Learning On The Job

Last week, I stole borrowed a page from my friends and colleagues at UWCSEA East and had students run a session with parents on social networking and other concerns. As I wrote in the school newsletter:

Thao , Tommy and Max did a fantastic job of presenting a student perspective and discussing their own personal use of social networks and other aspects of technology use, both in school and at home. It was great to hear them address the concerns raised by parents as well as share their experiences. According to one of the students, “It was helpful to listen to the questions from parents, and it helped me understand what kind of concerns parents have about the integration of technology into a student’s life.” Another added: “It was good for the students to see the point of view of the parent, so they would understand what the parent is seeing. It good to tell the parent about what we as student are doing on our tablet.”

The parents were also appreciative of the chance to speak to young adults and about the challenges and opportunities that are faced in an increasingly digital environment from their different perspectives. There was also a great roundtable discussion among the parents once the students had returned to class about some of the questions and concerns they have as parents.

One of the big discussion points that came from the parent roundtable (and actually, it has been brought up before) was the need for an online community for parents (primarily) to discuss some of the issues, questions and concerns that go hand-in-hand with the implementation of emerging technologies for learning.

I learned at ASB Unplugged 2010 that they are using a Ning for their parents. If I remember correctly, it is now completely moderated by parent volunteers and members of their PTA.

I’m wondering if any schools have successfully implemented BuddyPress as a community forum? As we are looking to finally start with edublogs, I wonder if this is a path that we can take? I’ve done some initial poking around, but I can’t solve the privacy issue: How do I make a BuddyPress installation so that parents can register themselves (moderated by an admin from the school) and so that the forums, groups and postings are private?

I’m also wondering if BuddyPress is even the way to go? Are there alternatives out there that you would suggest from experience?

How is your school engaging your parent community in discussion? Are you using social networking to improve parent communication and interaction? How concerned are you and your parents with the privacy of that social network? 

After my first attempt, I’m back with a new attempt to collect walkthrough data related to technology integration.

I’m currently working with Adrienne and Jeff on a presentation for ASB Unplugged on different coaching models and roles as related to technology. We had a discussion about our roles as data coaches and where this ranks on the list of things that we do. I’m hoping this form will act as a bit of action research for me and my school.

The walkthrough that I envision should take less than 10 minutes and the form is designed to support this. The data that I hope to collect should give me holistic data which can then be used to analyze departments, grade level and even specific teachers. It should be said that this isn’t about evaluation or appraisal (not that I have that power!), but rather about being able to target specific areas for support and PD.

I’ve chosen to use the SAMR model but this can be easily modified to suit your school’s needs or current practices.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and how it compares to how you collect walkthrough data at your school.

To help facilitate our Twitter for Teachers session at Learning 2.011, we have decided to post the general outline of our presentation and any resources on both of our blogs. We’d love to hear your feedback and how you are using Twitter to interact with your PLN. Feel free to leave your Twitter name in the comments as well!

(Mis)Perceptions of Twitter

We’ve all heard the “I don’t care what you had for breakfast!” diatribe against Twitter. We’re curious to know what the perceptions our participants have about Twitter.

How We Use It

Twitter, like anything else, is simply a tool. Use of that same tool will vary widely from person to person and Twitter is no exception.

Top Tips

For those just starting out in the Twitter game or for those that started an account years ago but never really got into it, here our some of our top tips for using Twitter to expand your PLN:

