Multi-faceted Refractions

I have been involved in two major projects, one professional and one personal which have eaten all of my time over the past week. I am the adviser to our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. Our final deadline to get this year’s edition to the plant in order to guarantee our spring delivery is today, February 28th. Most of my available time, during the school day, the evenings, and the weekend have been devoted to guiding our students through crunch time. It looks like we will have have 80% of the book in today, with the remaining 20% completed over the weekend.

My wife, who is an elementary school music teacher  in two different school districts, had the second of the four performances she is responsible for directing last evening. This one was her First Grade Program. I have been helping her edit her program, make a banner for the back of the stage, making sure videotaping and cameras were charged, and videotaping and lending as much support as I can. In addition, she is working on her third performance, a musical in her other school, so I am also cooking, cleaning, and trying to help with other household duties.

Tomorrow I am attending the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators in St. Charles. I will miss meeting up with Cheryl Toledo, who is coordinating the EduBloggerCon group gathering this evening.

I do have multiple new projects to report on, including an update on the Parting Waters Project, the Sound Poem project, and our Fifth Grade Mayan Project using Google Sketchup.

I ask you to be patient and return back soon, hopefully as early as this weekend when I have a chance to catch up and breathe.

I have settled into a routine over the past six to seven weeks, kind of a personal Professional Learning Tuesday, where I spend a significant amount of listening time over at EdTechTalk.com. I have a hectic morning with scheduled meetings and classes. I then try to settle in to listen to Alex Ragone (Learning Blog) and Arvind Grover (21 Apples) on their webcast, 21st Century Learning at 12:30 p.m. They have great guests and since they are also independent school educators, provide prospectives on issues that we are wrestling with daily.

In the evening, I settle down to listen to the Women of Web 2.0, a conversation moderated by Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher), Jennifer Wagner (Technospud), Sharon Peters (Musing About Teaching High School, Social Computing and Ed Tech), and Cheryl Oakes (cheryloakes.com). They have been interviewing great thinkers and educational leaders, such as Terry Friedman and Julie Lindsay.

Yesterday was a bit different. I listened to the Women of Web 2.0 while editing yearbook pages, as our final deadline is less than one week away, and instead of just listening to Alex and Arvind, I had the pleasure of being their guest. We had a great conversation about the powerful role that parents play in partnering with Ed Tech educators, since students spend more time outside of school than in school, and the need to educate parents about the new issues surrounding the new tools, so that parents can make informed decisions about their children’s use of technology rather than ones our of ignorance or naiveté. It was amazing how quickly an hour plus disappeared when engaged in great conversation. I had a great time and am really honored that they asked me to participate in the conversation.

Now, time to deal with  a wacky Wednesday.

On Friday, February 16th, I was given the opportunity to present to our Lower School teachers. While brainstorming with our Lower School head, Pam Whalley, it was determined that I should focus this session on how to create Global Connections. If I may say, it was a wonderful presentation full of wonderful ideas which has already lead to fruitful conversations during lunch and electronically with teachers. With this posting, I am reviewing the material presented to the faculty so that the teachers in our Middle School and Upper School, as well as you, the blogosphere at large, can benefit from the presentation. My del.icio.us links that I created for the presentationcan be found at del.icio.us/vvrotny/ls216.

Opening Presentation - a conversation with Julie Lindsay
We were fortunate that Julie Lindsay (E-Learning Blog) consented to open our session, via a skype conference. Julie is the educational technology specialist at International School Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was inspirational, not only because we actually opened the session on creating global connections by participating in a global connection, but because she gave wonderful advice and guidance based upon her experiences.

Click here to listen to our 19 minute conversation (Right-click to download) or you can subscribe to my podcast’s rss feed.

Websites Julie highlighted during her conversation:

Global SchoolNet Foundation

iEARN - International Education and Research Network

Technospud Projects

In addition, Jim Jim Heynderickx, the Director of Technology at the Oregon Episcopal School, highlighted a few other places to begin to make global connections in his blog K12 Converge in anticipation of his presentation at the National Association of Independent Schools Conference in a few weeks:

The Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections: this is the site I used in the early nineties to connect my Washington, DC students with two classrooms in other states.

The Classroom Connection Program links Social Studies and Language Arts classroom internationally.

The ePals Global Network claims to have the largest community of classrooms collaborating with each other.

