Category Archives: professional development

The Course of the Course: A Leadership Journey

adult learning, OLE, professional development, teaching, thinking out loud

June is a wonderful month for taking a class….if you’re not teaching a class! Or classes, as in my case. I’m doing what a friend called marathon teaching: two sections of an eight-week, two nights a week, course in technology integration. They meet back to back on Mondays and Wednesdays with a 20-minute break in between. I’m teaching for almost six hours straight. While we spend a lot of time exploring and creating, it’s still exhausting. And yesterday I spent a whole day at a Google workshop. I had a chance to learn something myself but there was no time for working on my OLE ideas.

So, in the interest of getting something out there, I decided to just use text. I am working on a series of videos about the course using Evernote to annotate and Screenflow to capture but the production is standing in the way of the ideas.

I’ve been thinking a lot of the idea of the “course.” We associate courses with sports: the golf course is the one that came to mind most easily. Everyone starts at the club house, equips themselves for the game, moves from tee to tee with the group.Everyone’s goal is the same but the process of getting there is going to be different. But what they do when they get to the tee may be very different: they can choose different tools and different strategies. Depending on who they are, they may even tee off from a different spot.

The ultimate goal of my course is to answer the question: What does an effective ed tech leader look like? What core beliefs can help a leader make good decisions around the integration of technology? How can a leader inspire purposeful change that moves beyond a focus on tools to a larger vision for innovative practices?

Each stop in the course will be one of the ISTE Standards for Administrators. I already use these standards as the outline for the course. There are particular activities that I want all students to do but then I also want to throw out opportunities for them to explore the standards and their indicators through some “choose your own adventure” style activities.

We’ll all start together in the clubhouse, equipping ourselves for the journey. We’ll each need a blog where we can share and report on our learning. We’ll use the built in blog tool in Google Sites (assuming I use that again), and I’m also going to ask them to create a Diigo account as I think that’s the best tool for saving and sharing web-based resources as well as being able to annotate webpages. For now, that’s all we need. The rest will come later as part of the assignments.

I don’t think we’ll necessarily go in order for the standards. I like to start with Standard 3 which deals with professional practice. I’ve listed the required and optional ideas for each indicator. You must do the two required activities and at least one of the optional activities.

3. Excellence in professional practice
Educational Administrators promote an environment of professional learning and innovation that empowers educators to enhance student learning through the infusion of contemporary technologies and digital resources.
a. Allocate time, resources, and access to ensure ongoing professional growth in technology fluency and integration
OPTIONAL: Write a professional development plan for your faculty that addresses the barriers of professional development. (So…what are the barriers should probably be the first question in this adventure.)

b. Facilitate and participate in learning communities that stimulate, nurture and support administrators, faculty, and staff in the study and use of technology
REQUIRED: Create a learning community for yourself. Choose a network and networks that you will engage with over the next 15 weeks. Then, engage.

c. Promote and model effective communication and collaboration among stakeholders using digital age tools
OPTIONAL: Write a communications plan for your school: how will you work internally and externally?

 

d. Stay abreast of educational research and emerging trends regarding effective use of technology and encourage evaluation of new technologies for their potential to improve student learning
REQUIRED: Create and use a feedly account

OK…something is written down. Now on to teaching…

Five Lessons, continued

professional development, social networking, , ,

In my previous post, I talked about two of the five lessons of using social media in my classroom. Today, I’m going to tackle lesson three: Integrate Tightly.

Of all five lessons, this is probably the most important, and it’s one I’ve learned over the past few years, particularly with the use of Diigo, the social bookmarking tool.

My goal with using Diigo was to provide a place for students to share resources related to course content. As someone immersed in the content myself, I made the assumption that my students would be equally immersed, spending time going beyond the readings and activities to tap into the wealth of resources on the Internet related to the ever changing field of educational technology. For the first semester or two, I did not make any quantitative assignment related to Diigo but asked them to share resources. As you might imagine, few got shared.

My next step was to make a quantitative assignment, asking students to share at least three resources related to the weekly topic. It worked a little better but had an inauthentic feel. Many students simply waited until the night before the end of the week and posted the first three sites that came up on a Google search. There was no annotation, interaction or discussion.

