Category Archives: community

Certification Update

adult learning, community, professional development

For many online courses, the weekly deadline is Sunday at 11:59 PM. While it wasn’t quite that late when I got online to start the Google training, it was late-ish. I knew some of the content as I had completed the first section over the summer and figured I didn’t need a lot of time to get back up to speed.

So, like many of my online students, I missed the opportunity to spend the week considering the content and really thinking about the questions. The first unit focuses on general ideas about using technology and helping students develop citizenship skills. I spent a little time brainstorming ideas for integration but did not meet the level of detail in the examples. I love that I can go back and expand on my original ideas.

Well…it turns out I am already behind! I went to check my study plan against the training center and realized that I had planned to do Units 1 and 2 this week. I didn’t complete Unit 2: Expand Your Access to Help and Learning. Guess I better dive in after my meeting tonight.

Then, my goal is to schedule time for Units 3 and 4 earlier this week so I have time to really dig into the content.

I’ve seen a couple folks in the GEGs who are interested in tagging along with me. Not sure how we might work together beyond just moral support: share ideas, tips, questions.

Google Certification Study Schedule Fall 2017

adult learning, community, learning, professional development

Here is my plan to study for and take the Google Educator Level 1 Exam before the end of the year. I’ll be sharing my progress here and encouraging others to join me in this journey through the Google Educator Groups in Virginia.

I’m working my way through the Google Training Center materials.

Section One:  ENGAGE IN PROFESSIONAL GROWTH AND LEADERSHIP

Week One (11/6/2017): Get Ready to Use Technology in the Classroom, Expand Your Access to Help and Learning

Section Two: INCREASE EFFICIENCY AND SAVE TIME

Week Two (11/13/2017):  Have a Mostly Paperless Classroom, Save Time Communicating

Week Three (11/20/2017): Organize Activities for Yourself and Others, Bring Meetings Online

Week Four (11/27/2017): Bring Student Work Online, Measure, Understand and Share Student Work

Section Three: FACILITATE AND INSPIRE STUDENT LEARNING AND CREATIVITY

Week Five (12/ 6/2017): Teach Students Online Skills, Build Interactive Lessons

Week Six (12/13/2017): Captivate Your Class With Video, Facilitate Group Work

Week Seven (12/20/2017): Promote Digital Citizenship, Final Review

Week Eight (12/27/2017): Take the Test

Building Community Around Reading

books, community, reading,

I attended the book group at the local library today. Today’s group was fun! A welcoming group of women who had smart and intriguing ideas about the book. One woman, in particular, had several interesting ideas about characters and their motives that I simply hadn’t considered. I am looking forward to next month.

I was in a book group before I moved to the farm but that requires a long country drive and a ferry ride so I had to give it up.  Until today, for the past five years, my reading community has been virtual, mostly tied to Library Thing.

I started as a lurker who mostly used the site to keep track of my reading. Over the past three or four years, I have been participating in one of their online groups and have about ten people that I follow on a regular basis. Three of them I was able to meet face to face last year so I will admit to feeling a bit closer to them. But, I have also built a strong relationships with two women I have only met in the online group.

This year, I am committed to be more involved. In the past, I have checked in only when I have finished a book and I went to update my thread, often just once a week. But this community is active on a daily basis and my weekly checkins simply weren’t enough. I was overwhelmed by all the posts and often left without posting at all.

This year, I’ve checked in every other day and sometimes even daily. I update my own thread with comments about my current reading or other items of bookish interest so people have a reason to visit my thread. I take time to reply to commenters as well. I also get caught up on the threads of my friends. I don’t feel like I always have to comment but I try to get involved at least once or twice a week, commenting on something they posted or getting involved a discussion with them and others on their threads. I’ve tried to keep my list of friends short so I can be more thoughtful and focused.  As with so many things in life, the key to success is knowing how much you can commit to and then committing to it.

