Do you find it easier to share resources and ideas with like-minded people in your pln (personal learning network) than with colleagues in the next classroom who may not be as active online?

During a visit to the magnet school “The Science Leadership Adademy” in Philadelphia in April 2010 Bill Gates said that schools need to get better at spreading best practices. How will you share what you have learned at BLC10 with colleagues in your school?

I will be presenting on this topic at Masscue in October and would love to have your input if you would be willing to briefly share your strategies using the google form below. I will consolidate any responses and share them right back with you. Thanks in advance…

Picture credit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thaiqn/2870888905/

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I’m running out of post it notes…

I was inspired to finally read tribes after stumbling into an elluminate session with Seth Godin hosted by  Steve Hargadon. The archive of the session can be found here

In the last paragraph of the book, Seth asks “spread the word”. I intend to hand it on to my 17 year old as pre- college reading. In the acknowledgements and story of how Tribes came about, Seth credits the work of Cory Doctorow and Hugh MacLeod.  My son has enjoyed both of these writers already. He flew through Little Brother and  devoured “Ignore Everybody” in the car on the way home from a college visit. Yes, I get the irony. Hope you do too.

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Capturing ideas has been on my mind lately. I use evernote when working, but I often get the best ideas away from my computer either while on a walk or on a bike ride. I usually have my phone with me, I often message pictures to evernote, but I would love it if I could leave myself quick voice messages.

This email, dropped into my mailbox today. I have one question. Could it be any simpler?

So, I have created a drop and have the link to that in Evernote. No more lost and forgotten ideas.

Check out the message dropio left at http://drop.io/maynewsletter

Uses for the classroom

1. Calls from field trips

2. Use as a homework reminder

3. Use as a parent message

4. Record student responses to a special event or discussion and then embed calls on your class blog or webpage

5. Provide a daily class update

6. Have students call in with their project idea assignments

7. Check out this demo drop showing how a teacher can use drop.io as part of their work  flow at http://drop.io/mrdavidson

Below I embedded the voice message from that demo drop to show one of the many ways you can distribute drop content.

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After a tip off on twitter (thanks @thomasdaccord) I found out Daniel Pink was on a quickie book tour and was going to be at Borders in Boston Wed Jan 6th at 1pm.

Having enjoyed AWNM and Johnny Bunko-I’m so there, methinks.

Tosh, I have an online meeting scheduled for PLC work at the exact same time. Luckily said meeting partner was wise enough to ask the right person at her school, in order to come with me. It turned into a PLC fieldtrip, just the change of routine needed to motivate and inspire.
Daniel Pink was promoting his new book Drive. I had watched the TED videoand listened to the NPR talk, but hearing it in person makes it better. Free, was a big motivator too.

One of the reasons I like to go to author talks is I like to see how these professional writers/speakers engage audiences.

Audience participation was his opening gambit, in order to illustrate a few of the 1st drive motivations that humans have. He paid an audience member to hold up a copy of his book in the middle of the store. A small amount, but the guy was motivated enough to do it. The crowd was small (surprisingly) he didn’t use the podium or microphone and meandered amongst us instead of standing at the front. Every person to whom he talked, he asked them their name and repeated it in the ensuing conversation. I am just fascinated at how quickly everyone became his for the 35 minutes or so that he talked.

One story about the 3rd motivational drive was about the open source movement, the way he described it matched exactly the way the grassroots technology group operates at the high school I worked at. He talked about how the open source movement is made up of people who already have jobs, yet want to work on this project on their own time because it interests them, they want to achieve mastery, and then they give it away for free. This enables them to be part of a community of like-minded people who also want to not only use what they have created, but improve, refine and customize their ideas. Nobody pays them to do it, their is no carrot and stick, their motivation comes from within and matches his ideas about the 3rd drive. Similarly, the grassroots technology group meets on their own time (in school, but outside the hours required for their teaching and professional development requirements), the group is autonomous in its’ exploration of new ways to use technology in the classroom, and in addition, they share their enthusiasm and ideas in school-wide technology showcase professional development time, for free. This was a nice validation of the model that we set up a few years ago and is still working despite members coming and going.

For those who want learning in their school to become more engaging and authentic, identify who in your school is teaching in this way, get them together, give them time and autonomy to compare ideas and explore, and then ask them to share what they are discovering with others. If you don’t believe me, google “fedex days” or “google 20%”

Due to the small crowd it was easy to chat to him while getting our books signed. On returning home, the book was ensconced by another family member fan, so I have to wait to read it.

