Multi-faceted Refractions

As in many schools, Directors of Academic Technology such as myself plan, prepare, and deliver training to two major constituent groups around our schools, faculty and students. We spend countless hours working with large groups, small groups, and individually so that they users can learn new skills, become aware of new tools so that they are able to create engaging learning networks for themselves.

Forgotten, or at least pushed to the side, is an important and influential group in the education of our students - their parents. It begs me to think about the following questions:

1. How much time do you spend on creating opportunities to teach parents about the new communication tools (blogs, podcasts, and social networks)? Is it only a fraction of the time that you spend on faculty and students? Why is that so, since students will spend significantly more time at home than they do at school? Do you focus only on Internet Safety, or do you show them some of the tools and how they can be used?
2. Most educational institutions talk about life-long learning, but do we model this by providing opportunities for our parents?
3. Are we offering opportunities to support parents to begin participate using these tools? If not, why not? Wouldn’t parents benefit from first-hand experience in the use of social networks?
4. Do we provide forums for parents to converse with other parents to develop parenting strategies so we can more effectively parent our children? Isn’t it better to know what other parents allow?
5. What is our method of delivery, the lecture format? Do we allow parents to share antidotes and experiences to make each of us stronger?

I feel that it is our imperative to do as much as we can to not only provide information, but to challenge our parents to participate. Last winter, I provided an opportunity for our parents to participate and experience. I am developing plans to provide learning opportunities for our parents which are participatory rather than lecture based, challenging them to visit Club Penguin, Webkinz, create a Facebook account, read blogs and listen to podcasts, and hopefully excite a few of them to begin to contribute to the conversation.

I will be sharing some of these ideas and provide feedback on what I have learned in my upcoming K12 Online Conference presentation.

I hope that some of you follow my lead and provide a more active approach in making sure that our parents do not fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

It is Thursday, late afternoon, and we have nearly completed our first full week of teachers meetings. This year, I had the opportunity to share new tools with each of our three divisions (Elementary, Middle, and High School) in sessions that I found very engaging, but exhausting. I am exhilarated each time that I present to each of these groups as the teachers are fresh from summer vacation and classes have not begun. They are enthusiastic about their own learning and they are open to discussing and thinking about how to utilize the new tools to enhance their curriculum. From the follow-up conversations that I have had after each of these meetings, I can tell that this is going to be a fantastic year, albeit a very busy one as I help provide the tools and support continued learning for these new tools.

On Friday, we have a training on transitioning from laptops to tablets which is being done by an outside trainer. I look forward to learning, rather than teaching. It will be a refreshing change.

Via my Twitter network, I am also trying to catch up on other’s training efforts. Those which I have had a chance to start to view have been excellent and has motivate and inspired me to a higher level. I want to thank all who have been sharing their experiences.

I also have had many new thoughts and ideas, which I have not had a chance to fully think through. I have started four new posts, which remain unpolished and I will try to do so over the next week. It is great to be back in school.

Due to some family issues, for the past three days I have been trying to keep moving forward, making sure that the student and teacher schedules from the timetable make sense are are balanced as best as they can and wrapping up a number of new initiatives in anticipation of the return of our faculty. At times, I have found it difficult to keep focused and am sometimes looking for distractions. Yesterday, when I went to moderate the comments on my blog, I noticed that there were two new incoming links to my both, one from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and one from the American Library Association (ASA). Imagine my surprise when the author, Debbie Stafford referenced a post that I created over a month ago about four essential questions that I have been thinking about regarding the implementation of Web 2.0 tools. I cannot wait to share this with our librarian, to see if she found the connection.

Not being one to toot my own horn, I still find it baffling that someone whom I never met, in a profession that I do not practice (librarianship), stumbled upon questions that I have about using the new tools, and found them compelling enough to highlight them in their own set of questions about the tools. I wonder how Debbie found this post, which I wrote three weeks after NECC. Part of me is amazed that not only did someone find my thoughts, but thought them worthy of helping them shape their thinking. It is amazing how these new connections are made each and every day, and how contrary to the thoughts of Andrew Keen in Cult of the Amateur, that these new connections and relationships are made by thoughtful and intelligent people around the world and that we are helping each other forge and shape our ideas.

As we start school, it also reinforces the notion that a single person, with a single thought, can begin to change the world, as their message begins to spread to others. It reinforces the need to push our teachers and students to begin to share their voice with the outside world so that the can develop an audience, connect and establish relationships with others. The challenge is to get them to take the first step, to allow themselves to expose themselves and potentially be vulnerable. It is scary when you first begin this, because you don’t know if you will be validated and accepted. You don’t know if anyone will listen and be interested in your ideas. It is scary not knowing whether you will be worthy enough of another’s time and interest.

