Looks Before Leaping

Image Source: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1223/577718504_85445c18b9.jpg?v=0 "Looks before leaping," should be the description of every education administrator. It doesn't mean that you're not going to leap, or that you'll stop, but that you take a long look before leaping. Due to the disconnect in many school districts between curriculum and technology departments--which find themselves spinning their wheels in tandem, parallel to each other, often headed in different directions without visible, tangible benefit to those they serve--"looks before leaping" might provide a measure of assistance in resolving issues. In the wake of No Child Left Behind, school districts found themselves investing in expensive programs--integrated learning systems that drilled/tutored children in the hopes of doing a better job than the poorly trained teachers. These sizable investments yield little results, however, as noted researcher Henry Becker has pointed out. The writing lesson today is a simple one. It highlights one possible approach to sending a message no one wants to read/hear. Here's the scenario:

The Curriculum Department for your school district has decided that to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), it needs to implement a costly, technology-based intervention. Your team of directors/coordinators realizes that the technology-based intervention is being ordered without a real grasp of the technology infrastructure challenges at the school. Simply put, the equipment in classrooms is not capable of running the software or too obsolete to run the client software. While everyone on the team is aware of the issues, how do you present this information to your supervisors who proposed the purchase and now have a pending purchase worth half a million to a million dollars in the pipe for School Board Approval? You're the only one who sees the issues clearly enough to articulate them. Everyone is looking to you. What are you going to do?

Well, one of your possibilities is to write an email or memo to the supervisors who may end up like the Emperor with no clothes. One possible response appears below:

Please note that VendorName REQUIRES—requirements from VendorName attached to this email--X, Y, and Z. Targeted campuses for VendorName lack the equipment to meet these basic requirements. However, there are other factors to take into consideration that have not all been addressed in anticipation of this implementation. The SchoolDistrictName, as you know, seriously needs to upgrade its infrastructure in K-12 to ensure successful use of ANY technology-based intervention system.

Additional Attention needs to be given to the following areas:

Area #1 – Hardware Requirements

• SchoolDistrictName's Curriculum Department needs to complete a Request for Technical Support for affected campuses to ensure that computers at those campuses meet minimum requirements

Area #2 – Network

• VendorName needs to be contacted and asked if their web-based program will work with/without a persistent wireless Internet connection.
• VendorName needs to be contacted regarding the use of a caching system, if one would work or not or even whether it’s appropriate.
• Bandwidth requirements (for example, VendorName single user requires at least XX kbps of bandwidth).

Area #3 – Account Management

• VendorName needs to support automated account management and maintenance including 24-hour secure FTP uploads
• The Student Information Archiving needs to be notified of requirements
• VendorName needs to identify how authentication of student and teacher logins will occur.
• VendorName needs to respond as to whether student ID # can be used as the student login with password generation
• VendorName needs to clarify whether data transfers are encrypted or open.
• VendorName, since it’s storing confidential student performance data, has to sign the agreement form to keep data confidential and to return that data to SchoolDistrictName if/when VendorName’s services are no longer needed.

Area #4 – Software Requirements

• Identify Minimum Browser
• Identify critical browser plug-ins/add-ons
• Identify minimum operating system for Windows (e.g. Windows XP has been identified) and for Mac OS X (e.g., Mac OS X.4 Tiger has been identified).
• Identify client software that needs to be installed on the computer

Again, I strongly recommend against moving forward issuing payment to—or implementing--VendorName until concerns in these critical areas have been dealt with.

Welcome Amazon Kindle Readers!

What a thrill to welcome Amazon Kindle readers to EduWrite Blog ! I hope you'll take a moment to leave a comment when you have the opportunity! I'm also delighted to share that my Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org Blog also appears on the Kindle:

My Copyright WebQuest

Some of my best writing, I did when I was unemployed and doing consulting for several regional service centers. That work was the Copyright Webquest, which actually paid out several thousand dollars...probably my highest paid gig ever! Can you tell how much fun I had writing this? Introduction "Uhh," I started intelligently, "I want to make a class set of these." The CopyMax guy looked at me like I was nuts. Then, politely, he reminded me about copyright law. Of course, I nodded my head, how could I have ever thought to make class sets of Slave Dancer for my students to read?

Like many educators I know, I've always felt the way that Maureen Pilgrim, a librarian, a Guardian of Copyright Law, shared with me in her presentation on the Big6: All ideas are stolen, modified to look like they’re not stolen, and shared among thieves.

Of course, that attitude can get you in lots of trouble. After all, violating copyright law didn't seem to hurt anyone when I first started teaching...but now, violating copyright law appears to have serious legal consequences for all. Whether you stack VCRs to make a quick copy of a Disney video, use CD-Recordables to make copies of songs off the Internet, existing music CDs, or educational software, it is clear that times have changed. But, as always, changing copyright law remains a gray area for most of us. What exactly is copyright and how does it apply to us? How can I teach my students to do work with technology that protects intellectual property and does not stifle creativity? In the space of 60 minutes, you're going to grapple with these questions and more.

The Task

To develop an understanding of copyright law and how it applies to you, you need to develop a thorough understanding of what you are allowed to do under copyright, and, what you are not allowed to do. One way for you to get there is to critically analyze a number of copyright scenarios and discuss them from multiple perspectives. That's your task in this exercise. If you're short on time, patience, or want to try a different way, you may want to review the presentation and then take the online quiz. By the end of this lesson, you and your group will answer these questions:

1. What is meant when someone says, "That's copyrighted" and what is fair use?
2. What is the best way to limit district liability in regards to copyright violations?
3. What does copyright law say about including copyrighted multimedia in educator and student products?
4. How do you get permission from the copyright owners to use their materials?

The Process You have several choices for getting the information you need to respond to the 4 questions above. You will need a copy of your district's acceptable use policy and, if they have one, their copyright & software policy. You can find some sample policies in the Resources section. Below are your 3 choices:

• You can view the presentation, //The Quest for Copyright Understanding// (or sit through it as someone else lectures to you). You can also get the PPT version.
• You can continue on to Step 1 of this WebQuest and complete the concept builder activities in a group (most fun way to do this), then take the Copyright Quiz.
• You can visit EducationWorld and read their excellent materials on Copyright and then take the Copyright Quiz I've put together for you.

Divide the whole group into small groups of four. Each small group member will assume one of the different roles shown below: The Copyright Author: You've spent over a year developing a collection of thematic lessons that are correlated to state and national education standards, incorporate videotape, your original artwork, and some really great ideas. Your publisher has just notified you that they believe your copyright is being violated, but rather than pursue the issue themselves, they've asked you to put your talents to work at designing a guide for teachers who want to use copyrighted materials in their classroom. A little angry at the creative uses other teachers have put your work to without compensation, you begin.... The School Administrator: In your mind, the best use of technology is the one that results in the least amount of litigation. You've heard from your campus librarians that several teachers are developing web pages that use copyrighted images, sounds, multimedia (like MP3 music clips) and you are concerned that it won't be long before you are embroiled in a lawsuit. You just want to stop the Internet and can't wait for this fad to be over. You decide to analyze school district policy to see how the district may have missed the mark on copyright policy. Begin... The Librarian: As a guardian of copyright law, you're a bit scandalized by the wide-scale copying of copyrighted materials in your school. You are in charge of your school's software checkout program. Teachers come to you to check out the installation CDs. Right now, the system is a mess. Even though you know who is checking out the software, you're not quite sure how teachers are using the software. Begin... The Technophile:** What a wonderful thing the Internet is! Last night, you downloaded MP3 music via your high speed cable modem and burned it on a CD with your CD-Recorder. The school computer doesn't have the right software to do graphics editing, so you found the pirated version on the Web, downloaded it and installed it on your computer and everyone else's at your grade level. Now, all of you can work on the End of School Memory Project. Begin... [lots of stuff goes here but has been cut out]

Conclusion

When you're done discussing what you have learned, it is hoped that you will have understood the importance of copyright law and where you stand as an educator, as well as developed some strategies for adhering to copyright law and sharing your understanding with your peers and students.

Technology Related Assessments

Expecting people to complete technology related assessments--or assessments of any kind--can be daunting. Below is an email to accomplish that, addressed to campus principals:

Administrators and instructional staff play a pivotal role in determining how well technology is used in our schools. Acknowledging that role, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires campus administrators to achieve acceptable performance on standards-based performance profiles of technology user skills as defined by the state. On April 14, 2009, achievement of this performance was mandated by the Texas Education Agency and deadline for completion is May 15, 2009.Reporting deadlines for NCLB also necessitate updating of LOTI information.

Two educator assessments are to be implemented, including 1) The NCLB Administrator Assessment for campus principals and 2) The Levels of Technology Implementation for classroom teachers. These electronic, paperless needs assessments provide critical data related to long range technology planning for [removed], as well as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funding. Results of the two assessments will be shared with teachers, and aggregated at both the campus and district level through meetings with principals and campus instructional coordinators.

ASSESSMENT #1 - NCLB ADMINISTRATOR ASSESSMENT FOR CAMPUS PRINCIPALS Timeline for Completion is April 27- May 15, 2009.

The Administrator Self-Assessment will measure the administrator’s level of practice for each standard based on their selection as to the level that best describes their practice. Campus administrators may be defined as campus principals and assistant principals. Individual administrator assessment data will be held confidential.

The process is as follows; note that this assessment will not be available until April 27.

1. Go to [removed] and click on the STaR Chart Assessment graphic to begin the assessment. A tutorial will be available online at [removed]
2. Complete the Self-Assessment prior to May 15th.
3. Campus principals failing to complete the assessment by May 15th will be contacted to ensure 100% completion reporting status.

TEA mandates 100% completion of this assessment.

ASSESSMENT #2 - LOTI ASSESSMENT FOR CAMPUS TEACHERS, CICS, LIBRARIANS Timeline for Completion is April 21 - May 30, 2009.

The Levels of Technology Implementation (LOTI) Survey is a consistent set of measures that accurately reflect the progressive nature of teaching with technology. The LOTI survey has been employed nationally and internationally to assess tens of thousands of classroom teachers’ level of technology implementation. Completing the questionnaire will enable your school to make better choices regarding staff development and future technology purchases. It will also enable the District to respond to the questions “What impact is technology having on student academic achievement? How has technology funding for professional development changed teaching practices?”

Teachers will be expected to login with their Outlook email account name (e.g. if your email is “[removed]” then your LOTI login is “[removed]” and birth month/day (e.g. 1022 if you were born October 22).

So as to ensure smooth implementation, you are urged to put the following suggestions into practice:

• The administration window for the needs assessment is April 21-May 30, 2009. The needs assessment is available online at [removed]
• Identify the target audience of the assessment:
• Who has to complete the assessment? Teachers, Campus Instructional Coordinators and Library Media Specialists will need to complete the LOTI Assessment.
• Who does not have to complete the assessment? Counselors, nurses, paraeducators need not complete the LOTI Assessment.
• Administer the needs assessment during Faculty Meeting time. It is a 15-20 minute survey. Since this needs assessment only takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and requires a computer per teacher, consider using computer stations in your computer lab(s) and library. The needs assessment can also be taken from any computer—on or off campus—with high-speed Internet access.
• Encourage those uncomfortable with using technology to pair up with staff who are more comfortable. While each will take the assessment individually, they can also lend a helping hand.
• It is important to note that this needs assessment may not be used for PDAS appraisal purposes. Only aggregated results will be available to principals, although teachers will be able to see their individual assessment totals.
• Rely on campus technology representatives to facilitate all professional instructional staff to take the online assessment. Also be aware that you can rely on the Office of Instructional Technology Services’ staff. You can reach the [removed]

Deadline for Completion is May 30, 2009.

Should you have any questions, please contact [removed]

When Disaster Strikes--Maybe Not

During the swine flu scare, my secretary asked a question that set me on edge. "Miguel, some of the people using the computer lab downstairs are coming from district where there have been reported cases of swine flu. Should we be disinfecting the lab computers?" While the swine flu turned out to be not as bad as feared, at the time, it was clear something had to be done. To that end, to satisfy the perception of need, the following was sent to all campus principals:

Although there are currently no confirmed cases of Swine Flu in [removed] County and consequently no restrictions for the area, we understand there may be concerns related to disinfecting objects used by multiple people such as computer equipment.

As a preventative measure, we encourage all campuses to disinfect all computers as well as keyboards, mice, and headsets that see frequent use in our schools. An alcohol based disinfectant, such as Lysol disinfectant wipes, should be applied to all computer equipment at the end of every school day.

Below is a listing of general tips that should be taken when cleaning any of the components of a computer as well as tips to help keep a computer clean:

1. Never spray or squirt any type of liquid onto any computer component. If a spray is needed, spray the liquid onto a cloth and then use that cloth to rub down the component.

2. When cleaning a computer, turn it off before cleaning.

3. Never get any part inside the computer damp or wet.

4. When cleaning, be careful not to accidentally adjust any knobs or controls. In addition, when cleaning the back of the computer, if anything is plugged in, make sure not to disconnect any of the plugs.

Cleaning the computer helps to prevent the spreading of germs. Therefore, you are encouraged to disinfect all computer equipment at least once a day.

For additional information, please contact [removed].

How did your district handle it?

Reaching for the Heart: 5 Tips for School District Communications

...the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing...It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

--Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense (1776)

"Jesus Figueroa tells trustees: 'My hair is not hurting anybody. My hair causes no students to be held back in their eduation.'" So reads the almost 140 character tweet sent by SA Express News writer, Michelle de la Rosa (http://twitter.com/mmdelarosa), who often covers local San Antonio school issues using Twitter.com, a social media tool. The challenge to Figueroa's long hair reaches a school district's school board (in San Antonio, Tx), only to see an eventual capitulation by that Board, "Unanimous board vote to grant Figueroa special dispensation from grooming policy. He gets to keep long hair and stay in regular classroom." (Read the rest of the story online at http://tinyurl.com/dfu7bp). Even if you cannot attend the Board Meeting, you are transported there, following electronic bread crumbs, or "tweets." Several districts, like Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD and Kerrville ISD, embraced the use of Twitter--a micro-blogging tool--during the alleged Swine Flu Epidemic (a list of Texas Twitterers appears online at http://mguhlin.wikispaces.com/txtwits). In the past, school districts have perceived media attention as invariably negative, rejoicing whenever positive stories can be had. Press releases, strategic presentations to special community groups and advocates are only a small part of what is possible. In fact, those approaches may even be superfluous to what is really possible with social media tools. Yet, time and again, school districts step back from encouraging their staff, students and parents from using social media. Failure to embrace these tools leaves school districts open to attacks, but times are changing--parents are fighting back using social media. "Activist parents now have," points out Dr. Scott McLeod, "a bevy of new tools and strategies to help facilitate their agendas and they are not afraid to use them. School organizations are going to have to get used to this new state of affairs in which parent activism and criticism are more public, permanent, and far-reaching." This article is about how school districts can use social media tools and connect with the global audience, circumventing the traditional media to get the real story out there. As such, this article focuses on 3 points and offers a few tips for using social media:

1. Refining our perception of what constitutes "Communications and PR" in a highly connected world
2. The power of story to unlock what makes your heart beat and overcome the Knowing-Doing Gap, which approaches the question of why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action. (Pfeffer and Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap, 2000 as cited in Dennis Sparks article, Reach for the Heart as Well as the Mind, online via free trial at http://tinyurl.com/m36a29).
3. How social media can be used to share your story.

REFINING OUR PERCEPTIONS AND ATTITUDES "Seek out change," advises a noted journalist, Jeff Jarvis. He goes on to point out that in addition to seeking out change, organizations need to find the opportunities in that change, as well as deal with the hard problems it brings instead of side-stepping them. In virtual space, if you're not sharing content, if you are silent, your absence signals your unwillingness to embrace the hard problems. In an online world, silence is failure. Our classrooms, our schools, our school districts are defined by the stories we tell about them. Traditional media spend little time on these positive stories. They are drawn to the conflict, the fear, and what constitutes the real story. And, their failure to recognize that the audience is no longer listening, but also, creating content that they are more apt to pay attention to using social media, has had a profound impact on newspaper sales. People know that they can find the truth that is real, authentic, openly shared and transparent via new venues. While staff freedom of expression via social media is tightly controlled by District Communication Departments because the stories aren't as positive as the slick flyer or press release says it is, muzzling the one group of advocates, who really know what is happening in schools, has severe consequences. Imagine the San Antonio, Tx district with a student with long hair. How could the school district have managed information sharing differently with the Community? To do the work of district communications requires a different attitude and/perspective. That's why in my school district, I have a page of videos (http://itls.saisd.net/lead)--created in spite of the teacher resistance that we are "tooting our own horn"--that describe some of our initiatives and celebrate student work. As an educator, I do not want my word to be the last word on what is going on in my school district. I want that last word to be spoken by an innovative teacher, a student's voice developing a project, a parent sharing what the work of education means to their child. As a citizen-journalist, as a person who has embraced social media as a way to share the exciting actions being taken by educators around me, I also see an important need for K-12 educators to tell "their" story, sharing what is happening at their schools, in their classrooms, in the offices, as openly and transparently as possible. My bias is that I believe that most educators live in fear of speaking up, fear of losing their jobs, being censured, being called into their supervisor's office or at Human Resources and asked, with the force of temporal power lurking behind each word, "So, tell us. What do you really believe and why should we continue to employ you if you're going to say this about us?" Instead, anyone with with the temerity to be transparent about the work they are doing should be celebrated and applauded. “Sharing is THE threat,” shared Mark Pesce at a recent conference (Source: http://tinyurl.com/6bgkj2). One of the key points of his talk was that in his ”honest and human act of sharing, any of the pretensions to control, the limitations, or power are revealed as completely collapsed and impotent.” As school district leaders struggle to lead, it is clear that though each of us has a phone that grants access to powerful, disruptive technologies, we choose not to use them. While students share ideas and information about everything under the sun, leaders are unable to have real conversations about critical issues. THE POWER OF STORY "All the education in the world is worthless," writes an 18 year old blogger at the A Boundless World blog (http://tinyurl.com/qt5a4q), "if you never unlock what makes your heart beat." He goes on to share in a must-read article about schools and education, that grades don't guarantee success. Instead, that passion, determination and positive attitude equal success. These are ideas that are emerging from the masses of K-12 and adult learners who work in our systems. Their expectations for what education, what school should be like, are changing dramatically from where we have been. That story of passion captures readers and raises a question for Communications Directors in school districts--if your readers have infinite choices available to access information, why would they want to read your dry, boring, canned version of what happened when they can sign on via a Twitter stream and read what happened as it happened with none of the gory details left out? These changing expectations have implications, not only for the educators that work or administer learning occurring in classrooms, but also for school district administrators who feel the pressure to represent change to a wider audience as positive, enabling, and encouraging. The problem is, press releases, powerpoint presentations to select groups, traditional media interviews that provide the video/sound byte that will be broadcast on YouTube...are often ineffective. At a TASA 2009 Midwinters Conference, the presenters of a workshop on using social media pointed out that, "Traditional communication tools have a limited life and as such are limited relationships. Even public meetings…a meeting tonight about school boundaries is limited to that room right there." (Listen to a podcast of this presentation here - http://tinyurl.com/blgljw). While the presenters have not achieved the pinnacle of social media control (which presents a paradox), transforming the underlying organization in ways that tap into the full power of social media, I applaud the way they’ve been transparent about their efforts. The question I’m left with isn't, “How can we can better navigate this process in school organizations?” but rather, how can we trust and empower our educational community to share the compelling stories that are a part of every day work? SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS - SPREADING THE CULTURE VIRUS "While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approved materials show up on your...home page," points out Seth Godin in his book Meatball Sundae, "your engineers, scientists, researchers -- ...even the marketing folks -- have been creating little Web sites for their own use." Meatball Sundae is a book I urge every school district communications staff member to read since it gets at the heart of the problem school districts face. You can't take advantage of social media unless you re-align your core approach to storytelling and sharing ideas/information to the new tools available. One way to accomplish that is to think of social media as a "culture virus," a term coined by Jim Stogdill in a presentation on open source software and government. Jim suggests that a culture virus has the potential to carry community, transparency, and collaboration across the various, traditionally impermeable boundaries - with community participation as the carrier. That is, the more you activate the community, the greater the spread of the virus. Why would you want to spread such a virus? The benefits to a school district would include culture emergence as "community participants find their perspectives, their worldviews and psychographic profiles spliced in with those community norms--things like transparency, collaboration, and a strong bias toward meaningful participation." While there are many social media tools available, here are some core ideas that can get you started in creating content that is engaging and will bring readers back. Think of the use of social media tools at all levels of your organization as a culture virus, a way to empower members to meaningfully participate in the work. Instead of three or four central office administrators trying to control what gets reported in your district, you have an army of people working 24 hours a day sharing what works, what doesn't, what's popular, what's not with a world. No matter what you do, this level of participation will get you noticed and may help bring shipwrecks to the light of day, while providing opportunities for organizational change. How does any organization achieve the change it desires so that new ideas (e.g. culture virus norms) aren't just being grafted onto an "old-world" thinking (e.g. school district adds a superintendent's blog to their site but it is authored by the communications director and the district lawyer, not the superintendent) organization? To begin sharing the culture virus, someone--preferably someone in a leadership position--has to embrace the fundamental principles of meaningful participation, increased collaboration and transparency. Then, you have to encourage the use of social media tools. Here are 5 tips for K-12 educators, communication professionals or not, inspired by Social Media Explorer similar blog entry:

1. Engage Your Audience with Your Content: Content that hasn't been prefabricated, is lifeless and written in third person, but is authentic, transparent, open about success as well as failure will be read by your constituents. Start with a story, including audio, video, avoiding being limited by one format or another (e.g. text, video, audio). Blend all of it in so that you reach more people through a media medium that they are interested in. The multimedia portions--audio and video--can be downloaded and put on iPods and MP3/MP4 players. What a great way for students, community members and staff to find out what is going on from others in their organization. At the risk of being imperfect, here is one example of a blog entry that tries to put some of these points into practice: http://tinyurl.com/lqkjdh and a more traditional eNewsletter approach - http://tinyurl.com/laxjao
2. Make Content Sharing Easy: Press releases on a web site just do not work anymore. Traditional web sites that can't be subscribed to using RSS feeds or that allow email subscription are dead sites. Many web users just aren't taking the time to come back to your site, instead preferring to subscribe to content that will come to them via Google Reader, Twitter.com updates to their phone, and more. Use a blog (e.g. Wordpress), and add plugins that make it easy for people to share your content with others. Some sharing tools include Delicious.com, Diigo.com, Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Facebook.com, and Twitter.com. If you're not familiar with these sites, then know that your audience may already be using them to share content about you that you may not like. The solution isn't to block those sites in schools, but to encourage their appropriate use. Most blog platforms and tools enable you to add easy to share/save tools. To get the result on the blog entry in the link shared in Engage Your Audience with Content, I used a Wordpress Plug in (a list appears here - http://tinyurl.com/queo9t) called Add to Any.
3. Create a Content Calendar: In your District, there are many wonderful things happening that your community wants to know about. Unfortunately, providing print copies of short articles via email or in print do not allow you to explore everything great that is happening and share it easily. However, online, you have an unlimited number of pages and a global audience. Why not create a content calendar that enables you to map out with a calendar what you will be sharing with others online?
4. Define and Build Relationships: While it may not be popular to follow your local news reporters via Twitter, it is critical that you do so. It is critical because you can raise their awareness by the engaging content that you are sharing about your school district. While they may want to focus on the negative, you can mitigate the effect of their tweets by building a relationship of trust and integrity through the stories you share about your district, your campus, and your classroom.
5. Make Offline Available Online: Every speaking engagement, each meeting is an opportunity to share your ideas. Avoid the mistake of creating content solely for online or offline audiences. When you create offline content--a conversation with parents at the morning coffee meet-n-mingle with the principal--take the time to write about it, maybe even debrief a parent in a one on one conversation. "What did you think about our morning coffee meeting? How did it impact you?" Take the time to share what you're doing online.

CONCLUSION In one of my favorite quotes, Clay Shirky shares (http://tinyurl.com/34a5ts) that "In high-freedom environments, people use social tools for fun. In low-freedom environments they use them for political action." Will you encourage your staff and students to learn how to appropriately use social media tools for fun, or will you be on the receiving end of their use? I suggest that many school districts today are feeling the brunt these tools because they are "low-freedom" environments. It's time to change. Shall we begin together?

Bearing Sad Tidings

Ever have something go wrong in your educational environment? If the answer is YES, then you may be struggling with how to write about the tough stuff. I've found the secret to sharing bad news involves:

1. Admitting what the problem is and how it came about. If it's your fault, then admit it as baldly and as plainly as possible. If you don't know why, say so. This is where you take responsibility.
2. Share what you did to fix the problem and what the resolution, if any, was.
3. What other options exist and what you can do to accomplish it.