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Amazing things that happened in 2009

• Educon even only virtually
• Keeping up with my blog
• Staff technology showcase at school
• Henry Jenkins at MIT in May
• Going to NECC in June in Washington
• Meeting many pln peeps and tweeps irl
• Asking a question via twitter to Malcolm Gladwell on live radio
• It was fun to be included in the David Pogue book, the world according to twitter
• Listening to Peter Reynolds twice.
• Attending BLC edubloggercon with Sandy
• Presenting at the MTA conference with Rachael
• Presenting at MASSCUE with Rachael
• The follow up response to our presentation at MASSCUE
• Seeing David Gray, Eddie Izzard with Chris
• Going to England and being ok with practically totaling the rental car and tiny hotel rooms.

Challenges I faced in 2009 is a biggie…

My sister-in-law for wisely persuading me I was too ill to return to work in September

She was right, as soon as school got in I was hospitalized and after many overwhelming tests was diag with Takayasu Arteris

I got very sick in the space of 4 weeks, spent 4 months not being able to breathe, not being able to do anything until cardiac intervention surgery on Dec 1st within 4 days after surgery I was up and about. Within 4 weeks I had lost 5lbs and was walking further and faster than I have for years. I commit in 2010 to completely take advantage of that and get into the best shape I have ever been in by hiring a trainer. This is the time!

What is there to grieve about 2009?

(What was disappointing? What was scary? What was hard? What can you forgive yourself for?)

It was hard to quit working at school

It was scary to be so sick so quickly

It’s hard to realize that no one will ever really know what it was like

Need to forgive myself for not expecting such great support, but getting it anyway.

What else do you need to say about the year to declare it complete?

Okay, the next step is to say out loud, “I declare 2009 complete!” How do you feel? If you don’t feel quite right, there might be one more thing to say…

I need to say how freaking rock star like my cardiac surgeons are. I need to let them know that with every breath I take they really are with me. I think of them all the time and cannot imagine living life without their help in 2009. They rock.

“I declare 2009 complete”

My word for 2010 is RADIANCE. Image is my own collage (created pre-op), cut pics and words that resonate from old magazine, the resulting words read:

Breathing Space, imagine, a well-lighted path, find, freedom, rock-solid, radiance.

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I just added a new rss feed to my “all in one place” place.

It was one of those, why didn’t I do this sooner, slap head moments.

I got the idea after a brief exchange in a chatroom between Jackie Gerstein and Joyce Valenza on liveclass2.0 on Saturday. The topic of the day was diigo. Jackie mentioned how she often starts her morning in Diigo checking out the links that have been added to the groups she belongs to. Joyce replied that she does that too. I always learn something in the liveclass20 sessions. While I was in the online seminar to learn about Diigo, as usual, the experience sparked a completely random idea that could not have been predicted.

After the exchange, I’m thinking, hey, I have a whole network in delicious (a kind of PLN subgroup that has been neglected), I bet if I checked their additions everyday it would be useful and informative and would make me smarter. I like the idea of all these great educators saving their resources and me taking advantage of that, collaborating.

This is another node in the flow of information from my personal learning network. One that I have not been utilizing enough.

I can stay on top of my network the laborious way, by going to the delicious site, logging in and checking network…

OR

“I bet they have an rss feed for that” and I can add it to my “all in one place” place. So when I go to that place everyday it will be there, updated.

How to, with Pics

Go to delicious and click on your network

As you can see there are 102,000 bookmarks saved by educators in my network

Scroll down to the lower portion of the page, and you will see the RSS feed link

After you click on it you will get a url that looks something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/network/lindseybarlow?count=15

I actually edited the field and changed the count=15 to count=35, this will make the feed bring in the latest 35 bookmarks from my network. If it is an active day or I miss a few days, then I will miss some of the bookmarks. This is not a big deal, I mostly just scan through the titles and investigate those that look the most interesting. Often a bookmark will appear more than once as the educators in my network have similar interests they tend to bookmark similar sites, especially ones that are shared via twitter. As you can see in the screenshot from the top, netvibes (my all in one place place) conveniently shows who bookmarked the site and its title. Scanning is a snap with this set up and doesn’t add much time to my daily check on what is happening.

Extra Credit

If you don’t have much of a network

If you don’t have much of a network in delicious, don’t worry. There is a shortcut. You can still take advantage of this idea, by tapping into the stream of someone who does have a good network. Replace the lindseybarlow in the above feed url with the delicious name of anyone with an account and you will have created a feed to anyone’s network.

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They are then required to find the list of videos aligned to the textbook they are using

The result of the challenge is that the student has a clear indication of which resources to  study with what chapter of their textbook.