The Wisconsin Department of Education has a nice site with a collection of sources for teachers who wish to build international connections, with links to CEARCH, KidLink, and the Peace Corps Worldwise Schools.

Passive Collaborations
The easiest way for an educator to begin to create global connections is to utilize the tools that will enable them to publish their and student work to a global audience. Working collaboratively passively is a non-threatening way of making your first steps. A teacher usually can take work which is already being done within the context of their current curriculum and with a few additional steps and a little time, can package that material using one of the new tools begin the global collaboration.

One of the easiest ways to begin participation is to find other projects and teachers and simply joining in. For instance, if your students are already writing stories in the classroom and you want them to collaborate with other students, you can post them to Clay Burell’s 1001 Flat World Tales Project. By recording what types of clothes and games that students play, students can enter the information into Chris Craft’s Comparing Our World Project. There is a minimum amount of commitment needed to participate in these projects once you find them.
The web 2.- tools that you can use includes blogs and wikis. Examples of projects that we are implementing using these tools include:

North Shore’s 11th Grade Blog to support their junior research project

North Shore’s Middle School Blog to support a global awareness unit

North Shore’s US History wiki to support visual storytelling project and new sound poem unit.

North Shore’s AP US History wiki to support visual storytelling project.

Chris Crafts’s Comparing Our World Project

Clay Burell’s 1001 Flat World Tales Project and associated 1001 Teacher’s site.

Darren Kuropatwa’s Expert Voices Wiki to connect those wishing to collaborate (added 2.19 - for more info, see Julie Lindsay’s posting)

In addition to blogs and wikis, there are some fun creative tools that teachers can use to create products which can encourage collaboration. Teachers can upload video to Google or YouTube, pictures to Flickr begin to receive comments. Teachers can also locate videos and images using these tools to support their curriculum. There are currently great examples of the use of GoogleEarth in a Foreign Language classroom and to teach grammar that have recently been uploaded.

Teachers can also use applications such as BubbleShare, PhotoStory, or SlideShare to take the pictures or PowerPoint presentations already used in the classroom. Some of these tools allows students and teachers to record a narrative track on top of the imagery that they have put together to share their thoughts and stories. Chris Craft has posted many of his PowerPoint presentations to support his teaching of language on SlideShare. You can find material that you may be able to co-opt and re-purpose. I know that I will see Chris’s PowerPoint on Pompeii begin used by our fifth grade teachers since it contains pictures of ruins of Pompeii.

Active Collaborations
Once you are comfortable with passive collaborations, if you find a willing partner, you can create an active collaboration. These projects take more time to plan but the payoff is much greater. One of the best examples of an active collaboration is the project that Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay created, The Flat Classroom Project. As Julie noted, it takes twice the time to plan and prepare for this type of project than it does to execute it.

How do you find projects and partners
The way that you can expand your network is to become active and involved using these new tools. Set up a del.icio.us account. Begin to tag the websites that you want to return to using this tool, so you can organize and notate the sites you visit. You will also then have bookmarks that are machine independent. Use the functionality of the site to see what others have saved that share a common interest. Connect and communicate with those users who seem to have similar sets of favorite sites. Search del.icio.us for keywords of units you are covering to see what others may have selected for their resources.

Another way is to become active in the blogosphere. Begin by reading the blogs of others. You can set up an aggregator such as Bloglines or my current personal favorite, NetVibes and collect new feeds via RSS. Find a few blogs and see what those people are reading. Look for suggestions. Read the comments and see if those individuals have their own blogs. Yes, this takes time, but I can personally testify that this is the way that I have made many of my contacts.

If you are really willing to move forward, create your own blog. Use it as a place to reflect on your teaching. Others may find it and be willing to share their thoughts and comments with you. Once the connections are made, then you can use them to expand your network.

Whenever I find a project, blog, wiki, or podcast that I want to utilize, I always contact the creator. By doing so, you let them know that they work that they created is valuable to someone and it allows you to establish a new relationship. It is through these new relationships and networking that you find out about other projects and resources. It is through sharing and communicating that we expand our world.
It all starts with you and your willingness to take the first step. It can be scary, but the reward far outweighs the risk.

Side note
When discussing RSS, I did update the teachers about Aaron Swartz, one of the co-authors of the original RSS 1.0 specification. He was a student of many of the teachers in attendance.