• Public, Personal, Private – Just as we would tell our students, it is important to understand the distinction between public, personal and private information.
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• BPL – Bio, Photo, Link. It’s hard for others to separate the gold from the spam when you don’t fill these things out!
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• Tear Down That Wall! – Don’t protect your tweets! Again, it’s hard for others to decide to follow you back if they can’t see what you’ve added to the conversations.
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• Go Beyond Basic – While Twitter as a service is fantastic, Twitter as a website is less than desirable. Try a Twitter client like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, or Echofon (just to name a few!) that allows you to separate your Twitter feed into easy-to-monitor columns.
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• Lists - Twitter lists allow you to create groups within your Twitter stream. You can even include people that you do not personally follow. Even better, you can follow lists that others have meticulously created. (Kim Cofino has a great International Teachers list.)
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• Hashtags – #learning2 #edchat #scichat #mathchat #kinderchat These are all examples of hashtags. Hashtags make it easy to group and search for tweets about a specific topic. Using a Twitter client like Tweetdeck, you can even use a hashtag to create an easy-to-follow column in your client. @cybraryman has a comprehensive list of education-related hashtags.
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• Search For It – Is there something that you’re passionate about? Chances are there are others on Twitter who are passionate about the same thing. Use the Twitter Search function to find people who are talking about your hometown, your favorite sports team or anything else you might be interested in.
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• Lurking (aka Legitimate Peripheral Participation) – One of the best and easiest ways to learn Twitter etiquette is to lurk amongst some of your favorite lists or hashtags. Once you see how things work, it’s a lot easier to join in!
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• Retweet and Reply – For some, the highest compliment you can pay them on Twitter is to retweet them. For others, they prefer the conversation that comes along with an @reply. Either way, it is a great way to engage others and to add followers to your PLN.
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• Conversation is King – Twitter, first and foremost, is about connecting with people around the world who can help you grow as a teacher and as a person. This happens through conversation and through getting to know one another as you would a fellow teacher on your campus. Sometimes these professional relationships develop into personal friendships that last a lifetime!

I’ve realized that in all of the chaos surrounding the start of the school year, I never got around to blogging about Inbox Zero!

Like many schools and institutions around the world, email has become an integral tool at UNIS. If the email server ever goes down for even 10 minutes (which, thanks to our tech department, very rarely happens!) there is a hint of panic amongst the staff.

Unfortunately, even as our reliance on email as a mode of communication has increased to the point of being absolutely essential, our ability to handle the vast quantities of email that we receive on a daily basis has barely evolved if at all. In fact, one of the most common complaints/concerns that I hear amongst our teachers is that there are too many emails sent.

When I first heard about Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation that he gave at the Google Campus in 2006, I was instantly intrigued. It was billed as the best hour that one could spend and I agree! I have probably saved 10 times that or more since I instituted this system 1.5 years ago.

While I highly encourage everybody to check out Mann’s original presentation, the basics are below. I presented this to some interested staff to start the year and it was pretty well received!

If I needed one sentence to summarize Mann’s idea, it would be this: Stop living in your Inbox! Instead of being a slave to email and living in your inbox, convert your relevant messages into predefined actions (mine are delete, do right now, to do later , and reference, in that order) and keep your inbox empty. Don’t use your inbox as a filing cabinet (it should be for new messages that haven’t been processed yet) and don’t spend a lot of time filing messages into subfolders (almost everything goes into that generic reference folder; if I need to find it I will search for it later).

One of the themes for my presentation on the subject (which, I admit, unabashedly steals large portions from Mann, including a few slides which I didn’t have time to prepare myself!) is to think about the analog equivalents of digital tools. This is why you’ll see quite a few references to Mad Men.

Nobody in their right minds (certainly not Don Draper!) would keep all of their correspondence stacked up in their “In Tray” on their desk. Why do we feel we can do that with email? If a phone message were to cross your desk, most people would act on it immediately, either by calling the person back, making a note in their calendar or throwing it in the trash. Why do we treat email any different?

Ultimately, Inbox Zero is about converting messages into actions and then disposing of those messages. It has helped give me a sense of purpose on busy days when I would have normally been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of messages in my inbox. Now I know exactly where I need to go in order to find things I need to get done!

How do you handle email at school? What systems work for you?

Image credits:
Inbox Zero Presentation by Merlin Mann licensed under CC BY NC ND
Cuffs6 by banspy licensed under CC BY

This year we are rolling out a new Responsible Use Agreement ¹ to all members of the school community. In my mind this has needed to be done for quite some time and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster getting here, but I would like to thank Andrew Churches for his excellent resources licensed under Creative Commons.

