During hiring @gcouros does a Google search of the candidate. No online presence at all? Weeded out. #Educon #cpchat

— Gerald Aungst (@geraldaungst) January 29, 2012

Amid getting ready for baby girl #2, I was able to jump in and out of the conversations at Educon 2.4 via twitter and the live stream. The particular tweet from Gerald Aungst came during George Couros and Patrick Larkin‘s “So You’re Connected … Now What?”  conversation around their Connected Principals initiative.

Now I’m not interested in hiring processes from a school’s perspective as much as I am from a candidate’s perspective. What do you do when the school or district you are applying to (or considering) is not connected?

Is it a warning flag when a school has little more than an schoolworld site? No obvious teacher websites? No online presence of its own?  Or is it an opportunity to bring those tools into a district, build on the pockets of teachers who are dabbling, thrust the school into the world of social media?

Or do you, as George puts it, weed them out?

Storybird is a visual storytelling site that allows users to create stories around sets of pictures or themes. In their words:

Storybird reverses the process of visual storytelling by starting with the image and “unlocking” the story inside. Choose an artist or a theme, get inspired, and start writing.

At the culmination of our study of The Crucible, English 11R students created storybirds to tell the story of an outsider. Their stories followed traditional story arcs, as the had to include exposition, climax, conflict and resolution, all while capturing the tale of someone trying to overcome exclusion. This also linked to our next text, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and allowed for a seamless transition.

Julie C’s Storybird (shared with permission)

Google Sites – Student Collaboration

During the Introduction to Journalism class, students collaborated with one another to create online magazines around topics of their choosing. They were responsible for layout, content and editing. Using Google Docs and Google Sites, they worked together to write stories, peer edit and finally publish their work.

Examples:

Food (shared with permission)

Using Skype for Interviews

For the second straight year, the Introduction to Journalism class conducted an interview with journalist Ted Mann. Students used a Google doc to collaborate on collection of research materials on Mann’s life prior to the interview. After conducting research on the journalist’s career, students used another shared Google doc to create questions and assign them to one another. On the day of the interview, students conversed with Mann using Skype video chat, peppering Mr. Mann with questions.

(photo: P. Rodrigues)

Recently we’ve started a mentoring program at our school that I am so excited to be a part of. A group of our high schoolers will be mentoring fifth grade classes in the district.  The idea behind the program is for the mentors to act as positive role models in their online interactions. The two groups will participate in a “room” or “group” where the conversations will be initiated by mentor prompts, but will be relatively free-flowing. They will demonstrate appropriate “netiquette” (the 5th graders call it this) and provide an outlet for questions and thoughts from the younger students. We’ll be doing this virtually through the Schoology platform.

We’ve just gotten off the ground here, but so far the interactions with the mentors in training have been thought provoking. In training yesterday we dealt with questions like:

How do you deescalate a situation where there is mutual bullying? And how do you do this without appearing to take sides? How do you do this without others thinking you’re “sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong”?

We also spent a while discussing digital footprints and the role they play, spending quite a bit of time considering what is private and what is public. Having these discussions with kids is enlightening. I’m really looking forward to documenting the project here, as it progresses.

What do you think are the most important issues to discuss with teens/pre-teens when it comes our role in crafting our internet identity? 

What’s waking you up lately?

Here’s my contribution:

For Gia

Today it was a soft pat,
Followed by a quick poke,
Nothing like I wanted,
But little babies don’t care,

At five am.

Tomorrow it will be laughs,
Or very likely cries,
Only needing daddy,
Either way, I won’t care.

A boundary closed,
defined exclusively for
giving him inordiante justification.
Knowingly, laughingly,
made nowhere.
Of particular quandaries,
racing steadily toward unknown vagaries,
we, xenophobes, yearn zeaously.

TeachmeetNJ
EdTech Unconference
#NTCamp
EdcampBoston
CoLearning

Unconferences.

After attending my first unconference, I know that the unconference is for me. It  has to be the model for my own learning and one that I model our school professioanl development on.

