Ruth’s Ruckus

cross-posted at Ruth’s Ruckus 2 

 I started a class on Web 2.0 about three weeks ago.  Sometimes the VDOE offers classes for TRTs.  I guess they think that they should help us decide the direction that we ought to be going.  I try to take as many as I can because I want to make sure that I am at least keeping pace with what the VDOE has suggested.  The classes have been interesting, but in general they seem to be things I have a pretty good handle on already.  I think the classes are great for learning about what is going on in other school divisions and for networking.  So I will continue to take them as I have the opportunity. 

We are supposed to post to our blogs weekly about the course content, and of course since it’s on my blog, this assignment has fallen to the way side.  So here’s the post that I was supposed to do last week.  Required reading for this week is some older posts from Richardson and Dembo, both of whom I read (when I am reading).  The posts introduce the idea of conjugating the word blog.  Blog (noun), blogging (verb), and what the concepts we are talking about really mean. 

Just to summarize, a blog is the site where you read what has been written and perhaps comment on it.  Blogging on the other hand is the act of reading, reflecting, and writing about what you read.  Which then might be read by someone else who reflects and then writes about what you have written.  The continuing circle becomes what we know as the blogosphere.  Dembo then asks a question:  When we take this practice into the classroom, are we rehashing the same old skills are we teaching something new?    Is the skill set required by students who blog different from what students are required to do in a regular classroom. 

I am pretty sure that this is a new skill set.  Especially if we allow students to choose whose reflections they will read.  I could be said that they might have the same outcomes reading and reflecting on The Diary of Anne Frank, but I beg to differ.  Blogging becomes alive in a very different way then the reading, reflecting, and discussing that goes on in a regular classroom.  Blogging allows the student to choose what direction the discussion will go in.  It requires them to thoroughly think through their thoughts and opinions as they have to be expressed in writing.  Too a student in a class will add to the discussion a partial thought and be unable to fully express it.  Another student adds to their thought in an attempt to assist and then the conversation has may be seeded with thoughts that the student was in no way thinking.  If one of the participants hooks on to that idea there is a fundamental shift in the conversation that may never come back to the partially expressed thought of the first student. A student’s blog is her own.  The conversation never gets away from her and she is able to bring it back to her point and clarify to her audience. 

Tags: EdTech; 21st century skills

 I’ve read some interesting stuff today and it’s wonderful that it’s thematic.  McLeod talks about marketing interactions.  You know the interactions that we have on a daily basis with our customers and other stakeholders (students, parents, and other folks in the communities that we serve).  These interactions have the ability to build or chip away at the trust and goodwill that we would like to exchange with them - the very trust and goodwill that is at the foundation of their support of our endeavors with their children.  

Our ability to have those great interactions has been hampered by NCLB.  We have a push to make the score at all costs.  We throw out every piece of the curriculum that isn’t directly measured by one of those tests.  Our bulletin boards have to be correlated to the tests.  Field trips have to be justified by objectives measured by the tests.  Art, music and PE have been changed to support mechanisms to drill additional content in order to prepare students for the tests.  No wonder we have poor marketing interactions with the community.  They are not interested in making their children good test takers.  They are interested in seeing their kids learn and maximize their potential.  

Unfortunately education under NCLB has become a very expensive venture into policymaking that failed. Our nation will reap the consequences in ways that we can hardly imagine.  So now that policymakers are willing to admit that they made a $6 billion dollar mistake will they allow educators to really educate our children?  Warlick asks what we would find if we had our constraints lifted…I think we would find time.  Without NCLB we would find that we actually had the time to learn about new technologies and design instructional sequences to teach children the literacies of the 21^st century. The technology is there, the support professionals are in place, we just need to have the teachers freed from NCLB.  

Tags: 21st_century, NCLB

I saw Warlick’s post on taming your PLN a few weeks ago.  I think that was when it started to bother me that I had not blogged in months.  I read a blog yesterday (sorry didn’t save the reference) about morning routines and the woman talked about including reading her feeds in her routine.  So I have been thinking about this for a while (yes a day is a while for me…). 

