All Educational Twitter Chats in One Calendar

Update [05.20.2011]: Sarah Kaiser made one of these too, and it may be more up to date than the one below.

I few weeks back I recognized a need for all of the hashtags and twitter chats to have a single calendar that could be added to my own Google Calendar. I looked around for such a thing, but all I found was a really nice list of every chat with dates and times. I have compiled this list into a Google Calendar that I would like to share.

Here is what I would love to happen:

1. Other folks would comment on this blog post and ask for me to share the calendar with them directly so that they can add their own educational chats and information (including links and documents that might be important) about the chats in the description section of each chat.
2. Anyone who wants to, can add this calendar to their Google Calendars so that they can stay up on when these great educational events are happening each week.
3. We share this calendar (with all of its contributions) to any new teacher, administrator, parent or student that gets interested in the educational conversations happening on twitter.

If all of those things happened, I believe the communities we are all trying to create will have a much better understanding of what the entire community is up to. We will be able to pay attention when it is time to do so, and learn from one another much more easily.

Without further ado, here is how you can access the calendar:

Embed:

Here is the code for you in case you want to embed it too:

<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?title=Educational%20Twitter%20Chats&mode=WEEK&height=500&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23060D5E&ctz=America%2FDenver” style=” border-width:0 ” width=”600″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>

HTML Page:
Use this if you want to see only the calendar without adding it to your own Google Calendars.

Calendar ID:
Copy and Paste this into your Google Calendar to add the whole calendar: 9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg@group.calendar.google.com

iCal Address:
Use this one if you want to add the calendar to another program besides Google Calendar (iCal, Outlook, etc.)

Please let me know if I can provide this calendar in any other format. I’m looking forward to the conversation about the conversation.

Too busy to work on workflow

The other day I was working with the principal of our online school on
creating a workflow for contacts, email, and calendar that would allow
her to add, read, and create from anywhere, meaning more productivity
for her.
 
I am pretty convinced that we need to be addicted to creating a better
workflow for ourselves, but that is a longer blog post. The reason for
this one was that Chris Lehman left a comment on my last post
expressing that he had a similar idea of people who were just too
busy. His post is right here:
 
And here is my comment on it:
http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?url=archives/361-Hardest-Working-Teacher-Syndrome.html
 
I recognize that this happens everywhere. I love that you have a
better name for it, though. (The hardest working teacher in the
building syndrome)
 
I know that you were talking about teachers when you wrote it, but I
really think that admin and IT need this post quite a bit.
 
The lack of help, support, and sharing that goes on because we are too
busy is truly troubling. Taking time to recognize that busy (or hard
working) is no excuse for not sharing what you are working on or
taking time to see what others are working on.
 
I think recognizing that an addiction to finding a workflow that
actually works is not optional anymore. If a teacher or admin is “too
busy”, their workflow is probably out of whack. That doesn’t get
talked about enough in our conversations. We just assume that others
aren’t duplicating efforts all over the place because we don’t.
 
If everything (our learning) is connected, nothing is out of place,
meaning that we don’t have to add more, we just make it flow better.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

“Hope Online” Professional Development 11.14.08

Do Not turn off your cell phones and laptops.
If you have them, use them.

(Throughout this workshop, you can ask questions via text message by texting hopeonline and your question to 41411. You can also add to our questions without a cell phone by going to http://www.textmarks.com/HOPEONLINE)

I am not here today in order to introduce to you a brand new initiative that will require extensive amounts of training and make your life busier before you see any real benefit. I am also not here today to say that there is any one tool or strategy for making the ways in which you work actually work.

Rather, I am here to ask you a lot of questions, mostly about what you are spending the most time with in your job. What are those things that take away from what you would rather be doing, the rewarding experiences of working with kids and other adults who are working with kids.

In order to do this, let’s get one thing straight. Information is infinite. Attention is finite.

You gather a seemingly insurmountable amount of information every single day from e-mails, voicemails, web sites, student data paperwork and many other sources. It can be even more daunting to think that there is more information out there about how to organize that information. With your attention stretched so thin, it is hard to think that there are ways of getting any of it back. We are still going to try, and for the most part, we are going to look at solutions that are already in your workflow.

Well, I would like to present you with a few possibilities for a different way of organizing information.

The first is I would like to use my voice to listen to my e-mail, create e-mail, put an event on my calendar, send myself a reminder, create a text, and post to my blog. While this service has a name, I would much rather you think about the strategies that I am using in order to create more time for other things. Because I am able to use my voice to do these things, I can make efficient use of my drive time (of which, there is a lot).

Dial2Do – A way to use your voice to get things done on your cell phone.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to next highlight the use of short messages to capture information. Many times, I need to be able to capture information from myself and others, but there is no time in order to send out an e-mail. I need to be able to capture it now. So I send a text message to a service that aggregates the information for me and for everyone else who I invite:

TextMarks – A way to both capture information and share information through SMS.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I use e-mail a lot. Well, perhaps that is an understatement. I am available by e-mail about 20 hours of any given day. With that in mind, I would like to be able to use e-mail in order aggregate archive the most important things that I am sending out. I want to be able to attach anything I want and have the archive understand it.

Posterous – The e-mail blog that don’t even have to sign up for.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Now, if I am on my computer and I want to capture information on a topic. I want to capture it as I am doing my research, not go back afterwards and document what is going on. I want to be able to simply highlight text and pictures and have them all simply show up in a webpage that I can e-mail to someone or share with somone for them to add to.