But we  have to encourage all who are willing to try, because if they don’t, they may never know if someone else will find their ideas interesting, as I have over the course of these ten months.

Today is one of those interesting days on the calendar, especially for those of us on campus who spend nearly 12 months on campus, rather than the typical teacher’s ten month visit. Today is the day where the majority of the campus is away, squeezing in that last bit of vacation before the arrival of new faculty next week and all faculty the week following.

For me, it is a time to be able to work on projects with at a leisurely pace. My project for the day today is to back up all of my data onto the network, back up my outlook personal folders, and then migrate my information to my the new Tablet PC that I have been assigned.

One of my resolutions for the upcoming year is to make sure that I back up my local folders to the server more frequently than I am currently doing. As my IT Director reminded me two days ago,

” You are doing too many important things and are developing so many important documents for the projects that we are implementing that it would a shame for you to spend significantly more time recreating what is lost than it would take to restore the documents.”

This is advice that we usually all hear, nod our head and say, “yes, this is what I should do,” and then move onto the next task than devoting the time to making this happen.

So far, I am really loving my new Gateway e155 tablet computer. I love the size and weight of the new system. It just feels comfortable, both while using it to take notes and while using it as a laptop. I think that we have made a great decision in selecting this model for our initial roll-out of the tablets. I am also looking forward working with our teachers to develop new ways to implement this exciting new technology into their teaching.

Migrating to a new system is always a challenge. I have spent two years tweaking and modifying my old laptop so that it would work just so. I dread the time researching all of the different applications and firefox mods that I have installed. This will take a couple of weeks to make sure that I have gotten everything just the way I want it. And I am going to have to do this during the busy and hectic first few weeks of school. What a challenge I have before me.

My data just finished copying to the server, so it is time to take the next step and copy the data to my new computer and begin configuring.

This week, I have been doubly blessed. First, the three principal (we call them heads) of each of the three divisions have carved out four hours of their time during the first full week back. This can be a hectic time, as they transition from summer mode into school mode, catching up with teachers, making sure schedules fit, and trying to determine who to launch a successful year.

Secondly, I am blessed that they have chosen to spend their precious time with me, learning about the new tools, and discussing and brainstorming the implications of these tools into teaching practice. For me, it is like a perfect storm, give the heads the time to be learners, give them time to collaborate with each other, which is a precious commodity in itself, and then let them reflect and strategize how to implement these tools and ideas with the rest of the faculty when they arrive in a week and a half. Our faculty and students don’t know how lucky they are to be led by such open-minded and forward thinking administrators.

On Monday,  we started off by showing the videos that Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted on progressive education and an excerpt of Sir Kenneth Robinson’s TED talk on Creativity and Education. I have shown them how to set up and use a set of wiki pages and how various teachers around campus are going to use wikis to support their teaching and the student’s learning environments. They have talked about the use of cell phones, picture phones, text messaging, and have learned about the mosquito sound.

Today, wanting to start with reflection, I pointed them to my previous posting on the shift in how to approach the beginning of the year Internet Safety speech for students and Chris Lehmann’s Planning for Innovation post from this morning. We diverged off of the planned curriculum to talk about rss, del.icio.us, tagging and how they fit together and allow individuals to make sense of the glut of information available to them. I showed them local examples of how teachers are beginning to use these tools to add feeds to wikis to streamline the process. We had a great conversation about the need for faculty and students these tools to help them manage information and how they could use rss and the collaborative tools to enhance and enrich their administrative team meetings. I then showed them two of my personal learning networks, my Netvibes rss aggregator and my Twitter network where I think that they were overwhelmed by the information. Only then did we cover Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Earth and Google Maps and talk about the new ways that teachers are going to use them within their curriculum.

What I have enjoyed the most is the conversations that we are having about the pedagogy and practice of teaching. It is reminiscent of the conversations which I had during EduBloggerCon and at the Blogger’s Cafe at NECC. While understanding the tools is important, it is how they are applied to the practice of learning by all, faculty and students, which is paramount. At the end of the sessions, I have been drained and exhausted, and needing to spend time performing the rest of my daily functions as we get ready for the start of school.

Tomorrow, we have our last scheduled day together and the current plan is to set up rss readers, talk about blogging and podcasting. I hope that we will be able to touch base at least once or twice during the course of the year so that we can slow down time, reflect and continue the positive conversations that we have started as a group. This is always a challenge, especially as the demands of day to day school life always seem to take on a slightly higher priority. But it is during this time, somewhat freed of the other distractions, that excites me and reminds me why I started teaching in the first place.