Multi-faceted Refractions

When we think of teachers, we often think of the adults in learning community. However, we should never discount what we can learn from our students.

Today, while speaking to a senior about an issue unrelated to technology, I noticed that he was using a web tool that I was unaware of, Flashcard Exchange (www.flashcardexchange.com). He had created a set of flashcards to review for a class of his. What was interesting about this site, as I began to poke around, is that you could create tags for the flashcard sets. This ability to tag your sets allows for others to search for your set and for you to search for other, so that you can take advantage of what others have created.

Thinking that I had stumbled upon a really great tool, I tagged it into my del.icio.us account. Imagine my surprise when I found out that 1845 other users had already located this tool.

This tools looks like a great resource that students can use to create review tools that they can use online. This online access may be something that will appeal to their desire to work more online. You do have the ability to study and play a memory game. With a paid account ($19.95) you can print cards and export them into other applications. Looks promising tool and I think that everyone should take a look at this tool to see how classes can use this tool. I can imagine a time that a homework assignment is for someone or a group in a class to create a set for each unit to help their classmates study and learn.

Over the past 36 hours, I have had several profound learning experiences. First, I have been trying to experience as much of the Learning 2.0 conference which was going on in Shanghai on both Friday and Saturday evenings.  Like members of my learning community, Carolyn Foote, Jennifer Wagner, Clarence Fisher, and David Jakes, I have been trying to follow the forums on the Ning which has been set up at the conference, following the messages on twitter, and trying to catch rides in the Elluminate rooms so that I could connect and learn. On Saturday morning, after reading a twitter message from Jeff Utecht, I raced to downloaded the opening session podcast before I jumped in the car, shaking off the sleep on a very cool, autumnal morning to do my Saturday morning errands, going to the bank and grocery shopping. For over an hour and a half, I hung on nearly every word, soaking it in.

On Saturday afternoon, I participated in a FlashMeeting hosted by Paul Harrington from the UK. There were between 8 and 11 participants from the UK, the United States, and Australia talking about best practice. The conversation centered on developing students spoken voice through podcasting. I got a number of great ideas on why this is important for elementary school students and found out about a great new project, Voices of the World, which I am hoping to integrate into somewhere into my school.

So while some may consider me slightly pathetic, since I spend my Friday and Saturday evenings at home, in front of my computer (flipping between the Cubs-Cardinals and Brewers-Reds baseball games and the Diamondbacks-Dodgers on Friday night, not a complete waste of time), I am happy that I invested the time and energy to continue with my learning. I will be better for it in the long run.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn

With the advent of the Internet and the new tools which many of you have begun to be exposed to, there are a opportunities for you to learn about new technologies and to cultivate new relationships with people around the world. Many of these conferences allow for asynchronous communication, which means that you can download audio files and read transcripts or participate in threaded discussions when you have the time to do so.
I am going to highlight two which are online and one which is a local, face-to-face experience.

Learning 2.0 Conference - Shanghai, China

Beginning Saturday at 9:00 a.m. in Shanghai, China (Friday night at 8:00 p.m. local time), Jeff Utecht (The Thinking Stick) is hosting the Learning 2.0 Conference (learning2cn.ning.com). This is a face-to-face conference which is going to offer many opportunities for you participate, even in Chicago. There are going to be several great presenters, including Will Richardson (Weblogg-Ed), Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach (21st Century Learning), and Wes Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity).  I know that I will be checking out the activity at this conference, which is being attended by many teachers in the Pacific Rim area.

K12 Online Conference

With a keynote which will be released October 8th, and 40 sessions (4 a day over a two week period, Monday through Friday), the second K12 Online Conference (k12onlineconference.org) is experience which is held entirely online. You can invest as much time as you choose in viewing the presentations (click for a list of presentations). Their are four strands to the conference:

• Classroom 2.0 - week of October 15th
• New Tools -week of October 15th
• Professional Learning Networks - week of October 22nd
• Obstacles to Opportunities - week of October 22nd

In addition, there will be four experiences which will allow participants to connect, three chat sessions (one after the keynote and two at the end of each week) in which presiders will answer questions about their sessions. The culminating event, When Night Falls, provides a 24 hour long marathon conference call which allows people from around the world to connect and share their experiences. It is a great place to meet and connect with other educators around the globe. I will share more information about these experiences and the conference as we get closer.

Northern Illinois Computer Educators (NICE)

The NICE group facilitates face-to-face meetings throughout the year at local schools. The meetings begin at 4:30 with a presentation beginning at 5:00 p.m. The first meeting of the year is this Thursday, September 20th. The topic will be “Orientation to Second Life” and be held at New Trier High School, Northfield Campus; registration & light dinner at 4:30 pm; meeting at 5:00 pm*  (For those of you already “in world” look for the NICE SL Group. To join, or for more information, contact Miche Nishi in world, or Michelle Russell outside of world, at mrussell@eps.n- cook.k12.il.us.) For those of you who do not know about Second Life, it is an online virtual world which you create an avatar and can interact with others in this world. It was the largest topic of conversation about emerging technologies at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) this summer. I am beginning to dabble in it, when I have a chance.