I really wanted to know why I had stopped blogging, and I realized that my reader is poorly setup and overflowing, so I guess I need to declare bankruptcy and start over.  Then I might be able to read something that I can reflect on…

http://students2oh.org/#what

http://beyond-school.org/2007/12/07/students-20-edublog-pre-launch-help-spread-the-splash/

Students talking about education..I know I want to hear what they have to say…

Yesterday at the VSRA governing council meeting, I introduced 50+ educators to bookmarking on http://del.icio.us !!  We will begin collecting and exchanging bookmarks as a professional organization.  I am excited!!  Many of them were not familiar with social bookmarking and so I was glad to introduce them.  Thanks to Steve Dembo  for the challenge to “build the choir”.

Vicki Davis has set out a challenge at http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2007/11/play-web-20-truth-and-dare.html Truth/Dare/Double Dare and I accept!

Do you spend any time talking about proper methods of e-mail? Not quite sure what she meant by this question, but I post about email use over at my work blog: http://ppsblogs.net/ruthokoye

Do you have a facebook or myspace profile? Yes I do.  It’s not really a great profile, so I’m hesitant to share it.  I’m just beginning to look into facebook as my goddaughter has joined and sent me an invitation…

If someone wrote about you, is your name hyperlinkable? (Do you have something they can link to?) Yes.  I have a two blogs. This one and the one from work mentioned above.

Do you know the names of all of your students? I’m really bad with names, and when I was teaching my students were quite aware of my diificulty.  I made up nicknames that I could remember for some and called most “sweetheart”

If your students have computers in the classroom, do your students make ongoing eye contact? When I taught and had computers in the room, my students were using them!  They weren’t looking at me…

Are you unafraid of what would happen if youtube, myspace, and facebook were allowed in your classroom? As a public educator, I do need to worry about student safety, however I would feel better about youtube and myspace being available if students were taught how to appropriately use these materials first.  Teachers at the elementary level (where I teach) should make used of free services to teach students how to use these types of materials before we let them.  www.imbee.com; tappedin.org; and the new ad-free Ning groups would be perfect to teach students how to use these.

Do your students collaboratively create documents? While I am familiar with wikis and googledocs, I’ve not used them with elementary kids at this point

Do you expect your students to complete their reading assignments? Kids never completed their reading assignments when I was teaching.  I never completed them while I was in school.  If we changed a few things like the publishing options, I think that might change.  If kids knew they would be blogging a response to a reading, they might know they can’t fake it.

Do you assign papers and grade them after reading EVERY WORD? I learned very quickly that I did not want to read a million papers, so I stopped giving boring assignments like write about…I used lots of options like create a brochure, do an oral report…that way I could really grade things fairly.

Have you ever given assignment and allowed students to create content on the public world wide web? I do now that I am in IT. 

Do you allow students to post content WITHOUT premoderation? I don’t think I could do that.  I teach elementary school.  They are still learning about what is appropriate.

If you allow students to post online, do you subscribe to 100% of their content in your RSS reader? No.  I post their stuff.  So I read it before it goes out there.

Do you comment on your student blogs? Yes, sometimes. 

Is more than 50% of your content relevant “to life?” (Ask your students) I think so.  I use lots of real life examples to get my point across.

Do all of your students open their textbook for your class on a weekly basis? When I taught they did in class.

Do you give reading assignments that include web content? Not usually

Have your students been taught methodologies for assessing the validity of web documents? I try to include that when I am teaching lessons that include research

Do you give students projects where they must manage themselves, multitask, and deliver a comprehensive output that is relevant to your topic? YES!!

Have you changed anything significant about ALL of the courses you are teaching THIS YEAR? Yes.  I’ve added blogging.

Do you care? Of course.

Here’s the video that started it all:

Neither of the administrators in the buildings that I am assigned to would caare about this, but I am showing this to my immediate supervisor.

I was reading Scott McLeod this morning…Yes, morning – it was very odd – and saw this post about Kim Moritz the blogging principal that we’ve all heard about. While I didn’t really read Kim’s blog, I knew about and checked it from time to time as those in my aggregator referenced her. It’s not that what Kim was saying wasn’t important, I just have enough reading trying to keep up with the edtech folks that I’m trying to read. Anyway, Kim’s latest post http://ghsprincipal.edublogs.org/2007/10/26/g-town-stops-talking/  references something that I am struggling with myself.

It is inevitable, that our professional goals sometimes take us to new positions. Kim has gone from principal to assistant superintendent. In her post she talks about having been a good principal and loving her job. She is taking a break from blogging because she doesn’t yet see the place for it in her new position.

