On October 19th I ran a professional development session showing exemplars of 21st Century Learning. Most exemplars of 21st century lessons are going to have a technology component to them. In order to field questions about the lessons and technologies, I had participants text me questions using poll everywhere. Here are the questions I didn’t get to answer during the session and my answers to them:
What would b easier 2 manage – a wiki or moodle?
It depends on your goal. Moodle is a course management system. It does a lot more then a wiki can. A wiki is a website that is easily edited by many users. My suggestion is to discuss this question with an Integration Coach.
Could we see rubrics from teachers in the district?
We will be working on gathering and creating rubrics this year. The goal is to share them out with staff once they are gathered.
How time consuming is having a moodle with ur students? How do u manage?
If you manage it effectively, it will take you no more time that you are currently spending assessing your students. Anytime you do something new to accomplish a curricular goal, you should let something go. When you start using Moodle begin small. Ex. Replace a traditional formative open ended short answer writing with a forum in Moodle. You now have a rich discussion instead of an individual writing what they think the teacher wants to hear.
Have you seen teachers use this in class?
I have used every one of these items in class myself and endorse them all as powerful tools for student learning.
do u need to download voice thread? Could u share how to add it to Moodle?
Voicethread is a web based tool, No download is needed. I do not have a quick tutorial on how to embed Voicethread in Moodle. I will look for one.
do u think having the kids maintain a wiki with newsletter info would work?
That is a great idea for how to use a wiki!
pros / cons of using a wiki within moodle?
Pro: Inside moodle with all of your other course assignments, easy to manage groups of students and permissions.
Cons: Not as graphically pleasing as pbworks or wikispaces, only visable to students in your class (this could be a pro depending on the purpose)
can you use moodle for peer editing?
You sure can, here is an example of how one teacher used it for peer evaluation. Contact a coach and we can show you how to use it for peer editing.
can you show me how to have my students text me questions?
The website is polleverywhere.com. I would be more than happy to give a quick overview of how to use it.
My question to leave this post, based upon this event, do cell phones have a place in school?
I always start professional development sessions with a video clip if I can find a good one that fits. I just saw this one and am wondering how teachers would react to it. What do you think?
About a week ago I asked my PLN on Twitter, “When a teacher says ‘I don’t have time for that’ do they mean, I don’t know how & I’m not willing to take the time to learn.” I will start by saying this is not my opinion, I was trying to start a discussion.
There was a great amount of wisdom in the responses.
@futureofedu It might just mean “I’m scared to try that!” from @kellyhines
I agree, many want to jump in, they are just scared of the water. In my district, there is me and the others in our educational technology department there to be their life jackets. Still, not all people are jumpping in.
@futureofedu means teacher doesn’t know how said thing fits w/curriculum therefore said thing is perceived as added on to curriculum. from @nancydevine
We must stress that it isn’t one more thing. When we talk about embedding technology and 21st century skills, it happens with the teaching of content, not separately.
@futureofedu Probably more like: “I’m being pulled in too many directions with stuff I already know to take on something else.” from @nlowell
@futureofedu Yes and no-My current workload exceeds my contractual liability.Should I feel pressured into even more with no allowance – no? from @sdisbury
@zemote @futureofedu re: teachers/time – I don’t even have time to do the things I know how to do and I desperately want to do. from @teacherc
Dear adminstrtors, please make time in your teachers schedule for them to learn and grow. Hire people in your district that can support this professional learning.
Dear Politician, Find a way for the above statement to be financially feasible for ALL schools.
Teachers need to shift their practices to embed 21st century skills and technology. This should not be an option. The problem is the lack of understanding and funding for this shift to happen at the speed it should be. The question I am left to ponder, what do we do to change this?
I am very fortunate to have one of the largest technology conferences in the US only 15 minutes from my front door. The unfortunate part is the lack of technology available at this conference. We have some of the best minds in the country keynote every year. This year Wes Fryer was the opening keynote speaker. He brought a great message of bringing change into the educational world. With thousands of educators in the audience he tweeted a message that he was going to have a back channel open using chazzy. As the introductions were made, he chatted with those of use that were in the chat room. WOW, chatting with the keynote speaker 2 minutes before he walked on stage, this is cool use of technology. This could have been a powerful conversation, but!
There is no wireless Internet at this conference. Ok, there is a coffee shop with one small hotspot. The only people in this conversation were those of us with smart phones (as if I needed a reason to love my iPhone, it gave me another). What about all the people in the audience who could have benefited from the conversation?
So what does this mean? Every negative has a lesson. The lessons I learned are:
• Make sure you have the connectivity to support your audience. In schools, the wires, servers and other network hardware are more important than the computers. Feed your funds into the backbone of your network!
• It is productive to have a digital background conversation during a lecture. I was engaged in the lecture (which is what a keynote really is). Our students can text, chat, IM during class and be productive. There need to be rules and guidelines though. I need to ponder this one a bit more.
• Even the tech people evolve. A year ago I would have never said “let them use their cell phones I class.” This showed me as a learner how it can be done productively.