I hope that you take advantage of some of these learning activities. It will be time well spent.

It is funny how much difference three or four years make. That is when I started providing awareness of Moodle as a course management system to our high school teachers during our technology professional development meetings. At the time, faculty just didn’t get it. Eventually, I got one teacher to pilot using Moodle in her classroom. From her success, it began to slowly spread from teacher to teacher, in a geometric growth.

Fast forward to today. We have just completed our first day of classes and we have many teachers who are pushing to have access to their Moodle course pages (so many so that I am thinking about having the students self-enroll), they are having their students create podcasts in the first week, and they creating video.

In the first week, I have had more contact time with Middle School students and High School students, showing them how to use wikis and digital storytelling tools than I have ever had in the previous 14 years.

We can often be victims of our own success. For this, I am proud of where we are and where we are moving to.

On Monday, September 10th, I had the opportunity to deliver my message that I had crafted on Internet Safety to our high school students. (Notes on the genesis of the new message). Unbeknown to me was that I had chosen to use a similar strategy to deliver the message  as other great people, such as Clarence Fisher (Remote Access - Internet Safety) and Christopher Sessums (Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog -Teachable Moment: Cyberbullying) elected to use, as shared by Jeff Utecht (The Thinking Stick - Online Safety -Videos that get ‘em). I tried to capture the conversation on my digital recorder, but there was a malfunction so I am unable to share it. I will try to recreate of the presentation. Unfortunately, individual nuisances are not captured in this description of the conversation.

I began my presentation by reading the first part of my post, about how I wanted to present a positive message rather than a negative one. I acknowledged that they were digital natives and the we the faculty were immigrants trying to assimilate into their world. I talked about my transformative experiences over the past 10 months and how social networking (blogs, nings, and twitter) and the connections that I have made as a result of these interactions have enriched my life in very profound ways. I also talked about how EduBloggerCon and NECC and the opportunity to meet so many great people face-to-fact enhanced these relationships. I acknowledged that these experiences have earned me my digital citizenship, on equal footing to each of them.

So that they could gain perspective, I showed them Did You Know 2.0  by Karl Fisch (Fischbowl) and Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant).  To further challenge them, I showed parts of  the vid-cast of Andrew Zolli’s NECC keynote, focusing on the section where he talks about the qualities of the millennial generation and how they share many qualities with that of the greatest generation, who was responsible for creating the foundation of the tools that we use day to day, including the Internet (via DARPA). I also shared the section where Zolli outines the types of problems that this generation of students may help solve to make the world a better place than how we are leaving it.

I next shared with the students about how glad that I was not a student, because they were living in a world which was much more public than mine had been. Relating to the speed of communication, first from an oral story telling tradition, to having access to limited written tradition, to the invention of the printing press, to today and the ability of someone to use the video portion of a cell-phone to record and post, within minutes, a mistake that they may have made. I talked about the example of Miss Teen South Carolina, and then showed two examples of videos of school events which are easily accessible via YouTube, the first a short video of our prom  and the second, a clip taken by one of our seniors goofing off and having fun. (This is what I think really reeled them in)

I then began to ask the questions that I posed in my blog post about how do they want to be thought of. We talked about their digital profile, including how they approach the commenting on YouTube and Facebook, which is often quick boosting banter, what I called smack talk, and how this is part of the profile that they are creating. They need to be careful about what they say and what they post.

I told that that my goal for the year was to:

1. Provide the leadership to make sure that the school had the adequate resources to allow them to be 21st Century Learners
2. That I provided the guidance and support to their teachers to make sure that they were given the opportunities to have experiences using these new tools for communication and to support their ever expanding personal learning networks so that they could begin create real-life solutions to problems and have interactions with others around the globe to help prepare them for the 21st Century.

I then focused my message to tell them that while we adults may be foreigners in their world, that we did have the resources to help them if they ran into a situation that they could not handle. If they found that their words or images were being used in a way which may be harmful to them, or if they felt that they were being harassed, that they needed to let us adults know. Our goal was to make sure that they were safe.

The feedback that I have gotten from fellow faculty was very flattering and positive. They commented on how the message was focused, direct, and positive. They commented on the fact that I hooked the students and how attentive they were. Many colleagues commented on how many conversations they overheard students having about the content.

All and all, a great presentation. I am happy about the tone and direction I choose and glad that it seems to have worked as well as it did. Only time will tell.