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Barbara Lindsey

Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Learning with Blogs and Wikis - 0 views

  • Teachers rarely get to self-select learning opportunities, pursue professional passions, or engage in meaningful, ongoing conversations about instruction.
  • Although most of my colleagues recognize that business-driven reform efforts are likely to have little effect on student learning, they are largely unwilling to challenge the status quo. "Nothing's going to change," they insist. "This is how professional development has always been done.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you agree with this statement?
  • First, there's a new emphasis on the importance of collaborative learning among members of close-knit teams in schools. School leaders are beginning to believe in the human capacity of their faculties and are structuring opportunities for teachers to reflect on instruction together. These joint efforts are targeted and specific, increasing educators' motivation and engagement.
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  • Second, digital tools now help fulfill Elmore's desire for fresh "portals through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools." Specifically, thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice. In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are actively reflecting on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. And all this collective knowledge is readily available for free.
  • Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.
  • What's more, the readers of my own blog challenge my thinking in provocative comments day after day.
  • Start by using a feed reader as a learning tool for a few weeks. Find several blogs that target educators in your grade level or content area and organize them with an aggregator of your choice. The search for blogs probably best begins at the SupportBlogging wiki (http://supportblogging.com), which includes a list of hundreds of blogs broken down into specific categories, such as education blogs, principal blogs, teacher blogs, classroom blogs, and librarian blogs.
  • Tell others how much you enjoy having your thinking stretched by the blogs you read.
  • Share your feed reader with your learning team and begin to explore together. Ask peers about the most interesting articles they're reading. Make it a point to talk with a colleague about a shared blog post at least twice each week.
  • Although reading blogs is the best way to start incorporating 21st-century tools into your plan for professional learning, writing your own blog about instruction can be equally powerful.
  • The difference between a wiki and a blog is that wikis are designed for collaboration among groups of users. Anyone with the shared wiki password can edit the content on a wiki at any time. Wikis also provide discussion boards for every page, enabling users to engage in ongoing conversations about their developing project. Some teams of teachers—such as the teachers creating Digitally Speaking (http://digitallyspeaking.pbwiki.com)—use wikis to reflect on the characteristics of effective instruction. Others use them to create warehouses of materials among teachers working in the same content area (http://cesa5mathscience.wikispaces.com) or as a source for teachers and teams creating entire classroom textbooks (http://anatowiki.wetpaint.com/?t=anon).
  • Consider finding a few peers to write about teaching and learning together. Divide your topic of interest into subtitles or sections. Teachers could be responsible for creating content for their area of expertise; they could generate key ideas, add links to external resources, upload appropriate documents, or embed interesting videos. Then allow users who are fluent with language to polish your final text. Find members who are sticklers for spelling and grammar and turn them loose. On a wiki, the writing process is far less intimidating than on a blog because you're not responsible for an entire selection all by yourself. Instead, you'll reflect with colleagues—which in and of itself is a powerful form of professional growth.
  • Digital tools have also changed who I am as an instructor because I've introduced these tools to my students. Together, we use feed readers to explore collections of student blogs (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/20982438) and organize resources on topics connected to our curriculum, such as biofuels and global warming (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/22534539). We write a classroom blog reflecting on current events (http://guysread.typepad.com/theblurb) and use wikis to collaborate around content (http://carbonfighters.pbwiki.com). I teach my students to challenge the thinking of digital peers with their comments—and to enjoy the challenges that others make to their own electronic thinking. At the same time, my students are learning to create, communicate, and collaborate—and to manage and evaluate information found online.
  • Blogs and wikis are changing who we are as learners, preparing us for a future driven by peer production and networked learning.
Barbara Lindsey

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner | College@Home - 0 views

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    Does not include Diigo!!!
Katherine Ruddick

ktschutt - home - 1 views

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    Kyle gave a great workshop about how to use free online tools for formative assessments. His website is very informative and has a bunch of great links.
Barbara Lindsey

One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

  • quietly tell select students about the policy
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      and which students then get to use this resource? What of issues of equity?
  • “We’re going to invite 20 seniors [this school year] selected by teachers,” he says. We don’t want the computers to be a distraction.”
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      So is this the AP version of digital access?
  • In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Sounds like a resonable solution
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  • The Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois, has taken a step in this direction by allowing students to bring their computers to school and connect to the Internet, but not log on to the district’s network, says Darrell Walery, director of technology.Stay Away from My Networkwalery sums up the struggle in this issue succinctly. He says tech directors who have been teachers favor the experiment, while those who have business backgrounds blanche at the thought. “My role as technology director is to mediate this exact issue,” he adds.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why we need more IT who have been teachers or really understand the difference between a business and educational environment.
  • Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.
  • Compatibility seems to be less of an issue each day as more online applications become available.
  • schools can turn to the growing number of free online tools available to all.
  • Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.
  • The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.
  • “How do you get teachers prepared to teach in a classroom where everyone is a teacher?
  • “Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”
  • “There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says,  from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.
  • Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”
  • Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.
  • While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.
  • “The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”
  • Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.
  • “It’s much more likely in a few years all students will have their own smartphones,” he says.
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    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
Barbara Lindsey