Here's an example of a problem involving an Apple Blog/Wiki server. The problem is as simple as the wiki user group isn't showing up. Even if you don't know what a wiki is, you have to admit that this email is unambiguous in sharing the struggle with getting it to work. This email--and this involved a follow-up phone call--is addressed to the users of the wiki system who directly suffered the loss of data:

As two of the most active users of Apple wikis, I regret to inform you that we've run into a bit of a problem with the wikis you have created. I apologize for not responding to you about this issue sooner; I honestly thought I was on to a solution that when implemented would yield positive results. Since I appreciate the loss of significant information you had in your wikis, I've taken the liberty of copying my supervisor, [name removed], so that he will be aware of the challenges we face. BACKGROUND Sometime in the last week--you probably know exactly when better than I due to your usage--the wikis went offline. After researching the Apple web site and support area for wikis, as well as consulting with a colleague, it appears that this may be a bug in the Apple OS X Leopard Server. I do not know this exactly but it is my best guess after scouring the user support areas for wiki. While your wikis still exist and, the wikis refuse to appear in the list of groups. To try and restore the group user list, I've taken the following steps:

• Consulted with [name removed], who no longer is employed with us but setup the server initially and is a certified Mac server person. His suggested fix did not work.
• Consulted with the District's Technology Department staff as to what they could do to restore the wikis. Neither is comfortable enough with Mac Servers to provide the needed support to resolve this issue. I spoke to both of them last week about this issue specifically.
• Spent several hours reading and reviewing solutions myself to trouble-shoot the wikis' disappearance, encountering other unanswered requests for help regarding the disappearance of the wikis on OS X Leopard Server after updates.
• Worked with a Mac server administrator in another district to see what his opinions might be.

In short, I do not entertain any hopes of seeing your wikis come back to life in the next week or two. In fact, pessimistically, I would say they might not come back at all. That's worst case scenario. I will be making greater efforts to connect with other educators using Apple Wikis to see what they have done or if they've encountered this problem. Pursuing those leads may take us through what remains of the school year. SUMMATION At this time, I cannot recommend continuing with the wiki solution. As such, I recommend that you consider use of any one of the following solutions:

• Use the wiki in your Moodle. While not as "open" as the Apple wiki, this solution can be easily supported.
• Use Wikispaces.com. Advertising is removed for education users and they provide excellent, no-cost support. While I am leery of posting content on outside hosting providers, aside from Moodle wikis, I do not have another option to offer you at this time that is as easy or friendly as the Apple wiki.

Please accept my apologies for the inaccessibility of your existing data. Thank you for taking the time to read this short note.

In this email, you can see that the author followed the basic formula outlined at the beginning of this post. Have you written any communications that followed it as well?

Twitter - Educational Apps

This past week, I found myself sharing Twitter as an educational app, a way to tap into the network of learners around the globe. Here are some of the Twitterapps that really caught my attention as usable in education while reading this fantastic wrap-up of the 25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter apps (I also have to point out that this is a great list article!):

1. Just Tweet It - It was created to make it easier for people using the popular micro-blogging service Twitter to find other “Tweeters” with similar interests. I can imagine sharing this with educators who are just starting out who need help finding other edubloggers.
2. Hashtag - Hashtags are an easy way to track a specific topic or event such as the San Diego Fires using the Twitter network. You can encourage people attending a conference or learning event to share what they're learning about and then track them all using hashtags.
3. TwitterMail - When you provide your Twitter credentials they supply you with a TwitterMail email address. For instance abcdef1234@twittermail.com. If you send an email to that address it will be posted to Twitter.com. Also you can receive your latest twitter-replies automatically by e-mail. This might be great for educators who live behind the "Berlin Wall;" you know, access is blocked by content filters in an effort to "protect" anyone from using the web inappropriately but with the more disastrous effect of preventing anyone from using it all. You can email your twitter updates out and receive them.
4. StrawPoll - Run your own poll on twitter with the new StrawPoll Platform, where you can use your own Twitter account to ask the questions you find interesting. Do your own surveys using Twitter...what a powerful way to get answers from your network of co-learners.
5. TweetBeep - TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter! Put in a keyword or website, and get emails when others tweet it! What a great way to tap into the conversation about education and reform without actually having to sit there and watch it happen as it happens.

Be sure to read 17 Ways to use Twitter and the Big Juicy Guide to Twitter (probably find out more than you ever wanted to know!)

Turning Up the H.E.A.T in 21st Century Classrooms

I love the writing in Dr. Moersch's LOTI Project: Targeting 21st Century Skills and Improved Student Achievement booklet, which replaces the traditional letter-size paper handouts. Dr. Moersch writes:

Many schools are inundated with curriculum initiatives, state mandates, and technology infusion programs designed to improve instruction and promote student academic success. The last thing they need is another new initiative to add to a litany of reform efforts. What makes LOTI Different? The difference is that LOTI (levels of teaching innovation) is designed to harness the power of your existing programs into one united effort to assess, plan, implement, and sustain a systems approach to improved student achievement using 21st Century teaching, learning and leadership.

You can also watch Chris share his perspective on this in the video below. What I like about the writing is that it appeals to educators who are overwhelmed by a barrage of initiatives (that often appear as separate and distinct from each other) can use the assess, plan, implement and sustain systems approach to make sense of it all. Seems simple, doesn't it? But in practice, it's far from it.

Click the image above to start watching Dr. Chris Moersch share about how to TURN UP THE H.E.A.T. with Levels of Technology Implementation. Kudos to Larry Stegall and Tonya Mills for their video recording and editing work!

HEAT is an acronym for...

HIGHER-ORDER THINKING

* Students taking notes only; no questions asked

* Student learning/questioning at knowledge level

* Student learning/questioning at comprehension level

* Student learning/questioning at application level

* Student learning/questioning at analysis level

* Student learning/questioning at synthesis/evaluation

ENGAGED LEARNING

* Students report what they have learned only.

* Students report what they have learned only; collaborate with others.

* Students given options to solve a problem

* Students given options to solve a problem; collaborate with others

* Students help define the task, the process, and the solution

* Students help define the task, the process, and the solution; collaborations extends beyond the classroom.

AUTHENTICITY

* The learning experience is missing or too vague to determine relevance.

* The learning experience represents a group of connected activities, but provides no real world application.

* The learning experience provides limited real world relevance, but does not apply the learning to a real world situation.

* The learning experience provides real world relevance and opportunity for students to apply their learning to a real world situation.

* The learning experience is directly relevant to students and involves creating a product that has a purpose beyond the classroom that directly impacts the students.

TECHNOLOGY USE

* No technology use is evident.

* Technology use is unrelated to the task.

* Technology use appears to be an add-on and is not needed for task-completion.

* Technology use is somewhat connected to task completion involving one or more applications

* Technology use is directly connected to task completion involving one or more applications.

* Technology use is directly connected and needed for task completion and students determine which application(s) would best address their needs.

5 Essential Technology Tools for Campus Administrators

Note: Only 3 essential tools are shared in this first installment of a three-part series.

“Miguel,” a superintendent in a district I was

visiting asked me, “could you develop a CD highlighting the top 5 technology tools to make a principal’s life easier?” I was flabbergasted. A CD? You mean, a compact disc? Who uses those anymore? The ubiquitous web makes it possible to access a wealth of online resources. Sure, a simple CD with free, open source tools would be useful, but there is so much you can do with free, online professional learning tools. As such, my response was simple:

5 Technology tools to make a principal’s life better are not CD—compact disc—based because they are not software. CD-based tech tools wouldn’t go far either since 99% of principals don’t have Active Directory installation rights. Yet, this list provides the opportunity for extended conversations.

But that kind of response does not go too far with a superintendent. You have to highlight solutions, not just counter with problems. Of course, one would want the content to be self-paced and enable administrators to work their way through it as their schedules permit. Here is a short list of topics that could be addressed in the context of a Moodle, which is a course management system. You could just as easily organize this in a wiki but Moodle makes it convenient because of the interactive questionnaire and discussion forums (View screenshot of Moodle).

Although each topic in the Moodle course I organized for the superintendent in question is a face to face class by itself, there are ways to accomplish this course online! You can actually preview one example of an Administrators’ Academy online (login as guest)!

1. Assessing Technology Implementation in Campus Classrooms
2. Building Interactivity into Your SlideShow Presentations
3. Surveys, Forms, and Spreadsheets - Data Collection Made Easy, and, though it’s beyond the scope of this month’s article, these additional items:
4. Putting Your Best Foot Forward, Online with Blogging and Podcasting
5. Facilitating Online Learning Conversations with Moodle

Although there are many more technology-related tools that administrators could use, these are some of the ones I have found most useful for campus administrators.

Let’s explore these briefly below:

1 - Assessing Technology Implementation in Campus Classrooms

“Is it possible,” asked the superintendent in my story, “to put together an assessment our principals could take so that we could identify other areas for professional development?” There are a variety of technology assessments that could be used with administrators. Although I definitely endorse the use of Dr. Chris Moersch’s Levels of Technology Implementation (or, the new name which is the Levels of Teacher Innovation), sometimes it is necessary to accomplish your own assessment within the District. Many school districts are forced to report on this data due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funds that they use in their district. For the description in the Moodle, I wrote the following:

This short assessment will help you gain insight into areas of strength and weakness, and enable you to better determine what professional learning opportunities you can seek out in the future. It will also help the District prioritize and customize professional learning for you.

For the purposes of the district in question, I adapted a sample technology self-assessment tool from Massachusetts and embedded it—with a few minor modifications—in a Moodle using the Questionnaire module. The Questionnaire module makes it easy to share surveys with staff and collect data, then view that data in graphical format. For example, here is a screenshot of the Massachusetts questions and responses (only 1 just so you get a feel for what it looks like):

In this case, it is important that administrators learn that they can use in-house district tools to gather information. However, it is a simple matter to use other tools as well to collect information. Finding the right assessment is also a matter of finding one that is valid and reliable, not just a series of questions designed by a committee. In those situations, only the LOTI Assessment will do.

2 - Building Interactivity into Your SlideShow Presentations

“How did you add audio to your presentation?” is a question that I often get now when I share narrated presentations with administrators. There are several ways to accomplish that, however, I like to share my favorite top 3 solutions according to degree of difficulty. They all work in essentially the same way: a) You send them your presentation; b) You add audio to your presentation if possible; c) You share the “embed” code on a web page so that the slideshow will play on your campus or district web page.

1. VoiceThread.com - This is my favorite, free tool to share. VoiceThread enables your viewers to add audio, video and text of their own. What a fantastic way to recognize the work that is being done, and invite recognition of that work done by your staff by others! When working with campus administrators, be sure to share the VoiceThreads4Education.wikispaces.com web site with them. There are a few examples of administrators at the district and campus level sharing their presentations.
2. MyPlick.com - This is a wonderful tool that allows you to upload your Powerpoint presentation, then, if you have it, send in audio you have recorded. When working with the presentation, you listen to your audio and advance the slide show at the appropriate moment. When you are done, MyPlick actually remembers and when played by a visitor, plays the audio in sync with your presentation slides. Amazing! (Thanks to Steve Dembo at http://teach42.com for this tip!).
3. Slideshare.net - This is another slideshow sharing tool that I use with great frequency. You can also add audio to Slideshare so that it works in a similar way to MyPlick.com.

There are various other tools available but this is a short list of some great ones.

3 - Surveys, Forms, and Spreadsheets - Data Collection Made Easy

Ever had to collect a lot of information from campuses, wanted to do it electronically but instead ended up with lots of emails flying back and forth with Word or Excel spreadsheet documents attached? And then, someone has to put it all together some way or another? Skip that.

You’ve probably already heard of GoogleDocs and it’s built-in spreadsheet function. You make a spreadsheet, GoogleDocs takes your column headings and makes a form that people can fill out online. When you view the data, it’s already arranged in a spreadsheet. You just send out the web page link to the form, and people fill it out. It once was incredibly difficult for non-techies to do this but now it is very easy, so easy that students are learning how to do it all around the world.

To facilitate your creation of GoogleDocs for information-gathering, set up a GoogleDocs area just for your District’s use. Campus administrators love it because setting up a spreadsheet is something they know how to do, and turning that into a form people can fill out is a cinch with GoogleDocs. One thing you should avoid using GoogleDocs—or any online tool that your District does not host on their own servers—is secure, confidential data. But most of the data campus/district administrators collect is not confidential.

Here is one example of a district using GoogleDocs (login as guest) to collect information. Note the two videos at the top of the page give you an overview of GoogleDocs and how it can be used in K-12 education by students and staff. How to get started and what success looks like:

• GoogleDocs enables you to turn your new spreadsheet into a web-based form others can fill out. All data submitted goes straight into your spreadsheet, which you can work with online or export as an Excel spreadsheet, HTML document, PDF, etc. And, you can make all of these formats available as the results for your participants!
  • Examples #1 - TechSalaries: What should your tech director be making?
    • Respond to Survey
    • Spreadsheet of Results
    • Results as HTML/web page
    • Results as Comma-Delimited format
    • Results as OpenDocumentSpreadsheet readable in OpenOffice or NeoOffice
    • Results in MS Excel format
    • Results in PDF

If you do not want to use Moodle and the Questionnaire Module, consider these 10 alternative online poll/survey sites you can take advantage of, all at no-cost:

• Poll Daddy - http://www.polldaddy.com/
• Cool Web Toys - http://www.coolwebtoys.com/
• Vizu.com - http://vizu.com/
• Blogflux - http://www.blogflux.com/
• Quimble - http://quimble.com/
• SurveyMonkey - http://www.surveymonkey.com/
• Zoomerang - http://info.zoomerang.com/
• Survey Gizmo - http://www.surveygizmo.com/
• Ballot-Box - http://www.ballot-box.net/
• Easy Poll - http://www.easy-poll.com/

Collecting information via the Web has never been easier! Make sure your campus administrators know how to do this.

Conclusion

As you can probably surmise, organizing this content in a Moodle makes it easy to track campus administrator participation, as well as to stay in contact with them. I hope you will take a moment to share your top technology tools for administrators with me via my blog at Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net for inclusion in next month’s installment of this article.

Broadcast Learning: The Power of Network Learning

What if you could broadcast learning at will via the Internet to a world of learners? How would that change your conception of learning? What if you could interact with people, not only face to face in your workshop, but also halfway around the world? What if your workshop participants could participate in a conversation with those other virtual participants, all of them discussing the broadcast learning going on? Pretty exciting, no? I still remember my first exposure to broadcast learning technologies now available via the Internet. The power of pro-sumers, individuals who create as well as consume...but we might call them "prolearners," as Vicki Davis suggests, instead, as learners who not only are docile consumers of knowledge, but also, active creators of it.

Image: FlashMeeting screenshot with Paul Harrington in the foreground.

My adventure began quite simply one day at work. On October 11, 2008, I had the opportunity to "sit-in" on Vicki Davis' UStream session on Wikis (http://k12wiki.wikispaces.com). The session was announced via Twitter (http://twitter.com/mguhlin), an instant messaging tool that allows you to follow what hundreds of others--in my case, educators--are doing. Someone shared the link and I was off to see this new broadcast learning technology. It was a lot of fun listening in on her workshop. I got a real sense of being there, even though the only person I could see was Vicki. Sometimes she was on screen, sometimes she wasn't. I also had fun tracking the backchannel conversation going on; the backchannel was a conversation about Vicki's presentation available via Twitter. According to Wikipedia, Twitter is a...

...free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application.

My second experience came the next day when I attended a workshop. Attending a workshop for Texas educational technology coordinators in Fall, 2007, I decided to flip my computer around, aiming the built-in video camera directly at the speaker, the State Educational Technology Director for Texas. I announced the availability of the presentation on the email list for the technology coordinators group, and immediately, participants from hundreds of miles jumped in to listen and chat about what was going on. My next experience enabled me to broadcast a spotlight speaking presentation with a colleague (Wes Fryer, SpeedofCreativity.org). Though we had a packed room of educators, we had a worldwide audience waiting to not only receive, but give back, to share their knowledge on the topic.

This is the world our children have at their fingertips...this article presents a few solutions you can use at little or no cost in your school district. Others have recently proven the value of broadcast learning at local conferences that took on an international flavor, such as EduCon 2.0 and the Colorado Learning 2.0 Conference. Another notable example includes thousands of students from around the world listening to Pulitzer Prize winning author sharing about George Washington, the United States' first President and Commander-in-Chief.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS FOR EDUCATION

Broadcast learning sounds so one-way, so uni-directional. Yet, the truth is that the learning IS interactive and multi-directional. There are a variety of tools available for use, most of them involving access to a computer that has built-in video camera and a microphone. In minutes, you can be broadcasting, even via wireless connection, to a worldwide audience. Two types of tools exist; those hosted by third party providers and those that you host yourself on your own server. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on solutions that are available at no cost. There are expensive solutions, yet these are often eschewed in the educational community because of their expense.

Free hosted solutions include the following, of which UStream.tv is the clear winner. I'm not going to discuss all the options because only the first two are appropriate for K-16 education (although educators are encouraged to carefully consider the use of these technologies, preview them prior to use to ensure avoidance of adult topics with youngsters).

1. UStream.tv - This is the top pick of free hosted solutions because the creators are making an intentional effort to capture the attention of educators and encouraging educator uses. Often hosted solutions--because of their broad appeal--allow anyone to put content online. Often the content can be inappropriate. UStream.tv also allows downloading of recorded video in popular video formats, such as FLV, WMV, MP4 and MOV. Concerned about others viewing the video? You can restrict your viewers to only those you invite, essentially creating your own live interactive video broadcasting platform.
2. E2BN FlashMeeting - FlashMeeting is based on Adobe Flash and requires pre-booking. It works quite well, as I once had the opportunity to observe a presentation from Teachmeet in Scotland. One person speaks (e.g. broadcasts) at a time, while others contribute using text chat, a whiteboard while waiting for their turn to speak. It is less spontaneous than UStream.tv since events must be scheduled but may be an option for those for whom UStream.tv is unavailable.

Other less education-friendly interactive video platforms include Blip.tv, Kyte.tv, and Operator11. Of course, you can always opt for a commercial solution such as Wimba.com, Elluminate.com, Persony.com, and Yugma.com (check out this handy comparison chart from NERCOMP, sent to me via Twitter.com/cmduke for some commercial solutions). However, educators often lack the funding for these types of solutions. If free and/or commercial, web-based hosted solutions like those mentioned above are not an option in your District--for whatever the reason, such as the desire to create a walled garden approach--you can also setup your own solution using free, open source solutions. As mentioned in a previous article, you will want to setup a server that can handle Moodle course management software. Once you have your Moodle server setup, you will want to use DimDim. It bills itself as a browser-based web 2.0 service that allows anybody to share their desktop, show slides, as well as talk, listen, chat, and broadcast via webcam.

TALES FROM THE FIELD: LARGE URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT

Working in a public school district where school closings due to budget shortfalls are now a reality, while at the same time trying to avoid embarrassing situations, I encouraged my team of education technologists to consider 3 different solutions for use on our network. Those solutions included 1) FlashMeeting; 2) UStream.tv; and 3) Moodle with DimDim installed. FlashMeeting, although it worked for us, turned out to be cumbersome due to the lack of spontaneity of learning. UStream.tv was still to wild a technology that could be used inappropriately by students and others, even though we had excellent examples of how it was being used. I still recommend UStream.tv's use at conferences and workshops as an easy way to broadcast and engage learners. However, the solution may encounter some obstacles in K-12 environment. Moodle with DimDim was one solution that actually worked on our network, allowing us control over the content. We were able to hold meetings online with chat component, not unlike UStream.tv.

CLOSING POINTS

Broadcast learning has quickly become a reality. Simple lectures can easily be converted to powerful opportunities for engaging learners. Carefully consider integrating these technologies into professional learning approaches in use in your school. Some quick tips on implementation include the following: 1) Encourage the workshop facilitator/speaker to actively use built-in chat technologies, or Twitter, as a way of keeping in touch with the audience. This "backchannel" conversation can yield important insights into the speaker's content, and allow learners to move from "sit-n-get" to prolearners (professional learners who create as well as consume learning); 2) Assign a moderator that will serve as the liason from the audience at-large to the presenter/speaker. Like a National Public Radio Press Club meeting, questions and contributions are collected by key staff and shared with the speaker. This minimizes the distractions the speaker will have to endure.

CONCLUSION

Learning at a distance can be powerful. As technology directors, our goal is to facilitate learning that goes beyond passive consumption of content to active engagement, the development of creative, collaborative learning that connects learning opportunities with creative contributions by learners. Interactive video platforms like UStream.tv and other technologies that allow us to connect with each other can help us tap into the power of networked learning.

About the Author

As director of instructional technology for a large urban district in Texas, past president of the state-wide Technology Education Coordinators group in one of the largest U.S. technology educator organizations (TCEA), Miguel Guhlin continues to model the use of emerging technologies in schools. You can read his published writing or engage him in conversation via his blog at Around the Corner.

How To Manage Your District's Learning Opportunities

by Miguel Guhlin

Source: Leigh Blackall

"Your support in Technology," shared the Human Resources Associate Superintendent in an email, "is the reason that we are able to realize these initiatives. Thanks so much for your help." Of course, she was referring to the Clerical Assessment Battery (CAB), a screening program for new job applicants to the District. It's implementation would save the Human Resources Department time in assessing clerical job applicants.

Development of the CAB module—using Adobe’s Captivate program—took 3 weeks and half dozen meetings with the Human Resources Department. The program was developed and deployed within our school district's learning management system. Since deployment of the CAB, my district has partnered with PBS TeacherLine to license and re-deliver an electronic graphic organizer course. Teachers login into the learning management system--which we call ePath--and participate in a facilitated 100% online course. The course is taught through the use of a course management system; the system we use is the free, open source CMS known as Moodle.

When we announced the course, two days later, the course had 59 teachers registered and registration requests continued to pour in. The enthusiasm for online courses that don't require a physical, face to face meeting is palpable in districts where there time is lacking.

Using NCLB Title 2, Part D funds, my district will be investing in InfoSource and PBS TeacherLine courses. The InfoSource provider provides teachers and administrators with access to ISTE National Education Technology Standards (NETS) aligned content. The benefit is that teachers can work their way through the content 100% online, checking in with a district facilitator only when they encounter problems. After completing an assessment, a feedback form on the workshop, they are granted a certificate for successful completion and earn professional learning hours. All of this is handled 100% online via the District's Learning Management System.

School districts need to be able to provide and manage consistent professional learning opportunities that are scalable, platform independent (web-based), as well as allow for interface with your district's data warehouse and other systems. When considering how to manage your district's precious learning opportunities, you need to give thought to several questions:

1. Knowing that everyone needs to participate in professional learning, how do you currently manage that?
2. How are you going to help people understand the benefits of managing your district's learning opportunities?
3. How will the learning management system you select help your end-users manage their own learning?
4. What online content can you find, or develop, that will meet the needs of your learning community?
5. How do you get started?

It is with that last question in mind that we will begin.

How do you get started? In my school district, it took three tries to "sell" the idea of a learning management system. The superintendent at the time could not understand how a learning management system could transform how professional learning opportunities were handled in the District. Imagine every department in your district, each with multiple secretaries managing paper sign-in sheets, faxed registration forms, payroll for workshops...a nightmare of wasted time and paper. Yet, that was the reality in my district before I proposed--with other directors--acquisition of a learning management system. An LMS can manage professional development at the regional, district, and campus level. While a web-based, database-backed system might work well within an area that has the "techies" to support it, what about sharing it with other departments? Departments such as Human Resources, Transportation, and, especially, Curriculum & Instruction, also have a need for managing professional learning. In fact, the Food Services Department with 500 cafeteria workers, nurses, counselors, district police, and bus drivers were traditionally left out of professional learning opportunities. Or, worse, included but left to fend for themselves when it came to tracking and providing reports. With Federal Program evaluation reports expecting hard numbers as to how many staff participate in professional learning, would it not be nice to have that data at hand rather than make rough estimates? How are you going to help people understand the benefits of managing your district's learning opportunities? It is critical that you bring as many stakeholders to the table to discuss how they manage professional learning. In my district, when I brought the secretaries together, it was obvious to them that the District was completely disorganized, that errors were being made, and they were desperate for a solution. However, bring these problems up to the directors of each department, and you would see shocked faces. Since they were dis-engaged from the daily, grueling work of tracking hundreds of pieces of paper per secretary, they had no idea what was happening. In addition to "putting the skunk on the table," it's also critical to calculate how much time and money is spent by staff on the current system--and how many staff that actually affects. If your district is spending thousands of person-hours on managing paper, each staff member creating their own tracking and certificate issuing system, couldn't that money be better spent on a system that uniformly addresses all the issues?

