In honor of National Poetry month, I have two haiku poems to share. I wrote these for a poetry contest at CHS and thought they’d be a perfect complement to the month’s celebration.
And while you’re at it, think about sharing a piece of poetry on your blog this month; either your own writing, that of your students, or even the work of a favorite poet. Our Creative Writing Class is publishing their best poems this month on our school podcast channel and their teacher is creating an exhibit on ALI to share the lessons and activities with other teachers.
You know the saying…. “Someday I’ll get around to documenting and collecting all the ideas and resources we’ve created at our school.” Well, for Colleen (PCHS Technology Coordinator) and I, this was the week that we finally got around to it.
For the past several days, we’ve spent most of our waking hours organizing, collecting, uploading, and designing a website that gathers all the pieces and parts of our 1:1 program into one comprehensive location. Our goal was not only to make it easy for us to document and find our 1:1 program components, but also to be able to share them with other schools so that we can learn from one another.
The site, located here, is divided into 3 sections:
Considering a 1:1 (How did we go about preparing our school for a 1:1 rollout?)
Conducting a 1:1 (How do we support the ongoing needs of students and staff?)
Continuing a 1:1 (What are future plans and how will we adapt and reflect on our progress?).
It’s by no means a complete list, but we hope it will be of use to others who are just beginning the 1:1 journey.
What I’m hoping too, is that you’ll find a way to get around to doing the same – sharing what you, your students, or your fellow teachers have created. Dean Shareski spoke about the power of sharing on his blog a while back, and that post along with a conversation we had afterward have both stuck with me since. The best kind of leadership and excellence come not from holding on to what you have, but from sharing what you know.
Since Katie Morrow and I spent some time in our last Always On podcast talking about professional development, it got me to thinking about some of the strategies trainers can use to get teachers talking. As part of our regular 1:1 teacher meetings this year and during the district Technology Learning Facilitator meetings in my previous job, I’ve often had to find ways to encourage teachers to open up and talk to one another. Sounds easy enough, but if you’ve ever found yourself in charge of leading discussions with groups of teachers, you’ve probably experienced that empty silence that comes when no one’s quite ready to be the first to share. Here are techniques I’ve used to get conversations flowing:
Four Square
This is a very low-tech way I’ve used to get discussions started within small groups or pairs. Give each participant a piece of paper and have them fold it into quarters. In each quarter, have participants write one word or a very short phrase to describe their thoughts. Depending on the topic, you might start with questions such as: What words would you use to describe:
• your best technology integration lesson?
• your biggest concern about the 1:1 rollout?
• your reactions to the reading we just finished?
Have participants exchange papers with a partner, who then circles one word on the paper. That becomes the discussion starter when it’s time to share. This has worked well because it piques curiosity in the words chosen and often leads to very interesting discussions. Plus, if you’ve got time to rotate discussion partners, you can keep using the remaining words as discussion starters for new conversations.
Video Vignettes
Video clips make great conversation starters, especially when you’re wanting the conversations to center on bigger ideas. I’ve started a playlist on YouTube where I bookmark videos that have been great motivators for conversations. Take a peek through the videos linked below and see what you think.
S.O.S.
S.O.S. is a conversation organizer I came up with 4 years ago as an icebreaker for district Technology Learning Group leader meetings. The purpose of each meeting was to allow Learning Group leaders time to collaborate and share best practices. But, because the meetings were only monthly and the teachers had little interaction with one another outside of this time, the conversations were sometimes slow to start. At other times, the conversations had the potential to become nothing more than gripe sessions where everyone aired their frustrations, but few solutions or suggestions were offered in return. S.O.S. became a regular framework for our meetings and worked well to give purpose to the conversations. S.O.S. stands for Successes, Obstacles, and Strategies. Those three words are used to help teachers organize their thought for sharing:
What successes have you seen in your class (learning group, department, etc) this month?
What obstacles have you had to overcome or are you struggling with?
What strategies have you tried or are you planning to try to move forward?
I find that S.O.S. also makes for a good meeting outline, because it gives participants a chance to start on a positive note, air their frustrations, and end with suggestions for improvement or change. I find myself now using it for many types of meetings and even for general post-project conversations with teachers, because it can cover so many situations in a way that doesn’t inhibit the flow of ideas.
What other strategies or suggestions do you have for facilitating conversations and reflective sharing?
