Learning On The Job

After attending Learning 2.010 in September, I really wanted to incorporate the the learning environments that were used at the conference at my school.

In November, for our schoolwide in-service day, I informally pushed the cohort model and got teachers creating artifacts to showcase their learning for the day.

And on January 12, two days after our winter holidays came to an end, the MSHS teachers created and facilitated their own unconferences. Here’s how we did it:

• Before the winter holiday, I created and distributed a promo video for the unconference. Most of our teachers had no previous experience with an unconference so it was a way to introduce them to the idea and to outline the process.
• On Monday morning, I loaded up the staffroom with “Topic/Facilitator” forms, markers and Blu-Tack. I also added the first possible session title (“Creating Better Wikis”) but left the facilitator blank.
• Over the next two days, teachers slowly began adding session titles. Most of them were without facilitators but that didn’t bother me too much.
• I sent out an email reminder every day encouraging teachers to create sessions and to vote for those that interested them.
• On Wednesday afternoon, I took down all the session titles and tallied the votes. We ended up with 10 sessions ¹ in total, divided into 2 groups of 5. Most of these sessions were without specified facilitators.
• I sent an email to all MSHS teachers with topics and room allocations and left them to learning!

Some observations:

• As a first go, the whole thing went relatively smoothly. It was nice to see the vast majority of teachers taking responsibility for their own learning.
• I was hoping for a wider variety of possible topics. I’m used to participating in unconferences a tech conferences, so there are always plenty of ‘experts’. Planting the seeds of presenting with some teachers I know are doing great things is going to be key.
• There needs to be more voting! This is something for me to stress in the future.
• It was my intention to not lead a session but because of numbers I needed to. Unfortunately, my session was somewhat heavily attended when my focus was on giving others the opportunity to present and lead.
• Even though most sessions (8 out of 10) didn’t have an identified facilitator, I think the teachers got a good sense of others who are interested in learning about the same things; a truly organic PLC.
• This was the easiest PD session ever to organize!

Now that the groundwork has been laid, it would be great to be able to run an unconference (as one teacher said later, it doesn’t need to be about technology but just about sharing good teaching!) every 6 or 8 weeks. This would give teachers a chance to share, learn and celebrate on a regular basis. Is this something you can incorporate at your school? Any other ideas on how to improve it?

A few weeks ago, we had an in-house PD day here at UNIS. At the beginning of September, the staff were surveyed on which of the whole-school goals they would like this day to focus on. The big winner (surprise!) was technology, followed by coaching and professional learning communities.

I spent a lot of time working with our Curriculum and Professional Development Coordinator on the plan for the day. We decided it would be an excellent way to introduce the entire staff to the Technology and Learning Plan that was developed (I was on the task force) last year. This plan consists of three goals: one based on the NETS for Students, one based on the NETS for teachers, and one focusing on our technology infrastructure.

Our goals for the day were:

• To learn more about the school’s vision regarding technology;
• To learn from each other about technology use;
• To think about goals for teachers and students regarding technology use;
• To facilitate discussion across the school divisions

So what did we do? I stole a page from Learning 2.010! Teachers were carefully grouped based on division, subject/grade level, gender, and comfortability with technology. After the MSHS principal introduced the Tech and Learning Plan, each group was assigned a strand related to one of the NETS-inspired goals. They discussed what they felt that strand meant to them as a way to generate some ideas. Then, they were given until after lunch (about 2 hours) to come up with some sort of presentation to the entire staff that introduced their strand.

Along the way, we modeled some different technology tools that could be used in the classroom. We used a wiki as a means of distributing information. We used Wallwisher as a parking lot for questions and concerns that weren’t directly related to the discussion. We used surveys on our SharePoint portal to quickly gather information from the group. We used Wordle to display our staff’s response to the prompt “How do you feel about technology?”

The presentation tools were varied; groups went with what they were most comfortable with – natural differentiation! There were movies, powerpoint presentations, a Prezi. One group tried to use SongSmith to emulate We’re All Connected; lot’s of groups used humor. The two Tech Facilitators (myself and my ES counterpart) were available to help troubleshoot but mostly groups just got on with it!

After lunch, we watched all the presentations and voted for the top two. We had created a very simple rubric (we are an IB World School, after all!) prior to the creation time to help guide the groups.  Not everybody was thrilled with the idea of a competition, but I really wanted to encourage groups to put in that extra effort!