LMS Key Components Administration/Management/Support Centralized Program Information Centralized Scheduling Easy management of educational resources Assessment of Learning Effectiveness Easy addition and management of learner portfolio components Ease of tracking external professional development offerings (such as in-house, off the shelf, customized solutions) Login/Password access when appropriate Online forum/support for synchronous/asynchronous courseware Automatic Emailed Confirmation of registration, changes in status or courses Interface with external professional development components and SCORM compliant Interface with course management system (e.g. Moodle) Interface with broadcast learning tools (e.g. Wimba) Professional development for administrators and sharing best practices in using a Learning Management System Pre-Curriculum/ Staff Needs Assessment/ Skill Gap Analysis Registration & Payment Tracks progress of the learner through a program of study Forum for learner collaboration Displays web-based Course Catalogs and allows for print versions Curriculum Provides tracking of synchronous/asynchronous professional development components Provides for synchronous professional development models Allows participants to see where they are, what they are registered for, as well as how much they have completed in relation to their goals.

Managing Your Own Learning

"How can I better manage staff who need professional learning to improve?" asked one principal. "I wish I could highlight an area of need in a staff member's armor and then assign professional learning to help them."

To facilitate this manage your own learning approach, consider the following essential elements of a learning management system:

• Support for the creation of multiple professional learning paths, also known as a "learning paths," that different positions can follow. Depending on the complexity of your organization, how wide an implementation you choose to make this, it should be straightforward to create learning paths for your staff. For new teachers, a learning path might include sexual harassment training, discipline training, lesson planning, information problem-solving strategies, and then a wide range of choices. For principals, the learning path might include the teacher options as well as how to assess the level of technology implementation (LOTI), STaR Chart, and getting along with your superintendent.

It is also important that the system allows staff to be a member of multiple learning paths based on there specific job requirements. A principal would be assigned the generic principal's learning path whereas a new principal would be a member of this learning path as well as a new employee learning path established by Human Resources.

• Online registration and certificate tracking: At its heart, a LMS is a database that should allow online workshop registration, setting up of classes, tracking of student participation, as well as administration of classes and workshop content. It should be expected that workshop participants and facilitators are automatically contacted regarding the status of a particular workshop. Also, participants should be able to un-enroll from a workshop given time but prevent un-enrolling to foil attendance tracking.
  
  
• Report Generation: As a principal or department head, or even superintendent, getting an email outlining how many staff have completed a particular strand of training is critical to implementation of a new district initiative.
  
  

What online content can you find, or develop, that will meet the needs of your learning community?

In the first two years of implementation, my district was grateful for a comprehensive professional learning solution that could be shared with other district departments. However, eventually, I started to wonder, How can we provide 100%, anytime/anywhere learning opportunities to staff? Of course, the way to accomplish that is to purchase content. And, purchasing content can often be less expensive than developing your own.

Some essential elements of online content to consider:

• Content-Design: It is also important that a district's workshop session facilitators be able to add content to the LMS. The more flexible an LMS is in allowing the addition of external content, the better. The LMS should also be forgiving if the content added isn't necessarily SCORM compliant.Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) makes it possible for online content providers to create and share their content modules with learning management systems. SCORM is the standard, although there are others. Find out more about SCORM at Source: Got SCORM?.

Some learning management systems provide access to custom curriculum development tools, while others require that you build your own and make these items SCORM compliant. A hidden cost of a learning management system implementation is the development of content.

If one considers the cost of developing content, you could easily see a $50,000 cost for development in a variety of areas, for example, Human Resources. Each department might want to invest in a staff member who would serve as an LMS content developer. This content developer would have to be familiar with high-end tools, be able to script video clips, and work with a variety of formats.

While some districts might want to move this into the domain of Instructional Technology, should the cost, time and effort involved be the responsibility of one department or multiple? What approach your district might choose to take, it is clear that having a content development team is important as we look to web-delivered options to meet the increased demand of training EVERY staff member. After visiting one school district, one IT director decided it would be worthwhile to develop her staff's skills in how to develop online professional development modules.

One district in a large Texas city paid $50,000 to develop a module. The vendor worked with the district on a module for new staff entering the district. Since the bandwidth of the district isn't robust enough, the content is saved to CD-ROM. The district pays $2 per user for content it helped develop but a vendor content development team put together.

The question that comes to mind is, Do you really want to spend $50,000 per module when you could invest the funding in your own staff? The home-grown solution is always best, at least, until the staff are offered a higher paying job in the district next door.

• Support for Multiple Course Formats and Assessments: A learning management system should provide support for multiple course formats including instructor-led, web-based, and other external approaches to course implementation. A key feature of a learning management system is its ability to track how staff development occurs, as well as assess growth. Assessment can take place in a variety of ways, either through the documentation of the addition of evidence to a session participant's portfolio, a multiple-choice or true-false quiz, or completion of an electronic tutorial.

To Host Your Own Solution or Not

Let me be brief--I do not recommend hosting your own solution. And, while this is not a comprehensive list of features you should look for in a Learning Management System (refer to KEY COMPONENTS), one last element you should look for is whether the solution can be purchased and hosted on your own servers, or whether it will need to be hosted on the LMS parent company's servers.

Choose to host--or not--and you affect the long-term price of your solution (might cost more to start-up but be less over the long-run as you pay maintenance fees rather than hosting fees). With a learning management system, it is easier to let the vendor host their own product, while the school district hosts its own content (e.g. video, audio, documents).

In an increasingly inter-connected environment, if you are going to use content from online content providers (e.g. InfoSource, Element K, PBS TeacherLine), make sure that your contract has provisions for working with your learning management system (and make sure your LMS vendor is on board from the start). Also, be careful to avoid content providers who lack an interface to your learning management system. While these providers may have great content, you are taking a step backward if you purchase their services without being able to track your staff's learning efforts.

Some Learning Management Systems have relationships with content-providers--such as Element K and Books 24/7--that grant users access to an almost limitless supply of online courses, tutorials and books. Want to learn how to use Adobe's Creative Suite? Not a problem, the courses and textbooks you would use are online. Yet, the increased benefits of having these resources may impede successful hosting of the solution on district servers.

Another consideration is that you may not have the MySQL, MS SQL--or other database--database administrator you need to successfully manage the solution. The cost of hosting your own solution is prohibitive, and even if you were to choose a lower-end LMS, you might sacrifice access to content.

Selecting the LMS

Making the right decision depends on several factors. The first is the technology infrastructure your district has. The second is the content the LMS has pre-packaged for you as well as the ease with which you can add your own content to the LMS. The third is the LMS's flexibility in delivering the content, and administration of the program.

The more third-party content an LMS has, the more likely you'll pursue a vendor-hosted solution with re-occurring costs depending on the number of users. Cost estimates for LMS with over 1800+ hours of online courses, and supporting up to 5000 users are in the $30K-$40K range. You could probably get a barebones LMS for $25,000. While this seems expensive, these solutions allow you to manage your district's professional development--not just IT or HR, but ALL of staff development that takes place in the district.

Similar costs for solutions that you host yourself might be in the $250K start-up range with re-occurring costs of $40,000 per year, all depending on the hardware and software you have available to host the solution.

Making the right decision about choosing a learning management system is really about finding the LMS with the right content that meets your district's needs. It's also about investigating how much of an investment you're willing to make in regards to content development.

Since a learning management system affects everyone in your district at a variety of levels--supervisors, employees, department heads, and those responsible for content development and delivery, it will be important to get approval, support and funding from all stakeholders.

You will also need to ask a few other follow-up questions. The key during implementation is buy-in from the superintendent and other central office staff; it cannot just be one department pushing it out to staff.

Some other steps you might consider taking:

1. Establish an implementation timeline.
2. Integrate the learning management system with existing information systems, especially Human Resources.
3. Develop learning paths and match learners to their appropriate path.
4. Acquire, develop, and/or link to learning resources.
5. Select appropriate technologies to deliver learning.
6. Require accountability and incentive systems to ensure learning.
7. Create and manage the learning content.
8. Analyze the return on investment.

Learning management systems certainly offer a lot. But, is K-12 ready for them? What is the return on investment? In my district, the return on investment question goes before the School Board soon.

Although my district has about 54,000 students, 9000 employees, and will have to pay an annual cost of $47,000 for its learning management system, the cost is worth every penny. When you consider how much time is spent by countless staff working through the paperwork, it's clear that schools are well-served by learning management systems.

School districts work hard to train their staff in multiple areas but may not know simple answers to questions such as the following:

• how many people have been trained;
• what training have they received; and
• was that training effective?
• how much time was spent in online professional learning vs face to face meetings?

Without answers to these questions it is difficult to plan and staff appropriately and respond to staff needs. A well-implemented and maintained LMS will help provide the answers to these questions and keep school districts working together and moving in the right direction.

About the Author

As director of instructional technology for a large urban district in Texas, past president of the state-wide Technology Education Coordinators group in one of the largest U.S. technology educator organizations (TCEA), Miguel Guhlin continues to model the use of emerging technologies in schools. You can read his published writing or engage him in conversation via his blog at Around the Corner.

Request for Proposal Guidelines

The following is a recommended--albeit not complete--list of considerations for a learning management system. While a request for proposal should be carefully developed by your district's purchasing department, it is hoped that these guidelines aid your development of an RFP.

System Requirements

1. The system specified must have an architecture that supports scaling to (NUMBER_OF_STAFF_IN_YOUR_DISTRICT).
2. The system(s) specified must support YOUR DISTRICT'S STUDENT INFORMATION SYSTEM used by the District.
3. The system is web-based.
4. The system includes secure, encrypted web-based access for staff.
5. The system(s) specified must be able to connect Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) data sources.
6. The system allows for the local hosting of the data and the LMS application.
7. The system provides data import and export capabilities in non-proprietary formats (e.g. CSV)
8. Application provides for the import of pre-existing staff development schedules and staff data.
9. Application offers an interface with other external professional development components and existing third-party proposer software applications.
10. Application provides sharable content object reference model (SCORM) or web standards compliance, as well as allowing the easy addition of non-SCORM compliant resources (e.g. multimedia presentations, web pages, video clips in Flash,AVI,WMV, MOV,MP4 formats).
11. Comprehensive documentation, both hardcopy or PDF, and online help, containing program features and software support.
12. Technical support hotline is available from 8:00am-5:00PM, Monday through Friday.
13. Technical support hotline is available through a toll-free telephone number.
14. An after-hours technical support point of contact is available for urgent situations.
15. The system supports web-based access for retrieval and input with web component running on Microsoft Internet Information Server or Apache web server.
16. Application is password protected using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security.
17. The system is designed and coded to be 100%, 32-bit client/server.
18. The system must support and allow the use of convention Cut/Copy & Paste functions, with or without the use of a mouse.
19. The system must not require specialized in-house maintenance, operating personnel, or network engineers.
20. The system must implement a "plug-n-play" method of installing only the desired module(s).
21. The system must be fully integrated, with all modules sharing a common database.
22. The software must be able to execute on and take advantage of, i.e. make use of all available processors, on a multiprocessor server.
23. System is Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) compliant.
24. System provides an audit trail of all data changes.
25. A printable or exportable audit trail report is available of all data changes.

Application Features

1. The system(s) specified must allow the establishment of learning paths that school district staff can follow.
2. The system(s) specified must provide a multi-level approval path for approving course request (e.g. Faculty member requests a course, principal is the fist level of approval, area superintendent is the second level, etc. until final approval).
3. Application will provide the ability to determine, in summary fashion, daily attendance for a multi-day class, e.g. 3-day class, some individuals only attend two of the three days. This information is needed in a report and data file format.
4. Application will not allow entry into a course, when the maximum number of students in a call is reached, except by manual override.
5. Application provides automatic and manual scheduling of staff development requests in accordance with course offerings.
6. The system provides for automatic notfication of staff development session status.
7. The system provides assessment and reporting tools for staff development offered.
8. The application's printing module provides for pagination of all printed materials.
9. The system provides for automatic notification of staff development session status.
10. Application provides for centralized administration and management, as well as scheduling.
11. Application provides--or allows for interfacing with--an online forum (e.g. Moodle) for synchronous/asynchronous courseware.
12. Application provides for displaying web-based catalogs and printer version.
13. Application provides class data by participant's name or number in a viewable or printable format.
14. Application allows participants to see where they are, what they are registered for, and how much they have completed in relation to their learning path goals.
15. Application allows for facilitation and tracking of face to face and virtual sessions.
16. Application provides for email notification of cancellations, scheduled reminders of upcoming staff development, and other user-defined events.
17. This application supports alpha, numeric, and special character grades, within the same system.
18. The program screens are customizable with the District logo.
19. The system must include access to setup options for all modules in one common setup screen, no matter which modules are installed.
20. The system must allow the user to access the participant maintenance module without leaving the grade reporting area, or existing the main system.
21. The system must allow the ability to search for participant by name, ID, or employee #.
22. The system must provide participant demographic information.

Printing Capabilities

1. The system has the ability to print all reports in black and white.
2. The system must have the ability to print all reports to a printer or to an ASCII file.
3. The system must allow reports to be customized, selecting only the data elements needed, and excluding others.
4. Reports are customizable with the District logo.
5. The system must allow the user to sort printouts by name range, data range or course range.
6. The system must allow the user to enter/modify the headings on reports.
7. The system has the ability to pull all certifications for a student.
8. The system is capable of creating PDF files.

Proposer Services

1. The proposer will provide best practice approach(e) for varied implementations and applications.
2. The proposer will provide an evaluation design for measuring implementation integration and use.
3. The proposer will outline an implementation plan.
4. The proposer will outline a District advertising plan for LMS.

Written Responses Required

1. What kind of infrastructure is required in the District for your product to operate successfully?
2. What is the minimum available network bandwidth for your product to operate?
3. What operating system requirements are mandated by your application for Intel-based computers?
4. What are your system's browser requirements?
5. How many simultaneous connections can the LMS support?
6. Is the product server-based?
7. How is management of user accounts handled?
8. Can the District use a 3rd party reporting tool to query the product databases?
9. Can participants search for specific learning resources?
10. Can participants register themselves?
11. How do participants know if a class is available and if their registration request is accepted?
12. Can participants monitor their own progress from a self-service interface or central page to see where they stand in regards to training?
13. Is there an easy to add external documents to the participant portfolio?
14. Can system access be based on organizational hierachies?
15. Does your product provide a facility for pre-training and post-training assessment?
16. Can your product be used to maintain the mapping of skills to jobs and competencies to training?
17. When using these mappings, can your product identify skill gaps?
18. Will your product record and track various professional certifications?
19. Can the catalog mix online with instructor led training?
20. How are instructors added to the system?
21. How are facilities (training locations) added to the system?
22. Does your application automatically identify conflicts and issue warning notifications to participants? Administrators?
23. How many standard (pre-defined) reports are available within the application?
24. Will the District have the right to reprint all manuals/training materials associated with this system without additional cost to the District?

The CTO Challenge: Building Your Personal Learning Network

As a Chief Technology Officer, or director of technology, one of the toughest challenges you face isn't keeping up with the technology, but rather, understanding how to leverage it for your organization. Often, we are limited by the experiences that serve as "learning experiences." As a learner in the21st Century, this isn't about learning as a special event that is bound by time and place. You don't just learn when sitting in a meeting, or when you're at a conference or from 8:00 to 3:30 PM when school is in session. Now, you have the potential to tap into the flow of

conversation, a web-based learning ecology that you can learn from 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

As someone who awoke to this just a short two years ago, I am continually astonished at the rapidity of change. In fact, I had my first--and so far, only--panic attack in July, 2005 driving down the highway to work as I realized that the world is changing faster than I can keep up. The only way to respond to a panic attack is to seize control, to realize that I have some measure of control over how I react to rapid, tectonic paradigm-shifts that inflict terror because they transform the world around us. Not feeling it, huh? Well, that means you haven't looked over the edge and seen it looking back at you.

The only way to deal with this challenge to our particular approaching to learning--aside from ignoring it completely, which is about as effective as ignoring an oncoming truck when you're crossing the street--is to seize the steering wheel and create our own learning network. As a technology director, people look to you to model learning new technologies. Are you taking advantage of all the resources you can to streamline the often messy learning process?

Why jump in?

Christopher Parsons shares that we need to do 4 things with the content we encounter. It's an overwhelming amount of unorganized content, often content that may be useful in the future but we won't know that until we encounter the situation we need it for. This content would otherwise be thrown away or filed away in a way that would not be useful--such as paper notes, in our email or computer's bookmarks and then forgotten. As we try to make sense of this barrage of content--information, ideas, tips and how-to's, and personal information--Chris shares we need to do the following at light-speed:

1. Read - Read/watch/listen to the entirety of the content that you are presented with.
2. Evaluate - Consider what the content meant to you, and whether or not it was a source of information that intuitively seemed appropriate/acceptable for the task at hand.
3. Critique - Moving beyond evaluate, seriously reflect on the material and form your own opinion of the material.
4. Write - Share your critique with others, so that they can engage with you and the original content to develop a cohesive knowledge-product.

In the past, reading, evaluating and critiquing were done to different degrees by each of us. As a literate society, especially one composed of educators, it was rare that few of us actually wrote and published our critiques with others. Now, it is possible to share how what I read, evaluate, and critique connects with my own personal learning and schema. This is powerful because individuals--like you and me--have the power to publish at will to an audience of millions. The key thing to remember is that as we externalize our thinking, it becomes less of "I'm an expert expounding on what I know" and more of "I'm a learner, just like you, sharing what I'm learning so that we can learn together through our common errors and mistakes and maximize our breakthroughs." Consider that our understanding of learning is changing. We need to think of learning as an experience that happens when we connect with others.

If you fail to connect to the network of learners, you miss out on a global conversation about what YOU are passionate about. And missing out is a darn shame because it can save you time, energy, and increase your reach, no matter how brilliant (or not) you think you are. That's a powerful idea. Smart people get smarter because they have access to the network of learners. People who are just starting out are able to learn as fast as they can to get what they need accomplished.

When I meet folks that are just becoming aware of the conversation--usually because I push them over the edge in a workshop--I like to share several tools with them. These are essential learning tools that every 21st Century learner should have. They involve action on your part to use them, but it is the acts of use that cast out fear of change. The act of building your own personal learning network (PLN) is your fundamental act of freedom. Start now.

The Tools You Need

You only need several tools to get started, although there are hundreds. Please be aware that the purpose of these tools is to externalize the knowledge-building you do every day from the public information that comes across your computer screen. It is also to take advantage of the power of networked learning that is possible. There are thousands of educators online, and you can tap into their collective knowledge to ask questions, have conversations about what you need to learn. The only expectation is that you share what you know with them. Each no-cost tool listed below does it in a slightly different, but complementary, way.

Where Learning Conversations Take Place (in alpha order) Classroom 2.0 - A place for members of www.Classroom20.com to share links, Classroom 2.0 is social networking site devoted to those interested in the practical application of computer technology (especially Web 2.0) in the classroom and in their own professional development. CTOnetwork - The focus of this group is to bridge the disparate organizations focused on CTOs, Technology Director, school district level technology issues. Educators - This is a group for educators to use to share bookmarks. It is completely open and anyone can join. It will have a set of standard tags to help us share things that you may use in addition to your tags. EDuStreams - Easily track Education related uStream.tv broadcasts (EDuStreams). Find out more about these via the Education World Broadcast Learning article.

1) Get a Diigo.com account. Diigo.com is a social bookmarking tool, similar to the popular Del.icio.us service, but also centralizes in one place various learning possibilities. The social aspect of learning is important, especially with our increasing focus on conversations that add value to what we are learning. Diigo.com lets you bookmark web sites and have an online conversation about them. Here's a diagram that addresses some of those:

Some of the exciting ways educators are using Diigo are listed in the sidebar. Centralize your learning through web sites and the conversations you have about those sites online by using Diigo. Since Diigo is free, you can encourage your superintendent and other administrative staff to become a part of the conversation. This kind of "networking" empowers all who participate in the conversation. Here are some suggestions:

• Annotating curriculum documents and adding stickies to show where tech integration is happening and could happen. This could be annotated for a group of curriculum writers.
• Annotate state education agency memos for your administrators. We get memos every day and they are posted online. Immediately, among a team, share what are the implications of the ideas shared in the memo, the most important points, etc.
• You can see instructional uses of Diigo as screencasts developed by Clay Burell, an International School teacher, online.

Example: http://www.diigo.com/user/mguhlin Find Diigo online here: http://diigo.com

2) Twitter: Use twitter.com to build a professional learning network. There are many 21st century teachers out there. Find them and create a twitter network that can be a support group, provide inspiring projects, and keep you in touch with like minded people. All of you participating in this workshop can be a group. Locate each other in twitter and become a network. You can use Twitter specific tools to connect with others. One of my favorites is TweetScan.com. It allows you to search the many "tweets" that occur each day (view a search on Education ) and subscribe via RSS (Read tool #3 below for more on RSS) to the results. That way, real time comments about what is critical to your work comes to you.

Whenever there is contact with other educators, there is hope. That's the power of communications. I can't share the excitement I felt at participating in a TeachMeet on September 19, 2007 taking place in Scotland. How did I find out about this? Obviously, I was not in Scotland. I was sitting at my desk working on work projects, when a "tweet" came in from Paul Harrington, an educator in Wales.

As a result of his sharing via Twitter, I was able to participate in this conference via my web browser and listen to speakers like Ewan McIntosh and others share what they are doing in schools in Scotland. Do you think this might have impacted my perspective about the power of global learning opportunities? How might it have impacted YOUR perspective to participate in a dialogue with educators from around the world?

By combining the power of Diigo and Twitter, I am able to more easily track ad-hoc professional learning opportunities as they occur, as well as have conversations about them BEFORE and AFTER. This kind of just-in-time learning, as it happens, can be very powerful for educators. One way that I approached tracking broadcast learning opportunities included creating a Diigo group. I invited other educators and now we have a collaboratively updated list of EDuStreams --educational professional learning happening online via uStream, Elluminate, Wimba.com sessions that are appearing online. EDuStreams are actually video/audio presentations and conversations done by educators about topics they are interested in. Twitter allows us to share these at will, while Diigo allows us to keep track of these opportunities and share them with others, even if they are not on Twitter. After you get your Twitter and Diigo accounts, join the EDuStreams group on Diigo to keep up to date on new learning opportunities.

Example: Norms for Online Behavior Find it here: http://twitter.com with a list of educators to follow at http://twitter.com/mguhlin

3) Start blogging. Blogging is a process of reflection on what you learn everyday. How can anyone spend time blogging on top of what they do all day? The fact is that some of my best blogging research--when I decide on Future Blog Posts--while I'm looking for something else. In fact, my focus during the day is learning something, either for work, to satisfy my curiousity (which begins with a question or a wondering).

At the end of the day, early evening in fact, I quickly look back at what I tagged for a Future Blog Post, which is actually a "tag" I keep in Diigo.com. I may bookmark many items, but only blog about those that are immediately relevant or connected.

Before, I would copy-n-paste the link, the relevant quote or point that triggered my thinking into my blog program (Thingamablog) but now I just use Diigo.com. In that way, blogging for me isn't a "special" activity, but part of everything I do. When I'm asked for what I know about a particular topic relevant to my work as a technology director, I am able to check my bookmarks. If I have spent time reflecting on implementation of a technolgy-related project in my blog, I usually bookmark that as well and can quickly pull up the needed information. This work prepares me in advance for questions my job naturally throws at me. I easily have 3 times that in ideas or info that I stumble upon.

So here I am again, coaching, and asking my students to trust that they will need what I'm requiring them to do: blogging, wiki-ing, social bookmarking, digital story creating, and online discussing. If they can get through my class, they will be able to apply these new skills to their teaching and their students will benefit.

Source: Cycling through EdTech

In a real way, this is a much different way of behaving and acting. Modelling it for our students is critical, as Cheri points out above, but understanding it ourselves is just as important. Before blogs (BB), I never would have done this (tag ideas, blog about my response/reflection, wikify my resources for others, podcast valuable conversations with other people for later listening). In fact, keeping a journal was a joke for me, even though I knew that every "good" writer kept one. It wasn't until I started blogging--with the real audience that's reading--that I understood the power of blogging everything.

Amy Gehran at Contentious Blog articulates this really well when she writes the following:

A blog post is not (or at least, it shouldn't be) a writing assignment you must prep for and deliver as a finished package. . .Blog your initial brainstorming...Blog your research & discovery...Blog your interactions. Did you just have an interesting conversation relevant to a topic you've been blogging? Ask the person with whom you conversed if you can blog the relevant portion, and whether you can identify them...The clincher to all this is to use your blog as your "backup brain" or at least as a public notebook. Why not get more mileage out of work you would have done anyway by changing your habits toward managing information and communication publicly? Instead of keeping your thoughts, notes, and conversations to yourself, post them.

via Teach-n-Babble

In my recent Blog Your World! workshop at the PBS/KLRN ICTT 2007 Conference, I shared it in this way, as perceived by one of the newbie bloggers, Juliet Ray at Deep Thoughts (drop by and give her a comment):

What an exciting day today is! I have created my first blog. Hello digital world, here I am! I look forward to using this site as a way of not only communicating with others, but to "externalize (Miguel's new big word/concept I learned today) my knowledge". Additionally, it will serve as a personal journal to assist in reflection on my journey through life.