To introduce th RUA to the teachers, I was given 1 hour last Friday. My goals were to familiarize all teachers with the new RUA and to empower them to feel comfortable discussing the idea of responsible use with students since they are truly the front line on this. I worked along with the counselors to come up with some “grey area” scenarios in Responsible Use. We then modified the Visible Thinking Routine Circle of Viewpoints to get groups of four to discuss the scenario from one of four viewpoints: student, teacher, administrator or parent. At the start of each of the four scenarios, participants took on a new role. The idea, in my mind, was to highlight the “grey” nature of these scenarios and, by looking at them from various perspectives, encourage discussion and the teaching of responsibility rather than judgement and assuming students know right from wrong.

The four scenarios we chose were:

• A legitimate search for images in class returns an inappropriate image. The student then shares that image with others.
• After completing their work, a student starts playing a flash-based game unrelated to school.
• While working independently, the student is constantly “multi-tasking.” As the teacher walks around, the student minimizes programs and hides the task bar.
• At break time, a group of students is playing online games together.

I was ² blown away by the amount of discussion this activity created, both during the activity and for the rest of the day. It has brought the idea of responsible use ³ to the forefront of our discussions about community.

The next step is to run a very similar session with all students in the Middle and High Schools as well as sessions for parents in the first couple of weeks of school. I want this to be on everybody’s minds as we begin this school year and it will tie in perfectly with our visit from Robin Treyvaud in October!

What scenarios would you choose to include that would generate discussion in your community? How do you share and discuss your RUA with parents and students?

Back in February, I had the pleasure of working with the great staff at YIS for a few days. One of the things that we focused on was the use of blogs in the classroom. While RSS is a lifesaver for teachers using blogging, one of the issues identified was the need to wade through posts that weren’t relevant. As a math teacher, I don’t really want to be notified every time students blog for their humanities class. Wouldn’t it be great if teachers could use RSS to subscribe only to a specific category?

Fast-forward a few months, and I came across the solution! Turns out it is dead simple. The only requirement (that I can tell) is that the blog cannot be using a service like FeedBurner, which redirects all feeds from a blog into a single feed. Here’s how you do it:

• Click on the category you would like to subscribe to. It will give you a URL like: http://blog.misterhamada.com/category/tech-facilitator/
• Simply add the word “feed” to the end of that URL: http://blog.misterhamada.com/category/tech-facilitator/feed

You can use this same hack to subscribe to posts with a specific tag or by a specific author as well.

(h/t WPRecipes)

If one year of a dog’s life is equal to seven human years, then one year of 1:1 implementation must be equal to about three human years. And seeing as we are entering in to our fifth year of implementation next year, we must be turning in to one of those cranky teenagers. Let’s break it down:

Year 1 – The Newborn: In our first year, only teachers of 1oth and 11th grade were given laptops. Everybody else, including students, were stuck with laptop carts and computers labs. While it allowed us to get familiar with the machines, we couldn’t really do anything.

Year 2 – Toddling Along: In year two, all teachers in the Middle/High School received laptops as did students in 10th and 11th grade. There was a lot of stumbling, falling down and crying.

Years 3 and 4 (this year) - Adolescence: All teachers and all students in grades 6 – 12 now have tablets. We’ve grown up, we’re getting more independent. For the most part, we are still trying to please but we are gradually testing the boundaries of what is ‘allowed.’

And this brings us to next year: Year 5 – The Cranky Teenager. Teachers and students are getting restless. Some want change and they want it overnight. They are no longer happy being told what is good for them or appropriate. They want to figure it out for themselves. They want to be subversive. Every wall is seen as a challenge to overcome rather than a boundary to be obeyed. And sometimes, just sometimes, people get cheeky just to see if they can get away with it.

Obviously, I’m not talking about every teacher or every student. But there is a critical mass forming. We’ve been given a rigid structure to help us understand one way of thinking. Now that we know the rules, some of us are ready to break or bend or ignore them. Now that we know some of the possibilities, some of us won’t settle for anything less than everything.

