Learning, Teaching & Technology

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.

Over the past year I have been working with teachers on the initial idea of blogs, for themselves and then for their students. Teachers who take our district technology courses have to set up an edublog and they have to enter the conversation by responding to others during the course. The first resistance is, “Why a blog?” We have had an email system for about six years, why not just write to each other by email? During the course it is wonderful to watch the process as teachers are thrilled by the comments that others leave on their blogs and the ways that interaction adds and even changes the relationships they have with colleagues. Some have sustained their personal/professional blogging practices, more often they become readers of blogs at first and hang back a bit on the writing.

Last year I had my first elementary classroom teachers setting up classroom blogs. I was surprised that it was at 2nd and 3rd grades and I wondered how well they would be able to “sustain” the blogs beyond the initial buzz. The teachers were careful in setting them up, added student artwork, brought drafts of student entries to the lab and wrote letters explaining blogs as part of the classroom reading and writing instruction. I was so impressed by the way they brought their skills of good teaching to the process of the blogs. One of the blogs can be viewed here: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=135362.

Today I talked to a teacher who has been a pioneer in other aspects of assimilating technology into her classroom, but has not been able to see a way to sustain blogging, thus has not started it. This summer she began to interact with a group of teacher/writers who had found each other through an online course and agreed to give each other feedback. This collaboration has been unlike anything she has experienced in 18 years in her school setting and has helped her feel empowered to try some new things in new ways. Her network of teachers has naturally included conversations about blogs and this year she is able to conceptualize a way to build writing and reflecting about science observations into a blog format. I shared with her the quotes from classroom teachers that Jeff posted on his wiki page and I know she will now be part of the collegial conversation about the possibilities of 4th graders learning through blogs.