Because they do not require the infrastructure and organization of a full-blown industry gathering, unconferences can happen more frequently. Because the cost to attend is minimal (or non-existent), anyone who wishes to can come. And because everyone at the unconference participates in some fashion, interaction, networking, and the exchange of ideas is a given. #

The last idea, “interaction, networking, and exchange of ideas is a given” is the key phrase here. Isn’t that what we all want when we participate in school PD? Our work is about building community and collaborating to improve student learning. This can not be done in isolation. And it cannot be done with a guru, an expert, or paid consultant. Just like our  students, we are not silos.  We are the holders of our own knowledge and we must learn from one another.

Now to start the work…

Some posts that have me thinking about these ideas:

A Professional Development Day that Worked via @bhsprincipal

How DIY PD Works via @snbeach

FedEx Prep: Time for Innovation via @mrwejr

The Evolution of PD via @justintarte

Canadian Educators Conference via @gcouros

Image via Wikipedia

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”—Charles Darwin

I was going to write about teacher observations tonight, but after reading my colleague Tony Celini’s post about our professional development work today, I’m a little fired up.

As some of you know, I wrote about some ongoing struggles with professional development at my school. I take professional development seriously, and I believe that it should be teacher/learner driven, teacher created, teacher led.

Since my last post about PD, we’ve conducted a survey about areas/topics of need. We developed a short presentation/workshop on differentiated instruction (the most popular topic) and facilitators from our professional development team worked with small groups to discuss ways we can differentiate our teaching even further.

At first, we got some good feedback. But then I read Tony’s post. I was bummed by some of the things he heard in his group:

In these small groups (about 10-15 teachers), the question was posed: how can we utilize differentiated instruction in our classrooms, and does it seem to be a valuable technique? (I paraphrase here.) And the teachers were not impressed. Their reactions sank to the negative:

• Why should we try to change?
• I just don’t see how this can work
• How does admin expect us to do something they want while making our jobs more difficult?
• I can barely cover the curriculum now…how can they expect more from me?
• They talked about this 10 years ago…where did it get us then.

First of all, in my mind, differentiated instruction is just good teaching. So there’s that. And while I sympathesize with teachers who are overburdened with covering curriculum and feel like new “mandates” are there to make their lives difficult, I shudder to think that this is how we deal with trying to better our craft.

If we do not continually reflect on what we do as teachers, we die. A slow agonizing death at that. We’ll be left in the dust, stuck teaching behind another closed classroom door. And ultimately, this aversion to change and working at our craft hurts kids. Even if we disagree with something like differentiated instruction, we need to think about how we can better our teaching. We need to process ideas, not condemn them because they seem difficult.

So I repeat this phrase in my head all the time: “those of us who want change need to be the loudest voices in the room”

I see those other voices that Tony described as the ones we have to convince, but the job isn’t impossible. It just requires hard work every single day, and an unrelenting voice for change that will benefit student learning.

How have you overcome those voices? Love to hear positive ways to deal with those who aren’t “on the bus.”

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been inspired by posts such as Lyn Hilt’s Knowledge Candy and others about passion-driven learning to finally write about an amazing childhood experience I had.

As an elementary munchkin I was lucky enough to be part of a group called the Divergent Activities Program (DAP), which was a gifted and talented program that met twice a week for a total of three hours. First off, this is not an endorsement for G&T programs, but a discussion of the program as a whole and why its methods should be applied to every student, regardless of age, IQ, or ability

So Divergent Activity Program. As a youngster I had no idea what that even met, and that’s why I never called it that. It was DAP. And it was what I looked forward to every week.

Sir Ken Robinson defines divergent thinking as

Divergent thinking is not the same thing as creativity, but it is a good example of it. It’s the capacity to think non-logically: to think analogically and associatively.

And that’s what DAP was all about for a small group of students at each of my district’s elementary schools.

It worked like this: At the beginning of the year, each student would generate a list of things he/she wanted to study, then the group would pick a handful of topics from our combined list. Wow, democracy at work. As a group we would explore those topics in full, following guidance from our teacher, Ms. Dyer, but we were also able to go down any path we wanted to explore. One year, we had been exploring the Greeks, so the students and teachers in the program organized a little olympic-style competition. It’s one of my fondest memories about the program – we were dressed in traditional garb, and competed in different events. And I got a talking to because I was too aggressive during the running portions (oops – I’m a runner, it was in my nature to race). But I digress.