Google Notebook – Collect text, pictures, and movies from webpages in order to be shared later with others.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Well, what if I want to show others exactly where to go on a webpage using my voice. I would like to guide people through a series of webpages that I think are important. I want to do this in less than 5 mintues too.

FlowGram - Create a screencast of webpages and archive it to send to others.

An example of using this trategy to create something.

Now I would like you to figure out what you would like to be able to do in terms of aggregating and storing information. Brainstorm things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you gather information now and how you would like to change that to be less attention heavy and more information heavy.

Now that we have all of our information gathered and stored, we will want to collaborate and talk about that information. The easiest way to do that is to meet face-to-face, but for much of the time, that requires significant driving and serious scheduling.

So, I want to come together with a few others to talk something out. I want to be able to see, hear, and write with them. I don’t want to have to set up log in to anything. I just want to hit a power button.

Tokbox – Always on Video Conferencing.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to work on the same spreadsheet with someone else so that I don’t have to send e-mails of the same document back and forth and get lost in the versioning. I would also like to be able to have information be entered into the spreadsheet via a form that others can fill out so that I don’t have to do as much data processing tasks.

Google Docs – A truly collaborative version of office

An example of using this strategy to create something.

NaNoWriMo(2)

Finally, I really want all of this stuff to be accessible in one place. I would really like to not have to remember exactly what all of these sites are. I just want one place to go to where it makes sense to find all of these things. Almost like a well-maintained professional development environment for hope.

Our IQity classroom - A one stop shop for learning tools, collaboration, and further professional development.

Now I would like you to figure out what YOU want collaboration to look like at Hope. Brainstorm
things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you collaborate now and how you would like to change that to be less
attention heavy and more information heavy.

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.

The Perfect Online Professional Development Community

I have really been thinking a lot about how to create an online community for all of the teachers in my school district who are as passionate about technology integration, reflection and collaboration as I am. The way that it stands, I feel so isolated in my quest for new and more effective ways of teaching. I know this is not the case, that there are probably hundreds of teachers who feel the same way, but that isn’t really much comfort when I don’t know who they are and I have no way of contacting them. I almost feel like I need to send out a classified ad: Young passionate teacher seeks the same in order to learn and collaborate about technology and pedagogy.

I can’t think of a better way to ask for a community than to create one and hope that other people join up. I have already run this idea by a few, more experienced, Edubloggers, Bud Hunt and Karl Fisch. They have both responded pretty well to the idea and are willing to help me get it off of the ground.

After my initial e-mails to my administration and these two great teachers/resources, I thought that there would be no way of stopping such a mammoth idea. My principal loved it, and the feeder area coordinator thought it would work well with some of our other goals. But last night, I received an e-mail from the Web Services manager of my district. In it he said that I should consider using two semi-crippled technologies (Firstclass and SchoolCenter) that teachers in my district are already fairly comfortable with (and the district has already paid for). I say that these are crippled technologies because they have real holes in their capabilities. They just can’t do everything that I want to do with this community.

Even with this minor setback, I have decided that I will not compromise (at least initially) my vision of the “Perfect Online Professional Development Community.” I would like to see just how collaborative, easy to use, scalable, social, and reflective I can make this experience for other teachers. So, without any further explanation, I would like to unveil what I think are the essential pieces of a new generation professional learning community.

A central portal will give you access to the following (I am thinking about using protopage):

1. A master blog that would guide discussion.
2. Blogroll
3. Recent Blog Articles (a la SuprGlu)
4. Archived Blog Articles (in a newsletter type format)
5. A Google Earth Mash-Up of all of the school represented in the community
6. Bios of the teacher bloggers (if they wish to include them) done in a social way so that collaboration is easier (an Elgg.org-type personal page)
7. A calendar for event planning (Skypecasts, Classroom Demonstration Webcasts, Classroom Picture Flickr Stream)

The other aspects of the community that will not be directly shown on the portal’s front page except for simply linking to them:

1. A Q+A section for both teaching questions and technical help questions (Ning.com has a great set-up for something like this).
2. A Digg-Style Article/Website recommender.
3. A Wiki for success stories of technology integration or improved practice (a little like David Warlick‘s Telling the New Story Wiki)
4. Walk-Throughs (screencasts) for how to create blogs, collaborate, etc.
5. A way of dealing with comments both attached to and unattached to their original posts. (co.mments.com has a pretty great strategy)
6. A professional development bookshelf (akin to either this one or this one)
7. A way of signing up for an e-mail RSS system for new posts (most teachers check their e-mail religiously)
8. A belief statements wiki about technology or teaching in general for certain collaborating members or individuals (this could be a running list of belief statements and/or a running list of questions that these belief statements beg to be answered. I also like the idea of using standpoint.com somehow).
9. A system for sharing lesson plans and ideas (both formatted and unformatted) including a collaborative document center.
10. A cross-school project starter (partnering up similar teaching styles)

Questions I still have about how to get this done:

1. How do we get as many different positions represented in this community (principals, core teachers, librarians, elective teachers, etc.)
2. Should we try to protect anonymity on the blogs?
3. Just how much do most people know about these technologies? Will it be like starting from scratch for most people? And if so, should I send out a formal (or informal) survey about these ideas (What have you done in your classrooms with technology? Do you like to create you own lessons? How much do you enjoy reflection? Do you want feedback on your classroom ideas from other teachers? How worried are you that this is going to take too much of your free time? How many of you already blog?)?

Well, that is pretty much it. I would like to make this project as appealing and voluntary as possible, so that everyone who is in the community has a lot of buy-in. Let me know what you think of this grand scheme. What is possible and what is not possible?