For most of my life, I’ve carried a physical sign that marked me as literate. At the age of 5, that sign was first acquired over weeks of laborious work under the guidance of my Kindergarten teacher as I carefully practiced forming the symbols of literacy by putting pencil to paper. For the next 12 years, as I filled pages and pads with notes, essays, reports and thoughts, that sign became a constant symbol of the work I put into my studies.
Through college, graduate school, and almost 2 decades of teaching, that sign remained. But recently, I’ve noticed that even though I write more than I probably ever have, I’m actually losing that physical reminder of my ability to write. Instead of a callused pad of skin formed from decades of balancing a pen against my finger as I write, there’s a smooth area where that callus used to be. It’s probably the most concrete example I carry of how my own mode of communicating and building knowledge is swiftly changing.
Since I’ve acquired digital writing tools – mainly a laptop and an iPhone – I rarely write more than a reminder or grocery list by hand. There are times when I spend the entire day writing, but don’t ever pick up a pen.
As look at the students who are part of our 1:1 laptop program this year, I wonder how long it will be before we see a generation who remembers fondly the scratch of ink to paper as part of an earlier era.
I’m a believer in positive thinking and a great example of this philosophy comes straight from the Improv community in the form of Yes, and… thinking. I wrote about it a bit here in a page about collaboration, but basic premise is that by taking an idea and building on it, you’ll find lots of great outcomes as a result.
What can “Yes, and” thinking lead to? My newest adventure is a perfect example. When I emailed Katie Morrow to ask if she’d be interested in a dual-blogging venture to help classroom teachers who use laptops, she upped the ante by suggesting we start a podcast on learning with laptops instead. I’ve helped students with our school podcasts, have given workshops on using GarageBand to create podcasts, but have never actually created my own. Sounds like it was about time, right?
So, here we are, two episodes into our new podcast, Always On. You can subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes store, or from your favorite podcatcher. We hope you’ll join us as we explore strategies and share ideas for using laptops both in and out of the classroom. Leave us a message, or send your feedback and ideas – we look forward to hearing what you think!
Imagine that your school has been asked to host a visit from a group of international delegates who are interested in learning how you use technology to communicate, mentor, and collaborate with other schools both in town and around the world.
Now imagine that the delegates are from Saudi Arabia and are visiting the United States for the first time.
Sound unlikely? Today that’s exactly what came to pass when a group of 9 delegates and 3 interpreters spent the afternoon touring our school and learning more about our technology program. The delegates all serve as leaders in the Boy Scouts of Saudi Arabia. Many of them also work as university professors or serve on the Ministry of Education in their country. We had little idea what to expect, but decided that we’d focus on talking about 3 aspects of our program:
Mentoring elementary students in other schools through programs such as our iPodPals project.
Collaborating with others via iChat such as the program begun by Dean Shareski where his pre-service students at the University of Regina are working with high school students around the world.
Communicating with our student body and parents through a student podcast series created and maintained by our Design classes.
Three of our students volunteered to present to the group about the iPod Pals, while Colleen Glaude (our Technology Coordinator), Travis Brown (our Design and Media teacher) and I gave an overview of the other programs. We were fortunate, too, to have Dean join us via a video chat from his office in Canada for a portion of the visit.
Here’s the great thing. Our students (and we) came into this experience not knowing what to expect. We had been briefed on many customs that could be offensive (showing the sole of your shoe, giving a thumbs up, pointing with your left hand, among others). How accepting would they be of our students our school, and our country?
In the end, however, our students left with a greater understanding of how difficult it is to stereotype someone when they’re standing right in front of you, asking questions, smiling at your student’s work, and gasping as Dean Shareski shares images of the snow outside his window during your video chat with him. It’s a lesson I hope will remain with our students for life -that deep down, regardless of where we live, what religion we profess, or what the media reports, we really aren’t all that different.
As the delegation left, they gave each of us a lapel pin from their group (shown in the picture above), while we gifted them with bookmarks from our school that list our core values:
Selfless Love
Commitment to Excellence
Personal Integrity
Commitment to Service
The nicest thing? Seeing them nod in agreement as their interpreter translated the 4 values written on the bookmark. It seems that those values aren’t just important to us, but to others around the world as well.
Over the past several months, I’ve had the honor of working with a group of wonderful educators from the New Jersey Powerful Learning Practice program. My focus with the group was on Collaboration: How can educators use collaborative strategies both in the classroom and in their own professional growth? We’ve spent time learning about the skills and mindsets needed for successful collaboration, discussing the challenges of collaborative learning, and discovering what others have to say on the subject of collaboration.