Each of these units lasted for a few weeks depending on where we went with it. Field trips, research, discussion all culminating in a project of some kind, either in groups or as an individual.

But the spring was where DAP really shined. Individually we chose another area of study and prepared a presentation to be given a couple of months from that point to all DAP students and their families. Present your work, as a fourth grader, to an audience. Hmmm, what a way to assess.

My three year sequence of exploration was as follows:
(Obviously pics are not my work – I was nerdy, but not that nerdy. Suit was made of cardboard and boat was made of balsa)

4th grade: Knights and Armor, where I researched and built a replica suit of armor

[Claire Houck [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

5th grade: Triremes (Greek Warships), where I built a greek trireme, to scale

Image via Wikipedia

6th grade: Running and fitness, where I made a Stretching video and organized a race at my elementary school.

Why was this experience so valuable? First of all, I think it honors a student’s sense of exploration and inquisitiveness. I had ideas as an eight year old and I was given the resources to pursue them. It also made me a problem solver. I was faced with challenges on the way – materials questions, math issues, ethical dilemmas (someone cheated in the race). I had to figure out the solutions by myself.

All this made me a better person. And probably a better student, though it’s hard to tell since when I got to middle school I became bored by school – when you see the “light” of what class can be like, it’s hard to fit in the mold of a teacher assigning a book for fifteen minute sustained silent reading.

And I sometimes dream about what school would have been like for me if I had been in DAP for the rest of my educational career. Or if I had been the only way I had learned. I was lucky enough to be in the age before testing, so you can’t argue that as a reason why we didn’t make this part of everyone’s day. I read posts from Ira Socol and documents from the 3i program and I yearn for those kinds of programs for my students and my own daughter.

Why can’t all school be like divergent thinking? What are we doing to make school like this?

Image via Wikipedia

My seniors (IB English A1) started blogging two weeks ago (North HS IB English), and I think it’s been successful so far.  We had been writing in paper journals, but in an effort to make our process more collaborative, transparent and paperless, I moved the writing to a blog.  We also go up to the lab each Friday to work on the blog, our various google docs, or generally find some cool stuff to share.

This has been an eye-opening experience for me, and one in which I have relinquished control. It helps that this is a small class (15 students) and they are seniors.  There are times when I want to prod and poke them when I see they are surfing a bit during our “freeform fridays” but I need to trust them, and believe that they will be using their wandering for the improvement of the class. I also know that I have students who will keep the others on track – calling them out, commenting on issues, and generally being a team.

Yet, I am just scratching the surface. There’s more I can do. I want this class (and all my classes) to be more democratic.

This will require a lot of “unlearning.” We (teachers/students/admin) have been so indoctrinated in the traditional model of what a classroom looks like, that doing what makes sense, often times seems radical and chaotic.

Giving up control can be chaotic and messy. But it feels good.

How have you given up control in your classroom? Tried a Fisch Flip? MIT OpenCourseWare? Something else? Please share below.

Image via CrunchBase

I started using Twitter and blogging on November 1st, 2010. And I can’t explain how valuable a resource it’s been – the help (as Bill Ferriter writes: Twitter can save you time), the information, and generally fun of it all has been great!

And since my return from Educon, I’ve openly talked about social networking and its power with colleagues. One colleague, Tony, has jumped on full force, and I’ve started working with our Tech folks because of something that I’ve written about on twitter and my blog.

This all leads to the idea of the development of my “face to face” PLN. Obviously there’s no distinction about where we learn, but there is something to be said about expanding the ideas we see on twitter and blogs to our day to day work, and with colleagues. It only makes sense if we do that; otherwise, aren’t we still working in isolation?

Now, lunch time is filled with talk of apps and articles, emails are flying back and forth sharing Sir Ken Robinson videos, and we’re expanding our PLN even further. And this work in my building continues to push my thinking on how I will talk about this with colleagues.

This isn’t anything you don’t already know.

Please share: how have you brought what you’ve learned through social media to your colleagues in your school?