The idea of leaving a job you love to follow your professional goal is something that I am struggling with right now. I know that I am having a rough patch right now, but generally speaking – I love my job. My teachers know it, my boss knows it, and the other TRTs in the division know it. But I am finishing a doctoral program in educational leadership. I went into the program for principal certification. Logically, when the dissertation is done, I should be moving on.

I just stumbled on this great job before I could finish. When I applied, I thought this job was meant for me. Who looks for someone with elementary language arts background in a technology field? Language arts folks that I’ve known have always been a little tech shy. Even I just dabbled before I got the position. I just happened to have the right combination of education. Undergrad in computer programming and grad in reading – I used to say this job is a combination of my two great loves.

The question remains – should I move on? Or will I find that I’ve moved on from something that I was really good at like Kim?

I just read Steve Dembo’s post http://www.teach42.com/2007/10/18/building-out-the-choir/  and I realize he is right. So many of us here in the “Blogosphere” are connecting with each other over and over again; each time we hook up we reaffirm our need and dependence on Web 2.0 technologies. We need to move beyond that to an “each one, reach one” strategy in order to share the wealth. As a teacher trainer, I have opportunities to share, but so many of my teachers still need the basics. I have teachers who “don’t have time” to read email…what they fail to realize is that they truly don’t have time NOT to. All of these tools increase our productivity. They help us to get or find the resources that we need in shorter amounts of time.

Well Steve, thanks for the hint…I have the opportunity to reach 50+ reading educators at a meeting next month. I had planned to just give an overview of some websites, but I am determined to sneak a bit of Web 2.0 in…maybe I’ll mention http://del.icio.us  and explain how they can bookmark sites that are of interest. I’m not quite sure how, but I’ll come up with something.

Of course the test of my resolve to blog biweekly would be to look at my blog.  So no wonder that 6 weeks have gone by without a single entry…Well I continue to try.  

I found an interesting entry at 21^st Century Collaborative on professional learning communities. In the post Beach talks about a learning community including administrators and staff working and learning collaboratively to improve student learning.  I find it interesting that this approach while endorsed by ASCD and many others (Beach quotes Senge who I had to read as part of my school administration studies) is not being carried out  in the school division.  Several of the schools are in dire need of some intervention…we’ve got sweeps, school improvement plans, after school programs, but we’re not sitting down to learn together or from each other.  When research says that this approach could turn a school around, why aren’t we trying it?  My department is driven to be a learning community…whether we like it or not.  We meet weekly to share best practices, discuss the literature and learn new techniques.  We are challenged to reflect on our practice so that we can become better trainers. Even though she is way too busy, our supervisor subjects herself to many of the same things that she expects us to do.  This way, we learn together.  It does work for us, although we do a monumental amount of stretching ourselves.

What would it take to get administrators and teacher to develop a learning community?  I guess it would have to be driven by the administrator.  How do you get an administrator interested in doing that?  Why has this practice not been brought to our division when it has the potential to make lasting change by changing the very culture of the schools?  

I am catching up on my reading…still behind everyone by a few weeks.  Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted about virtual learning communities and communities of practice.  I found her post interesting considering my charge this year to develop a personal professional development plan.  I’ve been a member of a few communities, but never got past the linking or lurking stage.  David Lee’s explanation of these roles describes exactly where I was coming from in my membership.  I find it interesting that while I felt the need to join these groups as a matter of my own professional development, I never considered my role or the need to become an active participant until challenged to “take it to a new level” by my boss.  I then had the task to decide which community I would become an active participant of.  I belong/subscribe to several: an ITRT Yahoo! group,  The DEN, VSTE forums, TiPS, and Classroom 2.0.  If I was going to make the move from consumer to commentor it had to be in the right community.  The choice wasn’t hard.  Three of the five aren’t active enough to merit a change. I’ve always found participation at the DEN to be challenging, so I went with Classroom 2.0.  It’s got all of the hallmarks of the healthy community that Sheryl mentioned.  When I joined I was immediately welcomed by several members and the topics of conversation are really relevant to what I am doing.  In the week that I have been a more active participant, I have learned an aweful lot. 

• I got an idea for a lesson for a fifth grade class that I’ll be working with.   
• One discussion helped me connect some ideas I have for a teacher workshop that I am developing.
• I’ve been challenged to change my pedagogical ideas about instructional blogging.

As I told my boss on Friday - it’s already changed my practice.  As Sheryl puts it, I’ll be around Classroom 2.0 a lot  - not just because it’s part of my plan - it’s  worth my time.