Say What?

CCK08 is the Massively Open Online Course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge being taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. When the course was announced in the spring I eagerly signed up. However, as the start date for the course approached my doubts about being able to keep up with the course (plus everything else in my life) intensified. Can doubts intensify? If they can mine did. The first week I dipped my toes in the CCK08 waters; I signed up for the RSS feed, I set up my profile on Moodle, I introduced myself, I read the assigned readings. I told myself I would get more involved in week 2, when I had more time…

The Thing About September

As a teacher and parent of one school aged child and one preschooler living in the Northern Hemisphere I have to say that September is a crazy month! As a parent I’m trying to get the kids into their new routines and make sure that I register in time for all of the activities that they would like to participate in. As a teacher in a distributed learning school this is a very busy month; our enrollment pretty much doubles as we go from September 1st to September 30th. That means lots of meetings with families, helping to order and distribute resources etc. along with teaching classes and marking, ahem assessing. My husband is a teacher too, so needless to say things are a little crazy here in September. Something had to give so we dropped Beavers (the 1st step in Boy Scouts in Canada). Great, now I’ll really get into the course…

I’m Fine With It, Really

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I’ve just not been able to keep up even my week 1 level of participation. I think I have to face facts; I’m a CCK08 drop-out. But I’m ok with being a drop-out. I don’t feel stressed. I didn’t feel like I had to read every single blog posting or Moodle forum. I was not flustered that I couldn’t participate in the Elluminate sessions or watch the UStream broadcast live. I guess that as I approach my one year anniversary of building my on-line personal learning network I’ve gotten used to the fact that you can’t read everything. You can’t watch everything. I feel like I’m standing at the river’s edge; there is a constant flow of interesting information (with the occasional bits of flotsam) and if you try to catch everything you’ll drown.

What’s Your Story?

Did you sign up for CCK08? If so, what has been your experience?

Choosing a Theme

It can be daunting choosing a theme, but luckily Sue Waters at The Edublogger wrote two posts back in July which were really helpful; What To Consider When Choosing Your Blog Theme and The 100 Edublog Themes Separated Into Categories To Make Choosing Your Next Theme Easier. Using Sue’s posts I decided what I wanted in a blog theme and started checking out the ones that seemed to fit. Well, after lots of thought and consideration I went with the theme that I really liked… the same one that Jan Smith is using (Ocean Mist by Ed Merritt). They say that imitation is a form of flattery, and Jan’s most recent post is titled Steal This, Please. I have personalized the theme though–right now that’s a photo of my youngest running through the spray at a water park.

Some Bumps Along The Way

I’m finding that a few things got lost in the transfer (like Clustr Maps) and I’ve been trying to re-jig things. I took my blogroll out of my sidebar and given it a separate page to try and reduce clutter. I’m still playing with the layout so that it works for me.

Your Thoughts?

What do you look for in a blog theme? Are you a 1, 2, or 3 column type of person, or does it depend on the blog content? Have you considered changing up the look of your blog? Do you have any suggestions to make my blog layout/set-up more reader friendly? As always, I’d love to hear from you!

Image: Bump, bump, bump by gwen

Mobile Learning the Future?

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This morning I read a post by David Truss where he talks about the future of technology in education:

I predict that in about 5 short years almost every Middle School student will own an iPhone or its’ equivalent, and they will be connecting to our wireless network via bluetooth for absolutely free. Students will be ready, willing and able to use these tools in our classroom… will teachers be ready enough to maximize the opportunities and learning experiences these tools (coming to our classrooms for free) will provide?

Really?! I feel that I am terribly out of touch with what mobile technology middle and high school students use today. I have a cell phone, but it is basic. I have a pay-as-you-go plan which runs me about $11 a month. I don’t text. I don’t have a data plan. For a period of time when I was homeless this summer I looked in to getting a beefed up plan, maybe even upgrading my phone (I do covet an iPhone). Basic iPhone rate here in Canada is $60 a month.

Surely the majority of middle and high school students don’t have a $60 a month plan?! I know I’m missing something though, because David is talking about students connecting to the school wireless internet for free.

I would love a hand-held “internet machine” (who coined that term? I know I just read it a few days ago…) that could pick up free wireless. Where I live there are a reasonable number of places that have free wifi (Starbucks, Safeway, schools).