To welcome a larger audience into our collaborative learning discussion, I’ve posted the conversation starters here on my blog. You’ll see a link to a listing of the discussion starters in the blog header above as well. My hope is that you’ll share your ideas and thoughts with us. I also hope that some of the original New Jersey participants will be willing to share their responses and replies too. Their insight and the discussions that resulted within our closed community were a wonderful learning experience for me.
I look forward to hearing your comments and continuing the conversation.
I’m sitting here looking at my SMS messages, my email inbox, my Twitter replies and my Google Docs listing, all of which seem to be beckoning tonight. As I sit here, deciding how much procrastination I can actually get away with, I realize just how much of my professional life revolves around the ability to communicate and collaborate seamlessly with people from around the country.
Who and where are the people I’m working with? I decided to create a map just to see how far my little corner of the world extended out from Pensacola with the projects I’m working on right this minute…
It’s amazing to me that from my little desk, I’ve been able to work with some of the best minds from around the US.
Now, it’s fair to say that I instigated a lot of the collaborative efforts linked on the map above. There’s nothing more exciting to me than starting with a seed of an idea and seeing who out there will come along for the ride. If you’re a person who relates to the “Now Discover Your Strengths” philosophy, it probably won’t surprise you that two of my five talents are Includer and Relater (the other three are Learner, Input, and Focus, which probably isn’t much of a surprise either).
But what still amazes me is how many of these opportunities simply wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago. It’s tools like Google Docs and iChat and Twitter that make the collaborating easy. The hardest part nowadays is coming up with an idea and then seeing it through.
Actually, that’s always been the hardest part.
For so long, collaborating meant working together either in person or through mail (both the snail and the e kind). The type and depth of those collaborations were limited by the ability to find common time or by the inability to get in a groove when you had to wait for an asynchronous reply before you could move ahead to the next step. The quality of the collaboration was often limited by the quality of the people within driving distance. No longer.
So, what does all this mean for teaching and learning and collaborating? How does our ability to do great things change when we’re not limited by the where, or the when, but by the what? How do we teach our students to aspire to great things when their greatness now can be judged by a global audience? How do we teach them to find, connect, and create with others both across the classroom aisle and and across the globe?
I’m still figuring it out. The most important thing, I think, is to be willing to jump in and give it a try. Sometimes the collaborating leads to great things, greater than I could have ever imagined. Sometimes, it doesn’t. But, that’s not to say the trying wasn’t worth the effort. Every experience leads to new thoughts, new connections and new ideas.
So, here’s the point to my rambling post. The web isn’t about publishing or product. It’s about possibility. Possibility that’s only limited by the ideas you have and the people you’re willing to share them with.
I’m finally getting a chance to sit and reflect on FETC 2009 (the Florida Educational Technology Conference). As usual, there were way too many great choices on how to spend my time and way too few minutes in a day to do them all. I presented on Thursday with Colleen Glaude and Katie Morrow on “Creating a PLN with Web 2.0 Tools” and even with the power outage that caught us just as we were getting started, we had a great time. I took notes in the other sessions I attended in GoogleDocs and posted my learning as part of the Scholastic TechTutors blog if you’re interested in finding out more.
One of the reasons I love attending conferences is the chance to see in person all the people I learn with virtually through websites like Classroom 2.0, ALI, Twitter, Plurk and more. It’s also an opportunity to catch up with my fellow Florida Apple Distinguished Educators. This year was especially exciting because of the number of interactions that began solely because of tools like Twitter and Plurk:
I got to see Michelle Olah (HolaOlah), a Spanish Teacher at Teague Middle School in Altamonte Springs, Florida give her presentation. Michelle does some amazing things with Web 2.0 tools in her classroom and it was great to see the examples she shared. During the presentation, I sat with Sylvia Tolisano and learned even more.
I met Cathy Baker (CathBaker) and was able to help in her quest for an iPhone charger.
I met the tag team Jeff Richardson and Suzan Brandt, two Tech Integrators from Hoover, AL who created a wiki to share their learning from FETC.
I got to spend some time with the Tech Integrationists Alicia Eslinger, Sonda Burckhard, and Judy Walter who work with Craig Nansen in Minot, ND.
I even got a ride to our hotel from Gordon Shupe, who just happened to notice my tweet about when we’d be arriving in Orlando.