The Tempered Radical: New Opportunities to Connect and Create. . . - 0 views

  • I've truly embraced digital dialogue because it provides me with the opportunity to be challenged and to grow all at once---and on my own time. The traditional barriers of time and space that prevent teachers from learning from one another are eliminated by technology---and the terms "relationships" and "professional development" are being redefined by new opportunities to connect and create together.
  • Last year, I tried to pass that digital enthusiasm on to the sixth graders of my classroom. Together with peers, my students collaborated on a wiki, recording nearly everything that we learned in my science and social studies class. The collective efforts of 90 motivated kids resulted in nearly 80 pages of content that had been revised and refined almost 400 times.  They also joined an effort to create a classroom podcast program that earned over 20,000 page views from visitors in 125 countries ranging from Bolivia to Burkina Faso. With over 110 posts, our "little adventure" drew recognition from technology experts like Will Richardson and was spotlighted on national resource websites like MiddleWeb. 
  • The children of my classroom grew as digital citizens throughout the year. They learned to see the Internet as a tool for collaboration and communication---rather than simply as a vast online research encyclopedia. They practiced posting on our own digital discussion board, polishing the unique skills that it takes to engage others electronically. They judged the reliability of online resources together, became experts at questioning, grew willing to open their work to review and revision, learned Internet safety practices important for protecting themselves and saw the potential of becoming citizens of an electronic world where content is being created at a blinding pace.
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  • What are we going to do with our wiki and blog at the end of the year?" they asked often. "Can we take it with us to seventh grade and keep recording what we're learning? It would be neat to see what we had at the end of middle school!"
  • Our students will buy and sell from countries across the world and work for international companies. They will manage employees from other cultures, work with people from different continents in joint ventures and solve global problems such as AIDS and avian flu together.
  • But what I've grown to realize is that very few people have really embraced the changing nature of a tomorrow that remains poorly defined. We know that the Internet today is far more powerful than ever before---and have heard about companies that are capitalizing on these changes---but we haven't figured out what that means for us. We're jazzed to have access to information and geeked by interactive content providers, but our digital experiences remain somewhat self-centered.
  • the new National Educational Technology Standards for Students being developed by the International Society for Technology in Education. These standards reflect an increased need to teach children how to use the Internet in new and different ways. Perhaps the most challenging---and important standard---for educators to embrace will this one:Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students: A. Interact, collaborate and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media. B. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats. C. Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. D. Contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.Does that sound like the digital work being done in your classroom, school, district or state?!
  • Together with the Center for International Understanding, North Carolina in the World is developing partnerships based on digital collaboration between schools in North Carolina and nations ranging from China to Mexico. Teachers and students in partnering schools are learning to use Web 2.0 tools like web-conferencing and wikis to connect kids across continents. Not only do these efforts help to build a general knowledge of other countries in our children, they are providing concrete opportunities to use technology in new ways.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Share with Glastonbury!
Katherine Ruddick

A Teacher's Guide To Web 2.0 at School - 2 views

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    This is a simple but informative presentation about how to get started with and manage web 2.0 tools in and out of the classroom.
Katherine Ruddick

Diigo Tools - 0 views

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    Bookmarklets, web browser extensions and more to make bookmarking and sharing on Diigo easy.
Barbara Lindsey

Top News - Six technologies soon to affect education - 0 views

  • Collaborative environments, cloud computing, and "smart" objects are among the technologies that a group of experts believes will have a profound impact on K-12 education within the next five years or sooner.
  • This is the first report we have developed with a focus on emerging technologies for elementary and secondary schools, and we hope that K-12 educators will use it as a resource for robust dialog and technology planning," said Larry Johnson, NMC's chief executive. "The technologies we identified have the power to transform teaching and learning both in the short and long term."
  • The six technologies detailed in the report are... - One year or less: collaborative environments and online communication tools - Two to three years: mobile devices and cloud computing - Four to five years: smart objects and the personal web
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Will be interesting to see how these compare with the predictions for higher ed .
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  • Access to these tools gives students an opportunity to experience learning in multiple ways, develop a public voice, and compare their own ideas with those of their peers.
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    Collaborative environments, cloud computing, and "smart" objects are among the technologies that a group of experts believes will have a profound impact on K-12 education within the next five years or sooner.
Barbara Lindsey

Lessons Learned: Webcasting and Live Blogging a School Board Meeting » Moving... - 0 views

  • In many ways, digital technologies can be used as humanizing and socializing influences in a community. One of the virtual attendees (Ernie Cox) tonight commented, “as a father of 2 small children I could be even more involved in civic life if more meetings where covered like this…..” Ernie is exactly right. Webcasting and recording events like this can open up many more doors for civic engagement and involvement. School
  • veryone who wanted to get into the room tonight could not fit. How many more Edmond residents and school district constituents could “attend” the meeting if it was both webcast live and archived? Many, many more.
  • If we want to help motivate and direct our students to become meaningfully engaged in the civic activities of their community, state, and nation (and I think this is an important goal) we should advance this purpose by encouraging them to become citizen journalists.
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  • The benefit of using a tool like CoverItLive (which was free, incidentally) was the opportunity to engage in a backchannel discussion with others during the meeting. This would not have been possible if we were simply viewing the board meeting on the TV. I could even envison the school board making time for virtual attendee/participant comments and questions.
  • This can and should be a context where the transparency afforded by social media tools produces numerous ancillary benefits for those involved, besides the simple act of documenting and sharing an event.
  • Our school board should go paperless. It was AMAZING to see how thick the binders of paper were which each school board member had in front of them during the meeting. In our digital world, it would be both prudent and useful to have all those documents digitized so they were full-text searchable.
  • the district blocks all videos and photos from the learning community so they are inaccessible by students as well as educators on the district network.
  • No one can predict with complete accuracy what the information and communications landscape is going to look like in 2015. How is this dynamic environment addressed in the site plans of our schools? I’m curious if these site plans will be made available electronically for parents to download and read. I think they should be.
Barbara Lindsey

udtechtoolkit - home - 0 views

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    Web 2.0 tools with universal design for learning approach
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