Tag Archives: 28daysofwriting

At Week’s End

Education, school reform

I am tired on this Friday evening. I have been fighting a chest cold for ten days but today I seemed better. I took the afternoon off and soaked up the sun on our sun porch. I read a bit and just rested, knowing that the weekend provided lots of time for checking in with my online students and doing some website work.

I don’t have any official sick leave from an employer. No one is going to ask for a doctor’s note. I looked at my to do list for the week and felt good about what I had accomplished so I put the lid down on the laptop and took a break. The world lived without me for a few hours.

I earned these hours of rest and freedom while the rest of the world watched the clock because my work doesn’t include seat time. It’s about getting work done rather than being some place for a certain amount of time. And, in many cases, I am the one deciding the work that needs done. For instance, I teach online courses and we are heading into the fifth week of the course. I like to take some time to provide feedback on their work. I use the audio recording feature in Evernote to record and email feedback to my students. I comment on what they have accomplished and look ahead to areas where they may need to dig in a bit more. All of them could be tweeting more, I think, but they are connecting nicely within their course.

I think, in many ways, I represent the future of work. A subcontractor with a variety of clients and jobs to claim my attention. I determine long range goals, focus on daily priorities, and am able to carve out pockets of time for my own work. I may work on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings so I can sit in the sunshine on Friday afternoon. I don’t spend any time getting ready for work or commuting so my mornings offer opportunities to read and write that others may miss as they get to their jobs.

Seat time…it really has nothing to do with learning or working. It is an easy way to hold people accountable: count the number of hours you spent in a particular place supposedly completing particular activities. Projects stretch to fill the hours since there is no real incentive to finish early, just another job designed to fill the day. One school I am working with is using mastery learning to help differentiate instruction. Students work at their own pace, completing activities and projects and then demonstrating learning through formal assessment. I can’t help but wonder what will happen if a student gets done early, say in mid-May. They’ve learned everything they need to learn for 7th grade. Now what? Can they move on? Is the 8th grade teacher ready for them? Or is now when they get to do something fun, during the “extra” time they don’t need?

Earlier this week, Sam Chaltain asked what we should be getting rid of as we reimagine school.  He doesn’t mention seat time but he does wonder about age-based cohorts and I think the two go hand in hand along with the Carnegie Unit, which came into question in a report issued at the end of January. We are starting to focus on what students learned rather than how long they spent learning. And we’re starting to consider that standardized tests are not the only way to determine if students learned, particularly when we are interested in skills and dispositions rather than content knowledge. I believe we are at a moment of transition in education. The status quo is being questioned even by those in the mainstream and interesting conversations are taking place in school divisions across the country. Possibilities seem to be blooming and it is up to us to find our place in the conversation. So, what do you think needs to go in order to realize a vision of a contemporary classroom? Here’s Sam’s question:

What would it need to look like if a system of schools was truly aligned around a different set of organizing questions — where the goal is not to standardize, but to individualize; where the objective is not uniformity, but uniqueness; and where the feelings “school” arouses in the majority of us are not endless shades of grey, but wild and inspiring spectrums of color?

 

Lessons From the Field: Using Social Media with My Students

adult learning, social networking, Twitter,

I’m doing a conference presentation next week for a mostly higher ed audience on how I use social media in my courses. I’m taking a “five tips” approach, and I’ll do a more extensive outline here later but for now, I’m just thinking out loud as I head into week four of the semester. I am teaching two sections of an ed tech for admins course in which I require students to participate in Twitter as part of a semester-long Professional Learning Network assignment.

It is highly scaffolded in terms of getting started: we review vocabulary, share ideas for who to follow, and brainstorm things we could do with Twitter.

There is no quantitative aspect to the assignment (ie, you must tweet five times a day). Instead, it is all qualitative: there are several reflections during the semester and then a report at the end about what and how you learned. I should also point out that they are also required to set up a Feedly account as well and they blog in class so Twitter isn’t their only foray into social media and PLNs.

I always have a few students who whine: they have managed to get this far in their professional lives without having to resort to Twitter. One student’s Twitter handle is something like “because I have to to graduate.” Others revive accounts they created as part of professional development or when they were in college. (Yes, my friends, some of them are THAT young.)

After a few weeks, it’s interesting to see the various paths the students take towards fulfilling the assignment. At least one student already had an active account (he tweets more than I do), so the list I created was initially all his tweets. It didn’t bother me as he provided some nice modeling as to what others might do. Now, the list is more diverse: students are sharing resources, commenting on articles, and just generally connecting. The “I’m doing this to graduate” students pops in now and then and posts a flurry of tweets and then is gone again. But they are good tweets and she is following some great people. Some begin taking on the world, replying and retweeting with the larger community. Others are still figuring it out and their tweets tend to be of the “I can’t believe I’m tweeting” variety.

There are a few that will need some prodding in the next week…I give them time to settle in and then send some gentle reminders that, while there isn’t a quantitative assignment, it will be hard to reflect qualitatively if you haven’t done anything. Plus, I can’t “see” lurking.