This kind of externalization is useful to others. For example, back in 2005 I wrote a how-to for doing something in GNU/Linux operating system that used KDE as the GUI (as opposed to Gnome or the others out there). In September 20, 2007, someone found it and blogged about it...if I hadn't externalized my knowledge, made a "backup brain," then this would not have been here for Jim Plumb to discover.

If you want to change the default view in the Linux file manager konqueror check out this article: http://tinyurl.com/373qea I wanted to have the view in tree mode rather than the default icon view.

Another neat result of this is that *I* rediscover my own blog entry when Jim writes about it or interacts with it. It makes me want to re-read the entry. In reviewing my social bookmarking network, I noticed Mark Ahlness had picked up on one of my favorite blog entries, "Writing the List Article"...I hadn't seen that blog entry in ages, even though every article I write is based on the structure outlined.

Blog what you learn, what you do. Soon, you'll realize you know--and as importantly, discover more--about what is in your head than you think.

Example: LeaderTalk Blog for school district administrators at http://leadertalk.org

Get Started at http://edublogs.org with an education-related blog about what you are learning and how it is relevant to your work. Ask yourself a few questions to get started, such as What are you most passionate about in your work? and What is the hardest thing you do in your work, and why is it challenging? Finally, share your successes--and failures, such as What obstacle or problem you encountered and how you overcame it? Some common questions technology directors have include the following:

• What backup software do you use in your district?
• Have you considered switching from MS Exchange to Google Apps? How did you make the transition?
• What Special Education tracking software or web-based service are you using at the District level?
• What kinds of audio/visual solutions are you using to broadcast school board meetings?
• And many more. Responding to these types of questions in your blog and sharing resources with other technology directors via Diigo.com will instantly enable you to share ideas about important matters relevant to your work.

Get started by joining this Diigo group (CTOnetwork) for Chief Technology Officers, Technology Directors/Coordinators, and others in district-level technology positions.

3) Use Google Reader to Manage RSS Subscriptions: Most new web pages now have what is known as an RSS feed button. Web sites with RSS--real simple syndication--feeds enable you to read their content without visiting their web site beyond the first time. You can subscribe to their content--and subscription is at no-cost--and any updates/changes to their web site are delivered to you directly ( Watch this Video). The benefit of this is that creating a personal learning network will not result in MORE email, but rather, less. Instead of receiving email notifications, you go to Google Reader to review the latest updates and changes, and participate when you have a need.

My Example: Miguel's Shared Items in Google Reader

Get Started at http://reader.google.com

Reflecting on the Tools

These three tools can save you a lot of time and energy as you try to join the flow of conversation. One of my favorite quotes--that came to me via Mark Wagner--is "He who learns from one who is learning, drinks from a flowing river."

I hope you'll continue to learn every moment and share that learning with others. The rewards are infinite.

13 Year Old Gets Movie Script Made into Motion Picture

“Creativity

is as fundamental as literacy and numeracy," shared Sir Ken Robinson in a TEDtalk video and subsequent interview published in Edutopia. "All young children have immense creative confidence. What strikes me is how few adults do. If you ask adults, they mainly think they’re not very creative. All young children think they are up to a certain point.” This article highlights the work of 3 children from Texas and Tennessee working in creative collaboration using online Read/Write Web tools.

When I first read Sir Ken Robinson, I made a distinction between children being frivolously creative and adults focusing their creativity on useful projects and under appreciating themselves. In a presentation available online (http://tinyurl.com/2bagz4), researchers distinguish between personal creativity and societal creativity.

LEVERAGING PERSONAL CREATIVITY

Personal creativity is shared as the creation of something novel and valuable to the individual (personal judgment). As an individual, I make a personal judgement about the value of my own creativity. Societal creativity, however, is defined as creation which adds something new to the culture. It’s important to recognize that personal creativity and societal creativity can feed off each other. With new tools, it is easier to leverage that personal creativity and share it with others in ways that add value to our culture. One such tool is a web site known as KibPub.com.

An online writing community has sprung up around KidPub.com, a site that has been enabling children to publish their writing since 1995. I discovered it many years ago, and introduced my own 13-year old daughter to KidPub as a safe place for her to publish her writing. In the last year, I have become even more aware that the site has evolved from a static site to a place where children are having conversations about their writing and the topics they are writing about. It offers a counter-culture perspective to the way technology has been used elsewhere. What is powerful about KidPub is that it allows children to publish online and puts them in contact with other writers interested in their work, fostering collegial conversations. There may be collaborative writing efforts underway.

ALONE IN THE MIDDLE

It was through one of these conversations that three children connected. In one part of the country, a Texas teen shares an 18-chapter fictional story. The work has been under development for years, constantly revised and re-written, finally finding its way onto the Web and then published on KidPub.com to an eager audience of her peers. The story has never been edited or reviewed by teacher, the parents of the teen writer publishing via the Web have placed their trust that the work will meet their expectations for appropriateness. Trust is the operative term, a dependence on a relationship built over time. Alone in the Middle is a story that would have found itself unknown, unread at any other time without technology to facilitate connections between children involved.

As I consider this personal creativity, I take a moment to reflect on a 13-year old KidPub author who published her multiple chapter story online, Alone in the Middle. The story is slowly being made into a "motion picture," or at least, a movie that will be shared via YouTube.com, another new tool available to children and adults alike.

TEEN MOVIE PRODUCERS

Last night, I watched the Oscars, and I listened to the Coen brothers who won an Oscar for their director role for a movie that swept the Academy Awards in 2008. In their acceptance, Josh Coen shared that when they were kids, he and his brother would make their own home-made movies using the tools at hand. “What we're doing today making movies,” he observed, “isn't that different from what we were doing then.” What a powerful insight; what our children do now has meaning, driven by personal creativity matures into societal creativity. What are your students doing in your classroom that would earn them an Academy Award, if repeated and deepened over time?

In the past, only movie producers--grown-up, important people who were probably rich, or so goes the stereotype--who had money could put their product in front of millions of viewers. Now, consider that the two directors of the Alone in the Middle story are a brother and sister team being home-schooled in a Tennessee log cabin.

As a result of becoming aware of this project--written and converted to an online video with a potential audience of millions--I have had a qualitatively different experience and understanding of the power of technology to facilitate creativity and collaboration. As an educator, I have to ask myself, how could we have deepened the dialogue that is naturally occurring between these three creative individuals? How could we have created situations in schools today that made this possible? If this is the kind of work we want our children to be engaged in, then how do we need to rethink what we're doing in schools?

PUBLISH AT WILL

My esteemed colleague, Wes Fryer, shared the power of the Read/Write Web to publish at will. Using free software (MovieMaker, Paint), two child directors were able to make a movie out of a story written using free online tools (free wiki for educators are available online). The original author--Rosalie--wrote an 18 chapter story, composed it online using a wikispaces.com site, shared it with other children in an online community known as KidPub.com . The two children in Tennessee emailed her the following:

My sister and I need your permission to create a cartoon-based on your story. We will post it on Youtube and email you for advice. Please reply.

Thanks,

Nathan and Nicole

As educators, we know that YouTube.com is a site that is automatically banned for inappropriate content. Yet, for our children, it is the place where they come together to share their work. At YouTube.com anyone--you, your students, your own children--can publish videos at will. You may have become familiar with it through the Presidential Candidate debates being hosted there. Both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates faced questions directly from voters on Monday in the first CNN/YouTube debate" (Source: CNN ).

There is power in using YouTube, and online video hosts such as TeacherTube.com (think of it as YouTube for Education), to achieve goals like those described in this Wired article :

The debates will feature 20-30 questions culled from a pool of possibilities sent in by the American voter. (if you're American, hopefully that means you.) Potential questions will be posted to YouTube's YouChoose platform, a section tagged specifically for material relating to the 2008 campaign. Questions will not be selected based on the number of views on YouTube. Nor will the selection process be made public, in order to prevent candidates from prepping. During the debates, the questions will be aired on a giant video monitor. YouTubers will be able to leave comments on the questions beforehand. They will also be able to comment on the candidate's responses, which will be posted to YouTube after the political showdowns have wrapped up.

It's clear that YouTube--as well as other online resources--are becoming powerful ways to communicate and share ideas online. It's not surprising that children are growing up using the digital tools available to adults and that they see modelled on television, if not schools (most schools universally ban YouTube access because it has a wide range of content, from appropriate to inappropriate).

YouTube serves a digital commons area where people can share their video creations, and everyone can remix that content, as well as add new content. Sometimes, that power to publish at will is used inappropriately, but, increasingly, students are following in the footsteps of responsible creators...achieving the top level of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, CREATE. In the next two years, every cell phone produced will have a video camera built into it. Imagine what our children will do with mobile video-phones. No, skip the negative scenarios that pop into your mind. Imagine the positive possibilities.

YouTube is used to share this introduction to KidPub.com, a web site designed specifically for students to publish their writing. This short video was created to introduce others--presumably a student audience--to KidPub.com.

COLLEGIAL CONVERSATIONS

As a professional educator, I'm overawed at the fact that two home-schooled pre-teens living in a log cabin took a thirteen year old's piece of writing, then made it into the first of several videos you can watch on YouTube. Here’s another exchange:

Ok, the first paragraph is complete. Are you allowed on YouTube if I give you the link?

The brother and sister team of directors--Nathan and Nicole--share their progress in converting Rosalie's story to a movie. This is a documentary on how videos are made from the written script. What is fascinating to consider is, "How are children in our own schools developing videos?" A bigger question is, “How are children developing the skills they need to engage in peer production—creating products online the way businesses work—without teacher cues to keep them on task?”

ISOLATED NO LONGER

Dr. Don Knezek, ISTE’s CEO, shared (http://tinyurl.com/2m385v) that classrooms can be isolated places no longer. He shared that “...opportunities to learn are available to us [adults] that we can't give our students.” While we as adults have opportunities, Dr. Tim Tyson asks, how are educators collapsing “the distance between children and meaningful contribution?” How do we align a school's educational purpose with that meaningfulness our children create? When I view Alone in the Middle, I can see that the potential of these students may very well have gone untapped. In fact, I know that the potential for enabling children to make meaningful contributions to the world has NOT been enabled. Why? The reason is that Rosalie is my daughter and I know how she does NOT use technology in school. In spite of that lack, our children are seizing these opportunities without our guidance as educators. And, that just will not work. Dr. Knezek shared in this presentation (http://tinyurl.com/38gqd5) in San Antonio a few other key points that sound an alarm bell for all educators in the United States.

In the past, Don pointed out that the focus was on what teachers should know about and be able to do with techology. Now, the focus is on what teachers should know and be able to do to promote students' abilities to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world. How do we align a school's educational purpose with that meaningfulness our children create?

What is striking is that these three children--Rosalie in Texas, Nathan and Nicole in Tennessee--could not have met without access to technology and the means to publish their writing and videos online. And, that the nature of their meeting was wholly online with little or no teacher supervision. While many point to the inappropriate use of technology by our children, it is clear that positive, creative uses that are of value to society are possible and can happen given the right conditions. How do we as educators go about establishing those conditions in our classrooms and schools?

Videos are online at these addresses:

• Alone in the Middle Part 1 - http://tinyurl.com/37rx4u

• Alone in the Middle Part 2 - http://tinyurl.com/3aqfsl

• Behind the Scenes Part 1 - http://tinyurl.com/345l8u

• Behind the Scenes Part 2 - http://tinyurl.com/3a4jnc

Or, you can go to YouTube.com and do a search on “Alone in the Middle.” By the time this article is printed, you may find part 3, or even, 4.

CONCLUSION

Over the last few years, we've seen new 21st Century skills that are different than anything required before. These skills are integral to our children's success in life and work, but especially so if they are to pursue higher education.

Mark Gura writes that "...these 21st Century skills are not solely technology skills, but involve the ways that learning, knowing, communicating, and solving problems have changed through the application of technology. They must be learned through the continual and ongoing use of technology (Source: Mark Gura, The Powers that be have been informed, http://tinyurl.com/2aoblp).

As an adult, I push hard to explore my personal creativity and share that online. It's been a learning process for me. I encourage you to start exploring this process on your own. Need suggestions? Start by going online to http://tinyurl.com/ywfzy2

Notes - Permission to Reflect

Source: http://www.lightandmatter.com/html_books/3vw/ch04/figs/fish-reflection.jpg Jeff has a great entry on Permission to Reflect because he confronts exactly the questions that anyone who blogs faces when others ask, "How do you make time to do this?" I get this question constantly...you must not sleep, you must be constantly writing, and the answer is NO, I get plenty of sleep, and YES, I am constantly blogging because that is what living is about...living and reflecting. It isn't easy in itself but over time, it can become easier to blog--read, reflect, write--about a variety of topics. Most of blogging that I do, though, isn't just about reflecting. It's also about exploring new ideas and looking at things from a different perspective. It is this aspect of blogging that presents one of the best opportunities to become a lifelong, continuous learner. This doesn't mean constant writing, but rather, constant openness to learn and sharing that journey. Here are my favorite parts of Jeff's entry...Diigo.com makes it easy to collect these quotable quotes and relevant sections to share with you:

• U Tech Tips » Blog Archive » Do you give yourself permission to reflect?

  tags: blogging reflection

  • Reflection is a great process…a proven process of learning. We’ve been asking students to reflect for years in education so one simple question:

    Do you give yourself permission to reflect during the work day?

    and another question:

    Do your administrators give you permission to reflect during the work day?
  • Blogging is not just writing, it is the act of reading, thinking, reflecting and writing. As a technology person in a school helping teachers, I need that time to reflect and learn about what’s happening, and I make a point to schedule that into my work day.
  • Make reflection part of your work day. If it is something you try and do outside of school it won’t happen. There is rarely a time when I’m not thinking about education and technology…but it’s my passion and I love it! Some teachers have other interests, and that’s great! But give yourself time to reflect on your practice. Make it a habit to reflect and make it part of your work day.

Speedy Email Responding

As an administrator in a public school district, I often receive emails requesting help. For me, prompt, speedy response that resolves the situation is essential to success. Prompt response means instantaneous response when we all have access to email. Yet, sometimes, helpful solutions take too long to deliver...your response depends on the actions of others. Here's one request:

I have a personal account with Animoto.com. I heard about this site during a presentation by librarians at the ESC Librarian Round Up. I have made a couple of short intro-type science movies just to get student attention in the library.

I can't use the site? I did see on the librarian 2.0 that Animoto for Educators was listed. Has something happened? If we are professionals and know what content to use and not to use, shouldn't we be able to use that technology?

Please advise, I would surely love to work with this site to create library resource videos. It is a good way to publicize the library

Thank you.

One can almost sense the indignation hinted at in the question, yet the author of the email pulls back. My response follows after multiple interventions on the person's behalf:

Howdy. Please be aware that Animoto is on the approved list of web sites, that I also have an account, and have used it to showcase District events. I submitted an objection to the HelpDesk and the individuals responsible for filtering on the following dates, and there have been 3 other campus/department entities who have complained about lack of access. To date, I have not been successful in seeing a change, but this is a busy time of the year for those involved in making the adjustment to the District's filters. Previous requests were sent on September 11th, September 17th and September 23rd. I'm copying the relevant individuals on this email response to you. I can only ask for patience at this time.

I copied the message above to relevant individuals and they took action--they'd been swamped with opening of school--to address the problem. I promptly emailed the folks affected this note:

Thank you for your patience! Animoto.com is now accessible! However, now that I know you are using it, please share the links to your Animotos so I can showcase them! Here is one I've put together to celebrate what is happening [removed] I downloaded my Animoto video and then put it up at http://edublogs.tv. This works better, I've found, than animoto on hosting (my experience).

How do you handle "customer" complaints?

Embedded Education Reporters

Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff Blogger, highlights this story about an embedded news reporter. Where is he embedded? In a war? In a mission to a hostile to American media hot-spot around the world? No...embedded in a classroom.

Over the school year, The Washington Post will revisit scatter plots and polynomials, word problems and standardized tests to explore how and why math education is ramping up.

Wouldn't a more exciting exercise be to provide FLIP video cameras and blogs to the students in that teacher's class, and allow them to blog each day, include snapshot interviews with the teacher as to what she planned to teach, reactions by other students to the presentation and activities, and the teacher's self-assessment as to her success? Wouldn't this kind of citizen-journalism do more than just waste our time, filtering an experience we are all familiar with--sitting through algebra class--through adult eyes looking back with nostalgia, if it just empowered children to share THEIR perspective and insights into learning as it happens in today's inner city schools?

Writing Tip

This writing tip struck me right between the eyes. I usually skip the coffee part and get straight to writing, especially when I have a deadline: Wake up. Drink coffee

Write. Ignore phone, ignore mail, ignore world. It will all be there when you are done. Just don't ignore your lovers for too long. Source: A. Swafford , author of "Jarhead" via Writing Time: Inspiration

What's your approach?

Blogging Benefits

Interested in blogging in the classroom or using blog tools to enhance classroom activities? TCEA TechEdge Columnist Wes Fryer and I have chatted several times about blogging and he’s doing some interesting things with a university class. Wes wrote an article on blogging that is available online. You can also find other TCEA Conference Blogging Resources online.

You can also find articles in different magazines. There’s one in THE Journal for February, 2004 by . They mention 4 benefits including:

1) The use of blogs helps students become subject-matter experts. They mention a three step process–a) scouring; b) filtering; c) posting.

2) The use of blogs increases student interest and ownership in learning.

3) The use of blogs gives students legitimate chances to participate.

4) The use of blogs provides opportunities for diverse perspectives, both within and outside the classroom.

The article also mentions that “knowledge construction is discursive, relational and conversational in nature. As students appropriate and transform knowledge, they must have authentic opportunities for publication of knowledge.” This last piece is key for me. As a writer, publishing my work is what motivates me in part to write…it motivates me even if I don’t get paid for it (believe it or not, the excitement is still there even after years). But, that’s not the only motivation. The other is being to easily share my understanding of situations, to hear my voice in a way that it can’t be heard when I speak aloud. It’s that kind of journal type writing that gets me excited and makes me want to write.

As such, just like THE JOURNAL articles states, blogging gives me–as well as students–full control and ownership over online content…and it does so in a way that is easy to manage.

Some practical suggestions to blogging that come from the article include:

1) Consider blogging yourself. I have followed this advice and, since I don’t want to setup a server at home to blog from, I use a cross-platform, free software program called Thingamablog. It’s free and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It works well and I carry it on my pen drive/thumbdrive so that I can easily blog from any computer I’m at…and I don’t have to worry about changing formats because Thingamablog is a Java Applet. You can get Thingamablog online.

Wes Fryer, TCEA TechEdge columnist, shares about other blogging tools you can use.

2) Spend time visiting other classroom blogs. Once again, you might check out the work of David Warlick’s BlogMeister at the Landmark Project.

3) Model blogging for your students. This also involves setting rules, etc.While I can’t say I’ve done this yet, here’s some additional resources.

Two other recommendations mentioned include making the blogs more public and explaining the “reach” of blogs to students.

Something the article doesn’t address to my satisfaction is how blogging fits into the writing process. However, at this point, what makes blogging so attractive is that it fits into the idea of journaling, reflecting on your writing, and those pieces.

POLICY ISSUES

On student pages hosted by the District, the blogs have to conform to district policies…they’re still web pages created in response to an assignment or project. In the case of a blogging tool external to the District, I would move to restrict student access to it. I would want them to work within an environment under control by the School District. This would eliminate the District-independent copyright and inappropriate issues that might arise.

Writing and Blogs

The following is an excerpt from Will’s entry on his blog…you can read the complete entry online.

The Social Studies Department at my school has started using a Weblog to archive lessons for the various classes in the department. . .they wanted the ability to comment back to the author of the lesson and it seemed that a blog would be more functional in that respect. They also wanted the ability to tag their entries and to search by those keywords, a feature that the Manila metadata plugin allows for. So now, if a teacher is looking for a plan about Native Americans, for example, she can just search for it within the site.

Now I know that this particular one is more of a history lesson, but what about adding these ideas to the study of Native Americans:

-Create a blog written in the voices of those early Indians complete with artistic interpretations of what they were experiencing. -Have students use the comments to begin conversations about the events between the settlers, the government and the Indians. Better yet, invite living American Indians into those conversations. -Have students go through Flickr and select pictures that they feel represents what Native American life is like today. Have them do some pieces of “flicktion” about what they see. This group tagged Navajo might be a starting point. (Some of these are really beautiful, by the way.) -Create a wiki where research information about that time period can be stored in annotated fashion by students. -Have students monitor news feeds from Google and Yahoo News, and the topic feeds from Furl and del.icio.us. -Create and publish oral histories by doing interviews with Native Americans via Skype or by having students role play characters or situations. -Ask students to create screencasts that show and annotate the best resource sites on the Web dealing with Native American issues. -Create a meta-blog site for this topic where students post news items about what they have created and found or links to student best practices. This might be where the teacher coordinates and organizes the content.

…the idea is that students can work collaboratively to create and publish content about any topic, and that we can aggregate that content in ways that create a rich and dynamic resource not only for the kids in our class but for future students and outside visitors with an interest in the topic. I think it gives a totally different feel to the classroom, one where students not only learn but teach. One where contribution is celebrated. One where the different mediums create entry points for all students and makes them creators, not consumers. Put these tools in the hands of kids with a teacher who understands how to choreograph the interaction and it could be an amazing learning environment.

High School Redesign

Elements of a High School Redesign, excerpt from A Principal’s Dilemmas: Theory and Reality of School Redesign. Paula M. Evans as printed in Phi Delta Kappan, Feb 2003 v84 i6 p424

REMEMBER that your small school must meet the following conditions.

Vision. The school must articulate a shared vision characterized by common core goals and high expectations for all students. The core goals must include the understandings and skills that all students are expected to master, including an emphasis on multicultural understanding.

Structure. The structure of your small school must:

* represent a cross-section of the population;

* have a low student/teacher ratio (maximum load of 80 students per teacher);

* employ flexible, heterogeneous grouping;

* use a flexible schedule and flex time for teachers; and

* integrate special education.

Program. The program of your small school must:

* include a grade 9-12 advisory;

* have a grade 9-10 core program and team (grades 9 and 10 may be together or separate);

* offer opportunities for integrated curriculum and interdisciplinary projects;

* give reading, writing, math, and other academic support as needed;

* offer field experience — internships, community service, and so on - - through outreach to institutions and industry and through “inreach” (bringing the outside into the school);

* use authentic assessment in the form of student portfolios, exhibitions, and presentations;

* make use of a senior project and exhibition or portfolio;

* allow for college and career exploration;

* foster strong parent involvement; and

* enable strong student participation in governance.

Staffing and support. The staffing and support in your small school must:

* allow all faculty and staff members to teach;

* enable all faculty and staff members to serve as advisors;

* provide common planning time for teachers;

* make room for regular teacher meetings focused on teaching and learning/curriculum/students; and

* provide for teacher training, resources, and ongoing support. — PME

AVID Conference Notes Day 3

Today, we had the opportunity to practice Socratic Seminar. The facilitator split the whole group into smaller groups that each analyzed a news article or poem. In my group, we analyzed Maya Angelou’s Poem on the Inaugural Address, On the Pulse of the Morning. Here’s a quick picture of the work we were about.

The assembled AVID Conference teachers (divided into two different rooms to listen to the keynote speaker, Mary Catherine Swanson) heard something like the following. Please note that these notes are not complete but they were the best I could do with pad and pencil. You can also listen to this audio clip (43 megs) of the presentation, although the quality is not good.

Mary Catherine Swanson, Founder of AVID, Keynote Address

Twenty-five years ago, I never envisioned what lay ahead. I started with 32 students, bused into the suburbs. Communities that were filled with abandoned buildings. All I knew was that we were embarking on a journey that would change the course of history. Although those 32 students and I didn’t plan to impact education, we did. Those we touch…have profoundly different lives. This has been our calling, our journey. It must never end…our calling must be to make education more than an accident. To make the expectation of a systematic education the rule for students in all our schools.

It takes courage to stare down the soft bigotry that bubbles beneath the surface. At its core, AVID is all about self-discovery when talents that have long lain dormant are revealed. When we encounter adversity…we need look to our students and recall their courage and conviction on display. If our students have this courage and determination, then, so must we as educators. It is our calling. According to Confuscian philosophy, it is the mark of a golden era when children are the most important and teaching is the most esteemed profession. Something deep within that moves us to do what is right and we should not claim to be teachers if we do less.

Dedicated to the promise of schools as dedicated, democratic institutions…a significant portion of the population is relegated, dismissed as low performers. Only 1 of 17 in USA can ever expect to earn a Bachelor’s degree. From rich families, those statistics change to 1 of 2 will earn a degree. Institutional change, bureacracy, turf battles, complacency…those impediments still exist. Should we despair, ignore our historic calling?

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” –Frederick Douglass

Power concedes nothing without demand–never has, never will. As we seek the courage to overcome, we must remember our students. We now face a critical juncture. We can change the course of history. Those who define the issues also determine the outcome. Challenging age-old beliefs with rigor and support, we can change…that will rattle ingrained systems…a “quiet revolution.” Each of you, small and large has the power to change course of education. Four factors influence student success–income level, family life, education, and the community they grow up in… we have proved that students don’t have to be determined by these factors.

