Category Archives: adult learning

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

Finding Time for Quadrant Two in Busy Times

adult learning, learning, professional development

Fall is my busiest time of year and life seems dominated by work. It’s work I enjoy and I get to collaborate with outstanding leaders and educators across the state. But, there are days when I just need to let the work go a bit and spend some time in what Stephen Covey called Quadrant Two: not urgent but important activities that focus on personal and professional development. I started today by cleaning up my desk and shelves. I’ve been sort of shoving stuff there as I come home between events and now that life has settled down for a few weeks, things can go to their proper places.

I have been using my personal time to play the guitar almost every day. I know *how* to play the guitar but needed something better than the old Mel Bay books to move me along to actually playing the guitar in an enjoyable way. I’m using a great app called Yousician that creates lessons for me and tracks my progress. It is challenging enough to keep my interest but not so difficult that I can’t keep up. The practice mode allows me to go slower and work through difficult passages.  I like the way the app focuses primarily on playing but also has a learning track related to music theory. (I’m playing minor blues scales right now.) I enjoy escaping to another room away from the office and just playing for fun…no pressure to achieve other than to please myself although I am motivated by the gold stars!

Professionally, I know what I want to do but I seem to keep putting it off: I want to earn Google Level 1 Educator certification. I have a test code tacked to my bulletin board and had plans to do it this summer. It didn’t happen and I had a revelation the other day that there was never going to be a perfect time to do it. So, I am just going to figure out how to work in study time.  My plan is to complete Google Fundamentals Training with a goal of  taking the exam before the end of the year. Then I can participate in the VSTE training for Level 2 in the spring.

Frankly, I’m a little nervous…I haven’t taken an exam of any kind for a very long time. I’m going to see if others want to join in with me to study. MOOCs might be dead, but I think there is still a place for people learning together and supporting each other professionally.  I’ll post my study schedule later today and then push it out via the Google Plus communities in Virginia. I’m not imagining anything formal but just a group of fellow travelers who help to hold each other accountable.

 

Literary Maps

adult learning, creativity, writing

This summer, I am taking a course through North Tier called Telling the World’s Stories Through Google Maps. We’re just getting started on the first week and I’ve already learned a few things I didn’t know about this tool that I use almost every day. I am fortunate to have Tim Stahmer as my instructor.

Part of my motivation for taking this course came from my reading. I was reading Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell, the western explorer known for being the first European to make the passage through the Grand Canyon. Using the maps to explore helped better understand the challenges of navigating the Colorado River. It was fun to look up the various places mentioned in the book, many of which Powell named.

From there, I headed to the 10,000 Islands area of the Gulf Coast of Florida as part of reading Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, the fictionalized story of Edgar “Bloody” Watson who lived in the islands at the turn of the century. It is a wild country, and the satellite view was  most helpful as the Google street view cameras haven’t quite made it to the mangrove swamps yet. Again, maps enriched my understanding of how the setting influenced the story.

Finally..and here was the real lightbulb moment for using maps in the English classroom…I was reading a cozy mystery series set in Leap, Cork County, Ireland. One of the characters was an elderly Irish woman and when I checked out the tiny village in maps, there she was! A woman showed up on one of the photos, pushing her walker down the road. I know it was not the woman from the book, but it occurred to me that exploring the maps would be a wonderful story starter activity.

Getting Serious About Goals in 2016

adult learning, blogging, books, reading

I feel like I drifted a bit professionally through 2015. Was it because I didn’t have any written resolutions about blogging, reading or being more active in social media? I think they were my hazy goals last year but without making any kind of action plan, they fell a bit by the wayside. I was a pleasantly surprised to count up 33 blog posts on this blog although fall 2015 has been a dry season.

Blogging more consistently is a major goal for 2016: at least twice a week here and once a week on my reading blog at In One Place. The action plan for finding blog fodder includes more professional reading and sharing. I encourage my students to establish routines around reading and sharing and am challenging myself to do that this year.

I’ve been loving reading other writers’ reflections on their year and their ideas for the coming year. I’m glad to know from Martin Weller that blogging isn’t dead. I want to move further out of my comfort zone along with Tamara Letter, work through Jen Orr’s list of her open tabs, and “do something” with Pernille Ripp.  The first thing I’m doing is joining in Pernille’s Passionate Learners Book Club. I know I am not the main audience for her book but I think it’s essential that those of us who work with educators model the kinds of ideas she writes about. For instance, my “non grading” practice has opened some really important discussions with the teachers I work with and I really enjoyed the conversation I had with other professors during VCU’s #ALTFest.

It wasn’t like I didn’t accomplish a few things, mostly around my areas of work. I developed and taught two new courses for University of Richmond and rediscovered the joy of working and learning face to face after several years of teaching exclusively online. I helped VSTE expand its offerings and its audience so it is now truly a year round professional development provider. I read 97 books, 22 more than my initial goal of 75. Admittedly, many of them were fluff, but I had fun with some old and new authors.  I’m going to set a goal of 75 books again this year, making sure to include professional books. I bought three new ones during Dean Shareski‘s keynote at the conference (The Wondering Brain, Writing on the Wall, and A New Culture of Learning.) I’ll write about this reading here while I muse on my personal reading over at In One Place. If you’re interested, I’ve written my top five books of 2015 post to kick off 2016.

One last new routine: I love looking at Tom Woodward’s weekly web harvest that gets posted via Diigo. I’ve had it set up for awhile but never seem to remember to use the tag that would kick off the blog post. I’ve got it ready to go for this week: I tagged the various sites I used for this blog post as well as a few others about blogging in general. I think the post should happen on Sundays.

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…