Idealistic? Maybe. Will we make mistakes? Definitely. But that’s part of growing up.

(For the record, I think this Cranky Teenager stage is an exciting stage to be in! We’re at the stage that Chris Lehmann talks about – except for our atrocious Vietnamese internet connection. The conversation is no longer centered around what technology we have in the school but rather what we are doing with that technology.)

How is your 1:1 implementation going? Are you going through similar stages, or are you a child prodigy?

Indexed is one of my favorite sites on the webs. Jessica Hagy does such a great job of representing a lot of ideas in simple graphs. This will definitely make it into a parent presentation next year!

Alternatively, I think it works as an interesting representation of infinity…

After the UNIS Unconference in January, I received a comment from Ivan Beeckmans, the Technology Integration Specialist at NIST in Bangkok. He told me about the weekend PD workshops he was organizing for the teachers there and we discussed how the unconference format could be incorporated as a way to empower teachers to be learners and leaders.

One thing led to another and Ivan invited me to join the NIST staff at NISTech 2011 last weekend. Considering the similarities between NIST and UNIS – Tablet PC program, SharePoint portal, IBO World School to name a few – and the proximity – Hanoi is closer to Bangkok than it is to Ho Chi Minh City – I jumped at the chance!

The weekend was full of great conversations by a group of teachers committed to learning. Julian Edwards, the secondary school principal, made the important distinction between dialogue and discussion at the beginning of the weekend. We weren’t here to prove that we were right or to win any debates; our main purpose was to talk with each other and explore ideas.

It was interesting to be the only non-NIST teacher at the event. It gave me a different perspective on things, even with all of the commonalities. It was great to see and hear how students and teachers are using similar tools to achieve similar objectives in different ways. It was also reassuring to hear the same concerns surrounding effectiveness, time management and student learning that our teachers at UNIS voice.

I managed to get in and facilitate a few sessions on blogging with WordPress, OneNote and Creative Commons. I even managed to geek out a little with Jay Priebe, the Tech Director at NIST, over SharePoint and Veracross.

I’m hoping that NIST and UNIS can continue to build a strong cooperative partnership between our two schools. At the very least I’m hoping to be able to reciprocate the hospitality that was extended to me by Ivan, Jay, Julian and rest of the great staff at New International School of Thailand.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations at school regarding acceptable/responsible use of technology, particularly with respect to gaming and middle school boys. I’m hoping we’re in the process of convening some sort of forum for all stakeholders to come together and review/discuss our RUP and how it pertains to students, parents and teachers alike. (If it all comes together as planned I’m sure I’ll write about it in more detail.)

One of the points I was making to our middle school counselor was the idea that gaming, for a lot of students, is now a social activity. Many parents and teachers – not just at my school – are up in arms that students are playing computer games instead of socializing “like normal kids”. But for these kids, computer games are normal and they are social.

I came across this excerpt from the book Losing Control, Finding Serenity by Daniel A. Miller on BoingBoing:

Genetics aside, our children are not nearly as much like us as we think. Yes, they look and act like us in varying ways, but they are very different from us. This point was powerfully driven home to me when I pressured my daughter Lana (then ten years old) to prepare for an important test. I wanted her to do it the way I had done it in school (making study notes, outlining the material, etc.), not by listening to loud rock music. She promptly responded: “Daddy, I’m different than you. I can’t do it that way. Listening to music helps me study better.”

I was immediately taken aback by the simple truth of what she said. Lana really is different than me, and vastly so. She studies for tests and does her homework differently than I did. She budgets her time differently than I did. She keeps her room and desk much differently than I did. She also has many different interests and talents than I had. After all, who am I to say that my way is the best way — for her? My way is just a way, nothing more. It worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it works for my child.

If we’ve only experienced our own childhood, how we do we make sense of a childhood experience that is set in completely different circumstances? How do we as teachers help parents realize the value in losing some of that control? How can this apply to parent education regarding the use of technology by students in and out of the classroom today?