The second week of Tech20Tuesday is in the books.  Yesterday afternoon we looked at Slideshare, an on-line tool for sharing presentations and other documents.  Think of it as a “YouTube for PowerPoints“.

Tech20Tuesday is our district’s latest initiative to support teachers in embedding technology within their learning environments.  With almost 800 teachers spread in a variety of schools, many over an hour away from the city, it’s sometimes a challenge to get mentors and coaches on the ground to support both teachers and students in 21st century learning on a regular basis.  We also recognize that teachers are busy, far too busy to give up large chunks of time in after-school PD.

The whole premise of Tech20Tuesday is that, by utilizing the connectivity of the web, we can meet teachers wherever they happen to be; school, home, the local coffee shop! We are using SMART Technologies Bridgit conferencing software, which is bundled within the Notebook software, to share a common presentation screen and audio/video.  The idea is, in twenty minutes, to show teachers a new tool, how it works and an example or two of how they and their students might utilize it within their classroom. No huge demand on time or effort.

After two weeks, the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.  Each week we have had 30-40 teachers “attend” virtually.  Some are individuals, but many are in groups. One school, located almost an hour outside the city, provides coffee and muffins for their staff who gather together (10 or so) each week for a bit of learning and professional talk.  Through technology, we are able to support their journey.

Oh yeah, then there’s my son’s Grade 11 Biology teacher.  My son came home Friday and noted he had a test. His teacher, who had attended the initial session on Wordle, used the tool to create a word cloud on the test, from which students could pick terms.

While the idea isn’t a walk-off homer, I would count Tech20Tuesday as a lead-off double at least!

Sometime in the last couple of days I was listening to a CBC Radio interview with a gentleman who was talking about blood-cell sized implants that will be used manage personal health issues.  He says that these are about 30 years away, when all of my students will be younger than I am now. His contention is that these tools will be so powerful that the first thousand year old is now walking the streets of a town near you.  It’s hard to imagine – and fraught with huge social issues that will demand much debate – but so was sending a man to the moon or any number of technology-based advances.

Creating global citizens prepared to work, play and learn in a world ten, twenty or fifty years from now, a world that we can barely imagine, is a huge undertaking.  The move to cloud computing will make PC’s – in their present form – obsolete in the next decade.  What will this mean? Why do we continue to “teach” computer-based software in our classrooms, somehow confident that it is preparing our students for their future?  Why do our teachers feel that by integrating PowerPoint into their teaching they are somehow creating a different breed of young person?

I still think it comes down to three critical questions when it comes to our children’s learning; what are we doing every day to a) create information artisans who are able to locate, harvest, assess, connect, create and communicate information in a digital, networked form, b) support them in developing and managing their own personal learning networks and c) help them understand and develop their own digital footprint, developing and managing their own personal brand.

On Monday, I’ll be working with language teachers at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ve been asked to center the conversations around the power of connecting students using web tools – I’ll focus on wikis although there are lots of other tools available – to connect students. Who better to learn about the world from than a fellow young person.  Through incorporating a foreign language study, it becomes an even more powerful tool or learning.

I am excited about the possibilities here. Properly designed and managed global projects address all three questions. Our students need more opportunities to work collaboratively with students around the world. While Cisco isn’t the only solution, they do have great commercials. This one captures the essence of students passion for connecting.

If you’re a teacher, are your students connecting, and not just connected?

Let’s get one thing up front – the older I get, the more I question whether or not spending the rest of my days in the cold snow belt of Eastern Canada is what I want to do.  My body starts to seize in October, and usually doesn’t thaw until late April.  For those six months, I am constantly sore and cold, shoveling is a chore and travel is a pain.  Today just reinforced the point. I am not going to go quietly into winter!

This evening I write from a hotel is Bangor, Maine, watching a major nor’easter – think the movie The Perfect Storm with snow – blast outside the hotel window. I am on my way to Newport, Rhode Island where I am slated to work with their language teachers on Monday as part of staff development day. I was excited to be asked, and I am looking forward to spending the day in great conversations. The getting there part…well, it’s turning into a journey. I got up this morning and hit the road, hoping to beat the storm. If weather permitted, I would have driven all the way today, but no luck. I got as far as Bangor

where self-preservation forced me off the road. I have a flight booked to leave here tomorrow at noon. I just hope it leaves. I had hoped to be able to drive all the way today and not fly, but right now the sanest option is to fly.

It’s days like this that I am extremely jealous of my colleagues teaching in international schools in more temperate locales.  My wife and I have talked of taking a couple of years at some point and heading overseas to work internationally. This might encourage us to move even quicker.