Changing the course of history by design…like our students, we have made the journey. We now have historic goals within our reach. For 25 years, students have risen to the challenge having the individual desire to succeed.

Some quotes from AVID Student Successes:

“America represented to us the door to opportunity.” –Maximo Escobedo

On reflecting on the horrors she witnessed each day, from drugs to stabbings and killings, Precious Jackson stated, “I never complained because I had eyes to see another day. Education became my key to success. In AVID, I was able to make sense of every class. AVID teachers are trained to be human first. it prepared me for college and got me through college. We have a moral responsibility to provide they very best for our students. They turn to us, they believe in us.”

AVID Conference Notes Day 2

Building on introduction to Socratic Seminar, we were shown a variety of small group activities for tutorial sessions prior to actually beginning a Socratic Seminar. We also engaged in Socratic Seminar and everyone had the chance to participate in both the “inner” and “outer” circle.

PRIOR TO SOCRATIC SEMINAR: TUTORIAL SESSIONS For homework, we read an article. After reading the article, we came in Tuesday. In an activity meant to introduce us to various tutorial sessions, the facilitator assigned different activities to each small group. Some of these activities included the following with these directions (note that you can view the actual example when it is available underneath each explanation; some items include short video clips):

1-Venn Diagram: Compare/contrast two characters from the text. Example not available. 2-Cluster Activity: Select one representative word from the text and put it in the center of the page. Students brainstorm what they have learned in the article/story in regards to the word. View Photo Example

3-T-Graph: Divide the paper into two parts with a large “T”. On the right side of the paper, the teacher presents a preselected list of five or six quotes directly from the story. Label this side as “Quotes”. On the the left-hand side of the T, students write down their collaboratively decided meaning of the quote and its importance to the story. This side is labelled “Interpretation.” View Photo Example and Video Clip (13 megs)

4-PMI Chart: Students collaboratively list ideas/issues/values from the story that they found to be a “Plus” to the story, those that they found to be a “Minus” in the story and those that were simply “Interesting” from the text. View Photo Example

5-Vocabulary Collection: Students search for new vocabulary or words to display on a five-pointed star that has been labelled for them. The labels may include the “5 Ws” or five separate categories such as People, Things, Feelings, Places, and Interesting Words. View Photo Example

SOCRATIC SEMINAR The idea of Socratic Seminar, with an inner group of students discussing a particular item and an outer group watching their respective inner group participant, seems a bit impossible at first. Yet, once you are placed in the inner circle, it is an engaging experience. Here’s a quick overview of the process:

1) Arrange the classroom into two circles of chairs. You can see that the organization of the chairs isn’t brain surgery from this quick photo. Class is divided into two groups. The first group forms the inner circle. The second group forms the outer circle.

2) The inner circle members directions are pretty straightforward. We are handed a piece of paper and asked to jot down some notes, questions we might have regarding the article/story we read for class. We will share one of the questions or statements we have written with the whole group.

One interesting technique was to leave an empty chair in the inner circle. This chair could be used as a “hot seat” or a “guest” chair, allowing outer circle members to offer a statement or pose a question. Yet, they could only make the statement or ask a question once, then they were required to return to the outer circle.

Outer circle members are also given another instruction: watch a specific partner and complete the following tally sheet (items shown below) for them. The purpose of this is to keep them engaged and listening. I found this to be particularly true since it enabled me to focus on one person, even as I listened to the discussion. Trying to keep track of others in the group would have been more difficult.

Observation Form: Inner-outer Discussion Circle Your Name: Partner’s Name: Directions: Each time your partner does one of the following, put a check in the box:

SPEAKS IN THE DISCUSSION LOOKS AT PERSON WHO IS SPEAKING REFERS TO THE TEXT ASKS A QUESTION RESPONDS TO ANOTHER SPEAKER INTERRUPTS ANOTHER SPEAKER ENGAGES IN SIDE CONVERSATIONS

AFTER DISCUSSION: What is the most interesting thing your partner said? AFTER DISCUSSION: What would you like to have said in the discussion?

Apparently, these individual pages–whether for inner/outer circle–can also be collected for grading purposes.

3) After everyone in both circles knows their job, each inner circle member shares their question/statement. The facilitator then asks one of the individual to elaborate on what they said. Again, the choice is up to the facilitator as to who to start with. And, then, the discussion begins.

4) After a specified time, the facilitator ends the discussion. She then invites the outer circle to provide feedback to the particular inner circle member they were partnered with. The facilitator is sure to cut short any feedback that does not specifically to the Observation Form.

5) Inner Circle members are also asked to complete a post-Socratic Seminar Reflection, which essentially summarizes the discussion that took place.

To quickly review then, the whole process is as follows:

A) PreSeminar Activities to prepare students for the discussion B) Socratic Observation/Discussion C) Post-Socratic Seminar Reflection

AVID Conference Notes Day 1

Today, we began learning the Socratic Seminar approach. Included are also pictures of the work created. The conference is organized in the following way:

In the morning, you spend time in your particular strand working with folks from all around the nation (world, in some cases). The strand we’re in focuses on Socratic Seminar. In the afternoon, teachers meet together to develop a campus-specific plan.

BACKGROUND OF SOCRATIC SEMINAR

“Let us examine this question together, my friend, and if you can contradict anything that I say, do so, and I shall be persuaded.”

Socratic Seminar serves as a way to introduce inquiry learning into the classroom. Inquiry immediately engages students with thinking processes. The results, write Socratic Seminar participants, is to enable “student ownership for enlarged understanding of concepts and values.” Some of the basic tenets include the following:

1) Participants begin the learning groups with questions. 2) Participants engage in all levels of critical thinking, from recall of knowledge to evaluation. 3) Participants pursue understanding with mutual respect and civility, mindful of each other’s dignity. 4) Participants are willing to be persuaded by arguments or evidence more powerful than their own and to change their minds in light of fresh insights.

QUESTION DEVELOPMENT In considering development of questions, Costa’s Model of Intellectual Functioning is considered, as is Bloom’s Taxonomy. Socratic Seminar suggests development of questions at 3 different levels, including the following:

Level 1: questions focus on gathering and recalling information Appropriate verbs: defining, describing, identifying, listing, naming, observing, reciting, scanning.

Level 2: questions focus on making sense of gathered information. Verbs: analyzing, comparing, contrasting, grouping, inferring, sequencing, synthesizing

Level 3: questions focus on applying and evaluating information. Verbs: applying a principle, evaluating, hypothesizing, imagining, judging, predicting, speculating

The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it–at no matter what risk. –James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”

SOCRATIC SEMINAR The purpose of this session is for participants to understand, practice and train others in the effective use of Socratic Seminar Instructional techniques. Our presenter was Ellen McCollum from San Diego, California. She introduced us to the “circle” which characterizes Socratic Seminar on Day 1, but first gave us some background and warm-up activities. This is a rough outline of what occurred:

1) After brief introductions (listen to them here; audio quality isn’t that great but gives you the flavor of meeting people for the first time) from folks all over the United States, with these directions in mind, we created Venn diagrams–in groups of 4-5 adults–about the differences between dialogue and debate (listen to one of the presentations).

Venn Diagrams created: Example 1 | 2 | 3

2) The facilitator established ground rules for behavior in the class; these were called “norms.” They included a wide variety of items. As we discussed these whole group, someone wrote them down on a white sheet of paper and we agreed to adhere to them while we were together.

2) After agreeing to ground rules, she gave us an article to read by Mortimer Adler. The title of the article was Democracy and Education. We sat in a large circle and we each stated a question we had about the article. This was difficult, especially if you were at the end since most folks honed in on particular questions. Some of the key points of the article included the following:

-All children are educable, not just trainable for jobs. -Universal suffrage and universal schooling are necessary to one another. The first without the other means failure. -Success in schools must be defined as same quality of schooling for all, as opposed to same quantity of schooling for all. -”The best education for the best is the best education for all.” (Robert M. Hutchins)

There were many questions about this article, some of them quite profound. Ellen, as facilitator, had everyone share their specific question, then focused in on one question. She really didn’t have a good explanation of WHY she chose that particular question and has later explained it as, “Whatever works for you.”

The resulting discussion took us in many directions and “broke the ice,” so to speak, about the idea of Socratic Seminar. We broke for lunch with a homework assignment.

AVID Conference Notes

The following are Miguel Guhlin’s notes on AVID Conference 2005 that took place in Austin, Tx during the week of June 26th. These notes, photos, and video clips are provided for any who might benefit from them. An update will be posted for each day for the purposes of sharing what was learned with others, as well as modelling “blogging” and “podcasting,” two new innovative ways to use technology in teaching and learning environments.

The purpose of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program is to restructure the teaching methods of an entire school and to open access to the curricula that will ensure four-year college eligibility to almost all students.

When you consider the message of books such as The World is Flat, which discusses the effects of globalization at a rate unimagined previously and the necessity to prepare students to compete with workers in India, China, and other countries, it’s clear that the AVID’s purpose is more than just about college eligibility. It is about transforming how we approach teaching and learning to ensure our survival as a nation. And, transformation is exactly what Instructional Technology is about.

On Sunday, staff discussed the purpose of the AVID Site Team at each campus, and what kind of plan to move the campus towards full implementation of AVID. Here’s a few quick “stream of consciousness” type reflections:

Listen: Miguel Guhlin on AVID and Inquiry Learning Connection

Listen: Miguel on Similarities of Problem-Based Learning and AVID Strategies

Listen: Miguel on the Learning Log-Blogging Connection

Live Your Writing

"We no longer just read articles," writes Cheryl Oakes, "we live them." Wow. This comment reveals a truth that was driven home just this past Sunday morning. Over the last few weeks, I have been writing about 4th Amendment Rights violations by the Bush Administration, trying to better understand them. Then, this morning, driving off to eat lunch at our favorite Chinese Restaurant, my wife exclaimed, "Miguel, everything you've been talking about with privacy is on the news. While you were sleeping..." and she went on to share what she had heard about Google,computer chips like Viiv and RFID that she had seen on the morning news. I shared with her that this is what I'd been writing about, including how my new iRiver T10 was a foul instrument of digital rights management and that I had--through lack of research and vigilance, as well as in purchasing it--supported big businesses like Microsoft so focused on regulating the digital commons. As our conversation wound down, my six-year old asked, "What are civil liberties?"

"An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy;" Thomas Jefferson is attributed this statement. As a writing teacher, it always bothered me that we were teaching writing and reading divorced from real life. It is probably for that reason that I sought out a different way of teaching writing. Fortunately, some of my graduate school professors (Dr. Curt Hayes and Dr. Eileen Lundy at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)) were there to point the way.

In this comment to a previous blog entry on "Blogs as Personal Learning Networks," Cheryl reminded me of Nanci Atwell's writing about writing/reading workshops in her book, In the Middle. As I dug into In the Middle, an old friend for a writing/reading workshop practitioner, I ran across this statement:

I nudge students to explore the social, political, and ethical issues that encircle personal experience...when they have avenues for considering the shape of the world around them...students will take on the world in their writing, confronting such issues as civil rights, acid rain, animal rights, environmental protection, nuclear power, and peer pressure.

When we write about the loss of 4th Amendment rights in the face of non-FISA Court approved, secret wiretaps, we are testifying to the reality of the world around us. Wrestling with reality in their writing, our students--whether they are the victims of a hurricane or negligence--can find a way of organizing the seeming chaos, the powerlessness of being a child. In my writing workshop, fifth grade students wrote about how they captured rattlesnakes, poverty, their friendships, and more. The power of students writing is that it enables them to fight back. Instead of passive receivers, doormats for adult goals and initiatives, children can write their way out of hopelessness and despair. They can find their voice in a world that increasingly shouts them out via various media.

As a director of instructional technology, I often feel powerless in the face of mandates for high stakes testing that render teachers as little more than mindless drones drilling their students in test-taking skills. This focus on technology assessments--some call them benchmark or interim assessments--sucks the life out of classrooms, constraining teachers to a scripted learning path that has little room for students writing to find their voice.

As a teacher who modeled writing for his students, as well as writes, I found that the juxtaposition of life experiences, current events, and emotion in writing could result in novel inventions. When writing touches the core of who we are, then that's when it's powerful to others, regardless of what we're writing about. Every time I sit down to write, I have to dig deeper to find that core of passion. Yet, writing from the heart may be a moot point in education today.

I had the opportunity to be in a school district meeting with English/Language Arts teachers. As we sat around the table at lunch, I shared with them that my students learned how to write via The Writing Workshop. Although the school I worked at promoted grammar (Houghton-Mifflin) books, working through the exercises, I based my entire class around mini-lessons, group shares, and students writing...and I wrote, too. We published our work in an anthologies, and my kids wrote like crazy...even those that were terrible at it when they began saw significant improvement. So, I asked the district experts on English/Language Arts, "Do we still teach writing this way?" The sad answer was, "No. We can't. We'd like to but standardized tests make that impossible."

And, just as I was the only teacher in a small school district in Texas teaching writing and reading a la Nanci Atwell, suffering the sanction of the more experienced teachers, so will those who use blogs in the classroom or any technology that puts the focus back, not on testing and diagnosing student problems, on allowing students to take interest, ownership, and be given the time to communicate. It is for that reason that we must encourage blogging in our schools today. At the simplest level, blogging technologies enables teachers and their students to write for a larger audience than their teacher and/or peers. They are aware that technology has broadened their audience. This was something I witnessed just last week when I walked into Ms. Wilson's classroom a San Antonio school district. When I asked her, would you like to have your students publish their work online, perhaps even perform their writing about Martin Luther King topics such as prejudice, she calmly replied, "Why don't you ask my students?"

I repeated the question to them, and the enthusiasm in this low socio-economic was electric and nearly overwhelmed me. I had not felt such enthusiasm in years...not since I'd asked my own students if they wanted to publish their writing in a print anthology. Contrast the wisdom of this writing teacher with another commenter, Susan Bishop. Susan shares, "I have tried everything I can to encourage our teachers in our school to use the Blogs I set up for them."

Maybe, what you should try is asking the students. Our students crave the power to make their work known to others. Writing about our lives, living what we write...that's a power that can shake the foundations. If we teach children to write without them understanding that they have to live their words, what have we really taught them?

What's a Blog?

I've struggled with how to best define a blog...to me, it seems so much like just an empty book of white pages. You fill them up with sketches, pictures, text...anything that is meaningful to you. I imagine it to be like a naturalist's notebook, where you can tape in a picture of a butterfly if you want to...but now, people can comment on what you've chosen to put in that book.

...an empty notebook can ... be a sketch book, a novel, an exercise book, a dictionary, or an infinite variety of other things, depending entirely on content. Equally, a blog can also be a tool for disseminating important news, or a project log, or a team building tool, or a marketing tool, or whatever its user chooses to make it. Source: Suw Charman on Exploding the Diary Myth

Students Writing

Yesterday, I spent my entire day at a UIL competition. All day. No connectivity. No computer. No internet...and, I had a GREAT time.

One of the frustrations I have had with the way writing is taught in most schools--this stems from my wonderful experiences as a writing teacher--is that so little is done in the "creative" writing vein. I see creative writing as a terrible term to use, but for me, a more indicative statement is that it is self-directed writing. That is, writing that does not come as a result of a prompt or some specific exercise. While it is possible to introduce the genres students can explore, they are not necessarily limited to writing just ONE piece in that particular genre or style. Instead, they can do the writing in that genre/style, then go on to write about other things. Their writing is self-directed, and my task is to help them focus that writing and facilitate publishing.

As I sat at the table with these teachers who brought 24 inch stacks of papers to be graded--I'm NOT kidding--with them while students were engaged in UIL competitions, two of the ones I was listening to (Ms. B and Ms. S) were commiserating about how to approach newspaper writing. This is my poor attempt at reconstruction of that conversation:

"I've started getting my advisory to do a newspaper," said Ms. B, "and although it's like a whole other preparation for me, I wanted to get them writing. I've assigned 3 editors to edit the newspaper but I'm not sure what to do." "Are you going to schedule the computer lab?" Ms. S asked. "Yes. I'm thinking of using MS Word but I want something different than that because...." "You could try MS Publisher. It comes with templates to use, and...." Ms. S interjects "Ok, that sounds good." Ms. B replies, "I'm just not sure how to get the editors to get access. Maybe I could get the students to save their work to my shared network folder then the editors could come in after them and read the writing when it's their turn to come to the lab."

[at this point, I'm squirming as I read my copy of S.M. Stirling's Conquistadores. I'm thinking of the possibilities here with easy to setup blogs or perhaps, even a wiki. But, I know from the conversation that these teachers may not be too tech-saavy. Maybe, working with a wiki would be too difficult. So, on the spur of the moment, I decide that if I was doing this, I'd probably do a blog with them. In retrospect, probably a wiki (e.g. jot or wikispaces) would have been a better solution for a newspaper online. However, this doesn't occur to me until later. In the meantime, I'm caught up in the excitement of keeping my mouth shut.

There are a few interruptions as students flow in and out of the room, and I have a moment to speak to the teacher seated directly across the cafeteria table from me. My credentials as a parent are already established and we've shaken hands although she doesn't know I'm a writing teacher and director of instructional tech for a large school district in the city]

"Hi, Ms. S. My name is Miguel Guhlin and I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. Have you heard of blogs?" "What are blogs?" "Web logs, or blogs for short, are simple ways of publishing student writing online. Think of them as an empty notebook, sort of like a naturalist's book where the pages are blank and you can put information in them." "You mean, like a journal?" "Yes, exactly...but you can write anything you want in them as well as include pictures and sound." At this point, Ms. B comes back and sits down, having sent off students to their respective UIL competition. I'm introduced and by this time they know what I do for a living.

"So, how do I get access to a blog? Can I use it for a newspaper? " "Yes, you can. You know what web editing is, and how technical it is to do, right?" They nod their heads. "With blogs, you don't have to be a techie. You can also assign rights to users in the blog and set up the editors you were talking about. They could post revisions of student writing as comments, and everything would be there on the Internet for you and students to access. More importantly, for me as a parent, parents would be able to read this online and you wouldn't have to do all the work with MS Publisher, unless you wanted to publish the work online."

The conversation went on for another 20-30 minutes, and was very rewarding for me. I left her with a short list of links to get started, my email address, as well as that of my counterpart in her school district. I even offered to host her advisory blog in my district if worse came to worst, a move I'm sure wouldn't endear me to the technology staff of the other district, but hey...I'm a parent who's in a unique position to advocate for publishing student writing online. Maybe, this conversation will nudge them in the right direction...and maybe it won't. After all, they have that 24 inch stack of papers to grade. I'm hopeful, though.

I never imagined I'd be explaining blogging without a computer handy, no Internet access. However, the concept isn't that hard to get across. It's the starting them off that will be difficult. I hope that the teacher will follow through.

In short, it was a great coversation--and this excerpt doesn't do it justice...one of those times I wish I was carrying my digital audio recorder and that it masqueraded as a mobile phone or something--to have on a day that we all saw as sacrificed for the benefit of children.

Blogging Energizes Writing

Out of step with a society racing towards technological nirvana, K-12 education struggles to keep up, clamoring for everything from more funding to an Office of Educational Technology Director. Some dismiss the conversations about educational reform on the Web as just so much sound and fury. "It's easier to write a check," said Anne Mulcahy (Xerox Corporation CEO), "than it is to rethink the way you work." Conversations are only the first step. It must be followed by action, then that action must be reflected on. And, perhaps, only by embedding technology in the fabric of society, can we achieve the desired changes. Two definite actions we can take is to exercise, as educators, our power as parents and our power to vote.

POWER OF SPEAKING UP

I have often heard teachers lament the lost art of letter-writing. "Email isn't the same," they say. Blogging, though, is different altogether. When you mix commenting in, the blogs take on a life of their own, they thrum with a palpable excitement. Consider this quote from CogDogBlog, and note that I've added the words in [square brackets].

There is nothing that will energize a budding blogger [writer] more than getting feedback, and the impact is even larger when it comes from someone distant or unknown. It validates (or invalidates, or infuriates) a blogger’s [writer's] writing. It says that you are not just spewing words out into the ether, that they land somewhere. And it connects us. Source: Read CogDogBlog

Blogs and wikis enable writers to, as Edwin Schlossberg writes, "create a context in which other people can think."

When I found myself in a position to advocate the use of blogs in a writing classroom this past weekend, I took it. I took it even as I sat there, in my role of parent, wondering if I should speak up. I didn't want to step on the teachers' toes, those wonderful ladies that had given up a Saturday to facilitate a UIL competition for my child. But, I said, "Why not? If I don't speak up and share the power of the Read/Write Web, who will? I want my children to be blogging and making connections." In an effort to better reflect on the experience, I blogged about the conversation, and then, emailed the appropriate people in that District. While I received one polite response promising action and delegating the task to others (exactly what I would have done in the director's shoes), I also received this response (I've removed identifying information):

...forwarded your Blog and Wiki email to me. I can't tell you how delighted I am that you send this. I, too, am a parent as well as in technology for the district. I've been talking about blogs for the last several years but we've not been able to get past the technology gate-keeping in the district. Our pilot at this high school, as well as, teacher interest and now knowledgeable parents (you) may finally help us get this on the fast track.

I'm attending TCEA primarily to attend a session on Moodle which has blogging and wiki capabilities. I love the idea of a class creating a Wiki over the course of a year to demonstrate how much has been learned. And it's the perfect way for student's to work collaboratively and allow the teacher to monitor their progress. What an engaging and educational tool!

Again thank you for taking the time to follow up on your conversation with the middle school teachers.

ADVOCATING FOR LEGISLATIVE CHANGE

Educational reform isn't going to happen because we yell and scream at the national and state levels. I'm reminded of Aesop's Fable of The Wind and Sun. Out of this weekend experience, I am encouraged to encourage other parents to ask for their children's writing, drawings and voices to find expression on the Web. Like me, I'm sure they're wishing that they didn't have to take a day off work to listen to their students perform one poem. Like me, perhaps they wish they could have listened to an audio blog entry with accompanying text to read. Writing can be intensely personal. So can connecting with others.

This week, like many other Texas educators, I am in Austin, Tx attending the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) 2006 State Conference. TCEA 2006 is more than just attending workshops, it's about building face to face relationships that are sustained electronically throughout the year. It's about "touching base," and "non-technical networking." I had that opportunity yesterday when I attended the Texas Chief Technology Officer Council meeting, a group aligning itself with the Consortium for School Networking (COSN).

Just yesterday, I heard about the proposed budget for 2007 is $0. As I sat in a meeting with Texas K-12 CTO Council members--strictly a guest at this meeting--I could feel the frustration at the President's budget cuts of education and Enhancing Education through Technology (EETT) in particular. In that presentation, state education agency director of educational technology made this point: The Nation is going through what Texas has already gone through. Legislators are now looking at federal spending on technology and asking, "What impact has this had? How has it made a difference in what we value as legislators?" And the problem is, as educators, we've been working on what we value, not what legislators value. Often we're stuck grading papers, finding ways to facilitate students learning...what legislators value, artificial standards central to politicians, is often so far removed from what we do.

From last year to this year, a 45% cut in funding. How long will Congress allow the President to cut education spending? The answer is simple. Again, the state education director (listen to her entire presentation here) points out that, "The Texas Education Agency does not fund anything, it only dispenses funds they are given...The U.S. Department of Education is in the same boat."

So, then, we are left with our only option. Not only must we speak up and mobilize ourselves as parents in the school districts, advocating for Read/Write Web technologies that can change how we communicate, we must also model the use of blogs and wikis to our the rest of the world. Finally, we must mobilize and challenge our legislators and push them to fight back against budget cuts.

And, for many of us, that means rethinking the way we work. Are you up to the challenge? I hope so...because we can only do this together.