One of the responsibilities, in addition to being the Director of Academic Technology, is being the lead advisor on our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. I love working with students to document and develop a journalistic approach to document and tell the story of the year’s events. Creating this “old fashioned” print record is an interesting juxtaposition to providing leadership in using emerging the new Web 2.0 methods of documenting and communicating.

Each year, we pick a concept or a theme to use as a prism to view the year’s events. This year, we have selected the concept of community as this years view. We are attempting to break tradition and create the look and feel of a magazine in our layouts, doing such things as placing ads throughout the book. As the lead advisor, I am taking the opportunity to use my advisor’s note, that I put in each year, to set the tone and define our goals for the book. Since we are nearing our final deadline on February 28th, I sat down and finished my good draft of the document. I am sharing it here so that we can all begin to have conversations around the concept of what defines the communities which we belong to. Without further ado, here are my thoughts:

Whenever someone talks about North Shore, invariably, the conversation includes the word community. It is used so frequently that one of the editorial team, when discussing the possibility choosing this as our theme for this year’s edition of the Mirror, stated honestly, “When I hear the word community anymore, I tuned out because it is used all of the time.” Various different adjectives are used to describe North Shore’s community, such as inclusive, warm, engaging, diverse, welcoming, and open. But does everyone share the same definition of community? If you were to poll the one thousand members of the North Shore community about the definition, my guess is that you would find that there would be one thousand different variations of what is meant by community.

In the greater society outside North Shore, the concept of community is being challenged by multiple technological innovations. The emergence of Digital Social Networks, such as MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Google Videos, blogs, podcasts have extended our opportunities to collaborate and communication with people down the street, across town, across the state, and internationally. This notion was so significant that Time magazine named the You, the individuals who are gathering in these new electronic communities as the 2006 Person of the Year.

So this year, we decided to document the events of the 2006-2007 academic year examining North Shore’s community. Using the three essential questions incorporated on the cover the book; what does community mean, what qualities of community make North Shore unique, and how do we know community when we look around, our goal was to go beyond simply covering the year, but to create that common definition of community that we can all agree with and use.
As we continued to develop the idea last spring, it became apparent that there were two characteristics that were crucial to the definition of North Shore’s community, membership and participation. Membership in the community and the various sub-communities. various classes, advisories, sports teams, ensembles, clubs at North Shore are paramount to our existence. At North Shore, we encourage students, parents, and teachers to gather together around common interests and goals. Without this shared membership, we cease to be neccisary.

But membership without participation would mean that the bonds which we create and renew each year would lose their importance. At North Shore, we encourage all to become active participants in all of the various groups that they claim membership in. We expect students to stretch themselves in all aspects of their lives, the academics, arts, and athletics. We are challenged daily to be both positive leaders and active, supportive members of groups.

This is the essence of the North Shore community. We have tried to capture these qualities in the following pages and I pleased with our results. I hope that you are too.

Richard Kassissieh (kassblog.com ) shared and interesting post about Global Ed and Technology. I agree with his assertions that  the use of lower quality connections as being as valuable as higher tech solutions. One reason is that it is more easily accessible in other parts of the world. You are more likely to find someone in Africa who can download skype (for free) and connect than to expect them to be able to purchase a more costly solution.

Jim Heynderickx, ( k12converge.com) commenting on Richard’s post, brings up a great concern of mine, which is finding partners outside of our schools. Right now, I am striving to find partners for a number of projects which are ripe for collaboration outside of the classrooms. Because of the connections that I am making using web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, and podcasts), my universe is expanding and I am beginning to find partners for a few projects. The other option that we have is to post projects in the public web 2.0 space (wikis, blogs, YouTube, Google video) and then either let connections serendipitously arise or promote your projects so that others will gravitate towards them.

t would be wonderful to have a few clearinghouses to help teachers, who do not have the time to seek connections or be afraid of venturing out of their comfort zones, be able to find willing partners. Not being able to easily find these connections may provide the excuse not to venture forward and attempt a project such as this.

Maybe this is an idea that someone would be willing to help me develop.  Utilizing a wiki or some other connections, to provide a clearninghouse so that teachers or  classrooms seeking other classrooms can find projects to collaborate on. Anyone game to take on this challenge with me?