The resources can be used for topic preview or review, discussion starters and useful additions to their own learning creations.

Teachers were excited to share this resource with their students, responses included

“That Hippocampus is awesome. Really Good.  I am going to assign it to my sophomores.”

OMG, this [Hippocampus] is Awesome!!!!”

For other digital literacy challenges see here and our masscue presentation here

Extra Credit

There are a few other websites that I like that have similar teacher time-saving alignments to the textbook.

For connected math curriculum by the Boston Public Schools there is Select Math

Please let me know if you know any others via the comments.

Related posts:

1. How will you share BLC10?
2. Dropio and voice messages in the classroom

The students can add their tweets via phone or computer. These tweets are distinguished from the mass of other tweets by using a hashtag. All of the tweets with this hashtag are projected onto the board at the front of the class for all to see, share and respond to.

Benefits to this way of learning:

• All voices can be heard and have equal weight
• 140 characters is a limitation, yet also a filter to quality information
• Participation can include students and staff who are not present
• There is a record of the discussion that can be used as a study guide later

It is only at the end of the video when the teacher mentions that she told the students “it was going to be messy”. I think this is the key component to introducing something like this into the classroom, it will be more likely to succeed if all participants go into it with the knowledge that everyone in the class is learning, that it is a process and that the form will shape itself as it goes along. On the video it didn’t look messy, until the teacher brought it up. I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether you have used twitter in the classroom.

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1. Dropio and voice messages in the classroom

Attended a free webinar from O’Reilly media Thursday hosted by Dan Meyer, a math teacher from Santa Cruz. The seminar was boldly title “How to save Math Education”

Even if you are not a math teacher, this is talking about getting students to think…and applies to all teachers really. It’s just hidden in a math webinar.

Dan talks a mile a minute, but here are some highlights I managed to jot down while he was talking.

Talked about Deadwood writer David Milch, who espouses that students today are being entertained via media in a way that makes them crave easy resolution to problems. The one-hour crime drama gets neatly tied up at the end. Our students have an impatience with irresolution, they want easy answers and do not tolerate failure well.

Be less helpful

Dan talked about how he has been perfecting his facial expression when faced with questions from students. He prefers to always give them the quizzical look whether or not they bring him the right answer. He responds to the right answer and the wrong answer in the same ways.

“Right, why?”

“Give me the wrong answer”

Skill practice yes, Dan is still a proponent that this is essential.

But sees the need to address a bigger problem in math education and that is

“How to get students thinking about math reasoning in the world around them”

A great guiding question.

He mentioned a muji cronotebook… clock in the middle of pages, as an example. Bare, structure has to be built around it by the user. Same idea for math problems.

Talked about “The Wire” which has no musical cues for who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, so the audience has to be smart enough to figure it out on their own. Dan runs his classes this way.

Dan will often start with an image on the screen and start a conversation about it with the students.

For example a photograph of a blurred tennis ball against a background.

The next snippet of info revealed is that the exposure for the photo (using data in iphoto stored about the photo) is 1/25, a twenty fifth of a second.

Slowly he layers a framework on top of a problem and has the students have a conversation about it.

• He Builds from multimedia
• Asks concise questions
• Encourages Intuition
• Scales in difficulty
• Iterates (uses more than one picture)
• Transmits fast

His shopping cart blog post, went viral, shows that his ideas are gaining traction.

Cognizent that kids learn when they are improving old knowledge and filling in the creacks and fissures of old knowledge.

Dan teaches remedial algebra with students who have not succeeded because they have suffered from boredom, low confidence, did not do homework. He finds them eager to find out if they are correct. He approaches them with a rehabilatative process, gets with comfortable with the process of building a framework of answering their own questions.

The results he sees in his students over time is that they wait longer to give answers, they are confident with the wrong answer, they can verbalize their process more fluently.

In the chatroom Kathy Sierra mentioned a book that we all should read. What the Best college Teachers Do by Ken Bain. (As, are all book recommendations I hear about it’s now on request from my library.)

Dan is creating a website with this style of curriculum pieces called belesshelpful.com, he gave a chuckle when mentioning a launch time of Spring 2010. If you want to beta test, he mentions to contact him via dm or email.

I for one can’t wait to see the site. My main question is why does this not fly so well in schools, it should be spreading much more quickly. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Most classrooms have a projector, images are so easy to create, many cameras and phones have video, so that is really easy to create. You can cut youtube videos to the exact point you want to show them. The barriers to creating the starting point for this kind of lesson is not very high. Is it the ideas? Is it time? Maybe the interest in the shopping cart lesson might start to break open the math classroom. Hope so.

