Category: blogs

#whatiwrite

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Someone asked me the other day why I don’t have comments enabled on the blog. After all, he said, a blog is a conversation.

True. And for years, I encouraged and responded to comments.

But a while ago, after having spent way too much time online in various social media, I discovered I needed a break. Time away from the conversations.

So, why do I write publicly? For me the blog is a record of sorts. When I go back through the years, I see posts from my days as an instructional technologist, trying to get folks to explore new ways of teaching:

And then the periods of teaching 8th and 9th grade English:

When my 8th graders dressed up to read Romeo and Juliet aloud:

As a community leader for a team of Aussie teachers in Powerful Learning Practice:

Sharing my thoughts with my kids in Virginia while I was with my dad in a hospital in Boston:

The December I began to question my involvement with social media…

Pushing myself into new writing territories with National Poetry Month:

And buying my first drum…

Unfortunately, I’ve lost the posts from 2004 to 2007, which makes me so sad. I’ve no record of my early days online and then in Connecticut, working for finalsite (a CMS provider). [edited: I found a link to my old typepad blog!]

I write to learn, to think, to share, to reflect. I’ve been writing in one way or another nearly all my life. Like a miner seeking gold, I often struggle to find the words. Those nuggets are precious, but I find myself pushed forward by the possibilities.

Mostly, I want these posts, all the links, and all the connections to be in one place. Here. Easily searched and categorized. Just for me.

Something tells me I might be ready for some conversation, too.

Sharing Our Learning

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Sometimes we get discouraged, wondering if our efforts to have our students working in self-directed ways can, well,  really work. Three years ago, a small group of us visited Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. He helped us set up a wordpress blogging system for our school.

It started slowly, but some people have taken it and run. One is Senior Exhibit adviser Katie Blashford, who sent me an email this morning:

If you have time you should see what our FA wiz kids are doing……many using their tech skills all on their own.

1.) see FAblogs with Maddie’s new tutorial videos embedded so cool
2.) Tomorrow is Rachel Fried’s medical forum.  Tom Catron is a guest speaker.  Unfortunately, he could not make a physical appearance so he prerecorded his speech and put it on youtube.  He is then skyping in during the Q and A portion of the evening.
3.) Kahlil just finished his KatalMath website…….this one speaks for itself.
4.) With many of the events coming up (gallary at Eileen’s Feb 13, Tyler’s guitar workshop , Rachel’s forum etc) the primary publicity has been via Facebook, medical blogs, guitar forums, and other social networking tools.

Of course, I give credit to Katie, who has pushed to help the kids make their learning transparent and meaningful. These are experiences they will remember. Powerful learning, Katie. Thanks so much for sharing.

Authentic Learning Works

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How Liveblogging is Changing Journalism

Reading this article about Amir Abo-Shaeer, the recent MacArthur award winner, took me back a few years. Amir has established an experienced-based learning program for his students.  Fast Company reports he runs the engineering Academy “like a business.”

“Students help write grants; they do PR, and they develop our website.” He calls his approach project-based learning and says the students learn both soft skills and business skills so they are ready “to join the world of work.”

“We are going to be left behind if we don’t see a paradigm shift,” says Abo-Shaeer. He therefore wants to see his project-based learning applied to all subjects and taught across the United States in order to meet the demands of “students as consumers of education.”

I applaud Amir for his work and insight into how students learn best– and what we can accomplish when we create the right design for learning.

Years ago, I taught high school journalism along with the standard English courses. Whenever I stopped to think about the difference in the two courses, I was struck with how much the journalism students gained from their real-life work. They wrote, published (yes, even back in the 1980s we used a Mac and published our newspaper at the local printer), and sold advertising. Working in teams, they learned to lead, collaborate, and share. We had real deadlines, and we stuck to them.

In contrast, my English classes, for the most part, sat in rows quietly, discussing the previous night’s reading or taking a quiz.Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to transfer what I had designed in my journalism classes to the rest of my day.

The journalism students tended to become better writers than my English students. They also approached their learning eagerly, often spending far more time working on our newspaper than our class guidelines required of them. Students engaged in debate about truth and fairness, they set goals, and they learned communication skills. Each student focused on his or her strength, whether advertising, photography, or writing, and yet, they all learned the skills. Heck we were even blogging back in 2004!

I guess  I am a slow learner because I finally realized I could apply similar principles to my English classes. And, as I’ve written before, much improved  learning came from this approach.

Amir has created a powerful program for his science and engineering students. His philosophy of education resonates with all of us who have worked to create project-based, authentic learning in our classes. And now he has been rewarded fully with a grant to teach other teachers.

This works.

image credit: By digitaljournal.com

On Their Own

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I have to admit to feeling somewhat disconnected this fall. After all, I’ve taught for most of the past 30 years, recently at Fredericksburg Academy as the instructional tech coordinator and an English teacher. Fall can be difficult for ex-teachers who love being in the classroom.

Today, a colleague shared with me an email and screenshot of work her kids were doing. She had sent it out to the entire faculty and then realized I might enjoy seeing what the students were up to. She was right. So cool.

Here’s her email:

Here is a little story about young, independent, tech savvy students overcoming their obstacles and taking responsibility. Blair is absent today, but she emailed me this morning to tell me that she had made arrangements with her partner about the paper that they were supposed to write together in class. Now, during class both students are typing on the same Google doc at the same time and chatting with each other in the Google chat feature. I thought that it was cool that I could check in on and literally watch students as they worked in my classroom, but this is even better. The best part: they set this up on their own.

Thanks, @jclarkevans for keeping me in the loop. I especially enjoy this coming from Blair, a student who claimed she just “didn’t love” using the laptops two years ago when I taught her ninth grade! (However, she was the one most intrigued by my talk about digital identity.) We never know where our students will go when we allow them to figure things out on their own. And teachers like Jennifer allow this to happen.

Will Administrators Use Social Media in the Future?

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Today’s CEO is not social, says Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony–in a study reported today on the Mashable site. I pulled one of the quotes that made me think about administrators in our schools:

Colony has concluded that, “None of the CEOs of Fortune Magazine’s top 100 global corporations have a social profile.”

Wow. None. But should we be surprised? Very few school principals, Heads of Schools, or even high-level administrators have a social profile. George Couros, whose fairly recent jump into social media has propelled him as a leader in this area, started Connected Principals to share those that do. But until the past few months, I saw few administrators willing to take the perceived risk of being “out there.”

I find social media fascinating. I can’t imagine not sharing and learning online. But it seems people either get it or don’t.

Educators are no different in that regard. But those administrators who have jumped report great satisfaction in their transparency with parents and families. Check out Larry Fliegelman’s latest post about connecting with his parents. Josie Holford, head of Poughkeepsie Day School, keeps her families up to date through her blog, Twitter, and Facebook.

So as I read the post on Mashable, I wondered….how different will our “school world” be when administrators around the world will feel as LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman does. In the post he says,  “perceptions around social media being too risky for CEOs are beginning to change.”

“I would predict that more and more executives will see this as an opportunity rather than a risk,” he says.

I hope more school administrators will soon discover the possibilities.

image:By Pranav SinghPranav Singh