During Learning 2.010 I was really struck by the enormous stress that we felt when trying to finish our group artifact. It made me really empathize with our students as we ask them to do this all the time without truly (I believe) thinking about what it puts them through. I hope this day helped to reinforce that with our teachers as well as highlight the amount of time these types of rewarding products take up.

Overall, I am very impressed with how these 100+ teachers tackled the day. It was extremely difficult trying to find a format that would suit the enormously varied needs of this large group of individuals in a way that they would find interesting, engaging and useful. We certainly asked the staff to be risk takers and to go outside of their comfort zones. They did so and then some!

Next up: Unconferences!

Some selected feedback:

“I really felt as though we each came away with SOMETHING interesting – even if it was not something practical to use for our own teaching, it may just have been a greater understanding of some things that go on elsewhere in the school, which also contributes to developing a whole school ethos.”

“I found the actual task and the working with teachers that I normally do not work with, very satisfying and I learned a great deal from them. Finding out things by ourselves was a great mirroring of how we should teach.”

“I really enjoyed having the opportunity to actually ‘work’ to make our learning happen.”

“I would prefer to learn about technology through direct instruction.”

“I found the presentation method very interesting, especially in observing the behaviors of myself and everybody in the group, how the decision were taken.”

“It really got us all involved and not only discussing technology but we were teaching each other new technologies that we used.”

“I liked the fact that it ‘demystifyed’ the use of technology in class and made it clear that it can be used, with basic knowledge, as long as you are ready to use your imagination and you’re are open to make use of others (students included) knowledge and imagination.”

“I thought the idea of familiarizing everyone with the school’s technology goals in smaller, mixed groups, and then using a technological presentation to give feedback was great.”

It started with a simple tweet:

And then:

And finally:

One of the big reasons we give to students about why we ask (make?) them blog is so that they can connect to an authentic audience. So why not give our newly blogging teachers an authentic audience as well?

The idea is to get a small number of teachers (5 – 8 is what I’m after) and lead them through the basics of blogging. At the same time, @intrepidteacher is going to do the same with his teachers and hopefully a few others (@klbeasley, @mscofino, @wmchamberlain? Anyone else?) will too. And our goal, with the Blogging Alliance, is to get these newly online teachers in contact with one another, giving them that authentic audience as well as a jumpstart to their own PLN.

Launch date is late October or early November. Are you in?

Last weekend I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Shanghai at the Learning 2.010 conference. It was a fantastic experience for a variety of reasons:

1. I got to meet up with a lot of my twitter friends: @klbeasley, @intrepidteacher, @dearlibrariann, @mscofino, @kurisuteen, @courosa, @dkuropatwa, @megangraff, @betchaboy, @brianlockwood to name a few. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but those connections are worth more than a thousand keynote speeches.

2. One of my colleagues, @lissgriffin, jumped on the Twitter train with both feet and now is a Twitter force-to-be-reckoned-with! Beyond that, it was so rewarding to watch her realize that, as much as she may try to tell you otherwise, she’s on top of this ‘teaching with technology’ thing. Some of the ideas she’s coming up with are mind boggling. One day soon I’ll get her to either a) start her own blog about what she’s doing in her classroom or b) guest post here.

3. My cohort was pretty amazing. Led by Kim Cofino and Darren Kuropatwa, we explored the Future of Learning. The idea was to work in small groups to explore this topic in more detail after a few introductory discussions and activities. In just over 90 minutes my group cobbled together a presentation we called ‘Bridging the Gap’. The focus was on what we felt the future of learning is and what can we do now to put us in a position to be ready for that future. It was a good experience to be thrust into the role of the students, if only for 2 days. Working under a deadline in classroom conditions to create a product that you must then present to your peers: something many teachers take for granted that students can do. It’s hard work and we need to make sure we give them the time they need to create products they can be proud of.

We also had to contribute a slide to the Great Quotes about Learning and Change Flickr group. Here’s my submission.

I’ll have more to say about what I learned in my cohort in a later post.