Conditions That Impact Teacher Technology Integration

Mitchell Shuldman share their research on Superintendent Conceptions of Institutional Conditions That Impact Teacher Technology Integration. This was published in Summer 2004 in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Some key points:

1. A discrepancy has been noted "between the level of computer use expected of teachers and its actual use..[and t]he consequence of underutilization is that there may never be the opportunity to realize the expectations for educational computing." (Marcinkiewicz, 1993/1994).
2. Obstacles that impede teachers' ability to adopt and integrate tech into their teaching include lack of time, expertise, access, resources and support.
3. Technology's greatest impact on student learning appears only after teachers have sufficient skills coupled with an understanding of how various technologies can be used as cognitive tools, and are able to weave tech experiences into their daily practice. This more robust level of understanding comes over time.
4. Administrators do not appear prepared for their emerging role in technology and their lack of understanding and resources sometimes creates barriers to change and improvement.
5. In many districts, superintendents have remained withdrawn from the technology discussions, leaving to staff the leadership roles of planning and implementing technology.
6. Technology integration requires individual as well as systemic change.
7. If districts expect teachers and students to adopt technology as a core instructional tool, then clearly access to availability of instructional technology resources is not a condition, but a precondition.
8. The people who will ultimately implement an innovation must possess sufficient knowledge and skills to do the job (Ely, 1990).
9. The presence of a system of rewards and incentives--incentives to move individuals to action and rewards for participation--can be a contributing factor in encouraging more teachers to enter the integration process and participate in the professional development.
10. People most affected by the innovation must have a voice in the decision-making process.
11. It is the teachers who will decide whether there is administrative commitment behind a push for integration.
12. Schools that have both technology and pedagogic support, a full-time tech coordinator, teachers with an above average level of tech expertise, as well as formal staff development, access to computer resources, time, and authentic or consequential use of tech result in exemplary computer using teaching environments.
13. Successful practices implemented by superintendents in their districts include the following: -Active participation on the district's technology committee, as chair person -Engagement in active discussions with tech personnel to smooth out and clarify lines of responsibility, authority, and overlapping interests -The creation of site-based technology committees to ensure active engagement by principals -Redefinition of technology teacher positions and the creation of technology curriculum coordinator positions -Use of the persuasive power of the superintendency to help a tech coordinator evolve middle school reading specialists into full-time technology integrators and to infuse the district tech ed faculty with tech skills -Assist in establihment of free evening technology classes for adults -Facilitate a project that has middle school students teaching email tech to senior citizens -Actively engage other locally elected civic boards into the district tech discussion to build broader community support
14. Expect principals to take the lead in ensuring that all teachers in their building work towards dopting technology.
15. Get principals to make sure that teachers included technology goals in their individual professional development plans.
16. The best hope for tech lies in its use as an asynchronous tool for communication that allows teachers to engage and collaborate with one another within a building and across the district. Encouraging online discussion amongst teachers in study groups is core feature of professional development strategy.
17. Establish campus instructional technologists.

Open Your World

Chris Sessums includes this quote about blogging:

"While 'thinking" might seem a solitary activity, or one not quite social, in blogging the presence of the audience and the writer's consciousness of the audience clearly introduce the social into the individual's thought process (as Vygotsky argued, more generally, 70 years ago). 'Thinking by writing' embeds cognition in a social matrix in which the blog is a bridge to others for getting explicit feedback, but also a means by which to regulate one's own behavior (writing) through connecting with an audience" (p. 227)... This quote exemplifies how the researchers frame the power inherent in weblogging as a means for showing how knowledge can be created, transmitted, reflected upon, refined, and republished/reshared. This idea is clearly related to the notion of a Vygotsky Space (Harre, 1984; Gavalek & Raphael, 1996), where the process of learning is cyclical and evolutionary, and wherein learning and change result in a cumulative and transactional process on both an individual and collective levels. Nardi et al (2004a) research suggests that bloggers are aware of a larger public when writing posts, that they consider "audience attention, feedback, and feelings as they write" (p. 225 - my emphasis). More specifically, Nardi et al (2004a) share this finding: "The blog is not a closed world, but part of a larger communication space in which diverse media, and face to face communication, may be brought to bear" (p. 225)... "Our research leads us to speculate that blogging is as much about reading as writing, as much about listening as talking" (p. 231). Source: Bonnie Nardi and colleagues (2004a) titled, Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? as discussed by Chris Sessums

As I read this, I'm struck by several things.

I imagine a school district that doesn't have technology, has no funding to bring it in at the level where teaching writing would have a systemic impact that will transform instruction. Should the educational technologists lay aside the technology and go be content area specialists?

Creative Adaptations Can Endure

As I read Literacy with an Attitude, I'm reminded of what a good teacher is about. . .and why our current educational system has been destroyed by NCLB and the high-stakes test focus that warps the real mission of schools. Thanks to Nancy at Random Thoughts, these quotes appear:

According to the author, another researcher, Debra Myhill, reported that The crucial ingredient... was a teacher's ability to reflect on his or her own performance and then to change it. and that teachers should neither passively comply with government initiatives, nor should they point blank refuse to implement them. Instead they should "adapt them creatively". The author of the article, Mike Baker, then goes on to say The big question now is whether - after 20 years of being told exactly what and how to teach - there are enough teachers ready to be "creatively subversive"?

In the end, is this where reflection and education lead us? To fight compliance with the Government, with CIPA? When I read this originally at Random Thoughts, I wrote the following comment:

I believe that we've set teachers up to atrophy that creative engine of their's. Experience teaches me that it doesn't atrophy, but that you can lose confidence in your own ability...creative juices flow strong as ever, you just don't think they're there. Reflecting on instructional practice is the catalyst for change, not what you use to accomplish it...however, being connected via blogs and wikis helps accelerate that change tremendously.

Nancy wrote back and two things caught my attention:

We do start to lose confidence in our abilities to be creative when people are second-guessing us, when we have to be too accountable...the connections that we make online can give us ideas we might never have had on our own. We are constantly challenged by the people we read and the ones who read us. We are inspired to action by the success of others. If our institutions are not open, innovative places, it is hard for us to find support for change there. The online community meets that need. I still struggle with the question of how to actually bring about the change I want, I but I know that there are people out there who will give me advice, who will let me learn from their successes and their mistakes.

I honestly believe that the conversations had here in the edublogosphere have value only to the effect that we have them back in our work environments. The only problem is that those conversations have a different context, these creative adaptations may very well be rejected by a culture who sees no need for change collectively, even though individuals may value change separately.

Discuss the Undiscussable

Source: http://www.diversityactions.com/images/button.gif

An undiscussable is a work-related problem that people hesitate to address with those who can do something about it. It isn't that people don't talk about undiscussables. They talk about them frequently -- in the hallways and parking lots, bathrooms and across the cubicles. But it isn't with the person or the people most often associated with the issues. AKA "the dead moose on the table," it's what people come out of a meeting to share with one another privately that should have been part of the agenda. Source: Unfolding Leadership

In every organization, there's is that which must not be spoken of. We spend our time avoiding it. It is a truth that some know but will not share. It is a truth that exists but no one acknowledges but everyone lives by. It is a truth that results in exile, that is never spoken because those who know it would rather use it as a weapon against those they are responsible for and to. In fact, it is to phrase these truths in inoffensive ways that administrators spend hours crafting a 2-3 paragraph memo or email.

In these organizations, the undiscussables are just so because they are too ridiculous to speak aloud, so obvious in their deceitfulness, their duplicity, that to "put the skunk on the table" is to get yourself fired or to be excluded. I've experienced it and seen it happen. And, I can think of no better reason to end up ostracized or dismissed from service. But really, who wants that? I have a family to support, not to mention 2 dogs, a house, vehicles, credit card companies, as well as the all-important U.S. economy on my back. What to do about truth-telling?

At Unfolding Leadership, the following suggestions are made:

1. Begin by identifying to yourself the undiscussable that needs to be addressed.
2. Introduce the topic to the group as a possibility for discussion.
3. When you get there, start by talking about how to discuss any undiscussable. First, establish ground rules, and don't be naive about them. Don't say, for example, that we will "separate the problem from the person." It's poppycock. If we could have done that, the issue wouldn't have become undiscussable. Instead, help the group agree to rules that are about staying open at tough moments, maintaining vulnerability, mutual learning, respect, forgiveness, and support, being willing to listen and disclose, and using one's freedom to identify feelings not act them out. Second, establish a plan for the conversation itself.
4. Have the conversation. If you use the facts, perceptions, feelings model, write this stuff down on three (or more) flipcharts or on a white board. Sort out the facts and perceptions first, then focus on the feelings the perceptions are driving. Stick to the process and keep it moving. It may feel risky to get even this far, so as leader you'll need to show that you are with the group by asking questions, thanking folks for speaking up, probing to help people articulate what bothers them the most, and, for sure, owning your part of the problem.
5. Move to action planning and decisions.
6. Follow-up. Don't let the issue drop just because people got a chance to talk about it. Rather, bring people together again later to collectively assess progress on the action steps.

Having gone through this process a few times, and I won't give myself more than a "B" for a grade and that's probably three grades too high, it's step 3 that's the hardest. Each of us is wrapped up in the problem...we either actively contributed to it then realized that the contribution was a mistake, or deep down, we still think this is THE only way to be successful but realize it's not working. Telling the truth means letting it work its power on you, too, not just everyone else.

Nicholas Humphrey wrote, "To speak the truth among people who do not want to hear it is considered almost an aggressive act--an invasion of privacy, a trespass into someone else's space. Not nice, not done." My experiences lead me to the idea that speaking the truth IS always an aggressive act to those who prefer to dwell in lies. Regrettably, sometimes each of us may find him/her-self in such a fragile dwelling.

Diane (Journeys) asks a question in a comment that I consider to be naive. Yes, naive. I do not write that to be rude, but rather as a measure of my own "jadedness." I who stand on the other side of youth, who look back to where Diane is standing, know the reality of these truths that go unspoken.

My question is: if they didn't have time to adequately study the new proposal, why did the Board approve it? Seems unprofessional, to say the least.

They approved it because they wanted to get it over with. They approved it because they'd tried to have a conversation and wouldn't commit to letting go of their own agendas. Perhaps, they honestly disagreed and appreciated the underhandedness of one group sneaking a copy in...maybe it's easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for working through the issues?

Yes, it was unprofessional. It is far better to lie, to deceive, to maneuver and spring an attack. The only problem is that we're educators. What we do reflects on who we are, and impacts how we interact with our students and those we lead.

For me, there is only one answer for such unprofessionalism. The easy answer is to leave, the harder, to remain and face it. While some claim that leaving is possible--in some cases, you just don't have a choice--it is far more important to remain and to speak the truth. To proclaim it from the mountains, to shine a spotlight on what is there. Yes, it is unprofessional, Diane. But, those are the games people play. Now, we have an option.

Used to be, if you wanted to get a message out into the market, you would give a talk at a conference, a reporter would write down some of what you said and mangle the rest, and you'd call it a day. Or, you could shortcut the process by simply giving an interview to the reporter and letting him mangle what you said directly. These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed. Mid-year resolution #1: No more public speaking. Mid-year resolution #2: More blogging. Source: Marc Andreessen

Yet, the one lesson I have to keep in mind is that if one commits to staying, to making a difference, then problems must be resolved. Simply, my goal isn't to prove the other person wrong, to show them up as a liar, but to find better ways to work together. It is a hard lesson, one that I am ever reminding myself to practice.

About Your Learning

Fascinating discussion took place over at The Edjurist Accord earlier this month. I missed it entirely but that's alright. I found the following question by Carl Anderson to be a fun one to begin with:

Shouldn't an education blog first and foremost be about one's own personal learning first?

First and foremost, a blog is about reflection, increasing the level of transparency for the blogger. By externalizing his/her understanding, he is able to see the flaws in his thinking, to come to a better understanding of what is believed or not. I was reflecting on some positive comments made in past conversations and juxtaposing those with some of my crazier writings. I had quite a laugh...and some of my writing is for fun as I explore an idea or perspective.

The blog tracks my journey through my mind, through foolish, as well as wise ideas...it is also a record of my learning. A snapshot of what I'm experiencing. Most people are content to keep their mouths shut and suffer paranoia, fear, anxiety and all the other negative emotions that result when working in K-12. I was conditioned to keep my mouth shut about such things. Blogging has--for the most part--eliminated that inhibition.

But the fact is that by digging those emotions out, dragging them into the light of day, I can transform them into wisdom-generating experiences that provide balance and stability. My mind is clearer after writing, even if that is my worst writing ever.

Image Source: The Case for Transformation

Blogging helps you ensure that appearance is closer to the reality.

For educators, the invitation is to join the ranks of professionals who reflect on their work and share what they learn with others. That is the invitation I share with teachers when I meet with them. To that end, it's worth revisiting some research:

• Blogging promotes critical literacy skills, including reading, writing, self-expression, reflection and creativity (Huffaker, 2004).
• Written reflection...is an effective method of thinking about practice. Blogs are especially effective at supporting...reflection...more so than other technologies would be."
• Reflection is important since expert teachers engage in continuous reflection about the effectiveness of their work
• Blogs enable teachers to establish communities of practice that support one another's work. This kind of collaborative interaction among peers can promote enhanced understanding of complex situations
• Blogs allow for individual expression and ownership, even as they promote collaboration between educators.
• Change was internal in origin with the most important factor being teacher reflection on instructional practices.
• Technology served as a catalyst for change in only one teacher out of three they studied, a teacher who was already dissatisfied with her existing set of instructional practices.
• When professional development presents technology within the context of student-centered instructional practices, teachers will be more likely to change their instructional practices with their use of technology.

Some of the discussion centers around the idea that the blogosphere is TOO ed-tech and this may turn off regular educators. I'm reminded of an epiphany I had a few years ago. I was running around trying to integrate technology into every content area, spreading my team a bit too thin over too many curriculum areas. As hard as we'd try to be a part of the conversation, we were always locked out, excluded, etc.

It finally occurred to me that the world IS changing, however slowly, and technology is increasingly a part of that. My job was less to evangelize than it was to anticipate what direction the changes might take, and try to be ready to provide assistance when I was asked. To be honest, I've been asked less than I'd like in the last few years, but I realized that it's not just my responsibility anymore. I lack the enthusiasm of a born again ed-tech evangelist; I recognize that tech integration a la Tom Snyder never succeeded as widely as I hoped. But that does not dampen my enthusiasm for helping other people realize the power of technology in their lives. That power is simply facilitating communication, collaboration, etc.

While change needs to be accomplished at the school and community level, the ed-tech blogosphere seems to be more about individual triumphs with/over technology. It doesn't matter how wonderful I am at using UbuntuLinux, but if free, open source isn't catching on at my workplace, if I don't know how to bring about change there, then what good is it? In an increasingly connected world, bringing about change in the community has to be the real battle.

Fullan writes that social systems include a great deal of inertia. To change direction, two forces have to be applied--pressure and support. Pressure is defined as having ambitious targets, transparent evaluation, and monitoring, while support involves developing new competencies, increased access to new ideas, and more time for learning and collaboration.

Everyone in curriculum and instruction is distracted by the high stakes testing. There is an over-emphasis on pressure and little time for support. One of the points made at the EdJurist is that ed-tech folks are pushing everyone to start using technology. I understand this perspective since it's similar to the point I just wrote about--when enough people change, the system changes. If we can help other educators learn to use technology, to be creative, collaborative and communicative with it, then the system will change.

However, I wonder if this isn't a "The Matrix" situation. As individuals wake up to reality and choose to swallow the red pill, there first reaction isn't to change the system and improve it. Rather, it is to disconnect from it, to be repulsed by what they have been a part of. It's not enough to change individually...you have to change the system. The problem is, short of a doctorate in educational leadership, how do you help teachers change that system while simultaneously changing themselves?

Consider some Matrix Philosophy:

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth.

The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

However, in order to investigate which course of action to take we need to investigate why the choice is faced. Why should we even have to decide whether to pursue truth?

The answer in short, is inquisitiveness. Many people throughout human existence have questioned and enquired. Most of them have not been scientists or doctors or philosophers, but simply ordinary people asking 'what if?' or 'why?' Asking these questions ultimately leads us to a choice. Do you continue to ask and investigate, or do you stop and never ask again?

For learners, the question is simple. You continue to ask and investigate. For teachers, the system reinforces the response, "stop and never ask again." As cited in Fullan...Elmore writes:

Improvement is more of a function of learning to do the right things in the settings you work. The problem is that there is almost no opportunity for teachers to engage in continuous and sustained learning about their practice in the settings in which they actually work, observing and being observed by their colleagues in their own classrooms and classrooms of other teachers in other schools confronting similar problems of practice. This disconnect between the requirements of learning to teach well and the structure of teachers' work life is fatal to any sustained process of instructional improvement.

This seems so obvious. For those who blog, twitter, it is possible to engage in continuous and sustained learning. But energy is expended, energy that could be used for other purposes. For those educators that are NOT committed to continuous and sustained learning--like the educators who are not blogging as described in the EdTech Jurist blog entry--there is no hope to bridge the disconnect. For those educators, work as an educator is fatal to their ability to learn.

The role of the ed-tech bloggers is to find those who are ready to make the choice, and like Morpheus in The Matrix, facilitate the choice. Maybe, this IS more about salvation than I thought.

Power Concedes Nothing

While blogging is so much about reflection, it is rare that I do take the opportunity to reflect on what I've written in the past...not the recent past, but long past. However, I took a moment to do so because a conversation about writing for social justice and working with children made me remember a quote I heard from the founder of AVID.

I had the opportunity to hear Mary Catherine Swanson speak at an AVID Conference in Austin a few years ago...here's an excerpt of what she said, and I think it has applications to conversations we have every day:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” –Frederick Douglass

Power concedes nothing without demand–never has, never will. As we seek the courage to overcome, we must remember our students. We now face a critical juncture. We can change the course of history. Those who define the issues also determine the outcome. Challenging age-old beliefs with rigor and support, we can change…that will rattle ingrained systems…a “quiet revolution.” Each of you, small and large has the power to change course of education. Four factors influence student success–income level, family life, education, and the community they grow up in… we have proved that students don’t have to be determined by these factors.

What powerful words these are, not just for students who participate in the AVID Program, but for adults in schools today.

Powerful quotes remind us of who we want to be, of striving to be the change we want to be in the world.

The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it–at no matter what risk. –James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”

and Patrick J. Finn's work:

First, there is empowering education, which leads to powerful literacy, the kind of literacy that leads to positions of power and authority. Second, there is domesticating education, which leads to functional literacy, literacy that makes a person productive and dependable, not troublesome.

Power concedes nothing without demand...are you part of the struggle for progress?

Successful Bond Campaigns

"Successful Bond Campaigns- Making the Case for Technology" was the title of a Texas CTO Clinic presentation facilitated by Vicki Smith Bigham (Email: bighamv@aol.com). You can read my notes for this presentation here, but you'll want to listen to the podcast to catch some of the points that were made too quickly for me to catch!

Also, my apologies to Vicki, but I cut her introduction out due to the poor quality of the audio and started with Gray Salada's introduction.

Panel members included the following:

• Gray Salada (Austin ISD)
• Karen Fuller (Klein ISD)
• Lenny Schad (Katy ISD)

Listen to Podcast

Some of the important take-aways:

1. What is the baseline for technology that needs to be a component of the bond issue? That needs to be our replacements cycle. PC, laptop, server replacements and network retrofits. These are standard brick-n-mortar and our community expects it.
2. Public understands the retrofit, but we have to put C&I in front of that. It gets the public to see this as a C&I requirement/initiative rather than technology focused.
3. The most unique part about the bond that passed is a 1to1 initiative with bond funds.
4. Engage key members of the community, the commerce group, form a citizens’ bond committee, get campus people who are very involved. They work with the school board and superintendent and get that committee to address this. With this guidance—including facilities folks and do that then have them recommend what the bond should be about. The School Board will hold hearings and then this goes back to Committee, gets adjusted, then discussed again. Additionally, it doesn’t hurt if there is some specific special interest that is a big community item.
5. Put a committee together, different depts presented their needs, did assessments of existing facilities, evaluating the buildings, formed a committee of community members, students, every aspect of community we could involve in various meetings. We presented where we needed the money. Our superintendent did not have a free day during the whole bond campaign, including attending bunko games, etc. He was so instrumental in getting the word out, the right type of information, addressing the misnomers…he wanted to get the right, correct information.
6. One of the things we’re doing is keeping the info flowing…communication and community involvement are the key factors to help people answer the questions.
7. If you can just get your own staff member to vote—campuses and teachers—then your bond election would pass.
8. Once the bond election passes…here’s what we were going to spend money on, the timeline, and evaluation of how money was spent. People need to see how bond dollars have been spent.
9. By 2011, we’re doing online testing. If you’re going to test online, then you better be teaching online. This is why we’re going this route in our schools. Make videos of technology integration (1to1) with teachers, parents, students talking, and technology baseline standards (document camera, whiteboard, etc). We did the best we could to get the information out to our parents. We were able to show what students need and how it’s impacting what students are doing.
10. We have a fundamental blueprint for what the classroom configuration will be. They talk about technology in bond elections.
11. We have an educational specification…this is how many drops we have in each classroom, how many computers/printers in each classroom. We have this specification for each grade level and size of school.
12. You can build in time to implement. It’s all centered around implementation. Once you go live, then you can’t use bond funding. As an implementation cost, and for a doc mgmt system, I’d do all this work to get it ready for production. You run into a grey area with training. They don’t like to use bond funds for training.
13. You have to have an awareness in your community in what they value in the education of their kids. When they don’t understand beyond new construction, technology becomes one of those sacrificial lambs. Anything beyond construction then doesn’t get paid for.
14. Need to educate folks on what they can and can’t say. During school hours, you can say fact/fiction. When you’re on your own time, you can say whatever you want.

Relevant Links:

• Miguel's Notes on the presentation

Non-Routine Problem-Solving

One of the books I missed purchasing while at NECC 2008--if it was even available--was Clay Shirkey's Here Comes Everybody. Since I have two-three other books I need to read for work ahead of it, not to mention about 20 from the local library for pleasure, I'm not too eager to spend precious book reading time on another one.

However, I was pleased to see Will Richardson share the uStream of his interview, and even more excited to catch Scott Floyd's summary. Scott writes his take-aways from the interview, as well as how they apply in his district:

[Shirky said] Internet provides basic support for collaborative work...What Shirkey said struck a chord with those of us involved in helping educators utilize more technology in the classroom. Many of the so called Web 2.0 tools are built around this collaborative environment. White Oak ISD switched to Google Apps for email and the entire suite of collaborative tools that come with it. Some campuses have taken the lead in that area and utilize Google Docs to schedule student tutoring, detentions, testing windows, and more and share the document campus-wide. This is a great start for them to see the power of these collabroative tools.

Scott also hits on 3 other points that I just have to quote below:

1. At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that’s what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity
2. These characteristics are not just important in our business, but in every business, as well as in government, philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change…
3. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major. (Source: Jonathon Rosenberg, Senior VP of Product Management, Google)

As I read this, I'm jumping up and down inside yelling, "YES!" This is what problem-based learning are all about and focused on--ill-structured problems. But we continue to separate using technology for creativity, collaboration and more from key learning efforts in classrooms today because we don't see the connection. Instead, technology is recognized as important but a parallel pursuit. Important but only for drill-n-kill, tutorial stuff, or data-gathering/diagnosis of children.

Collaboration on non-routine problem-solving strategies and/or skills. Are schools measuring up?

Blogging for Administrators

"One way of rebuilding trust is to use blogs to reopen, reconnect and be transparent again. Community building is built through commenting feature. Parents can start dialoguing with you. They don't have to leave their job to come to the school building, they can come and communicate meaningfully without leaving their house." Source: Dr. Scott McLeod on Blogging for Administrators workshop in 2007

So shares Dr. Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) in a presentation on blogging for administrators he gave in San Antonio, Tx at a large urban school district last year...digging through my catch-all folder, I stumbled across this gem of a recording and had to share it!

Although we're off to a slow start due to some technical obstacles, Scott takes off once those are overcome and shares some great info and advice for administrators. "School web sites are pathetic," he shares. I couldn't agree more. This is why content management systems are so critical, and blogs are a part of that.

Listen to Dr. Scott McLeod (about 34 mins)

What Makes a Good Story

What makes life interesting is "the dark side" and the struggle to overcome the negatives — struggling against the negative powers is what forces us to live more deeply, says McKee. Overcoming the negative powers is interesting, engaging, and memorable. Stories like this are more convincing. Source: Presentation Zen

I love this quote featured at Presentation Zen. About 6 months into my Mousing Around blog--the original name for this blog, BTW, as well as the name of a column I wrote for 10 years for a magazine, and a parents' technology institute I facilitated in East Texas school district--I decided to change my focus to transformation. I decided I'd try to focus on Transformation writing.

While I was unable to sustain the focus--too much to write about in the face of an intense desire to publish--the focus resulted in some of my favorite blog entries, including:

Beginning - This is the blog entry that signalled the change I was trying for. These are quotes I find worth reflecting on for myself:

• Educators are finding themselves in a quest for a new map, one that involves realignment to what is going on in the world. Failure to realign leads to what Robert E. Quinn characterizes as "slow death." We face slow death because the "dominant coalitions in an organization" are seldom interested in making deep change.
• This is a role that leads people to not rock the boat, maintain the status quo at all costs. They are putting in their time until they have to go home, collecting their pay-check. They reject the work of the organization, noting that it is "dying" and "wrongly assuming they are not."
• It is for this reason that several have "left education" as we know it, instead seeking out consultant jobs. In Isaiah, Bonhoeffer found that which forced him back to Germany and death. He drew strength from the statement, "He who believes does not flee."

As I reflect on this initial blog post in the Transformation category, I'm shocked at how true these reflections are even today in my work and outlook. I have to resist the desire to NOT rock the boat, and be vigilant at NOT maintaining the status quo. I do NOT want to just collect my pay-check. While I'm not at the same point I was when I wrote this blog entry, a little over two years ago, I'm definitely not all the way there. It's a slow, arduous process.

