to learn how to incorporate that into classroom learning. Alice Barr and I will be working together on ways to have students as our “allies” as we help teachers to face the obstacles and opportunities of adding web 2.0 tools.

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.

I started this session last October when it was first posted. Working daily with Alice and having access to Cheryl and Bob as southern Maine colleagues and participants in my personal learning network I was excited to see what they had prepared for us. At the time it was my introduction to podcasting and an early use of voicethread, gizmo project (now http://gizmo5.com/pc/) and a group ning. One thing that was striking about this session is that there were several tasks to be completed with great instructional resources on how to setup and use each tool. This presentation is full of examples I can share with teachers of expanding the conversations about learning using recording tools that are clearly presented in their tutorials.

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.

I chose this session because I am still early in the process of engaging teachers in blogging, for themselves or with their classes and I need more rationales and reasons to support my efforts. The safety issues movie presents some of what I know teachers feel about avoiding the responsibility of providing students with blogs. John’s point of view about our role in guiding young students to safe practices with supervised experiences in the early grades is similar to mine. The presentation does a good job of bringing to the surface the reluctant stances that teachers may not be willing to articulate, but I know are there. Having each movie address a separate topic makes them short bits that could be used at a faculty meeting or team meeting for discussion as a few pioneers help others move to adding classroom blogs to their writing activities.

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.

Last year when Alice, Mike and I filled out the paperwork for credit for the K12online Conference we found that the criteria for credit for an online course had not been updated to reflect web2.0 tools for communication and collaboration. As the K-12 Instructional Technology Integrators we were offered the challenge of remedying that situation and we need to be among the voices that participate in that. As Jeff mentions in this session, in the last two (now three) years there have been tremendous changes in what we can do for professional learning online.

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.

I selected this session based on the title and my knowledge of Sharon Peters from the WOW2.0 webcasts. While I agreed with many of the initial points of this session, when Sharon talks about teachers being expected to demonstrate growth in their own profession I was really struck by how that isn’t the assumption for all in the teaching profession. In my technology integration role I too often feel that teachers see me as representing change at a rate they don’t want and perhaps an area where they feel a lack of competence that is threatening. Job security for me perhaps, but not the pervasive attitude toward lifelong learning that I would want.

I was also intrigued by the conversation about helping teachers to measure key indicators that lead to success for students. Some of Vince’s indicators (like “personal satisfaction”) can be hard to measure, but need to be able to analyzed by some form or numerical review. One thing we are doing that has led to change in this direction is the focus on action research by teachers in our professional development process. Using student work, over the course of the year teachers select a change they would like to make in their practice and then identify what student success might look like based on that change. Working in concert with others teachers review this research a few times during the year and submit their work as part of a 3 year portfolio. The conversations are one of the most powerful parts of the process in my experience. The capacity to self-reflect and consider change, and even more, the professional satisfaction of seeing increased success in our students are vital energizers in what can be a long and rewarding career in education.

I chose to view this session as I have worked on a couple of digital storytelling projects with classes, with groups of 4th graders in particular. We have used still photographs, podcasts, voicethreads and iMovie to expand ways students can express their stories, but I hadn’t really considered a collaborative storytelling venture using web 2.0 tools.

Not having explored shared editing, I don’t recall hearing about the online tool jumpcut prior to this session. While they said they had some problems with the tool, this is a whole new area to explore for me. Since I figured that this might be an area under development, a quick search indeed turned up more tools that are collaborative online editors: JayCut, eyespot, photobucket, and even more. As always it will take some time to review various sites and determine what might be the best tool to use for a project at the elementary or high school setting. While finding the time is always a challenge I can possibly put some high school enthusiasts on the task and have them confront my real life problem and offer solutions.

One thing that was interesting in the video by Bonnie and the podcast by Kevin was to hear their own progression from teachers who gathered in a shared physical space to learn about digital storytelling to teachers who encouraged others to collaborate using only blogs, wikis and video clips without traveling from their home sites. In my own way I have to be patient with teachers who are expanding writing at the elementary level to include reactions to photos students have taken, podcasts, and electronic drawing tools to express themselves. The web 2.0 aspect of adding collaboration is still new to most of them, we may start with working between classes in our own school until that becomes comfortable. Perhaps this coming year when I am at the high school two days a week we will find some as yet untried ways to have high school students (whose forays into the communication world are constant) to work with classes and teachers to expand on the options for working in new ways.