Making Connections

This morning Beth Still’s post, PD Cafeteria Style, popped up in Google Reader and her thoughts on PD and Social Networking really struck a chord. Particularly this observation of why we turn to Ning, blogs and other social media to learn from:

If you have ever sat through an inservice that had absolutely no meaning to you then you already know the answer to that question. When we are part of a network we get to pick who we learn from and we get to pick the topics that we want to learn more about.

For me, my online PLN is eseential to my continued professional development. Without the scope of subject areas, years experience, global location my learning would be limited largely to within my immediate school community. My ability to extend my awareness of available tools, to find new tools, new projects, new classroom activities would therefore be limited. My PLN is still growing, it’s tiny compared to other peoples, and already I find something new everyday to learn, to try. Everyday my pedagogy is enriched by social networking tools.

So, I’m with Beth…

By blocking access to social networking sites schools are depriving teachers of legitimate opportunities to grow and become better educators.

Making me sit through yet another PD session aimed at those people not yet using our virtual classroom tools (generally without my laptop, just so I look like I’m paying attention) isn’t helping me grow as a teacher. On the other hand, giving me time to access K12Online to catch up on presentations (without half the hosting sites being blocked), or the chance to Skype a call with a colleague I’d like to run a joint project with next year, or time to read those educational blogs (again without blocking them) I get so many ideas and inspiration from – those are things I’d find useful, productive even.

At the end of her post, Beth speaks about how the blocking of sites from people’s base of operations is stopping so many voices being heard, acknowledges that this needs to change and finally asks, how?

First of all people need to get over their fear of the term – “Social Network”. Just because it implies connecting and sharing with people you’ve never met face-to-face does not mean they’re about to rob/cheat/destroy me…in fact I’ve rarely come across malicious people in my social networking experiences and those few interesting characters have promptly found themselves removed and blocked.

How we help people overcome this fear, I’m not entirely sure just yet…education, modelling, and sharing our experiences is important. I regularly email my colleagues with links that I think they’ll find interesting and make sure I tell them I found it through my PLN. I’m at least not getting strange looks when I explain I participate in online net meetings with people from around the world, or when I reference a blog I came across over the weekend.

We’re probably still a long way from our online social networking being recognised as official Professional Development – it’s too…informal for many administrators to cope with just yet. How would they measure our productivity?

So, Beth, my apologies I have no magical answer for the question, but I’ll stand up in support – something needs to change!

Wordle was introduced to me about six months by a colleague at about the same time she was introducing this very simple tool to the rest of our staff. We isntantly took to it, loving the visual representation of chunks of text it offered.

As the year has gone on my students and I have used Wordle to create title pages, visualisations of essays, as a way to pick out the key words from text and to identify words we may be over using in our writing. As part of Teach42’s 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger I put my RSS feed through Wordle and came up with this:
I was quite pleased to see that creative, flexible, future, change and education all rated highly. I found it interesting that ‘teachers’ rated higher than ’students’, but then in reflection I think that’s fair. More and more I find myself thinking about the role of teachers and working to support other teachers in their ICT journeys.

An interesting activity really and quite a revealing one about my focus recently.

Wordle – helping me make the connections

This morning we woke up to an eerie stillness in our house. There was not whir of fans, no hum of computers, no glow from the microwave, no alarm clock blarring it’s annoying little squeal.

Sometime during the night we’d lost power.

Whilst I love living in a semi-rural area, there are times when things like our reliance on the pump for running water is annoying. Thankfully they happen rarely and when they do happen it gives us time to get creative about ways to entertain ourselves – this morning we played “file Nic’s marking”. Yay!

It also reminds me that we don’t need all the whiz-bang flashy stuff to do our jobs well. So many teachers seem to think that without the latest “flexible” furniture they can’t play with the concepts behind flexible learning spaces, or that without 1-to-1 using technology in the classroom is just un-doable.

A couple of years ago I was transferred (willingly) to a small rural school as the only drama teacher. We had no laptops for teachers, very few projectors, and the drama room was…let’s just say cramped. Going without the wonderful resources and spaces I’ve seen in other schools made me get creative – I formed a partnership with the local civic centre whose cinema had the perfect sized stage for final performances, I learnt how to make juggling balls (and how to teach how to juggle – although I never fully mastered the art myself), I became an advocate of drama, anytime, anywhere – classrooms, lawns, undercover areas, hallways…you name it we played there (much to the frustration of teachers who like their peace and quiet).