What Do You Think/Set Me Straight

Do you agree with David Truss’ prediction? I like the vision that he paints. Do you have the piece of the puzzle that I’m missing?

A week ago I facilitated a session called ‘Blogging 101′ for teachers in my school district. The session was aimed at teachers new to blogging. By the end of the session I wanted participants to be able to:

1. search for blogs of interest
2. subscribe to blogs in a feed reader
3. submit comments to a blog
4. set up their own blog
5. write their first blog post
6. be able to add media to their posts (images, videos, etc)

The session was all built around a series of blog posts on my other blog, Tech Pro-D Tools. The posts are all tagged/labeled ‘blogging 101′. The focus on the posts was mainly ‘how-to’, with lots of screen shots and step-by-step instructions. The session ran from 8:30 to 1:30 with two 20 minute breaks.

Reflections

Resources
My goodness it took a long time to put together the 11 posts which make up the bulk of the

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Blogging 101 series! My hope is that it will be useful to anyone who is interested in getting into blogging, especially if they are planning to use Google Reader and Blogger. In addition, if I do another intro to blogging workshop, I’ve got the bulk of my resources ready. For the record, I do not receive kickbacks from Google; I chose these two tools because I am familiar with them, Blogger is easy to set up, and it requires only signing up for services with one company.

I did not provide resources other than what was in my blog posts. I didn’t prepare any handouts. In future I think I would prepare a one page handout with key information on it such as the blog address, how to contact me, and how to get into the Google account once it has been set up.

Time

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I tried to break up the session so that participants were interacting with each other and getting out of their seats. Having said that, I think I needed to have more of this. The participants all seemed very into what we were doing, but 5 hours is a long time to be sitting at the computer. A couple of the participants suggested a two day session would be a good format, then they could go home and try out some of the things we talked about and come back the next day with questions. I suspect two 3 hour sessions might be a good way to do this.

Group Size
Seventeen people were signed up for the session, but only eight actually showed up. I think that 17 would have been way too much for one person (me) to handle effectively. As it was, 8 was perfect. I felt that I was able to move around the room and help people when they needed it.

Knowing Your Audience
I did create a pre-session survey and 7 of the 8 participants completed it. Their experience with web 2.0 tools was all over the map and it was helpful knowing where everyone was at. I erred on the side of making my instructions in the ‘Blogging 101′ posts geared toward the technologically inexperienced and I think this worked well. If you are more experienced you can ignore the step-by-step screen shots and just go with the flow. But if you are uncertain, the step-by-step is there for you. I would have liked to have an exit survey, but I just ran out of time.

Random Thoughts
I was a little surprised at how many participants wanted to keep their blogs private. I had forgotten how apprehensive I was about privacy and security when I started blogging–so this was a good reminder. The session focussed mainly on the mechanics of blogging. Given more time it would be great to discuss how to write good posts, be a good commenter, track blog stats etc.

The Wrap Up and Heartfelt Thanks

I was happy with how the workshop went, and as I’ve mentioned above there are some things that I

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would change. It took me a tremendous amount of time to write all the posts, so that’s another reason I hope to do another workshop on this again to get more mileage out of all the work! Lastly, I would to thank Sarah Stewart and Sue Waters for their comments on a post I did soliciting ideas for this workshop. Sue has been a fantastic blogging mentor for hundreds (thousands?!) of new edubloggers and I am so grateful for all the support she has given me this year. Sarah Stewart was generous enough to share the outline and resources she used for her recent blogging workshop. We also had some good discussions via Twitter on how to run a successful workshop on blogging. You can read Sarah’s reflections on the three sessions she and her colleague ran here.

If you have any suggestions on how to run a successful blogging workshop, please let me know. Any comments on the Blogging 101 series I ran would also be welcome!

How can we change the system so that more teachers are rewarded for not taking the short cuts?

Chris’ post was inspired by video number 8 in Dan Meyer’s summer video posts–which have been excellent.

How To Keep The Ones We Love?