Sadly, though, there just wasn’t enough time for the in-depth conversations I was craving.
On the way home, I did a lot of thinking about the traditional type of conference model that FETC represents and how I’d like to see it evolve. While at FETC, many others were gearing up for learning at EduCon 2.1 in Philadelphia. EduCon is an example of how professional conferences can evolve into more than a “sit and listen” event, but I wonder how we can support the need for volume events for thousands of educators (FETC regularly hosts between 7,000 and 14,000 educators) and the need for interaction and conversation.
If I could make some suggestions to the FETC planners, here are three takeaways that I’d like to share:
Ditch the bags. I’m a teacher. I have enough conference bags in my closet to last more than a lifetime. But that’s not the reason I want to see them go. To me, the canvas bags are an invitation to collect paper: paper handouts from sessions, brochures and catalogs from vendors…you get the picture. If we want to model digital literacy, how about giving each participant a conference web page instead? On that page, we could create a schedule of the sessions we want to attend and the vendors we’re interested in talking to. Then, as we attend sessions, we could take notes directly on our web page or add links to vendor information for followup. Participants could link to one another and share notes, start conversations and plan meetups. Which brings me to my next request.
Create a place for conversations. Give up a couple of the conference rooms and turn them into conversation rooms instead. Put in some groupings of comfy chairs and several round tables. Put in some power ports so we can recharge our laptops between sessions. You could even designate particular rooms to specific conversations (a 1:1 room, a Web tools room, a video production room, etc). Don’t worry about putting someone in charge of leading the conversation, or moderating a larger group discussion; that’s called a Panel session and it’s already available. Just give us a place to let our own conversations evolve.
Give time for reflection and internalizing. There’s nothing worse to me than becoming engaged and excited in a topic and then having to make a choice – do I run to the next interesting session that starts in 15 minutes or do I skip it in order to put some of my thoughts down in writing or to discuss them with others? There’s got to be a way to mix time for learning with time for reflection and discussion.
It’s a tough fact to face, but the words we write on our blog, the mighty effort we put into teaching and collaborating and learning every day will fade. We’d all like to think that our words will live on forever and for that special few, they may. But for the rest of us, what will remain are the personal moments. The times when we moved beyond our official roles as teachers and shared a little of our personal selves. The secret portal into what makes us passionate educators who stretch beyond.
With that spirit, I join Sharon Elin and a host of other educators who are participating in the “7 Things Meme.” It’s a chance for us to learn a little more about one another. A chance to know more than we can learn in 140 character bites or topic oriented blog posts.
Here goes.
One. At the age of 16, I left home. Many call it running away, but to me that conjures up visions of sneaking off into the night to sulk. When I left, I knew there’d be no turning back.
Two. I owe much of my success in life to Gladys and Gene. At the age of 17, I was offered a place to stay by the family of a friend. They had seven children of their own and thinking of it now, I have no idea if I could have done the same and opened my door to a stranger. But they did. They helped me get my first job, helped me re-enroll in school and housed me for the next several years of my life as I graduated high school and started college.
Three. My husband has been my best friend since I was 16. That friend I moved in with, you see, is now my husband. I shared a room with his sisters and learned what it was like to live within a family of people who cared deeply for one another.
Four. My teaching philosophy is shaped largely by what I learned when I re-enrolled in school. After missing almost an entire quarter of classes, there was no possible way I could pass without some intervention. I learned there are three types of teachers:
Those who say it’s not their problem if you missed the assignment and give you a failing grade. I didn’t learn anything from these teachers.
Those who say it’s not your fault and excuse you from every assignment so you can pass. While I was grateful, I didn’t learn much here either.
Those who admit life’s tough, but then look for a way to make it better. These were the teachers who taught me the most. They expected me to be accountable for learning, but gave the the chance to learn and catch up as best I could.
Five. I believe in seeing the best in every situation. I don’t believe in dwelling on the mistakes or the problems or the things I can’t control. Life’s too short and too full of opportunities to spend it worrying or wishing for something I don’t have.
Six. I believe in seeing the best in every person. I am constantly amazed at what my students are capable of doing if they’re just given time, attention and a little bit of care.
Seven. I love grits for supper – plain with a little butter and pepper. (You didn’t think all 7 would be deep and meaningful did you?)
In honor of National Poetry month, I have two haiku poems to share. I wrote these for a poetry contest at CHS and thought they’d be a perfect complement to the month’s celebration.
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