4. Facilitating unconference sessions was very rewarding. I volunteered to facilitate a session on Tech Integration in a 1:1 School. I didn’t suggest the topic, but I figured it is my job and I do work at a 1:1 school so I was pretty well qualified to at least lead the discussion! Keri-Lee and I also ran a Twitter for Teachers unconference session, mostly because of conversations that we had with other teachers the previous night about the “banality of Twitter.” Needless to say, we disagreed. Twitter is only as useful as you make it, that’s true. Some teachers just need a little help in seeing how to make it useful and I hope we did that. (As an aside, is there another community of professionals that is using Twitter as actively as teachers?)

I was at the Learning 2.008 conference as well. I will be pushing hard to make sure I can be involved with the next iteration too!

I just received the feedback forms from my first MYP Mathematics workshop that I led in March.

It’s mostly encouraging, although the few responses in the “Strongly Disagree” column really jump of the page.

• One person strongly disagreed with the statement “Information was presented in a clear and organized manner.”
• One person strongly disagreed with the statement “I gained a deeper understanding of how to achieve horizontal and vertical articulation.” (This was probably, overall, my weakest point according to the results.)
• Two people strongly disagreed with the statement “I can use what I learned in this workshop to collaborate effectively with other teachers in my department/school.”

In general, the feedback was quite positive. 78% rated the overall quality as “very good” or better. 88% were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the workshop. Overall, I’m not too concerned if one or two people didn’t like my presentation style: I know it is impossible to please everybody. I also know that we (as a group) chose to focus on certain things, such as assessment, at the expense of others, such as interdisciplinary planning. It does concern me that two people walked away feeling that didn’t learn anything that would allow them to collaborate effectively with others, especially since the main thrust of many of my sessions were around using Zoho Docs to create and edit collaborative documents, particularly when it came to planning.

In the free response section, some of my strengths were listed as:

• Very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Listened to participants very well. Led discussion well and allowed time to cover topics participants needed to know about.
• He obviously is an extremely organised teacher with very thorough methods of assessing his students. He was reactive to needs of the group, was able to answer (almost) any question that was set and clarified some of the less concrete MYP requirements (the unit question/significant concept debate)
• He was very open to people’s ideas – and as result participants were very open to share and accept feedback. He did not allow arguments about assessment to go onto long.
• Kept the group on task, listened to everyones point of view, accepted the times when someone disagreed with him and was always open to other people’s points of view.

Some of the suggestions for me:

• Some people in the workshop kept having private conversions during the workshop which made it very distracting. I wish he had a creative way of addressing that situation.
• differentiate the sharing session by grade levels
• some of the participants were a little disgruntled that we started things and put them aside without unpacking them or wrapping them up (eg. the newspaper exercise). That said, the ability to share our work and ask numerous direct questions about our practise meant that something had to give…
• Make a summary of what has transpired in a previous session before proceeding to the next session.
• More time is needed sharing resources and actual units of work. More time spent on mathematics and less on general IB topics.
• I thought the first day included too much introductory information about the MYP as this was a stage 2 course. (Not a big issue but this would be my only criticism of the course.)

Probably my biggest concern as the workshop leader was my midjudgement of time. As two of the suggestions point to, we didn’t have enough time to complete the task and then have a discussion about the task. I had hoped that a lot of that ‘unpacking’ would have happened in their own personal reflections on the session (I tried to incorporate a different Visible Thinking Routine for each session, both to model the use of VTRs and to give some variety in how participants were reflecting upon their learning).

Any ideas on how I can address those suggestions? My future workshop participants – next up: Kobe, Japan in October 2010; like one person said to me, I couldn’t have sucked that bad if they asked me to do another one! – will certainly appreciate it. So will I! =)

Welcome to UNIS!

Dr. Michael Thompson, author of Raising Cane and It’s a Boy!, has been on campus the past few days speaking to staff and students alike. He has a fascinating expert view of children and how to best meet their needs. From his one-hour chat with the entire middle school:

The two things that are always at play in the lives of middle school students: friendship and popularity.

He then asked some students to define friendship. They went around and did a pretty good job of it. When he asked one of our teachers what her definition of friendship is, it was virtually identical. Conclusion: these middle schoolers are capable of adult friendships already.

Defining popularity was much more difficult. Nobody really seemed willing to identify or call out the traits of popularity at UNIS. I wonder why this is?

He’s talking to the high school tomorrow and also holding a special ‘Dad’s Breakfast’ tomorrow morning. I’m already clearing my schedule.