Chat Clip

from Dan Meyer to All Participants:

dan@mrmeyer.com

from Lindsey fallow to All Participants:

@dan – do you encourage kids to teach / guide each other? Or does it all flow through you?

from Brian Danielak to All Participants:

@lindsey – great question

from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:

I’d love to see *students* learn to create these.

from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:

Dan’s ultimate BLH (Be Less Helpful) points a way that allows for WIDE variety of implementations, topics, delivery mechanisms, teacher styles, etc.

Even if you don’t teach math, this is about teaching kids to think, to use their intuition, to be comfortable with being in the process of discovering, rather than trying to resolve quickly the “correct” answer that the teacher is eager to hear.

For more information about Dan, go and check out his blog. Subscribe in a reader. At least read this post

I found out about this webinar through twitter, I have quite a few others saved in evernote, so stop by, in the next few days I plan to put them all in a blogpost. Free professional development can only be a good thing to share.

Anyway, blog comments always make the rest of the day shinier, that's what it is here for.....

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Reflections on an Interactive Library Orientation

by Rachael Costello

I would like to thank Lindsey for inviting me to guest blog. Before mass computer and internet infiltration in to the classroom, I always tried to spice things up with comic strip projects, museums projects and even puppet shows.  As a classroom teacher, I understood that a student’s level of enthusiasm dwindled after the third time doing a particular activity. So if several teachers incorporated a comic strip project the students were bored after the second and maybe third experience with a comic strip. Their saturation point is even lower today. When I moved into the library, I wanted to transform the student’s view of a library and the librarian, and my first priority was making sure that students saw me as a teacher first. We have a flexible schedule so I tried to get as many teachers to let me teach information literacy skills in their classes as possible. My first two years, 9th grade library orientation was me physically leading students around the library giving a tour of the physical library and highlighting procedures and resources. The first year, this was good. The students were excited and the feedback was positive. Last year the same tour received a lukewarm reception, and I knew they had reached the saturation point with me doing all the talking even if it was on the move. So, I went back to the drawing board with three goals in mind. The first was to cover the content of library orientation but to remove myself as the teacher directly from it, to make it more interactive for the students and incorporate technology. Through our Grassroots Technology Group (This is a group of teachers who meet one a week before school, who have an interest in incorporating more technology into our classrooms. It is teachers teaching teachers. Each week we take turns introducing something new and then use it in a lesson), I had learned a lot of new web 2.0 applications and used those as the foundation for the lesson.

The lesson…

Bring your Cellphones

First, I emailed teachers and told them to encourage their students to bring their cell phones. I was told that the students were very excited when they heard this. While students entered the library for orientation, there was a “Do-It-now” activity on the Smartboard. Using polleverywhere.com, they had to text a yes or no response to the question; did you read a book this summer? After class began, I outlined their options for the lesson. They had three options:

The Amazing Library Race

Yes, designed after the TV show The Amazing Race. It was a traditional low tech scavenger hunt and I thought would be the least popular. I was wrong.

An audio docent tour of the library.

Using Audacity, I recorded a walking tour podcast of the library. Yes, it was exactly like the one I gave the previous year, but this time it was loaded onto two IPod Touch’s with two rock-star splitters and the students were in control.

Video tour of the library

I created a video tour using Photostory. The irony was that, I produced all of these activities and therefore they all had my voice and all the options had almost exactly the same content and script as last year.

This year Library orientation was a huge success. A google form embedded in a netvibes page formed the lesson assessment.

Here are some of the Student comments;

“That was fun,”

“Great orientation,”

“Fantastic,”

“I thought this was really great! Giving students the choice of how to learn about the library was really great,”

“Thanks for this wonderful tour,”

“I believe a good effort was made and a great outcome. I felt prepared for the orientation quiz and feel comfortable using the library now,”

“This was very helpful!”

“I enjoyed the podcast orientation. I think you should keep it for next year.”

There were also some good suggestions to make the various activities better. Of the 190 students who participated over three days there were a few students who thought it was boring (i.e. my challenge for next year).

I credit the success of this year’s library orientation to incorporating technology. Students were excited to use the ITouch and several asked where the rock-star Splitters came from. The other contributing factor to the lessons success was giving students a choice and control of their own learning. The lesson ended with everyone completing a Google form evaluation and survey. Additionally, most of Library orientation was electronic so I was able to upload it up to a Glog http://rachael0205.edu.glogster.com/library-Orientation/ which I was then able to post the link on our school’s portal for absent students, but also upperclassmen and staff who want a library refresher.

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