Those are lessons I have the ability to affect. One lesson I can’t affect is regarding eTech Ohio. I’ve been told for years about the dysfunction of eTech. This conference displays the dysfunction. Hopefully new leadership in the state of Ohio will bring new life to the governing body of technology in the state.
Every once in a while I put together short training. They are hands on, quick, easy learning events. Yesterday I did one on making your computer read a Microsoft Word document back to you.
Why would a teacher want to have a student do this? Here are few reasons:
Find mistakes in their writing. I hate when my porpoise doesn’t have a purpose in my writing.
Learn to edit…you write and make mistakes, let them listen and find the mistakes
As I work toward the future (or catching teachers up to the present), I struggle with where to start. The day to day tasks of emails, meetings, etc… sometimes move my focus. I am now trying to refocus on the question, how do we get teachers into the 21st century. Some are already on their way. Those are the early adopters. Many are interested, they just don’t know what direction to take. Should I focus solely on these folks right now. There are enough of them to fill my days. The dilemma I run into is, what about the kids who don’t have these teachers? Is it fair? A student could luck out and get all the “21st century teachers” and live an engaged life. Another students could sit through 6 hours of lecture a day. The only engagement they would get would be lunch conversations.
My goal today is to figure out what the focus of my work is. Do I target groups? Do I fight the fight to change the entire system? Do I keep spending my time with the teachers who come to me (the good news is there are enough of these to fill the majority of my time)? Oh, my brain is already aching and I haven’t even started?
A while back I wrote that my new goal was to get administrators to model the use of web 2.0 tools so staff members would see their value. Since I wrote that post, I moved to new district. I have a different set of administrators to try to convince. I envisioned this could go two ways. I could walk into a dream school where the administrators were ready to go day one. Dream is the key word. The other way was more realistic, it would take months or years to build trust and relationships before we would really make any changes. To my surprise, it has been a little blend of the two.
My working partner and I were meeting with HS admins a few days ago. We were giving them some updates as to what we’ve been doing and where were going next. Then out of the blue the principal asks us if we can teach him about blogs and wikis. He is a great leader, an excellent principal, but not very high tech. For him to jump into the 21st century will be a huge boost to our efforts to create a 21st century school district.
The next step is to actually get him into the training. Not only does he want trained, he wants to do it along side his teachers. I went to the Language Arts department head today to see if his department would like to take part in this event. Sounds like we are a go.
I am starting to see a little bit of light through the trees. We have a long way to go till we have a 21st century school, but the first step is to have teachers and administrators walking down the same path we are.
Life has been good over the last week. I found out my job isn’t being cut (this year), created the websites mentioned above and saw the Columbus Destroyers (Arena Football) win a game. Why did I mention the game? After the game my friends and I are sitting and listening to a band, interesting funk band at that. The table next to us are a bunch of kids (early 20’s) snapping pictures. I overhear this statement made from one of the young ladies to a young man: “what is your name? I’ll tag it.” Our kids are living in a world where they know what tags are and how to use them. How many teachers know what a tag is? How many teachers have even heard of a tag? I asked a teacher what a tag is in regards to technology and the reply was “is that the sticker with the number on the side of the computer?” A tag to a teacher is a sticker we use to identify the computer in our inventory. This comment stresses to me that we have a lot of teaching to do, not just to our students, but to our teachers.
The question being when? With it being testing season finding time is tough. Everything right now is “I can’t till after the test.” UGH
Today I had the great experience of presenting at the Ohio eTech Conference with my wife. I have presented at conferences before, but this was special. I want to thank her and everyone who attended for making it a great experience for me.
For those of you who attended the session, I hope you enjoyed it. I appologize that we didn’t get to share more ideas for using wikis. All of the great questions guided the session in a direction I didn’t expect. All of the ideas I was going to share are on the website. If you didn’t attend the session, the website should be a good resource for learning how to use wikis in educational settings. I will also be adding a few more resources to the site when I get back to my building Thursday.
Feel free to let me know what you thought. If you have a wiki, or go out and start one, post the address on here. I would love to see what everyone else is doing with wikis.
One thing I didn’t get to mention at the conference is I have a free 1 year upgrade for pbwiki. The first person to post their pbwiki address on this blog will get the upgrade.
I am getting ready to create an online professional development class for the teachers in my district. It will be worth one semester hour college credit. I am currently trying to figure out what the content of the class will be. I will be using Moodle to teach the class. In our district we use Moodle for our blogging, wikis, online classes, etc… Last year I taught a class that covered a wide range of topics (Inspiration, blogging, digital photography, photo editing, teacher webpages). It went well, but I want this class to have more of a focus. My thought was to center the class around “using web 2.0 tools in the classroom”My question is, with the numerous tools out there, what is best to focus on? Any opinions would be appreciated.
I will have to use this as my first Twitter question. I finally took the time a few nights ago to create an account. I now have to find a few more people to follow me. If you are a Twitter’er (what is the correct term?) my username is “futureofedu”
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