Learning is Change

Our district is starting to consider using student smart phones as a part of our overall device strategy. As we continue to think about leveraging this growing group of learning opportunities, I have gathered three ideas that I think are worth putting on the table (and not just our district table):

1. This is an amazing list of iphone/ipod touch apps that are split out by learning discipline. There is more than enough there to do a pilot in high schools and middle schools.
2. I have used Textmarks.com and Textthemob and a twitter backchannel (through texting, smart phones and the web) to great effect. Backchanneling should be a part of much of the PD and teaching practice in the future. (Putting texting into an assessment system isn’t quite ready yet, but I think it is going in that direction… it looks like you can already use sms for forums and communication via moodle: http://www.moodletxt.co.uk)
3. This video is a great example of what the future may look like in terms of mobile devices. It is youtube, so you will have to access it somewhere other than on a school network (depending on the school).
4. I also think that this blog is pretty much the coolest thing on the topic of cell phones in the classroom. Nice tools and a great focus on learning.

Let me know what other resources you are looking at in order to ensure that we can leverage these devices more in the future. And more than that, so we can actually have a strategy for how to do it.

I have been more and more interested with using twitter as my primary means of staying fully connected, including receiving important updates on topics that are close to me (via twitter search and Nambu), cultivating a network of people that I can go to at any time with any question and receive a thoughtful response, and finally receiving links that are relevant to all that I am thinking about.

While the first two are quite easy to accomplish using twitter as it is now envisioned, the last idea still requires a social bookmarking site that I monitor and parse through and a rss reader that takes quite a  little bit of tending. The fact is that I have time to scan links in twitter, whereas I can let my Google Reader account go on accumulating for a month before I get to many topics. So, I really wanted a way to make twitter do my feed reading and link aggregation for me.

Enter twitterfeed.

This little service allows me to feed all of my delicious network into a twitter account. It also let me feed my friend’s shared items in google reader into the same account. Any feed that I want to keep track of as a single stream that is pumped into my twitter client and is therefore also searchable and archivable as well.

If you are interested in following my delicious network via twitter, here is the link. Already some good stuff has come through.

Although I haven’t spoken much about the project itself on the blog, I am a Douglas County School District Digital Educator Mentor, which means that throughout the year I have been leading a small cohort of 6 teachers through some conversations about teaching and learning with technology (you can learn more about the project here). For our final meeting of the year (our 4th face-to-face), I have decided to do a podcast/screencast on Google Docs, Google Reader, and Twitter and ask for some reflection in the comments on this podcast. Here are the questions that they will be asked about our 3rd and 4th meetings. If you would like to take part in this reflective process, you can as well, simply by replying to these questions in the comments:

Meeting #3:

1. What have you hoped to achieve through this study group?
2. What has happened differently in the classroom or worksite as a result of what you are doing in the study group?
3. What resources are you using that have been most helpful?
4. What impact?
5. Which study group activities/strategies have been most helpful? (ie Article readings/reflections, hands on learning time, group discussions, project share time)
6. What would be your advice to a beginning study group?

Meeting 4:

(Finish the following statements as your first year of being a “Digital Educator” comes to a close):

1. We started…
2. Regarding school/classroom or worksite/office culture changes, we see….
3. Changes we are seeing in students, colleagues, etc are….

(as appropriate to you job category?

1. We have made progress in…
2. We hope to add value….

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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I really appreciate all of the talk recently about how a district can use strategy as a way forward with connected learning. The conversations around losing Web 2.0 tools (or losing their “free” status) is warranted, especially with how much we have come to rely on them for our daily learning fix.

The two that I am the most interested in, at the moment, are:

Miguel’s articulate questions:

• Can we sustain this solution if it goes district-wide and everyone starts to use it?
  
• In the time it takes from start (one school) to full implementation (everyone), will our technical support staff have the opportunity+time+desire to learn how to support it?
• Will Curriculum and Instruction Dept’s choose to embrace these solutions as part of our core mission, or it will have the equivalence of a firecracker in an open palm (noise but minimal impact)? And, even if it’s clasped tightly, will these technologies help or damage the organization?
• If “minimal impact” from the initiative results, what are the resulting consequences for staff morale, perception of negative innovation quotient (i just made that up with apologies if some else did already)?

And

Bud’s wonderful podcast about how long and where we need to keep student creations:

As a language arts teacher, I rarely asked for something that wasn’t precious. What kind of schools are we providing if all our students do is throwaway busy work?

And if we are only asking kids to do meaningless stuff, then I want that documented, too, so that we can change.

Our kids deserve that. And so do our societies.

While I think that both of these posts are much better at handling this conversation. Here are my two cents:

Web 2.0 has never been about free stuff for me. Wikispaces was just a way to understand the power of wikis. Blogger was a way to understand the power of blogs. Podomatic was just a way of understanding podcasting. I didn’t think that any of those places were “district solutions”, but I needed them in order to see what was worth keeping and what wasn’t.
I moved on to a hosted wordpress solution, with podpress plugin, and a Google site. All three have backup plans, exports galore and solid business plans behind them (i.e., me and Google)
We need people to try out “the free” in order to figure out “the good”. But, I don’t think that districts can do these kinds of pilots. Individual teachers and other innovators have the flexibility and the direct contact with students to try things out, but the responsibility (and the part that is missing) is the communication with “the district” after those pilots actually happen. When a teacher figures out what “the good” is, the district needs to be able to analyze and see if it is scalable, responsible, and frugal.
Strategy should come from research… in the classroom.