Powerful Beyond Measure - This is a blog entry I have referred to man times, if not to read it again, to remember what I wrote. Some of the key quotes for me that are hard-hitting to my comfort with the status quo:

• We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have been drenched by many storms. We have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense... Are we still of any use? -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• In a time when we have been drenched by many storms, when we practice the arts of equivocation and pretense, can there be any doubt that Bonhoeffer's words have meaning for us today?
• Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.' Your playing small doesn't serve the world. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. Source: A Return to Love, more info at http://www.marianne.com/
• How to fight back: 1-Speak out and ask authority if what they are doing is legitimate and according to their original responsibility. 2-Help those affected by the rules. 3-Jam a spoke in the wheel

As I reflect on this blog entry, I find that I have a much different perspective, especially in regards to "how to fight back." I feel very comfortable with #1 and #2, but #3 is still problematic. I'm not sure if it's possible to jam a spoke in the wheel and remain employed. However, I don't have to practice these steps in my regular work, but I have been successful in practicing it with the other organizations I work within, and I am happy with the progress I've made. However, I need to do more...move more to the radical end.

Ideology - What ideologies do I hide behind? This blog entry shares a story from Vaclav Havel's book, Living in Truth. Instead of hanging a sign in his window that says he is afraid and obedient to authority, the grocer hangs a sign that says, "Workers of the world, unite." This sign is safer because it appeals to the grocer's vanity and allows him to retain his dignity.

Havel writes, The display of the sign “Workers of the world unite” allows the greengrocer “to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”

Again, what ideology am I hiding behind?

As I reflect on these blog entries, I see the struggle that appeals to me--overcoming the negative. But at what point do you say, "You know, I've had enough negativity. It's time for a change?" Or, perhaps the converse is true. "You know, things are going great...but I need more struggle in my life, more of a challenge."

Which story appeals to you?

Writing for Admin

Imagine this:

You setup a brand new blog for a campus administrator but before anything can get published on it, it has to go through a hierarchy of approvals. Why? It constitutes public relations/communications for your district. The blog stagnates, no one posts anything because by the time it gets approved, it just isn't worth it.

It's not an uncommon scenario in some districts I've heard of, and I wonder if we don't need to consider a new approval process. This post is inspired by HowardOwens advice for journalists. Owens writes this advice...and the question I have is, what would this look like for administrators?

• You generate your own story ideas.
• You decide the angle, who to talk to, where to gather information and what you do with it
• As you gather information, you find and save any relevant links
• You decide what other assets the story needs — video? a map? a pdf? a database? a graphic? pictures? You then either create or get created those assets
• When you write the story, you include appropriate links (to names, locations, documents, previous stories, blogs and previous coverage)
• You gather all of the assets, publish the story in draft form and let an editor know it’s ready (with the expectation that the story will be live on the web within 10 minutes)
• When the story is published, you socially bookmark the story as appropriate; you send the link to bloggers you know who might be interested; you e-mail the link to sources or readers you know would be interested
• After the story is published, you follow and participate as appropriate in the online conversation, either via comments on the story or on other sites (blogs and forums)
• You take everything you’ve learned and repurpose the story for print
• If the conversation brings to light any new significant information, you plan a new story and the process starts over.

Here's my poorly adapted version for school district administrators:

1. Set clear policies for sharing ideas that are personable, reflective of the reality at your district and include media whenever possible.
2. You pick the stories that show your campus in the best light and then follow-up on those.
3. Follow the story, especially when it reflects the truth of the situation. If you don't like the story, share the obstacles and what is being done to overcome those.
4. Include video, audio, photos that tell the story compellingly from multiple perspectives (e.g. parents, students, district admin, teachers)
5. Include links to available online content. If the content doesn't exist (e.g. documents), then make those documents available when not confidential.
6. Publish the story and then send the link to your supervisor with the caveat: "If you haven't provided feedback in a day, I'll be sending this out to the world." Follow up with a phone call.
7. Encourage online conversations--whether in the comments or an online discussion board--for this.

Does this work? What do you think?

The Game Leaders Play

Jonathan Becker asks us all in his LeaderTalk blog entry entitled, The Future of Educational Leadership, the following questions:

1) Are schools going to become increasingly virtual and distributed (as the authors suggest of businesses)?

2) Should school leaders be spreading around the leadership wealth so as to encourage experimentation?

He cites a report that points out that if we want to see what business leadership will be in five years, we need to check out online games. I was grateful to Jonathan pointing this out, as well as highlighting the report. It reminds me of the Demos "Their Space" report I read a few months ago. In the article, the skills a World of Warcraft guildmaster needs are as follows:

• attracting, evaluating and recruiting new members;
• creating apprenticeship programs;
• orchestrating group strategy; and
• managing disputes.

Isn't it ironic that these are the tools that in 5 years--and if you wait that long to acquire the skills, you're out of business according to Don Tapscott and Anthony William's Wikinomics--business may find useful, necessary for communication in a flat world?

Changes needed in schools include the following: a) Recognize/value learning that occurs outside the classroom; b) Support this outside learning, providing a space for reflection, enabling students to recognize and transfer those skills to new situations and contexts.

This sentence makes me wonder at what potential goes untapped in schools today. The answer is staggering--our children. It is our children that are untapped. This led me to the next question: What needs to be unleashed in schools? Children's power for creativity and innovation. Slow to respond to change in schools, schools' failure to recognize and value the skills that young people are developing is a blind spot.

Educational leaders, in neglecting to use mass collaboration tools like wikis, fail to model how students can interact with a changing world that expects global collaboration.

A few months ago, I found myself walking my seventh grader through the halls of a local high school. She was there--ahead of her time--to take the SAT, that high stakes test that determines whether you will be successful.

As I read more and more of the Demos' THEIR SPACE report, I started to wonder at the relevance of the SAT my daughter was taking. Wouldn't it have been better if they'd put her in a team of learners who had to solve a problem? And, solving that problem involved coordinating the work of others around the world (or in the next classroom) using technology tools, voice over IP? Wouldn't such approach to assessment do what the SAT was meant to do in the first place? SAT 2.0 would do the following:

• Challenge young adults to demonstrate how they can collaborate at a distance to develop creative solutions that involve mashing-up different technologies.
• Successful completion of the SAT 2.0 would mean using Web 2.0 tools to connect, collaborate, create and share ideas/solutions with each other.
• Successful completion would involve the team catalogue each team member's strengths and weaknesses, then assign jobs/tasks that build on strengths.
• Based on a team's weaknesses, staff people from outside their team--across the world but accessible via VOIP technologies (like Skype)--to buttress their weaknesses.

What other ways could such a project be used to measure what students need to know in a Read/Write Web world? What skills and strategies that need to value the soft skills our children are developing for recreation, that are worth emulating, but aren't unleashed in schools today?

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION LEADERS

The more important question for educational leaders isn't whether schools are going to be more distributed or virtual. Rather it is whether educators--including administrators, teachers, students in leadership roles, regardless of position or title--will be able to continue functioning in five years WITHOUT these skills.

I fear that if the answer is YES, then we will have schools that serve as centers of static learning...and our "students" will have already found somewhere else to learn what they need to. The SAT will have become meaningless except as an out-dated rite of passage.

Are you modelling online collaboration and enabling others in your district? If you're not, then you need to consider how you can accomplish that within the work you are expected to do every day.

Wikifying the Superintendent's Work

Last week, I wrote about organizing yourself with wikis. Not surprisingly, someone emailed, asking a couple of questions of how this might be relevant to superintendents and the work they are about. The two questions highlighted a deeper issue--Is YOUR Superintendent taking advantage of the latest tools available to stay in contact, foster collaboration among staff?

When I read Technology Tools for Educators, I was immediately hopeful that such tools might find their way into the hands of superintendents. My own experience with people in those high level positions is that they are "big picture" oriented, moving from project to project facilitating deep thinking about project management and implementation. Keeping that data in a wiki might be useful, but might be too time-consuming and considered "high-tech." Superintendents are less hands-on than a principal or director level position, and, they may fear that the involvement may jeopardize stakeholder opinions. After all, a superintendent is THE BOSS.

Yet, every reason I can think of for a Superintendent NOT using these tools is also a reason FOR using them. Wikis and their use can equalize powerful ideas, regardless of their source, and yet, not detract form the Superintendent's ability to make the final decision. A project management wiki--like the one I shared in my previous entry--can be useful. It allows the Superintendent to focus on ONE aspect of a project at a time at his/her leisure. Yet, it allows his Cabinet to work together on multiple aspects.

Wikifying the Superintendency might result in the following benefits:

1) Increasing transparency of work among all parties, keeping everything fair and above board for all. However, transparency can be challenging. The challenge in itself is worthwhile, but some superintendents may not be ready for the consequences. For example, consider what this superintendent wrote on his blog--another Read/Write Web tool that facilitates conversation--about the wiki he had started:

In either case I can't serve as moderator on two forums and do my "day job." Ulitmately when the public is comfortable with how open web 2.0 environments work, they will police themselves. In other words the first mature reader that noticed the "Duh - look I changed the page" comment - they could have restored the original comment immediately. (Same philosphy on vadalism - remove the perpetrator's work immediately) Source: Why the Wiki is Down

In this case, the Superintendent was responding to the charge that he was being less than transparent when he removed the wiki. The Superintendent rightly pointed out that a wiki is a community effort. I would advise a superintendent seeking to use a wiki to select the community he first starts working with (e.g. his/her Superintendent's Cabinet).

2) Allow you to, as John Maxwell shares, "staff your weaknesses." A superintendent can flesh out an idea, general directions, outline non-negotiables, and then allow her team to fill in the missing components, as well as enhance the basic framework. For example, one approach to this is exemplified by a wiki created by Laura Nelson. Ms. Nelson is facilitating a class, but her approach to modelling wikis for use by her students could easily be applied to a superintendent's use of a wiki.

3) The wiki can be used as a place to track ideas. Emily Dickinson wrote that "A word is dead, some say, when it is said...." However, put those words and ideas into a wiki, and they live on until they are needed. A wiki page for new ideas can be accessed by the Superintendent's team, and serve as the basis for new initiatives, projects, or ways to complement existing ones.

While there are other considerations, the questions that arose as a result of my previous entry are as follows:

The two questions that I was asked included the following. I have shown my responses underneath each:

1. Do you think your superintendent would relate to this subject? Does he/she use one?

My current superintendent would relate to this subject; he even keeps a blog online at http://www.saisd.net/superintendent . I hope that previous work on recording podcasts as a means of communicating with campuses and constituents will bear fruit. Most superintendents I have met focus on oral communications, creating environments that their staff can flourish in. Putting things in writing isn't something superintendents like to do...and a wiki requires just that.

That caveat in mind, I do see superintendents encouraging their staff to take advantage of wikis simply for the transparency aspect. A superintendent can get a quick report via a wiki, but they can also check the wiki themselves or know that their team (the cabinet) is working on a project. There's no reason why wikis closed to the public couldn't be used to facilitate online conversations that continue AFTER the meeting is over.

2. Do you know other superintendents who do?

I do not know of any superintendents who use wikis. The tool is "new" for use in education, but especially so at the superintendent level. Of course, it is that newness and usefulness that makes it worth sharing. I welcome any superintendents who are using wikis to share how they are using them in the comments.

Other superintendents might see the wiki as a place for their constituents to share ideas...for example, how can we improve what we're doing? Are there any services that could be streamlined to provide greater benefit?

As a technology director, I often ask myself how I can use new and emerging technologies to change--for the better--what I do. If new technologies like the Read/Write Web can foster increased communication and collaboration, and knowing what emphasis top level administrators on such activities, it seems wikis and superintendents could be a nice fit.

What are your thoughts?

Organize Yourself with a Wiki

Over the last few months, I've been experimenting with wikis. As a district administrator, I have fun keeping track of hundreds of documents that find their way into my inbox, that get "locked up" on my hard drive. Often, these documents are not confidential, should be looked at by lots of people. Yet, since email is the "killer app" that we've all grown old with, we find ourselves with more in our inbox than we can delete.

If you find those characterizations to be true of your inbox, then you may find this next one to be even more apt. Documents that are attached to your emails eventually take over your email backups. You start to wonder, where can I put that valuable document? You realize that your email program become the primary way you interact with information. After all, it's easier to keep documents in your email than save them to folders on your hard drive. You put a document on your hard drive, and then you may spend some time looking for it. Even though there are hard drive utilities to find stuff, only the techies know how to install them.

A few months ago, I decided to change that. I began to put non-confidential documents into a wiki. The power of the wiki is that I can continue to move content around, reorganize it easily, and better yet, leverage my secretary's organizational skills. Once my secretary--an excellent organizer--learned how to use the wiki, I began to point those emails with documents to her. "Would you please post this on the wiki in the appropriate place?" I'd ask. After a light chuckle--she allows herself these laughs at my expense--she would put the documents online.

Now, I'm beginning to find that the wiki is THE heart of my document management. And, I've started keeping my meeting notes there, as well as works in progress. I'm meeting with the technical crew on campus vs district server options. My job in the group is to craft the executive summary (oh boy, you should see those...need one for every project prior to approval) that we'll submit to the higher-ups. What do you know, planning it all out there makes the work transparent.

Transparency. Yes, that's what I'm really striving for. I never know what might happen to me on my home from work. Now, I know that should something happen, my team, those I work with, my supervisors can find out exactly what I'm working on, the documents relevant to that, and more.

Duck, Dodge and Hide

"Duck, dodge, and hide" leadership is contradictory. It implies that a leader can be someone who ducks problems, dodges inquiry about those, and hides from the truth. If I hide from criticism, I set myself up for failure. If I listen only to criticism, or, alternatively, compliments, I still set myself up for failure. Balance has to be struck between the two, an understanding of the ying and yang.

In response to Stephanie Sandifer's recent entry explaining leadership strategies, including "DUCK" which stands for "Dependent Upon Criticizing and Killing Success," Lorne (Education and its Discontents) writes:

...I couldn't help but feel there is something quite condescending and essentially manipulative in the suggestions you list. As a retired teacher, I can tell you that those measures would only work if they came from the heart, not as a strategy to win over the staff. Teachers have a tremendousw capacity for detecting b.s., and you can be certain that if administrative gestures are forced or insincere, they will be seen through by the majority of staff. Teacher goodwill can only be achieved by genuine respect. Source:

The last comment rings true, especially as we consider that genuine respect is often lacking in the political commentaries. On the one hand, some focus on the negative rather than the positive. On the other, some ignore the negative, afraid that it will derail their efforts at improvement. Whether you're ducking positive or negative comments, you're still practicing "Duck,dodge, and hide."

Pete Reilly (EdTech Solutions) shares an observation that I have found true no matter what job I have worked:

As educational leaders we often encounter people who are not aligned with our vision. They can surprise us by the tenacity of their negative energy. They have already "been there and done that" and know, that whatever we're trying to do; it will never work. They see every place in the organization where things are not working and, for them, this confirms their negative outlook on their jobs, and in many cases, their lives.

When I began working as an administrator 7 years ago, I felt a powerful drive to get the job done, to make it happen. I would have perceived the people Pete describes above as roadblocks, people that fit into Will Rogers famous quote (poorly paraphrased by me here), "You may be on the right road but if you're not moving, get out of the way." Like my superintendent in an East Texas small town district (13,000 population for the town) said once about a teacher on the techology committee, "We need to pave right over him and smooth out the bumps" likening the teacher to a bump in the road that had to be pushed down.

I had a visceral, negative reaction to that statement and, corrected him. "I want to hear the other point of view" and I kept that teacher on the Committee. True to form, he always offered insights into what we hadn't thought of. I'm grateful to him for teaching me the value of oppositional thinking. What's the point in having people who only agree with you?

Of course, as I liked to say it--which now reminds me of Collins' Good to Great or is it Built to Last--"The bus is moving, whether you're on it or not." As I recall Collins says that even more important about knowing where to go with the bus is getting the right people on the bus--and the implication for me is kicking the wrong people off!, which I disagree with--and then getting them to decide where the right direction is. As an educator, I find this reprehensible, especially for public school educators. The bus--as is with people of differing perspectives--is a jigsaw puzzle, a blood and muscle game of Tetris, but where the pieces fit themselves to the puzzle to ensure maximum gain.

I like to think I've gotten more mellow these days. Although I still see the value of make it happen, I like to imagine that "let it happen" works better. Let it happen means letting things take shape, evolve...as the situation develops. Although I know I want the bus to move, I'm more inclined to trust folks...where I disagree with Collins is that you have to get the right people on the bus. I have found in my "small" organizations that the right people are on the bus, they just haven't been allowed to build on their strengths and share their wisdom. My role is to tap into that wisdom, and encourage them to use their strengths for the benefit of the organization.

My first insights into dealing with those caught up in "victimhood" was simply to help us (that person and I) surrender to several important ideas:

1) Even though the world is difficult, that does not mean we are released from our obligations.

2) Since education environments are dependent on so many variables (e.g. politics, people, funding, legislation, etc.), just because something DID NOT work when you tried it, doesn't mean it won't work when we try it again. And, when I say "work" I don't mean that the initiative was unsuccessful ("didn't work") because the person doing it was incompetent or didn't think things through, but rather, that it was not approved or that it failed to catch on. That the time wasn't right then, but you never know the time is wrong until afterwards.

3) Surrender to whatever may happen. We are all called to serve passionately...while we may never surrender our passion, we must certainly surrender to the fact that our passion may not move things in the direction we want. It's this last idea that reminds me of an adaptation of something Dick Westley wrote in Redemptive Intimacy...

Having faith doesn't mean bad things won't happen and God will protect you from them, but rather, that bad things may happen but they won't matter as much because God has faith in you

.

So, with that last point in mind, I'm not the kind that believes in smiling to keep a happy face. I believe people can be joyful even as tears run down their face. I believe that negative energy is an essential part of the Ying-Yang, a spur that encourages one to be grateful...accepting...of the realities we face even as we challenge that reality and seek to transform it. I'd like to think negative/positive energy forms the nascent synergy that can transform who we are, what we do, and how we serve.

As Lorne writes in her blog, one of our obligations as administrators is to "Recognize that one of...[our]...most important functions is to provide a positive climate for both staff and students. Lead the school with moral conviction, not craven career ambition."

The craven are those who fail to acknowledge their fears, to share them openly. They instead act to protect themselves rather than do what is right. You want moral conviction as an administrator, as a leader? Then acknowledge your fear, share it...and welcome oppositional thinking for what it is. . .the power to transform the positive/negative energy into fuel for forward movement.

1 Reason to Change

"Why don't you type up your writing assignment like you do your stories?" I asked my 13 year old daughter a few weeks ago. Her response shocked me. "I have to write it up at school by hand, so why use the computer?" she replied. My daughter publishes her stories and poems online via a wiki, but has given up trying to turn her assignments in via a blog or wiki...her teacher won't accept them. One reason to change, that's all we need.

A recent Pew Research study showed that twelve to seventeen year olds share what they think and do online, while one in five teens remix content from a variety of sources, synthesizing and making new creations. Yet, when these children get to school, they are forced to engage in irrelevant activities with no real audience, without the technology they have learned to use and without appropriate role models. One reason to change, that's all we need.

The study also found that 56 per cent of young people in America were using computers for "creative activities, writing and posting of the internet, mixing and constructing multimedia and developing their own content." Research and technology are driving profound changes in expectations for the use of technology in schools. These are embodied in the International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards (NETS) for students AND teachers. One reason to change, that's all we need.

Schools are expected to overcome obstacles and help children develop skills required in a digital world to "produce and innovate" using technology. The revised standards are organized into six categories: creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information retrieval; critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts.

Under communication and collaboration, you will find:

Students... (A) collaborate, publish, and interact with peers, experts, and others employing a variety of digital media and formats Example: Expert Voices - http://expertvoices.wikispaces.com/

(B) communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences utilizing a variety of media and formats Example: Flat Classroom Project - http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com/

(C) develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. Example: International Teen Life - http://internationalteenlife.pbwiki.com/

and

(D) contribute to project teams to produce original works. Example: 1001 Flat World Tales Project - https://burell9english.wikispaces.com/

This is work that is done, not in isolation, but in collaboration with others outside of school. Click on the links above to see examples of each.

"These teens," shares Lee Raine, "were born into a digital world where they expect to be able to create, consume, remix, and share material with each other and lots of strangers." One reason to change, that's all we need.

What should schools be doing? Should they ban the technologies children use at home in school, or model appropriate use in school? And, as education leaders, what are the implications for us?

If not for the children you serve, but for your son, your daughter, your precious grandchild, change. One reason to change, that's all we need.

Beyond Fear

A superintendent in a small school district gave a talk at the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) Midwinter's Conference a few years ago. She moved her hands quickly in the air, her hands almost blurring, parallel to each other. "This is the kind of change we need in schools," she exclaimed. "But this," and she moved her hands ever so slowly, " is the change we're getting. We need this change [moving her hands quickly] because our children can't wait."

I was impressed with her talk...and I wasn't alone. "You know," I said to the tech director in that district, "I wouldn't mind working with her to achieve that vision she articulated." At last, an administrator who gets it. A superintendent who will bring about change.

Less than a year later, she had been ousted from her perch and the community had mobilized against her. Whether she was bought off, resigned, it didn't matter. Everyone wanted her gone. Riding the coat-tails of her defeat, the very people she cited as the problems rose to power. The balance swung in the opposite direction. What she had hoped to accomplish was laudable, but how she went about it scarred the District, not to mention her career.

When I stub my toe on the "rocks" that block the way to successful change in school districts, I remember the story of the Superintendent mentioned in the story above. Change is necessary. Who we serve, not change itself, requires us to move quickly. As I get older, I notice that I get increasingly impatient with the slow pace of change in K-12 education. Yet, change has occurred. My son, on the way home from school, answered the mobile phone. "We're on highway 604," he told her. I was shocked...he had never shown an awareness of where he was by street name or the name of the highway. "He's growing up," I said to myself. Then, I heard him say, "No one told me it was 604." He was acknowledging that he had grown up enough to know where he was. That's how change occurs.

But, it can also be an auto wreck, like the one that left a Putlitzer Prize writer suddenly, unexpectedly, dead. Which is better? I've seen both in education, and been grateful for both. In one district, upper administration was cleaned out as if by a plague. Prayers, some say, were answered and change happened. Other times, change is a dawning realization. Nature allows for both sudden and gradual changes...shouldn't we?

I've worked side by side with teachers, campus, and district level administrators. At every level, I have found much to be enthused about, but also, come to see that there is always someone who opposes change for no rational reason. That reason is fear-based. Rather than face their fears, they act from fear to block change, to prevent that which would require them to overcome that fear.

My dad, who died a few short months ago, always encouraged me but cautioned me never to cheat. "Better to try honestly and fail," he'd say, "than cheat, even if you're not caught." Those words taught me the meaning of honor and integrity. Better that we brand our educational leadership efforts failures. Yes, better that than fail to acknowledge we hold our children back when we fear disruptive technologies and the change they bring.

Embracing Citizen-Journalism in K-12 Leadership

Source: Patrick Lencioni's 3 Signs of a Miserable Job Model

Job misery, shares Patrick Lencioni, author of various educational leadership books, comes as a result of 3 reasons. Those reasons include the following:

1. Anonymity - If others in authority are unaware of what you are doing, then you are unhappy. We cannot long work in obscurity.
2. Irrelevance - If our work is irrelevant, means nothing to the organization, has no impact on the bottom line—teaching and learning—then why do it? Why get up and fight the good fight?
3. Immeasurement - Failure to measure our success—or lack of it—means that we are unable to assess our progress. And, without that tangible measure of forward movement, of change, it is too easy to be lost in the midst of the change we are trying to facilitate.

As an administrator, I see it as my role to clarify for staff how their work is relevant to the organization, to provide feedback on their rate of success, and to celebrate their hard work so that all know they are responsible. If we assume the mantle of citizen journalists, then we can tap into our own creativity and eradicate the 3 reasons misery finds its way into the hearts of our leadership teams.

Power in Creativity

When I do something—teach a class, create a product—I get a charge of energy. At the end of a day of meetings, I walk out drained, tired, and wishing I could take a nap before driving 45 minutes through bumper-to-bumper traffic. When I “do something,” I walk out feeling awesome and I’m ready to go out for the evening, craft administrative procedure, or facilitate a workshop.

The reason creativity is so powerful for me is that I am at heart, a teacher, a person who likes to share what he is learning with others. Citizen journalism is about reporting on what is going on around me, and enabling others to have access to experiences and ideas that are daily occurrences but that only a few see.

Fight Job Misery with Read/Write Web Tools

Patrick Finn, author of Literacy with an Attitude, shares that powerful literacy involves creativity and reason—the ability to evaluate, analyze and synthesize what is read…it is also the ability to write one’s ideas so that another person can understand them. As leaders in public schools, we can take on the 3 factors of job misery that Lencioni identifies and minimize them in school settings. It is simply a matter of using technology to transform the negative, to be creative and create online value that others can come to better understand what our students and staff are doing.

1- Recognize - “There is something that is much more scarce,” shared Elbert Hubbard, “something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.” With easy access to publish at will tools, you can easily recognize educators, students and parents in your school community.

