Response to Paul (on PD must be better)

This post is in response to a comment on my last post which went something like this:

As I read your list I went back and forth agreeing with you.

Do you ever question if it is not how we do PD but the audience that we have hired and put into the “seats?”

Do you think we could stop “doing PD” if we simply hired a different caliber of professionals?

Do you worry that we have to “give(!!!) context, meaning and perspective” to teachers?

Here is my response:

I do think that it has to do with who we are talking to and what messages they will accept. However, I really do believe that if given enough reason to change, everyone will. I believe in the power of people to see something great and to become a part of it.

I also think that we could stop “doing PD” once people start thinking about networks as PD, but I still think we need to give people time away from their classroom responsibilities to actually create that network and to do their learning. We are passionate about learning what is “new”, but not everyone is. Others have to be given the time to do so, even if they are able to be a networked learner. They need to have the space to network.

All learners need to be given a space that has context, meaning and perspective. While I may create a lot of the context for what I do, I live it every day. I cannot expect people who do not blog to understand the context of blogging. I cannot expect people who do not use twitter to understand the context and meaning of a twitter conversation. And, I cannot expect people who do not use wikis and revision history to create a perspective to gain that perspective by doing anything other than actually using wikis and looking at revision histories.

When I say give, I believe that I am giving an experience. The experience is what matters to me. It is what will allow them to start creating context, meaning and perspective. Nothing else will do this and expecting them to create that experience on their own is just a little to harsh for me.

Technorati Tags: learning, pd, response, online, elearning, professional development, paulbogush

New Responsibility

I was thinking about waiting until I got a little further into the
project to start blogging about it, but since I made the choice to
start blogging daily, I have really found that this forum let’s me
think through all of the things that I need to.
 
So the new responsibility is this: I have been put in charge of
administrating multiple moodle installations in our district. The
reason why this new charge I have been given is so strange to me is
that up until 2 months ago, the only “official” moodle installation in
our district was at a high school in parker, which I had little to do
with.
 
 The reason for the shift is nothing short of an economic and
pedagogical perfect storm. Our district had slowly been building the
capacity for more and more teachers to start asking for a way of
teaching and engaging with their students online, and with the failure
of our bond election, the only choice for an LMS was to have someone
who was already working in open source to implement and support a
solution like moodle.
 
The best part is, however, that no one I have talked to thinks that we
are settling for something. From all of the initial conversations, all
stakeholders believe that professional development, online learning,
and blended learning fit well within a vision of moodle that includes
outside assessments and google apps for communication.
 
I guess the only reason for this post is to ask for advice. If you
were asked to design and implement learning environments for an online
school, a professional development program, and a blended model
(online and in centers/schools) using moodle, what would you make sure
to do (or not do)?
 
While I have a definite vision for the way forward, I am not the
smartest person in the room (considering that I have no idea how big
this room is). I want to know more… Always more.

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Two things I have learned from blogging

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail that I sent out earlier to a group of people in my district who are interested in using social media to get all people within the district to be a part of the decision making process (good idea, if you ask me):

The two key things that I have learned from blogging for the last 5 years are as follows:

1. You have to build credibility and authority by joining the conversation from a place of almost no authority and credibility. In the online world, your title doesn’t mean much. You have to build respect by creating a volume of content that just can’t be ignored, making sure that it is relevant and meaningful to some audience, no matter how small.
2. You have to make your voice searchable. Tag the heck out of your contributions on twitter, delicious, and your blog. If people can’t find your side of the story, they will simply assume that someone else’s is all that exists.

A question

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

The On Button Archive

While I was doing some searching over at Tweetgrid (my absolute favorite way of looking at twitter in real-time), I came across these notes from my Educon 2.1 Session, The On Button: Instant and Always on Collaboration.

I figure that now is as good a time as any to put up the archive of that presentation and to highlight just how good Live Blogging can be. Sarah, a teacher in “midcoast Maine”, did a wonderful job of capturing the questions and ideas from the conversation that we had at Educon.

I love the idea of being able to archive not only the video of a conversation, but also the conversation that happened about the conversation. Here is a list of links that also were talking about this session. I can’t wait to hear where else this session goes:

1. List of Sessions
2. Twitter Feed for the session
3. The original Wiki page

What I am more interested in, though, is how are you aggregating the conversations that surround a learning event? How can we make sure that the supports for our sychcronous environments do not go by the wayside.

Connecting is the hardest…

Connecting is the hardest thing to do in learning. If you don’t believe me, ask a student how many times they have received meaningful feedback today. Ask a teacher how many parents know exactly what goes on in their classes. I want to do this connection every single day and I’m setting up ways to do so. I’m very excited about them, but I was out buying a house today, so I will be blogging about them soon. I guess stay tuned.

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Twitpress

I was having a little trouble with getting wordpess to update my twitter account when I post from my phone. I think that things should just work, but apparently even wordpress 2.7 (which nay the only blogging platform I will ever need) doesn’t understand the need for instant twitter acknowledgment
 
Let’s see if this works any better..
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Guest Teaching 12.05.08

Cores 1-4:

1. Discuss-on:
2. Brainstorm ways in which you would like to “reframe” A Christmas Carol:
3. 
4. Well, let’s talk about how we will be reframing A Christmas Carol using animation and microblogging.
5. First, XtraNormal will allow us to completely create the scene, choose the characters and their actions, and even add background music, all without having to record a single video frame or sound file. Let’s take a look.
6. Next, Edmodo will allow us to have some conversation around what we are creating and learning. It will allow us to all think out loud without having our thoughts become too entangled (or having it get deafeningly loud in here). It is the way that we will honor the process of creation and not just the product at the end.
7. The conventions of microblogging are as follows:

• Write down exactly what you are choosing to do with your project (which scene you are using, which characters, etc.)
• Write down why you are making the choices you are making (why put Scrooge on a beach, etc)
• Write down questions that you have about your project (why is Scrooge so angry; does he have to be in our reframed version?)
• Reply as much as you can to others.

As for the requirements for the movie, please use the following guidelines:

• Have no fewer than 5 dialog exchanges.
• Do not copy and paste words from the book/play. Rethink the dialog so that it is appropriate for the scene that you have created.
• Block out the entire scene before you click Action!
• Don’t forget to have tell your microblogger what you are thinking.

I’m holding my son…

I’m holding my son right now and talking to my WordPress blog and I am considering whether or not this is going to be a great way for me to start blogging regularly again and thinking a lot of different things in order to get my mind out there and produce something.

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Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:

Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.