I loved my time at that school. Professionally I grew from being the uncertain, jaded novice to being confident and sure of my ability to just do it. Personally I grew from being incredibly one tracked when it came to my planning and thinking to being far more creative and enjoying the job so much more.

I worry about those teachers who haven’t had the chances to be creative like I did, good teaching and certainly innovative teaching cannot be achieved by ordering the ‘right’ furniture. If you can teach, and innovate, when you’re resources are severely limited and/or out-of-date then you’re on to something in my mind.

I’m slowing working my way through an extensive pile of marking, filing and reporting at the moment, as well as wrapping up the podcast project and working on a couple of other small projects (yep, videos just appear, they don’t take much time…two days notice is HEAPS of time).

I need to take the time to thank those who have been leaving me comments – I will get to them, but right now my responses aren’t going to do your wonderful thoughts and ideas justice…

My brain’s not exactly in the right place for reflection, but I have started reading a new book I’ll talk about next week which suggests finding time for fun and creativity…I find that hard to do at this time of year – how do you keep your spirits up when the mountain of work ahead looks almost impossible?

Image by: Drul @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/36543076@N00/164364367

I got offered a massive challenge today – to go and work with a group of openly resistant teachers who are unconfident when it comes to technology and ways it can be used to enhance our teaching. I’ve met resistance before from my own staff, but I’ve never worked with a group of people I don’t have a connection with before, and my brain is ticking over trying to think of ways to approach what could be a quite…negative environment.

So, I turn to my online support network for advice. How do you approach situations like this? What has worked for you, and what do I need to avoid like the plague?

I’m considering using the ‘Trevor’ cartoon strip I posted about here as a stimulus as well as this video:

Any other suggestions?

A couple of days ago TheCleverSheep responded to George Sieman’s recent post asking for answers to a few seemingly simple questions:

1. Does education need to change?
2. Why or why not?
3. If it should change, what should it become? How should education (k-12, higher, or corporate) look like in the future?”

Below are my responses:

1. Does education need to change?

“If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got.”

In light of that quote I have to ask, is what we’re producing now good enough for the future? Will our current structures (buildings, timetables, curriculum) prepare our young adults for a future where:
knowledge is accessed with relevant keywords and the press of a button
the lines defining maps and time zones don’t really apply to who you’re able to work with on projects
the available jobs haven’t even been dreamed up yet?

Personally, I don’t think so. I think we’re very good at producing citizens equipped to work within the lines, who believe that their power to recall knowledge defines how ‘smart’ they are, and who look to others to solve their problems.

So, in short, yes I believe our approach to education needs to change.

2. Why or why not?

If education does not shift to align itself with the present and prepare itself for the future I feel that an increasingly wide divide between educated and “drop out” will grow because more and more students will disengage from the system. We need to give our students the best opportunities to succeed in life – that’s the bottom line. If we’re not doing that, we’re failing them.

3. If it should change, what should it become? How should education (k-12, higher, or corporate) look like in the future?”

Something more than it is now – something collaborative, with the teacher acting more as a mentor with smaller groups, inspiring, creative, flexible… Personally, I’d love something like the picture as my classroom…

Image by: Amit Gupta @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/48600091327@N01/579033711

I got a message from a Smart friend tonight talking about how hard it can be to convince parents about the changing face of education. I know how she feels. Sometimes it really does feel like we’re hitting our heads against brickwalls. My only advice for her…we’ve just got to keep at it.

Image: by inked78 @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/61637725@N00/8156893

How do you keep motivated in the face on continual resistance from seemingly every angle?

Image by andreaspears @http://www.flickr.com/photos/95767977@N00/566663776

The more I think about this the more I worry I’m doing the wrong thing trying to push the boundaries…

All year I have encouraged my students to be independent, creative, expressive…themselves. I have shared their learning and guided them. Rarely have I ‘lectured’ (less and less as the year has gone on). And the dividends have been well worth the effort.

But the reality is this…

Next year I may have a small group of these students I have done the hard yards with, but it is unlikely I’ll have more than a few. They will be split up, spread across classes and teachers, and in doing that they will encounter the very thing I worry about…19th century teachers.

My students are used to a teacher who pushes the boundaries, who shares their experiences with them, who replies to emails (generally with a 24 hour turn around, but it’s usually much quicker). They are not used to a teacher who says/thinks the following things:

When I first decided to mix things up in my classes it was because I was bored. I had classes full of incredibly bright students who would come into my room, sit at their desks and copy whatever I wrote on the board. A lot of my colleagues expressed their envy of having such compliant classes…

But they wouldn’t answer a question without first looking to me, they wouldn’t share their opinion, they were educational zombies. I remember when I came clean with the group and said, “I’m bored teaching you, so you must be bored too.” they were shocked. They honestly had never had a teacher say something like that to them before and when I gave them the unit and said “you know how to write a short story, let’s play” they didn’t know how to cope. They thought I was joking and one boy said, “I’m used to not thinking during class, Miss.”((!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!))

