I’ve been thinking more about how I learn. Or more to the point, how I learn differently now.
Wasn’t it simple then? Read a book, take some notes, write a paper.
Books such as A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, or Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, have energized me. Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins and Wikinomics by an old reading friend Don Tapscott have challenged my thinking. 
My learning community includes my RSS feeds, Twitter, and several ning networks, including one I just created for Virginia independent school teachers.
What a wealth of information. What opportunities. In the past couple of months, I’ve participated in a live streamed discussion of the future of schools, watched students from SLA talk about how they learn, connected with a teacher from Bangkok, and clicked on more links than I can keep track of to help me focus my efforts on how we learn and teach. One night I couldn’t sleep, and the next thing I knew, I was online, participating in a conversation with teachers in Australia!
Sometimes this information overload seems, well, overwhelming.
The term "community of learners" can be a buzzword or can be the central focus of what we do, what we encourage our students to learn to do. The onus is on us to ensure  this happens effectively and efficiently for all us.
I am spending the next few weeks thinking through the next step so I don’t feel like I am flailing my arms, running around in circles.

[image: Creative Commons Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man!RWhitsell]

What does it all mean?
I’m not sure I know. My new job this year has enabled me to do lots of research (posts, Twitter, Ustream) that says, we MUST change the way we teach.
The future is unclear, and I believe we must help students learn how to learn, analyze and organize information, and collaborate globally and locally. But those are buzz words unless we really understand them.
So I invited teachers at my school to talk–about the way students learn, the way we teach, and what we need to do to prepare our students for the future (including creating a vision for our laptop program.

And, yes, my focus is technology because I do believe that using technology enables teachers to present material in a variety of ways, allows students to collaborate in innovative ways, and enhances what we do. But I have NEVER believed that technology in itself is the answer.

On the other hand, as a laptop school, we must use our laptops in efficient and effective ways (and this hasn’t been done the past two years). So I’ve encouraged people to try things (Voice Thread, Google Docs, wikis, blogs, etc) since I started working with them full time in September.

Interestingly, the first topic that we discussed was the resistance students are showing to using technology. Though they have had their laptops for email and note-taking (and game-playing) the past six years, this year we are asking them to push themselves in new ways. Teachers said that students told them using technology was too hard, too much on top of the content for the class. I received this email from the student government president today:

This past week, the student government hosted an Open-Forum
in which the students expressed their concerns and ideas with what is going on
with the Upper School thus far. One of the issues that
a couple of the students brought up was that teachers are trying to use so much
technology in so many different ways that it’s getting overhead.

I think you get the idea (overhead= overwhelming?) It’s the same message I heard from some of the teachers on Friday. It’s discouraging. I know this doesn’t represent all students, but I thought they would be encouraged we were trying to work with them in ways that meant something–their world, you know?

We need to decide if the technology innovation is coming too fast, or if students who are complaining are just not interested in going above and beyond the standard "write a paper" assignment. Yes, the technology can be confusing, and yes, the technology can fail (we’ve had issues with our network lately). But I am surprised this loud "voice" from the student body is so resistant to adding technological components to the curriculum.

And I’m not at all sure we need to define our laptop program. Shouldn’t it be seamless? Shouldn’t it be a part of what we do? If we start to define what it means, haven’t we separated it out from everything else we do? Shouldn’t we define what good teaching is? Shouldn’t we define how we want our students to learn?

Please weigh in on this. Our conversations will continue.

(Edited: and I just read this… on Patrick Higgins’ blog. And this:

I hate the AP review project. It is a
superfluous use of technology that only leads to frustration. More time
is spent organizing the page and competing with overachievers for
things to do then actually learning anything about history. Scrap it
please before it evolves into a worse monster that no one can manage.

Hmmmmm….)

[image: DeclanTM http://flickr.com/photos/declanjewell/]

Personal Learning Communities, School-wide Communities of Practice, Professional Learning Communities, these are all concepts I’ve been tossing around in my head lately. We are attempting to begin our own PLC here, meeting during lunch on Thursdays and Fridays.
The benefits are tremendous. And, if we use the tools available, we expand our school PLC to a global PLC. No longer are we working in isolation. In an instant, we can put our hands on research, tools, anecdotes to support whatever we are working on.
Here’s an example, I was thinking of how to talk to our students about their "online presence." We are a laptop school and attempting to embed (not integrate!) technology into our classes. A few minutes ago, a Twitter popped up from Jeff Utecht on a presentation he did for his students. Perfect! Then, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted about school-wide community learning related to 21st century skills and this great quote from the Journal of School Improvement:

"That means a new role for teachers. Great teachers will not only
serve as subject matter specialists but will also become partners
with students, helping them learn how to turn information into usable
; knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. Rather than simply dispensing
information, 21st century teachers will become orchestrators and
facilitators of learning" (Marx, 2002).

Some days we get weighed down by the technology that fails, the students that seem overwhelmed and unwilling to try new things, or the teachers who are stressed by not having enough hours in the day to consider other ways of teaching.
Then there are days like this when I find this about leading and learning, or this on turning fear into goals. And get this from a colleague, who is letting me work with her students in spite of the tech issues we are having:

This is all a learning process……..
and isn’t that what school is all about!  I’ll stop by your upper
school chair tomorrow morning to catch up.

Sigh. It’s a good day.

Last night we had Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired, What Your Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online, speak at our school. Her message was right on target, and we loved hearing her validate what we have been saying to our parents and teachers. However, it was raining–for the first time in what, months? I suppose everyone decided to stay home, as we had fewer than 25 (including administrators and teachers) in the audience. Too bad. They missed a good session.
At the last minute, I realized I could try to capture her speech using Ustream, so I plugged in the webcam minutes before she started, and clicked Go Live.
Well, I thought I was. But I wasn’t.
I’m not sure what I did, but nothing recorded, unfortunately. I shouldn’t try to wing these things! Next time, I"ll be more prepared.
And next time, I hope we have a better turnout.

Somehow David Warlick always manages to say what is in my brain. Before I can even begin to articulate it, he’s blogging about it.

So, I think that if we can simplify the question of staff development
by saying that, “It’s part of the job of the teacher to continue to
grow,” then we can get on with the far more interesting question, “What
does the school and classroom look like where learning is what you see happening, not teaching — where learning stops being a job, and, instead, becomes a lifestyle.”

Read the whole post here.