I had the most success when I tied Diigo use to specific assignments. For instance, in the early weeks of the course, students create a webpage related to the history of educational technology. Before they dive into the page, they research and share resources via Diigo. This use of Diigo seemed to make more sense to them and thus led to more activity.

This semester, however, I have changed the sharing piece of the assignment. I am teaching two versions of the course for two different universities. I wanted a place where they could share but also experience opportunities for discussion and collaboration that go beyond Diigo. So, I set up a Google Plus community and have substituted it for the various places where I had used Diigo in the past.

I continue to use Diigo but as an optional tool. I kept the groups from the last time I taught the course and offer students the opportunity to join. A few will use it to share; mostly, I use it to post additional resources. It has become a great repository of course-related resources, my 21st century bibliography.

In addition to Google Plus, I’m using Twitter and Feedly. These are both part of my Professional Learning Network assignment. My goal is for them to make connections with the larger community of school leaders with the hope that it will continue even past the course. Learning from my lesson with Diigo, I realized I needed to make these tools an integral part of the course, so crafted a semester long assignment around them. Students are asked to reflect on their progress several times over the course of the class; at the end, they create a multimedia report about what they learned. The assignment does not have any quantitative component, which can be difficult for students, but I try to provide as much support as possible and that will be the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Five Lessons from the Field: Using Social Media for Community Building

professional development, social networking, ,

As I mentioned, yesterday I did a presentation as part of FantasTECH, a virtual conference offered by JR Reynolds Community College. They use the AvayaLive Engage platform, an easy-to-use virtual environment. It was fun to be part of a new environment for teaching and learning and am hoping to have a chance to explore further before next year’s conference. While it was easy to access, I know I didn’t get to really dig into the platform to figure out how to make it more interactive.

My presentation was focused on using social media in the higher ed classroom and I used the “five lessons” approach as a way to organize my thoughts. I have the sense that nothing I said was all that earth shattering but I hope I gave people a way to think about integrating social media in their courses in meaningful ways. For today, I’m covering Lessons One and Two: Consider Goals and Align Carefully.

Consider Goals and Align Carefully: If we feel pushed into using social media because “all the young people are doing it”, we are making a mistake. Just as with any resource, activity or project we use in our courses, we need to know WHY we are using and how it supports our learning goals and objectives.* For instance, in my ed tech for admins courses, one strong objective is to help my students connect to the larger world of education–that great big PLN in cyberspace–through Twitter, Feedly and Google Plus. The objective is tied to the ISTE Standards for Administrators, specifically Standard 3: Excellence in Professional Practice:

Educational Administrators promote an environment of professional learning and innovation that empowers educators to enhance student learning through the infusion of contemporary technologies and digital resources.

a. Allocate time, resources, and access to ensure ongoing professional growth in technology fluency and integration

b. Facilitate and participate in learning communities that stimulate, nurture and support administrators, faculty, and staff in the study and use of technology

c. Promote and model effective communication and collaboration among stakeholders using digital age tools

d. Stay abreast of educational research and emerging trends regarding effective use of technology and encourage evaluation of new technologies for their potential to improve student learning

I have a myriad of tools I could choose from to fulfill this goal, but I stick with what I see as the Big Three: Twitter, Feedly and Google Plus. I hope that, by giving my students the time and excuse they need to dig into the tools, I get them “hooked” so they continue on in the future. I haven’t done any follow up surveys to see if that was the case although I do see the occasional former student posting in my Twitter feed. What I really hope is that, once they take on leadership roles, they consider opening the time to their faculty as well as a way to provide access to just-in-time, individualized professional development.

But I don’t use those three tools in every class. For instance, this fall, I’m planning to use Pinterest as part of my instructional design course. With a very visual component, I think having students “pin” links to resources and, even more importantly, example both good and bad, would be a really powerful part of the collaboration. Even though they work on their own projects, they form a design team for the class. So, I have dual goals: use the platform to support the team but also create a gallery of instructional design that might help spark their own creativity.

I can only make these kinds of decisions after I have considered the goals. Then, I choose the best tools to meet those goals. Part of the reason I use Feedly AND Twitter is that Feedly helps connect students to current events and commentary that can then be great Twitter fodder. They can share their thoughts in the Tweet rather than just retweeting other links and resources.