Until then, guess I’ll have to settle with the knowledge that it’s only 56 days until we find our warmth. The only white I want to see will be the sand on the beach!

I have truly enjoyed the last four months of being back in the classroom.  The opportunity to be part of a school community and work directly with students all day is why I became a teacher.  It’s about collegiality and learning.

There are, however, many things I miss about my old job as a technology mentor for the district.  My job was nomadic and flexible, with my primary goal to support teachers and students in embedding technology in the teaching and learning process. It allowed a great deal of freedom with regards to place and time and my vision for learning.  The feeling of isolation, being out of the loop and ineffective in promoting change on the larger scale has been frustrating at times.

Part of the issue is I came back to a technology-rich school, where teachers (at least those that are motivated to) have created a culture of connected learning. In short, I can provide a limited amount of support, but many are self-sustaining. That’s why I was moved to start an after-school PD series, which I tagged tech20tuesdays. In short, each Tuesday we had a 20 minute PD offering directly after school. We would look at a particular tool or idea and explore how you could use it in a classroom with students, all in 20 minutes.  While the uptake wasn’t quite what I had hoped for, interest and feedback was sufficient to encourage me to widen the net.

That’s why after Christmas we’ll be moving tech20tuesdays district-wide. Unfortunately, our district has almost 1000 teachers spread over hundreds of kilometres, not conducive to short after-school get-togethers. However, what we do have is a good technology base, a base we’ll leverage to connect teachers as learners.

The plan is in progress, but here’s the jist. Using SMART Technologies Bridgit conferencing software, we’ll connect from my classroom to any teacher who wants to “attend” from their computer. They don’t need to be at a SMART Board, just a laptop – which they all have! They can be at school, at home or even the local coffee shop! Learning can be from anywhere they have connectivity.  As various levels end their school days at different times, we’ll begin at 3:40 pm (high schools end at 3:30) and end at 4:00 pm. Still 20 minutes, same basic idea. Bridgit will allow audio and screen sharing, with an embedded chat for back channel conversations. It’s powerful stuff!

While I hope that many teachers are able to benefit from this, this is purely a selfish endeavor. I need to connect, to feel like I am having a voice in promoting change and doing my part in promoting a new vision of schools and a now story of learning. This is just another pathway to that end.

While we will be promoting this amongst teachers in the district, theoretically we could have teachers join from anywhere in the world. In fact, one thing I want to explore before the end of the year is to tap into my PLN and invite a guest to share with us, a guest from another school, another province or another country.

Any volunteers?

Photo Credit: Congratulations!, uploaded to Flickr under a creative commons license by Clara S.

One of the three critical questions I think we need to be asking ourselves about our practice as educators is what are we doing in our classes everyday that assists students to develop and manage their own personal learning networks?

Part of the answer to this question is modeling the power of a connected learning environment on a regular basis.  This can take many forms. Today, in Mr. Gellert’s Grade 7 Social Studies class, that meant a short video conference with Ms. Holmes’ class at Fort Worth Academy in Texas. Many questions were asked and answered, from the weather and the environment (the connection was part of a large Biomes project) to fashion and school uniforms.  I think the students were suprised to learn they share much in common, despite their geography.  It is truly a small world.

Working, learning and playing in the 21st century will require, more than anything else, for us to understand the power of being connected and the need to develop and nurture our own personal networks.  Learning in the 21st century is, more than ever, about the power of the story.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

I love conferences.  But even as someone who has made a presentation or ten at various events (admittedly, I get way too excited about sharing ideas in any format), it’s usually the conversations outside the presentation rooms that count.  However, whatever your motivation, the rising cost of travel (and it ain’t easy to get anywhere from New Brunswick by plane!), shrinking school and district budgets and personal time/money crunches leaves less and less opportunities for teachers to develop networks face to face.

With this cruch, on-line professional development opportiunities are becoming more and more prevalent, not to mention necessary.  Many commercial operations are offering fee for learning opportunities to connect, but the grassroots, volunteer-driven movement of the annual K-12 Online Conference (click on tag in right side-bar) far exceeds anything offered by the corporate world.  Whether it’s due to the commitment of the educators involved in the organization or the wide-spread viewpoints and special interests of the volunteer presenters, K-12 Online offers a valuable community-based opportunity for learners to connect.

It all starts next Monday with a keynote by international educator Kim Cofino (with whom I co-managed last years 1001 Flat World Tales collaborative writing project).  I am especially excited to hear what Kim has to say and follow up (hopefully) in the post-keynote discussions with other educators.

It’s all about the conversations – whether it’s on-line or face to face.  Maybe I’ll gather a few friends around the old radio set (aka laptop) and tune in with some cold ones and pretzels.