What Would You Add to the List?

community, history

The National Park Service has just announced 24 new national historic landmarks.  They include sites related to some more recent path including the Civil Rights movement (Medgar and Myrlie Evers House) and the Vietnam War protests (Kent State shootings site). One quirky addition is the Davis-Ferris Organ, which can be found in Round Lake, NY, where it was used as part of a Methodist camp meeting.  The organ was added as an example of mid-18th century organ technology.

The criteria for being named a National Landmark is described by the NPS on their website:

National Historic Landmarks (NHLs) are nationally significant historic places designated by the Secretary of the Interior because they possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.

I poked around the National Park Service site but their database is down and the records that I can access are static pdfs. Thank goodness for Wikipedia! Here’s the list of national landmarks in Virginia. I think they meet the mission of “illustrating or interpreting” the heritage of Virginia. Historic homes range from Monticello to the Maggie Lena Walker house. There are Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields. There are slave quarters, seaside cottages and schools where the desegregation fight took hold.

The locations provide a guided tour of Virginia history and could spawn a lifetime of learning, finding interesting and odd connections. For instance, Richard Quiney, who bought Brandon Plantation in 1635 was brother-in-law to Judith, the daughter of Shakespeare. Wonder if he helped write the plays?

For younger students, identifying new national landmarks might make an interesting exercise. For older students, the discussion could go more in depth about the process of choosing the landmarks. Are there any groups or historical periods that might be underrepresented? What landmarks in their community help tell the story of their town or county?

What Does It Mean to Succeed at Blogging?

blogging, community

Back at the desk after a holiday break that included lots of crocheting, binge watching and then a lovely visit with old friends. The snow storm sent me home a day early and we have been settled in our den for the past three days, warmed by the wood burning stove and watching football and the birds.

I browsed my RSS feed this morning and got stuck on this post from Tim Stahmer about the importance of independent blogging.  In blogging years, I’m very late in replying to his post, but that’s one of the barriers I face in my blogging practice so I’m not going to let the fact that my reply is a month late stand in my way of publishing this post.

That sense of immediacy is just one of my personal barriers to blogging. The other is the pressure to say something profound, and that’s obviously a bigger hurdle to tackle. What can I add to the conversations around me? What insights do I bring from my own experiences? I think I set the profundity bar too high. Better to just write it and send it out there sometimes. A simple share with a brief comment highlighting an important point or idea can spark a conversation as well as a long read.

For instance, I can highly recommend listening to How Silicon Valley Can Help You Get Unstuck from the Hidden Brain podcast. It focuses on applying design thinking to your own life, featuring the work of Burnett and Evans. I was fascinated with the idea of prototyping your life, particularly the idea that failure is to be expected, maybe even welcome. That isn’t the message we send our students, outside of a makerspace perhaps.

The title of this post also came out of the podcast. I have blogged on and off for a very long time in various spaces. Right now, I have two “active” blogs but do not have any schedule or plan for updating them so they are pretty sporadic. Am I failing at blogging? If not, I live at the very fringes of success. Completely failing would be to give it up and since I’m not ready to do that, I need to identify and pursue some definition of success that makes me feel less like a failure, I suppose.

I’m not ready to give it up because I agree with Tim that blogging continues to be a powerful way to share our stories and ideas. Getting beyond our personal barriers is an important first step in beginning a blogging practice. And, like any routine, it needs to become part of our schedule. Some people benefit from a good challenge: Jon Becker, for instance, is moving right along with his own Tweet of the Day blog entries.  This all help generate content.

From there, as Tim points out, the community becomes essential:

We also need to help each other build an audience and build communities around those educators who are willing to share in the open. And, on the other end, to teach our colleagues, parents, and even students why reading blogs is important, where to find the good ones, and how to easily build them into their routines (RSS still lives!).

And that is the biggest barrier of all. I wonder if a blogging challenge tied to a tweet chat would be a good start. It gets some content generated around a similar topic and as part of an already existing community.  There is always plenty more to say after a tweet chat.