Tomorrow’s Lesson: Integrate Tightly
I’ll describe my professional learning assignment and also discuss why I made Diigo optional.

*I know some teachers use social media as a course communications tool (ie, test and homework reminders) but I’m thinking specifically about how to use social as a learning tool that integrates with the content of the course.

Grand Challenges are Hard!

Education, professional development, teaching

It is 11 PM.  I drove all day, had an online meeting, caught up on email and provided some feedback to my students. I turned off the laptop, turned on the news and then remembered my 30-day challenge: a blog entry every day! So, here I sit, laptop on lap, writing about how easy it is to not write and thinking that if I’m really going to make this change, it needs to be the first thing I do each day rather than the last.

But I do have a quick comment before heading to bed.  My online meeting was with a group of teachers who are implementing a 1:1 iPad project.  They are leaders in their schools and trying to bring the rest of the faculty online after running a pilot program last year.  We spent some time talking about how they could encourage their colleagues to meet deadlines so they could move forward.  While they were a bit frustrated at experiencing reluctance, they also understood the problems: they had not had a salary increase for the past four years and yet they were being constantly asked to do more with less. Professional development often happens after work hours without any compensation and what little planning is included during the day is often taken up with administrivia.

Then I saw one of those Exxon “let’s fix this” videos, the ones that point out how the US is lagging in international test scores and how we can fix it.  They emphasize having knowledgeable teachers in the classroom and breezily suggest we should support our teachers:

As with much of this type of rhetoric, they don’t offer any specifics, leaving it up to the viewer to decide what it means.  Since we live in a pretty toxic environment related to teachers, many probably assume it means getting new teachers.

What it really means is that we should look at how those successful countries treat their teachers: how many hours they teach versus how much time they have to plan or learn.  This article from Stanford is a good starting point.  It focuses on professional development.  Since it’s late, I’ll just quote one example and let you read the article:

In Singapore, the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers. This is in addition to the 20 hours a week teachers have to work with their colleagues and visit each others’ classrooms to study teaching.

I’m wondering if this is what Exxon has in mind?

Relaxing with a Game

21st Century Skills, gaming, professional development, Uncategorized

I have been traveling and training for the past two months and finally just needed a Friday afternoon mostly off to relax a bit before the last push next week. So, I opened up my current game: Roads of Rome 2. It is a time management game, my favorite kind, and I was looking forward to a bit of time creating settlements, negotiating with pirates, building roads and picking up crystals and other artifacts. But as I played I was thinking about gaming…something I’ve been doing a lot of this summer with the book group and the discussions I’ve been having with teachers and tech coaches. Two quick observations:

1. There are parts of this game that I still don’t completely understand. They have added a few extra types of buildings that help in some way that, at least to me, is not completely transparent. In some cases, I haven’t built them at all and it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the outcome of the level. It’s odd that I’m able to play a game fairly successfully without being an “expert.”

2. I also haven’t always had to upgrade the buildings in order to get the expert score. In fact, I suspect I got the high score because I DID NOT upgrade the buildings. It seems that one of the lessons of this game is learning how to prioritize your use of manpower and resources. When do you hire new people and when can three people do the work? Which buildings must be upgraded in order to succeed? Sometimes I get it right on the first try but often I replay the level, putting my knowledge from the previous tries to work. Which resources were in short supply? Did I get a lot of warnings about needing more workers? With time ticking away, there really can’t be any down time as you wait for more gold or for a worker to scurry home.

Can these lessons be applied to life? In the James Gee video from Edutopia that I shared with some teachers yesterday, Gee talks about how World of Warcraft teaches collaboration by forcing you to work with others who have different skill sets and expertise, certainly a very important real world lesson. The lessons above should also be part of a real life toolkit: being able to live with a little ambiguity and knowing how to use resources and people wisely are mentioned by many leadership experts as characteristics of successful leaders.

Am I rationalizing playing a game on Friday afternoon by trying to write something thoughtful? Sort of….but my audience yesterday was not made up of gamers and I could tell they were surprised by learning about some of the features of games and what kids (and grown ups) might be learning as they are playing or how games like Chore Wars could make houseclearning fun!