Let the learning begin.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, k12online, kimcofino

We’ve been busy talking about digital footprints and our on-line presence, present and future the past few classes.  My student intern just asked the class “does a digital footprint happen by accident?”

That got me to thinking – how does my digital footprint develop?  Of course, we know we play a large role in developing and managing our own profiles, but how do we begin to assess the power of what we write/publish?  How far can it reach?

We can create our own portfolios, blogs, websites, etc and shape our presence through these on-line presences, but is that all there is to it?  Can we just avoid a Digital Footprint by not posting anything? What about the google full of other data out there with our name on it that we don’t have as much control over? What about the tagged photos in facebook? What about information posted by organizations of which we are a part?  Obviously, as more and more information becomes available in digital form and search tools/aggregators become even more powerful management tools, it will be even more imperative to have the skills necessary to assess and manage our own profile.

As an example of the power of the Internet to bring our feelings and ideas together, my student intern is showing the class We Feel Fine,  a new website that aggregates, connects and mashes together the plethora of feelings and emotions posted in the billions of blogs around the world.  Amazing.

So, what do our kids need to know about this power of the web?  How can we best prepare them for an increasingly connected world where they will be visible at a click of the mouse?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Photo Credit: Então, Uploaded to flickr on November 12, 2009 by Malu Green!

It was just around 8:20 this morning. I had just fired up my laptop and turned on twitter, skype and my other connection tools, but didn’t check to see who was on yet.  I was half listening to the morning announcements and then I heard it, the familiar sound of the skype call.  Someone was calling me, at this hour of the morning.

Without looking I answered, figuring it was one of my colleagues from Asia or Oceania looking for some info, but lo and behold the voice was a more familiar one. Being east of the east (the Eastern Time Zone that is), we rarely see anyone up and around from North America – most are still dozing or going through their morning routine.  However, there is one time zone even more east than Atlantic, and that belongs to our wonderful friends in Newfoundland and Labrador.

This morning, it was that province that beckoned me.  I recognized the first voice as that of my teaching colleague Keith Pender, who also happens to be a colleague from the softball community as well through his post as the Umpire-in-Chief for the province.  He teaches at a small rural community about an hour south of St. John’s – the provincial capital.

And then I heard them – his students.  He had promised them an audience using their new Mac computer in the class, and he delivered.  For the next three minutes I provided them with an authentic audience of one. While the audience might be small – it was not insignificant.  They were delighted to play the new song they were learning for me, and I was delighted to listen.

This is exactly the kind of opportunities our kids need to address the three critical questions (see previous post on this here) we/they need to address to prepare them for their future; how do we prepare them to be information artisans, how do they learn to develop personal learning networks and how to develop/manage their digital footprint. By connecting with me, Keith was able to model for his students how his networks allow him (and them) to learn, the role of an authentic audience and how music (and art and photos and video and…) all have a critical role to play in the information landscape of the 21st century – rivalling text as their tool.

For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to meet and engage with some wonderful young people through a colleague – and a gentle reminder of why it is we do what we do.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Another in the installments of free wifi spotting.  I am at the airport in Ottawa on my way home through Toronto.  YOW doesn’t have free wifi, but – if you agree to fill out a brief survey – the airport will give you 15 minutes of free connectivity.  Guess I’ll have to type fast!

Andy Warhol said that everyone had their 15 minutes of fame.  Guess this is mine.

On Monday of this week we awoke to news that vandals had done significant damage to the cenotaph, the monument in my town that honours our veterans and serves as the central focus for Remembrance Day ceremonies.  This just two days before Remembrance Day itself.  In a smallish, close-knit town next to a large military base, this was a significant event.

I don’t have a significant record of military service to honour within my own family, but my wife’s father (deceased) and her mom were both involved in the war effort – her dad as a Canadian servicemen in WWII and her mom working on the home front as a young lady in her native England. She later met her husband to be and immigrated to Canada as a War Bride.

Today, because I am travelling, I missed the service.  In retrospect, if I had of been thinking, I would have attempted to be in Ottawa earlier for the national service – something I have always wanted to do.  With the damage to the cenotaph, it seemed particularly important to show my respect and express my thanks.  Now comes news of the tremendous outpouring of support for the veterans as the community rallies to repair the cenotaph.  I am always proud to be from Fredericton, but even moreso today.

To all of you out there, past and present, from Canada and other democractic nations from around the world, who fought for our freedom, thank you.  We will remember.

Photo Credit: Fredericton Cenotaph, Uploaded to Flickr on August 15, 2009 by Ed Corey

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