Talking to the Middle School

No, not that March Madness…

I’m off to Mumbai today to attend ASB Unplugged 2010 at the American School of Bombay.

I’m back on Sunday and then off again on Wednesday to Beijing to lead a Category 2 MYP Mathematics workshop at Western Academy.

I’m back on Monday afternoon and then leave again early Tuesday morning to join our Grade 6 team on their annual trip to Cuc Phuong National Park.

Madness, I say… I better buy my lovely wife something pretty special for leaving her alone with 3 small children.

Image: My What Big Ears You Have by Frank Peters (CC BY NC ND)

When my principal approached me in November about organizing a technology-in-the-classroom showcase, I knew just what I wanted to do: Speed Geeking. I first heard about speed geeking from Kim Cofino (who I later found out learned about it from @FrznGuru).

First, I sought out seven volunteers willing to share something cool they’ve done in their classroom. By cool I mean creative, innovative, engaging and effective. It was pretty easy to come up with a list of teachers to approach since I’ve been trying to track who’s been doing what with Google Forms. The tricky part was finding new faces to act as presenters. One of the criticisms of previous sessions like this (rightly so, I might add) is that it is always the same people showing their goods. Instead of asking for volunteers, I strategically approached people from different departments who mightn’t have otherwised stepped forward.

Then I divided our staff (Middle/High School only) into 7 groups. This worked out to about 6 or 7 teachers per group. They were a mixed bag in terms of gender, department, comfortability with technology, age group taught, etc. I wanted the groups to be as diverse as possible.

On Wednesday each presenter gave a 7 minute presentation, including time for questions/discussion. I found this great online countdown timer to help keep track of the time. Then all the groups rotated through every other presentation. In under one hour all 50 teachers saw all 7 presentations and were able to ask clarifying questions to suit their own needs. Here’s what it looked like in practice:

(BTW, the music in that video was remixed by one our grade 10 students using ACID Xpress 7.0 and showcased in one of the speed geeking sessions.)

The feedback from teachers has been extremely positive. A quick sample of comments received:

• Timing helped listeners and presenters – 5-7 min was enough for brief questions and to pique interest to prompt a teacher to further investigation. Teachers were forced to ask only VERY pertinent management questions, and could go back to the expert later if interested.
• Loved it- enough time to see what some great ideas without needing to hear lots of detail that I can’t absorb quickly.
• I really enjoyed just getting a snapshot of what is happening in other parts of the school-I was amazed at what kids are actually doing!
• 7 minutes at each section was so effective
• Lovely job done by lovely people who were each quietly modest about the cool things they’ve been doing.
• Good, quality presentations – how to implement, what it can do for the kids, thoughts of where you can use it, and possible drawbacks (ie: tech difficulties you would have to sort out or live with). Beauty.
• Very real and meaningful examples that were inspirational. This was PD like it is supposed to be.
• Thanks a lot. Its a really good set up. Can we do it again next Wed?
• This session came at a good time and was the right type of duration for a Weds afternoon – too much focus on technology can be overwhelming, but it’s good to see what others are doing and what’s working well. Thanks
• Most effective tech. session this year, for me, by far. It was enough to really get a sense of the great things people are doing and gave me lots of ideas.

Perhaps most telling for me: when asked to rate their willingness to do this again, 21 of 27 rated it 5 out of 5. Everybody rated it 3 out of 5 or higher.

The fast pace did not suit all participants and there were 2 comments reflecting that, but I think the overall feeling was that this was a good thing.  Also, it was suggested that there be two rounds of speed geeking so that the presenters from one round would be able to view presentations in the other round. I think this is a great idea but it would have been difficult to manage in the one-hour time slot I was given.

If you’re looking for a great way to share ideas, I would definitely recommend speed geeking!

I just finished watch Kim Cofino’s Keynote presentation for this year’s conference. To participate in this free online conference:

1. Join the conference Ning.
2. Use the “for participant” pages of the wiki to learn how to get started utilizing everything the FREE conference offers.
3. Subscribe to updates on the conference blog.

All presentations are now listed by date/time on the 2009 Schedule. Bookmark / favorite this page, it will be updated throughout the conference as presentations “go live” each day!

Check out the Ning schedule of events and participate as much as you can! Also follow K12Online on Twitter!

(Taken from the K12Online wiki)