I know that many of them will abandon Twitter the moment the assignment is done. But each semester, at least a few continue to drop by. I’ll get the occasional DM with questions or get a mention when they post something they know I’d like. There is also the somewhat astonished post about how they didn’t realize all this was going on in Twitter! I love the small celebrations when one of their tweets get retweeted or favorited by someone outside our circle, maybe even someone famous.

And, it’s a great assignment for me, too. I tend to drift in and out of Twitter but each spring, when my students work on this assignment, I get more engaged as well. In stopping by to check on them, I always find something for myself and, in modeling engagement, I tend to tweet more myself. It helps connect us outside of class and lets them know that I value this assignment because I’m willing to be part of it myself.

This coming week, I’m asking them to be part of the #edchat tweetchat which means I’ll be there, too, and I’m really looking forward to it.

This notion of how to use social media seems to be getting some play. Marie Owens has some good ideas in Faculty Focus, and she links to an article by Laura Devaney about using social media in the classroom.

For me, the real objective of this assignment is to help my students connect to the larger world. Despite all, I think schools still tend to be isolated. And the principal can be the most isolated with little opportunity to connect to other instructional leaders during the school day. I want to help them see that they can break that isolation and be part of a larger network of learners. They must not forget about their own learning and development. This article from 2002 makes a nice foundational argument for my ultimate objective.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, here’s my list for the semester.

What Was I Thinking?

blogging, Twitter, writing

Yesterday was Sunday…a quiet Sunday and I was perusing Twitter. I discovered that Tom Barrett had started the #28daysofwriting challenge. Since I had had a blog post lingering in my brain for several days, it seemed like a good way to make posting it a priority. So, I posted and then tweeted that I was in on the challenge. I even signed the form.

Then, Monday rolled around and with it the usual Monday chores: a newsletter, online course checkins and feedback, a few extra issues that had come up and, did I mention, I was still sick with the hacking cough I have had since last week. It wasn’t until about 2 PM that I even thought about the challenge. And, I’ll admit, pretty quickly dismissed it with the thought that maybe before bed I could manage a couple minutes.

But then, there were the emails from Tom reminding me of my commitment. And, my tweet had been retweeted so lots more people had seen the commitment. I felt a little more committed with a community behind me. Now what?

I folded up the laptop and walked away for a bit. Took a cold pill to help silence the hack. Changed the sheets on the bed. Solved one of the extra issues that had come up. And then set the timer on my phone, opened up a new post, and started writing.

One of Tom’s suggestions for the challenge was to create a list of possible topics so that seemed like a good post idea. It will help you understand the kinds of things going on in my life and work that might make it onto the page in the next month:

Teaching: I am teaching A LOT this semester, from full blown college courses to shorter workshops. Most are online but I have taken on a face to face course for the first time in nearly three years and I am loving it! The course is a ftf version of an online course I teach for a different university and there are lots of possibilities for reflecting on the affordances and constraints of both formats. In addition, I incorporate a fair amount of social media in these courses in, I hope, meaningful ways. I’m working on a presentation for an online conference next week about how I do this and a blog entry or two will help flesh out that presentation.

Building Community: I retweeted Sylvia Duckworth’s graphic version of George Couros’s blog post about 8 things to look for in today’s class with the comment that I try to incorporate all 8 in the courses I teach for adults:

There are lots of opportunities for blog posts here in terms of reflecting on how I do this.

Stuff I Read: Yesterday’s post was a reading roundup of sorts, with short reflections on a couple articles that had caught my attention on Feedly. I’m making my students use Feedly this semester and they have had some good suggestions for new feeds. I’ve suggested they can use Feedly for their own writing fodder so I should be doing the same. In his challenge post, Tom writes about “not posting perfection,” a topic I addressed in the recent past myself. Twenty-eight minutes is enough time to get something in place but certainly not the epic post. Just enough time to think out loud, make a point, or share a sentiment. Reading and writing go hand in hand and I think I read more critically if I think I’m going to write about what I’ve read.

Finally, with just five minutes to go today, I’m wondering on the nature of writing blog posts. I have not been typing non stop for 28 minutes. I had to look up a couple links and copy the embed code for the tweet. Tom isn’t making a whole lot of restrictions so I’m including that bit of research and code into the writing process. Perhaps, as I dive deeper into the commitment, I shall have those links ready to go prior to setting the timer and “write” for the full time. But linking and embedding are indeed what make blog posts a bit different from journal entries as they tie the posts to the greater world, one of the original goals of the blogging platform. Linking and commenting were a way of making a community of writers who were also linking and commenting.

The last topic that has been floating around in my brain is about errant pigs as an analogy for those things we wish we could control but we can’t. I have a few real world errant pigs wandering around my farm right now. According to my husband, unlike the other pigs, they have no respect for the fence. That seems to me to be a pretty powerful idea for thinking about our students and ourselves. Where are the fences in our lives? And should we respect them? If we don’t, who is there with the stick to prod us back in?

A minute to go…I’m feeling good. A great thanks to Tom not just for the idea but the willingness to follow through and send those emails today. They helped, Tom. I’ve written and I’m pressing publish now. See you tomorrow!