In response to one of the comments, Chris outlined what he does in his role as principal to improve the sustainability of the profession. You should really check out Chris’ comment in its entirety*, but basically he says that he;

• - buys extra teaching positions to reduce the student to teacher ratio
• - treats his teachers with an ethic of care
• - fosters collegiality and collaboration amongst his teachers

These things come at a cost–for example; reductions in non-teaching positions–so the choices are still difficult ones to make. My favourite quote from Chris’ comment is this;

In the end, I believe that high school teachers shouldn’t have more than 80 kids on their academic roster. Teachers should not teach 70% of their working day, because that guarantees that the diligent teacher is consigning themselves to 60 hour work weeks — minimum. Both those solutions mean spending a lot more money, but I think that’s what it takes.

30% Preparation Time–Where Do I Sign Up?

I can tell you that I would have loved to have 30% of every teaching day as prep

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time. In my last school, a grade 8 - 12 school, we ran a semester system. It meant that for one semester (half the year) you taught 4 out of 4 classes. For the other semester you taught 3 out of 4 classes and one block was for prep. A week into the new semester you could walk into the staffroom and tell right away who had prep and who didn’t. Those without prep, if they were even in the staffroom at all, had that tense wide eyed look you see on horses when they’re spooked. Those with prep had a whole different body language–sitting relaxed on the couches, joking with their colleagues.

When I had prep in a semester, life was pretty good. I would only have about 75 students to keep track of, and I would have the chance to overhaul some units and do some fresh stuff. I could collaborate with other teachers who had prep at the same time, or I could come in and watch another teacher’s lesson during my prep and learn from them. And when I got home, I could actually spend quality time with my own children. The end result was that my students had a teacher who was more relaxed, able to roll with it, better able accommodate their needs, and able to provide more challenging and engaging activities. Conversely, when I had no prep I was responsible for around 100 students and always seemed to be running fast just to stay in one place. I’d often scarf down lunch in my room while I prepared for the afternoon lessons–missing out on valuable time to connect with my colleagues.

Now maybe for Chris that 30% wouldn’t be all prep time, but I’m sure that it would be time that would allow teachers to do a better job and provide a better learning environment for their students.

Weighing In

If you teach in K-12 how much prep time in the teaching day do you get? What do you think would be the ideal? How else could we make the profession sustainable?

*I haven’t figured out yet how to make a link to a specific part of a webpage yet, so you’ll have to go to the post and browse the comments.

Definitely worth a look if you teach any chemistry, otherwise forward it on to a colleague who does!

Divergent Thinking

Robinson discusses divergent thinking, which he feels is a prerequisite for creative thinking. He refers to a longitudinal study where children were given a test on divergent thinking at ages 3 - 5 and then every 5 years for a number of years. Using the predetermined benchmark for “genius” in terms of divergent thinking, the results are startling, perhaps not in their trend, but in their magnitude. At ages 3 - 5 years 98% of the children scored at a genius level (I believe the sample size was 1500). It then rapidly dropped off (I can’t locate the exact figures) until at adulthood those scoring at the genius level represent only 3% of the population.

Schools Kill the Creativity in Children

Robinson argues that schools kill the creativity in children, not on purpose, but they do it none-the-less and they do it systematically. He argues that our current school system, based on the industrial revolution no longer works. The industrial revolution needed a large number of workers with basic literacy and numeracy to work in the factories, a smaller number of more literate and numerate people were needed to manage the workers, and the top level of the hierarchy were those who would attend universities and become the doctors, lawyers, and leaders of industry. Today’s societies and economies have different needs. We need creative thinkers to tackle the issues of increased urbanization, global warming, the incredible growth of the Earth’s human population…

We should be encouraging creative thinking, we should be nurturing the talents that children have, we should not be aiming for conformity.

So How Do We Do That?

I think that Robinson makes some very compelling points, but I’m struggling with the practical aspects. I would love to see a school where they are free to abandon standardized testing, teach to the talents of the students, and group students based upon pedagogically sound reasons (not merely based upon birth dates). Then there is the on-going debate of what information is necessary for all our citizens to learn. If a student’s talent is in visual arts, is there anything from the other subject areas that can be omitted so that they can fully pursue their talent? I do not want to come off as a naysayer–I really like Sir Robinson’s ideas, I’m just having difficulty visualizing the system he proposes. Does project based learning address some of the issues he discusses? Perhaps I’ll just have to read his books to get a better idea.