I have had multiple meetings this week around the topic of online assessments. Much to my surprise (well, not really), it looks like there is a lot of passion behind creating, hosting, and using assessments effectively. The needs of our district, as far as I can tell, are to have a single place to create all assessment items, tag these items with “essential learnings”, create sophisticated assessment banks,  administer them as best practice for interim assessments, and have all of the scores from these assessments feed into our Infinite Campus (our information management system). No small task.

However, I don’t have a good answer for this issue, mostly because online assessments have always been a pretty dry topic to me. My orientation is to do nearly all assessments as a part of an online project, something that is more authentic than a question bank can hold. So, here are the options that I have delved into so far:

1. http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ – Hot potatoes seems to be a very simple way to create and host assessments, but this needs to be held somewhere and it doesn’t allow for a lot of tagging or reporting as a native format.
2. Moodle Quizzes – The built in Moodle Quizzes are pretty robust, but they do not seem to be that portable outside of moodle, and I do not see the ability to categorize all questions and assessments as a part of a greater organization. Putting these together with Infinite Campus looks like it could be done with some integration, but I don’t think that it is worth it if the assessments can’t be analyzed for effectiveness and tagged with many different sorting abilities. (Although the tagging does look like it is coming in 2.0)
3. Ed Mastery (Seriously, this is the best link I could find) – This is the proprietary solution that our online school will be using because more than half of the assessments are already stored there. It has a lot of the functionality that we need, but it is somewhat of an unknown because the company does not have a community of users (as far as I can tell). And, it will have a license fee per student.
4. http://www.qtitools.org/ – This looks super promising in terms of getting all of the information created, stored, accessed, and assessed. However, it looks hard. I’m not sure that the majority of the people creating assessments would be able to tackle it.

So, the help I need is this:

Do you know of any other Assessment Engine that is out there that will cover all of the bases that I need? What direction should I bee looking in to make sure that I am researching every possible angle.

Although this post will not go extremely in depth into the pedagogical implications of twitter, it will take a look at a new Twitter application called Nambu and explore whether or not it is getting us closer to a view of twitter that has less and less to do with friends, and more and more to do with search.

So, for the past few months, I have been explaining twitter to those who are uninitiated, as the best search engine that you aren’t using. I describe how google is a search of the past, and how twitter searches what is happening right now. We go into how that can be good and bad, and we eventually come around to a discussion of “what would you look for if you believed that at any given moment someone was struggling with the exact same problem you are right now?”

Up until now, I have also recommended that people use Tweetdeck or Tweetgrid in order to do those kinds of topic searches, but since I saw Nambu on Read/Write web the other day, I have been truly astonished at how good it is at compiling all of my searches into one space.

I can type them in one after another and then I can monitor them in isolation or in one stream. What this means is that even someone without a twitter account, can have a single stream of every topic that they could care about. While this isn’t a good sign for adding to the network, it is truly a great step forward for people who aren’t early adopters.

(Reading this back, I’m not sure that I am making a whole lot of sense. However, please go and check the program out (if you are on a Mac) and see for yourself if you think it would help more people to see the value in connected learning.)

In a post from a few days ago, a reader of this blog asked a very simple question:

I would ask why are they less willing and who are the “they”? You often refer to asking the right questions and so I would encourage you to ask Who and Why before How.

This was in reference to my need for non-power-users to pilot the online learning spaces that I am creating. So, Jamie, I would like to outline exactly who I am looking for whenever I plan a pilot for a new learning space. I would like to do so in the form of a classified ad, just for fun.

Wanted: Beginning Teacher-Learner for long-term learning commitment

1. Must love students and all of their quirks. Must love talking to them and wanting to make sure that they are getting the most out of their education. Must know that they have something to teach you.
2. Should be afraid of at least one button on the computer.
3. Not having administrative rights to your school computer, a plus.
4. Doesn’t mind engaging in active reflection on personal habits and teaching habits.
5. Must have taught or been taught before the invention of computerized grading programs.
6. E-mail should be a second language.
7. Needs to be comfortable asking questions.
8. Is not immediately interested in blogs, wikis, twitter, or social networks.
9. Finds traditional PD boring, but has had at least one good PD experience in the last 2 years.
10. Must read for pleasure.

These are the factors I am most looking for in teachers who are going to push the limits of online spaces. They are wise enough to know that not everything is important, yet they are still thirsty for the knowledge of how to do things better. I would like to turn it back on you, Jamie. What do you look for in partners that push you to be better?

I was at a restaurant this morning with my family and my wife’s
fingers were getting stickier and stickier from the leaky maple syrup
container. After a while she started looking for some water to wash
them off with. Her water cup was empty but the condensation on the
outside was still there so she used it to clean her hands.
 
I’m not sure why this sparked something in me, but the act of her
using only the water that was on the outside of the glass made me
think of what is happening in many school districts that I see around
me.
 
We can see the water, the life giving liquid inside, but we have to
settle for the small beads collecting around the outer edge.
 
We know that the bandwidth that is needed to fully share with one
another the media, ideas and resources of our district is available.
It exists for businesses and other entities out there, but in
education we are stuck with the runoff from those large high speed
pipes.
 
We need a straw, but we are stuck licking at the glass.
 
(The preceding metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but I did want to
get it out there just in case someone else found it useful.)

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