Beyond Classroom Tech Tips…

In response to a teacher who asked him what she should do to become a 21st century educator David Warlick told her, “read blogs”.

Reading blogs, facilitated by my rss reader Bloglines, has been the most powerful professional development I have experienced in 28 years of teaching. It has connected me to educators around the world, exposed me to a wide variety of educational views and helped me clarify my own thinking about learning and teaching. I cannot help but think how wonderful it would be if every teacher could experience the professional growth that this form of learning provides.

David Warlick then goes on to offer a number of other activities that can provide self-development for a teacher wishing to become a 21st Century literate educator. In our school division the small schools and large distances between schools makes it difficult to indulge in some of the face-to-face activities he suggests but it is certainly worth considering how we can use tools such as our blogs,  WizIQ and Skype to create a group of individuals interested in sharing and tackling some of the following activities:

1. Find two or more other educators in your school [division] who are interested in learning and using emerging information and communication technologies. It would be of enormous advantage if you can include [a teacher-librarian from with the division]
2. Identify the appropriate person in your school or district who can provide technical support and configuration for your increasingly utilized computers and network. Bake them some chocolate chip cookies. [food is always appreciated by our tech people!]
3. Identify some edu-bloggers who are talking about the emerging ICTs you are considering. See the Bloggers to Learn From wiki, contributed to by a world community of educators. [and check out Alec Couros' Canadian Edublogger's list.]
4. Delegate! Assign each member of your team some of the selected blogs to follow, and share specific posts with each other.
5. Read, study, and discuss books about teaching and learning and the world we’re doing it in. See the Books to Learn From. wiki, contributed to by a world community of educators.[Some titles are available from my library]
6. Schedule regular meetings (once or twice a month) at a local restaurant, coffee shop, or pizzeria (preferably with WiFi). Meet and discuss what you’ve learned and what you want to learn.
7. Start a group del.icio.us (A social bookmarks service) account for organizing and sharing web resources. [this is a great way to share resources that we find]
8. Start a wiki for posting notes, links, and step-by-step instructions.
9. Join one or more of the Ning social networks, such as: School 2.0, Library 2.0, Classroom 2.0.
10. Start your own blogs for sharing your reflections on what you are learning and how you are learning it.
11. Start experimenting in your class and share the results.
12. Share your results with other teachers in your school and Invite them into your conversation.

These are all great ideas that can be used to reduce the isolation felt by teachers separated by many miles in a large school division.  How do we begin?

One of the more interesting projects that our school division has tackled this year has been our entry into streaming video with Discovery Education Streaming Video. To ‘kwout’ one of our new division bloggers, Gary…

Inside Gary’s Head via kwout

Another blogger, Terry, posted a link to a web-based lesson that he had created which can be viewed by school division teachers.

Terry’s Blog via kwout

Priscilla provided support and inservice for her teachers:

Fjeldstrom’s Framework for Success via kwout

allison’s alloqui via kwout

 I am very excited about these initial uses of Discovery Streaming Video and look forward to increased use as we provided more support and professional development for our teachers.

Currently I am on a three-month Education Leave attempting to finish my Master’s project – which will bring an end to my program.

My project is to bring everything that I have learned about technology, information literacy and instructional design into a structure that will provide teachers in my school division with instant access to resources about information literacy and to online tutorials that they can work through.

When I began my Masters I was in a teaching position that I had held for over 15 years. I was ready for new and exciting challenges. I am now in a new position as the Learning Resources Consultant for the school division and deeply involved in many new initiatives. I find it very hard to leave behind the committee, the people and tasks that we undertook at the beginning of this year – I find them all so very stimulating that they occupy much more of my thinking time. And, yes I end up spending time working on the projects much more than I should.

Just this week I had an opportunity to spend a morning with Arts Education Consultant and her lead teacher team working on their Arts and Technology Projects. 

I very much enjoyed the discussions around critical and creative thinking and the new skills that students need to be successful learners and the new skills that teachers need to be successful educators.

One of the goals of this group is to commit to an Arts Ed and technology project using one of the tools available, such as but not limited to:

• Movie Maker
• Podcasting with Audacity
• Voice Thread
• Painting with an Interactive White Board
• Comic Life

We spent sometime examining VoiceThread and the teachers then spent the afternoon working and collaborating on their projects.  I am looking forward to watching their work in progress and seeing the finished results.

The cameras we requested as part of the peripheral package for our teacher committees are here and should soon be distributed. And… just in time is this wonderful video on photosharing from Common Craft.

 Blooms Revised Taxonomy lists remembering as one of the lower order thinking skills. Lower order does not mean unimportant – remembering includes…

• Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding

…the basics upon which other skills and activities can be built.

The following are two sites that can be used to develop student capacities in this Bloom’s category.

Multiplication - games, activities and resources to teach the multiplication tables

Spelling City – makes practicing for spelling tests fun.

Via Doug Johnson I came across this article about Minneapolis students facing disciplinary actions after their Facebook photos are sent to school officials.

 Students disciplined for the Facebook pictures were suspended from sports or activities.

This article could be used to generate discussion about what is shared on FaceBook and the action taken by school officials.

As Doug Johnson points out in his article Rules for the Social Web, we need to consider how we not only protect children from predators and each other (cyberbullying) but from themselves.

Clarence Fisher dispels the belief that only when each kid in a classroom is using the same Dell or MacBook laptop that we can really teach with technology. In his post, Who Cares About the Box, he talks about the mishmash of computers that his students use including their own and the ipod touch.

The point is just that the kids and I are both realizing more each day that the technology is just a channel, a pipe, a point of access to what is really important; the connection, the information, the people out there.