What Do You Think?

Do schools systematically kill creativity? Is there a way to revolutionize schools and education to promote creative thinking? How do you work toward it in your own sphere of influence?

As always, thanks for reading!

Image: Which one… ? by carf. Licensed under a Creative Commons, attribution non-commercial no derivatives license.

31 Day Comment Challenge Awards

On Monday, Michele Martin over at The Bamboo Project Blog announced the winners of the 31 Day Comment Challenge and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was a co-winner for the most comments on a wide range of blogs category. I tied with Bonnie Kaplan. Other winners were Carla Arena for the most high quality comments that thoughtfully reflect on the topic, Kevin of Dogtrax for the comments that provoke and promote the most learning, and Taylor for the student award.

Not In It For The Fame

I enthusiastically joined in the Comment Challenge back in April and was raring to go with the first task on May 1st. I knew there were prizes, but that’s not what motivated me. I just wanted to become a better blogger. Well, what a month May was! About part way through I knew that I was not going to be able to keep up, and that was OK. Part of the reason that I wasn’t able to keep up was the usual life things (kids, work, school…) but a big part of it was that I was finding all sort of new blogs and commenting like crazy. Through the challenge I got to meet a lot of great new people; heck I didn’t know any of the other Challenge winners prior to May, but through the challenge I’ve ‘met’ and conversed with all but one of them. I also enjoyed reading posts and comments from Kate Foy, Christine Martell, Ines Pinto, and Ken Allen who were some of the others nominated for Challenge awards.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

The Comment Challenge has really helped me to grow as a blogger and I want to thank the fantastic four who organised it; Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, Michele Martin and Kim Cofino. I know that I felt pretty busy during the challenge, but these wonderful women must have been going crazy, because they were everywhere–commenting, posting, and generally supporting participants. Thank you all so much! I also would like to thank Diane Hammond for nominating me for the award and all those who voted for me, read my posts, and especially those who took the time to comment on something I wrote.

Give It A Try!

If you didn’t participate in the 31 Day Comment Challenge, you can still access the tasks and the links to participants posts at the Comment Challenge wiki. If you can get a large group of people to do it at the same time, even better. Or you might be interested in Web 2.0 Wednesdays; an idea that sprouted from the Comment Challenge, and is organised by Michele Martin.

Images: Elvis Statue in Hawaii, by Hawaii. Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license. Not sure how to credit the Comment Challenge Logo, but here goes; the logo was created by Christine Martell of VisualsSpeak for the use of Comment Challenge participants.

I Believe…

• - every child deserves respect
• - every child should be valued
• - every child has strengths that need to be recognized
• - no one deserves to be told that they can’t do something or that they’ll never amount to anything
• - education must be relevant to the learner
• - assessment needs to be meaningful
• - students must be given the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon what they are learning
• - grades should not be used.  as a motivator.  as an end in themselves.
• - the focus should be on the process, not just the product
• - learning builds on prior knowledge; it is a teacher’s role to uncover that knowledge
• - our students are diverse so our teaching methods should be too
• - there is more than one way to demonstrate knowledge
• - the best education encourages wonder
• - a good education should empower students with the skills to be able to continue learning about the things that are important to them.

These are just a few of the things that I believe with respect to education.

The Thing About Blog Memes

I’m not a memeticist, but I’m not sure that this is really what Dawkins would call a meme.  I can’t help but feel that they are pretty similar to chain letters with the exceptions that

1. they rarely demand that you tag a required amount of people in a limited amount of time or else…   and
2. men are just as likely to participate in memes as women–unlike chain letters which seem to be the domain of women and girls

Tag–You’re It!

So it is with great trepidation that I tag the following people:
Kevin /dogtrax (Kevin’s Meandering Mind)

Sarah Stewart (Sarah’s Musings)

My trepidation is they will see this tag as an onerous task to add to their to-do lists.  If it catches your fancy–great, do it (I’m keen to find out what you believe!)  If not, that is ok too.

The Final Word

What do you believe is truly important with respect to education?  Write a post or leave a comment below.  It is an interesting exercise, to be sure!

Image: ‘Tag!  You’re It!’ by Lance and Erin licensed under creative commons attribution, non-comercial, no derivitives works 2.0 generic.