That particular boy now occassionally finds his way onto the Australian Stock Exchange website during my lessons but he’s also a stand out student on his assessment record (and besides, he’s teaching us all about the exchange, very informative stuff). My classes are fun to go to now (for me at least) – we have conversations, we laugh (sometimes hysterically), we learn new things (books, movies, technologies…even curriculum content sometimes ).

Next year these students are going to be in classes with teachers who take a very different approach and I worry that they’ll go back to being those educational zombies they were – simply because that’s what teachers expect students to be. Are those of us who are pushing the boundaries helping our students for the small snippet of time that we’re working with them, or are we setting them up for a fall when they move to a different teacher who hasn’t yet been moved to shift?

Have I set these students up for a fall, or will they fly no matter what?

Image: “World Spins Madly On”, by emma.c @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/7262596@N08/2207748365

I’ve watched in awe as the work of Lucy’s students has crossed my path online – the book in a day project where Year 9 students wrote collaboratively using google docs around themes drawn from the novel, “Animal Farm” was just amazing. And I’m really excited to hear more about her next project, collaboratively planned by teachers from around the world using the power of the network.

Through following Lucy’s project I came across Tanuj’s, a student of Lucy’s, blog and have since become a regular reader – his insight into the work his teachers are doing and the observations he makes about the potential and benefits of PBL are refreshing – especially since they’re from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

In part, this is a shout out to both Lucy and Tanuj – thank you for sharing your experiences and helping to inspire others to stay the course when comes to pushing the boundaries of our education systems.

For some teachers the idea of PBL has sat in the “too hard” basket for a very long time, and it’s something I’ll admit I’ve struggled with many times in the past – especially in the Drama classroom (which in my opinion lends itself naturally to this style). I’ve tried many different projects and had mixed results.

As the cyberdrama project wraps up with students completing their formal assessments this week I feel like I’ve put some of the bits of the puzzle together this time.

Yesterday I collected the journals tracking my students’ experiences and pulled apart their own cyberdramas (I’ll talk more about why I didn’t do these as eportfolios another night). I was gobsmacked when I saw them. In past drama journaling has inspired a lacklustre response from students, sort of done at the last minute, barely meeting standards. This time…the majority of the class obviously loved this activity:

There are PAGES of detailed reflections, hundreds of pictures tracing their journey through this project, incredible examples of how visually and textually these students think (feathers, glitter, jigsaw puzzles, card, colour) It’s going to take me weeks to do their efforts justice, and honestly I’m loving the thought of getting lost in these, I keep picking them up and just flicking through them, they’re a drama teacher’s dream come true. More than that what teacher doesn’t want their students to say things like:

“I think this term has been an amazing one. I have actually learnt so much and I feel as if we’ve all grown through producing these cyberdrama’s.”

The key phrase in there that makes me even prouder than I already was – “we’ve all grown”. This project has meant more to them than class work or assessment, I couldn’t ask for more.

When showing the principal the work produced by the class last week she asked what I thought had allowed them to fly so high. Honestly, I think I gave them room and I trusted them – they were ready and the “norm” would have held them back. And the success of doing so has my heart and mind bubbling with new ideas and plans for the future. Dean asked in a comment whether I’d go back to “traditional” instruction after this – my answer in short…no way, how could I?

It’s with a heavy heart that I await to hear my timetable for next year, I highly doubt I’ll be working with this group for drama next year. I just hope their new teacher is ready for them…

…tap into the true power of the network.

Image by: Nimages DR @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/11452351@N00/2048034334

One area my teaching and use of social media has lacked in this year has been enabling a self-sustaining and independent learning network to develop in my classes. Now, I believe I’ve facilitated my students becoming more active learners – they seek answers and ask questions, but my weakness is that they are still looking to me for those answers. Next year (since these particular classes only have two weeks of school left for the year) I want to change that.

All weekend I’ve been fielding emails from students filled with questions their peers could answer for them – if we had an active online network happening my inbox may be less full and they may feel more supported (faster answers, given by peers that are going through the same thing).

In order to make that really happen I’m going to have to overcome some inherent resistance in the system – try and push some of those walls back a little and that sort of thing. It’ll be a challenge, but one that will be so worth it.