Foster recognition by featuring the work you or your team does in blogs and video clips that show how they are working on behalf of their target audience or colleagues. To get things going, check out how success is celebrated in this online collection of video interviews and sharing of student work. Some specific tools you can use to achieve this include:

• Blogs - Setup a blog you can easily contribute to. Blogs make it easy for people to subscribe to them, and you can add photos and videos to them. While initial setup can be challenging, there are now many educators who can provide assistance.
• Wikis - Moving to the next level, challenge teachers and others you trust to contribute content to a wiki, an editable web site. The ease of adding content should enable people to contribute content.

Both of these mediums are essentially blank journals, or bulletin boards, that can hold sound (e.g. podcasts), video (e.g. vidcasts) and text media (e.g. narratives). If you are not comfortable with embedding media like video or audio, put it on a web site that simplifies the process (e.g. Edublogs.tv is a great site to host video or audio at no cost and without advertising).

Once you have content online, you can also choose to create a narrated tour. Some tools you can use include the following:

• Diigo Web Slides - These allow you to create narrated slideshows of web sites. The web sites remain interactive and clickable even as you add your audio narration to them.
• Flowgram.com - This new tool enables you to combine audio narration with web sites, pictures, and a variety of content in one easy to use tool. You record directly from your computer (you’ll need a microphone) and just need to know the web address of the content you want to add. This makes it easy for you to highlight online work that your staff and students are creating and sharing via the Web.
• Jog the Web - Create a guided tour of web sites, adding your comments to each site. Lacks the audio component available in Diigo Web Slides and FlowGram.com.

Other possibilities include using tools like MyPlick.com, VoiceThread.com to upload a slideshow document—such as one created in Powerpoint—and then adding audio to it. VoiceThread even enables your viewers to add audio, video and text of their own. What a fantastic way to recognize the work that is being done, and invite recognition of that work done by your staff by others!

2- Engage - Engage your colleagues in conversations and work that makes a difference in the lives of others. As educators, we have opportunities to engage others every day. One Read/Write Web tool that we can use to engage others is to facilitate professional meetings and learning that is available using Moodle. Often, our meetings and workshops leave us disconnected, shuffling from one disjointed event to another.

Creating a Moodle and empowering your staff to participate in it can provide opportunities for engagement, for enabling individuals to be heard and to exercise their voice. However, do not expect success immediately. It may very well take a year of hard work, including consolidating resources in one place, to see results. You can find Moodle.org online, and there are ample examples of Moodles being used to enhance work and professional learning settings.

3 - Set Clear Parameters for Success - If the team needs to be able to measure it’s own success, it’s own progress separate from me as the boss, then I need to set clear definition of what constitutes success. This is often difficult with changing expectations from above, “scope creep,” as projects do take on a life of their own. I always come back in those projects to whether the end user has learned how to use the technology proposed, and whether they are using it at a maximal level that optimizes their work.

While some administrators have access to project management tools (e.g. MS Projects), there are now ample tools that enable collaboration. Wikis and Moodles are two powerful tools you can use that do not involve adding yet another tool. However, data collection can sometimes be a challenge.

Why not use a tools like GoogleDocs Spreadsheets and Forms (login as guest) to collect information on the progress of an initiative? Or, install the Questionnaire module in Moodle (view example)? While these simple tools cannot replace more sophisticated project management tools, they do provide ways for educators to collaboratively design the parameters for success and to report progress on those.

Conclusion

As education administrators who have access to a variety of Read/Write Web techologies, it is possible for our teams to experience anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurement. Yet, it is a possibility well within our control as leaders.

Take a moment and learn how to use simple Read/Write Web tools to become a citizen journalist rather than continue as merely an administrator who waits for a Communications Department to decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t.

Author Miguel Guhlin is Director of Instructional Technology Services for a large urban school district in San Antonio, Texas, USA. You can engage him in further conversation online at Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net or read his writings online.

VoiceThread Tutorial

In a few days, I have the opportunity to share with administrators how VoiceThread.com can enhance how they interact with their community. Here's my CC Sharealike-Attrib-NC copyright print tutorial for VoiceThread.com.

Although there are a lot of VoiceThread tutorials out there--and in a variety of media formats--I decided that I wasn't happy with any of them for my purposes. Isn't that what always happens? So, this afternoon, I've sat down and created a tutorial that fits how I might use VoiceThread.com with administrators.

I hope the tutorial is useful to others. The tutorial is far from done but I thought I'd share what I have for now. It is shared under Creative Commons Copyright (Sharealike-NonCommercial-Attribution) and available in open document format (I made it with NeoOffice on a Mac but you can open it using OpenOffice).

• PDF Version of the Intro to VoiceThread tutorial
• OpenDocument Format Version of Intro to VoiceThread Tutorial

Up to date copies of the tutorial, supplements, will appear on my Digital Storytelling with Web-Based Tools wiki page. Some more important pieces:

• Page numbers (very important but missing)
• VoiceThread examples and narrative, which is missing.
• Better introduction.

If you improve on it, please share back!

UPDATE 09/07/2008:

Wow, I'd forgotten how much fun it is to prepare a print tutorial. I've made the revisions above to the 09/07/2008 version and here's the new table of contents with what is covered:

How To...

• Register for a VoiceThread Account
• Obtain the Free, PRO, Educator Account
• Add Your Picture to VoiceThread.com
• Put a Slideshow Online
• Share Your VoiceThread with Others
• Exploring Export Options
• Add Audio Comments via the Phone
• Exploring Phone Commenting
• Upload Pre-Recorded Audio
• Add Video Comments
• Add Text Comment
• Great Examples of VoiceThread in K-12

Alone in the Middle - Teen Fiction

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Check Yourself in the Mirror

"Check yourself in the mirror," my Dad would call out each morning before we left for the drive to school. That last minute look in the mirror would often reveal a hair out of place, or that my shirt buttons and belt buckle weren't lined up right. Worse, it might show a bit of stubble--when in high school--that I hadn't shaved, or crud in the corner of my eye. Now, every morning, I offer my nine-year old the same advice. It's not about vanity but knowing how you will appear to others. And, if you're sending the message you want to send, then that's fine. But if you're not, that last check in the mirror can provide a crucial moment of insight. While some prefer to never look in the mirror when it comes to their organization, it's absolutely necessary. Our role today in schools is about building Global Communications Center for our campus or district. It is NOT the job of the Communications Department...it's YOUR job as an educational leader. WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING ABOUT YOU? Dave Fleet shares some suggestions for online monitoring of your organization's image, or the buzz around it. He says it's important that before you do anything--such as set up a blog, whatever--that you find out how to track what's going on out there. I see his suggestions as part and parcel of establishing your own Global Communications Center for your school or District. Fleet writes:

Before your organization launches a blog, before you start playing with Facebook, before you even think about Twitter, you should be listening to what people are saying about you.

"Google is managing your identity unless you are," as quoted by Dean Shareski in his Going Global, Going Public. "What digital footprints are existing for you right now? It's not an ego search but to find what others are saying about you." This goes for each of us, but also, for organizations like schools. But it's important we go, as Dean and others share, beyond just tracking our digital footprints, but that of others' footprints when they interact with our organizations.

As an edublogger, this is something I learned while setting up my blog and finding ways to connect with others. However, the tools that are available now are much more comprehensive than what were available when I began. A quick look at Dave's suggestions, and I'm astonished that I'm using most of these approaches already. What I doubt is happening, though, is that school districts and schools are doing this...most of our organizations may very well have a less than active interaction with news and other people out there. Simply publishing your own television show isn't enough when most people thrive online, and most content endures online more than in a broadcast.

I love this quote (Christian Grantham as cited in NewAssignment.net) about ending the "passive relationship with local news" in this blog entry. What catches my attention is that the same tribulations and troubles students, teachers and leaders are going through, well, that's what a lot of folks in the news industry are going through. You could tweak this paragraph easily to reflect the angst among educators:

I love working with people who see the importance of the role the net will play in transforming the way the world gets and interacts with information. I also love working with veterans of news, and I will always remember the challenges they face with the changes that are happening. For some, that change is very difficult. But the fact is, we are no more in the television and newspaper business than Wal-Mart is in the trucking business. Our business is no longer the industry that surrounds distribution – the trucks, the printing press, the reams of paper, the broadcast towers, the satellite dishes, the lights, the huge cameras, the buildings, the “live trucks”… It’s the final product: information. The market in an on-demand world for news and information where people have to wait to receive a highly produced product is steadily shrinking. At the same time, the online audience for news and information is growing significantly. It’s an exciting time to be working in a new medium that is transforming the way we get information.

How has our "business" in education changed? It's no longer about textbooks, that's for sure and canned ideas. It's about creativity, communication, collaboration. Even as the market shrinks in the news world, in the education world, I find this statement to be as true as it's ever been in education (BTW, the link below includes a Clay Shirky moment in video):

If our information was made freely available and became the building blocks through which other work could be done - we would be the foundation upon which the news and information world is built upon. Source: DigiDave - Journalism is a Process, Not a Product: Changing the Legal Structure for Digital Journalism

That education is still the foundation--albeit being switfly eroding--is because it is firmly entrenched in a "no market" environment.

Dave points to 4 steps and I've included links to some with sample searches for "mguhlin" in each:

1. Define your keywords
2. Create your searches...some of the tools Dave shares include: -GoogleNews -GoogleBlogSearch -Technorati -TwitterSearch (Dave mentions Summize, recently acquired by Twitter.com, and TweetScan) -Blogpulse.com
3. Plug the results into your RSS reader OR
4. Collapse all the results RSS feeds into a service like AideRSS.com (I've included a list of Tools4RSS here)

One additional type of tool that I'd add to Dave's list includes Social Bookmarking sites.

The idea comes to me from a presentation Alan November did in China (Learning2.0 Conference) where an audience member suggested using Del.icio.us as another search tool in lieu or addition to regular search engines. 3 skills November says aren't taught in schools include:

1. Teaching students to deal with massive quantities of information (pattern-making, organizing patterns for information)
2. Global Communication skills/global communication, as well as checking sources with people on the ground
3. Self-directed, lifelong learning

What's neat about becoming your own "global communications center" is that you can teach students these skills as you're setting up your classroom web site. Imagine what would have happened if model classroom teachers using blogs with students--such as Bob Sprankle and Darren Kuropatwa--had set these tools up (if they'd been available) BEFORE they started blogging with their students. Wouldn't it have been awesome to capture the feedback flowing in from all over the world, including traditional and participatory reporting?

WHAT ABOUT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES? It would definitely be fun to know how many folks are bookmarking what you're doing, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of results. To accomplish that, you'll probably need to use Page2Rss.com--a tool someone told me about but a week or two ago (speak up if you're out there!). Neither Diigo or Delicious, as far as I can see, support RSS for search results. So, with that caveat in mind, to the list, I'm adding these two:

• Diigo.com - RSS wasn't available via Page2Rss.com since Diigo timed out.
• Del.icio.us - RSS

OTHER TOOLS A few other tools worth checking out include these:

• IceRocket.com - RSS
• Teoma.com
• Spy ...lacks an RSS feed but you can get one with Page2RSS (not sure yet how well it works). Lets you know what's going on in Twitter, FriendFeed, Blogs, and Google Reader.

Though I had some of these items setup (Technorati, TwitterSearch) I didn't have all of them setup. As a result, I discovered some new blog entries out there--and new blogs I wasn't reading--writing about what I'd written. Nice to be in touch!

GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CENTER You know, I hadn't ever thought of myself--or the work the Communications Dept in a school district--does as Global Communications. But, that is exactly what we're doing with Read/Write Web tools. And, that is the challenge facing districts as well as journalists. We are caught up in a "citizen" journalism, teacher communicator.

"Should learning professionals be leading the charge around new work literacies such as social media and informal learning?" Good question. My answer: yes. Because everyone should be. Tucker writes, "my responsibility is to work on my own sphere of influence, starting with our online course development team leading by example for our facilitators." Christy Tucker, Experiencing E-Learning Source: As commented on and cited by Stephen Downes

How are YOU setting up your Global Communications Center? How are YOU leading the charge? The answer to this question is a lot easier than taking this position:

Al Gore said: "We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift." He was talking about global climate change but he might as well have been talking about our attempts to transition schools into the 21st century… Source: Our Policies have to Shift, Dr. Scott McLeod, Dangerously Irrelevant

Compare that approach--abandoning the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve the crisis in education, or journalism--to this one from Pete Reilly (EdTech Journeys) with his tale of Gandhi's decision to not offer advice unless he was living by it himself.

When you get up tomorrow morning, take a moment to check your school or district's virtual image in the mirror of public opinion. Begin now to build the resources you need to keep track of those, and make a difference.

Engage Your Community

"Either write something worth reading," shared Ben Franklin, "or do something worth writing about." This entry outlines a few strategies for enhancing your communication strategies as a "administrator-journalist." As educational leaders, powerful tools are available to us. Assume the role of a citizen-journalist, or "administrator-journalist!" The idea behind this is administrators that can--although we lack professional journalism training--use modern tools to create, enhance and/or share information. At a time when we're all struggling to share what we're about, why we need more funding, it's essential that each of us recognize that maybe, it's no longer just about teaching, learning, and leading...it's also about sharing about that in ways that are easy for others to understand. The techniques shared in this blog entry will help you.

TECHNIQUE

As a writer who began long ago sharing ideas, I found the advice that Charles Main offered up in an article entitled The List Article in The Handbook for Magazine Writing to be easy to follow.He shared that the list article is designed to solve problems, present information and otherwise help the reader. This makes it perfect for"administrator-journalists" to use to share their stories of success.

To get started, make a list of how you have solved a problem, or better yet, how someone at your campus/district has solved it. See if you can get them to guide you through their problem-solving process. Capture that process with audio or video, and then share it online. The results are powerful because you 1) Celebrate problem-solving by your staff; 2) Invite feedback and stimulate idea sharing with a broader community; 3) Build a deeper relationship with the individual and the broader community; and 4) You establish a record of how work gets done at your site. This last piece is one that has inestimable value since it serves as a "living" record, an oral/video history of your efforts. It reflects well, not only on you as the educational leader, but also your team and organization. Who, after all, can argue with the success that has been shared with such a wide audience?

SOME IDEAS FOR GETTING STARTED

Although you certainly don't have to implement all of these ideas immediately, I encourage you to review the list and practice this in your daily work as a campus or district administrator. I'm amazed at the opportunities that arise for sharing engaging, positive stories with others provided I am prepared to capture them.

1. You pick the stories that show your campus in the best light and then follow-up on those.
2. Follow the story, especially when it reflects the truth of the situation. If you don't like the story, share the obstacles and what is being done to overcome those.
3. Include video, audio, photos that tell the story compellingly from multiple perspectives (e.g. parents, students, district admin, teachers)
4. Include links to available online content. If the content doesn't exist (e.g. documents), then make those documents available when not confidential.
5. Publish the story via a blog.
6. Encourage online conversations--whether in the comments or an online discussion board.

Though it is not my intent to go into each of these in detail at this time--I will in future blog entries--I do want to encourage you to embrace writing in the first person. We have all been taught that formal writing is critical and appropriate. The truth is, though, all writing has voice, and if your voice is stilted and boring, no one will want to read you again. Worse, they will be less inclined to think well of you. A friendly, personable demeanor as conveyed through your writing is important. You can achieve that by eliminating jargon, and writing simply. As Samuel Johnson liked to say, When you find a phrase or sentence that you think is particularly good, strike it out. Our goal is simple, straightforward writing from the heart. Also, pick stories that you wish you could tell in more detail but are unable to. I often find myself wishing I had a staff member present at a meeting so they could share what happened with all the original enthusiasm bubbling up inside them and out to the audience. There's no capturing that enthusiasm for others unless you use audio and/or video recorder to capture the event. Often, a photograph snapped with your camera-phone or digital camera is enough to capture the moment. The audio is easy to share, as is the photo. Some quick technology suggestions:

• Have the right equipment - Use an inexpensive Olympus WS-110 digital audio recorder ($50-$60) to take your podcasting on the road. I keep my recorder in my pocket and have impromptu conversations with staff. This is powerful, just-in-time kind of story gathering you want to engage in. If you want to do video, get a FLIP video camera ($150) and use that. The software to work with audio includes SwitchFree (to convert it from WMA to MP3) and Audacity (to edit the audio itself). If working with video, use Moviemaker on a Windows computer or iMovie on a Mac.
• To put your audio or video on the web, use EduBlogs.tv. It's easy video/audio hosting, free, and education-focused. You can copy the link of the file once it's hosted and then put it on your blog.
• If your district isn't able to set you up with your own blog in a timely manner, get a free blog via Dr. Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) or Edublogs.org.

Blogging Administrators

Source: http://farbucks.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54eeb42b6883300e5529158df8833-320pi

I want to give an inspiring presentation in 30 minutes...this post is me flailing about for ideas, what to discuss and share. The audience, I suspect, will not be interested in what I have to say. They are "hostile" in the sense that I want to share powerful ideas that aren't considered relevant to improve AYP, student achievement, test scores. Instead, it's about becoming more savvy technology users, engaging principals and campus administrators in learning to use technology in profoundly transformative ways. I fear that they will listen politely, then ignore me. But then, I know it's not true. i know that deep down, some of them are ready to listen, some are ready to act and to embrace a message of transformation...and some never will be. But I'm not here for the latter, am I?

I have a presentation to do next Wednesday--in 30 minutes or less--with principals. I get to share with them the value of positive communications, etc. I'm planning to share with them Dr. Tim Tyson's work at MabryMiddle School, and what it can mean for each of them to become bloggers and share what's going on in their school, tell the stories that the Communications Dept can't get to because, well, they have to do their Communications work (ironic, isn't it?).

In 30 minutes, what 3 points would you make? What examples would you share? I'm struggling with this...procrastinating on a Sunday afternoon. I go back to this blog entry I wrote some time ago. It's not what I wrote that is so helpful but the comments (not the wot bolox one, though...although I wish whomever left that had said WHY):

I started blogging because I teach teachers the benefits of reading blogs and blogging with their students. I don't spend a great deal of time writing. I mostly write about new tools that I would recommend for teachers. This is because I think my small audience are teachers that I've had in workshops, although I rarely get comments so as far as I know, I am blogging for myself. I don't write about the mundane or personal experiences because I don't like to read blog posts that complain or rant. Thanks for this post. It helped me to reflect on what direction I want to take my blogging experience. One is for me to share my educational ideas, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. The other is for the community in which I work. I share a lot with parents via the blog, and the response from them has been great. I use the blog much more than a monthly newsletter. I usually write blog posts at night when the house is quiet, although sometimes I will post on the blog for parents from school during the day. Source:Dave Sherman at Leadertalk I love doing it and have mastered the “2 minute” blog post. I found that if you post a picture of something that is going on at school and write about it, people love it! Also, once a month I try and do a video summing up what has happened at school that month. . . I have learned that although people are not going to leave a lot of comments on my blog, they are read it a ton. In fact, my blog is the #1 hit site in our school district, by far. People will often comment on how much they appreciate reading what is going on in my school, my life, and the lives of those around me. It helps people see that I am a real person and our school is a great place. I don’t spend any more than 20 minutes a week. I usually blog at the very end of my day. It is a perfect time to reflect and seek positive things out from our day. Blogging has become part of my job. If I don’t blog for a couple of days I actually get emails from people asking me why I haven’t posted. Source: Tim Fausnaught at LeaderTalk Starting these blogs is one of the best things we have done in terms of public relations and ease of getting the word out to people. It's not additional work; instead, it's a huge time-saver...Get started! You can have your blog up and running in a few minutes. The few minutes you spend setting up an account and learning to post will save you hours upon hours in questions you are NOT answering over the phone and memos you are NOT printing and Xeroxing. Source: Frank Buck at LeaderTalk There are two primary reasons to blog: One is to disseminate information to others. The other is to express thoughts and opinions either of a personal or professional nature. If you want a blog in order to set up a channel of communication between you and staff, students, parents, and community - go for it. It can be on your school's web-site and can be monitored by you in a way that only campus-relevant, family friendly, politically correct material is posted. Source: Far Bucks When My Muse Wanders Off

3 possible points to share with principals:

1. Take responsibility for your school's image online
2. Make learning experiences transparent for your community
3. Become a citizen-journalist

Relevant links:

• Dr. Frank Buck
• Dr. Scott McLeod's site on Principal Blogging Project
• Dr. Scott's Why Blog as an Administrator

Reading these blogs took me to FarBucks blog, where I ran across something I hadn't heard of (happens all the time) and thought to share with you...a documented created by Texas Superintendents entitled Creating as New Vision for Public Education in Texas - A Work in Progress for Conversation and Further Development.

Far buck's suggests the following: "There are FOUR ACTIONS we can take at this point:"

1. Urge your school staff to download and read the document;
2. Promote the dissemination and reading of the publication to as wide an audience as possible through word-of-mouth, blogs, emails, phone calls, and other means;
3. Provide your input to the Institute (you will see how within the document itself); and
4. Begin a meaningful dialog with as many people as you can...working toward the implementation of the Institute's work at the local and state levels.

What I'm looking for is a story that will bring this all together. This is a jumble of ideas. Let's see what coalesces into reality.

Delivering Bad News

Delivering bad news is the role of every administrator. For whatever the reason, you're stuck with having to deliver bad news. One of my supervisors liked to share bad news by embracing it. That's right, he took particular pride in making it seem like the decision to do something unpopular was his alone. He would then spend the next hour tap-dancing trying to justify the decision. It was quite humorous to watch...and we all knew. We, the audience, knew he was lying because the REAL story always gets out...in fact, it travels a lot faster than any other version. Here's my example of delivering bad news--discontinuation of a digital video system.

Over the past several months, Instructional Technology Services has sought to obtain affirmative answers to these questions:

1. Will Curriculum & Instruction and the Tech Dept jointly fund—or advocate for district funding—the digital video distribution system district students and teachers deserve?

2. Will Curriculum & Instruction and Tech Depts issue a request for proposals (RFP) for a digital video distribution system that includes NAME-BRAND digital video content?

3. Will Curriculum & Instruction align digital videos and content to core content scope and sequence and jointly provide professional learning of digital video WITHIN core content professional development sessions facilitated by teacher specialists?

While you can find an account of the meeting (05/05/2008)--with follow-up notes and emails--here [link removed], no final decision has been made regarding these questions.

The Office of Instructional Technology Services submitted a budget enhancement of $74,000 so that the District could obtain the new digital video service from a provider, as selected by bid process. That budget enhancement is still under review. Recognizing that THE OLD DIGITAL VIDEO SYSTEM usage has fallen off severely--equivalent to videotape usage in 2002-2003-- and that the cost of OLD DIGITAL VIDEO SYSTEM may increase, and that no decision has been made to fund, acquire, and jointly implement digital videos within core content areas, I am withdrawing funding for the digital video distribution system. This funding will be re-allocated and used to better achieve Technology Applications:TEKS assessment requirements within DISTRICT classrooms.

Please be aware that THE OLD digital video distribution system will NOT be available for the 2008-2009 school year. All saved videos, images, and resources from THE OLD DIGITAL VIDEO SYSTEM must be destroyed/deleted from DISTRICT computers in compliance with the license agreement.

Instructional Technology Services will continue to urge the Curriculum & Instruction and Technology Departments to jointly fund, acquire, as well as plan for implementation a digital video.

In the meantime, you are encouraged to take advantage of the videos embedded in....

My goal in this email was to be as transparent as possible. In feedback from one staff member, she stated, "It's clear why we're not getting the benefit of a digital video system."

Proposal Writing - Type #2 Implementation Notes

"Miguel," asked my assistant superintendent a few years ago, " could you give me a proposal that shares how you're going to accomplish everything?" Having done a few implementation plans already--and suffering the tediousness of preparing the paper versions of those--I decided to abbreviate the standard form I use for an implementation plan into something shorter. Here's what I ended up with, which I'll label as "Type #2 - Implementation Notes." The Type 2 proposal has these headers in it:

1. Goal
2. Vision of What Successful Implementation would look like
3. Background Information
4. Content Area Focus
5. Professional Learning
6. Implementation Phases
7. Key Areas to Implementation Success
8. Implementation Timeline which includes a table with action step, office/staff responsible, and a completion date.
9. Appendix with information such as:
• Readiness Checklist
• Hardware Assessment

Below is an example of such a proposal: Goal Directly impact student achievement through enhancement of the learning tools available to students and their teachers. To achieve this, this initiative will provide an elementary campus chosen by the Offices of Math and Science—judged eligible by their criteria—with 95 Palm Tungsten C Handheld Computers, the necessary peripherals and software, and then assess their impact on student learning. Aside from the goal of impacting student learning, this initiative also seeks to do the following: 1. Ensure an effective use of handheld technology in elementary classroom settings to impact math, science, and reading. 2. Transform teaching and learning practices as informed by research and best practices. 3. Provide ubiquituous access to handheld technology at the point of need. Portrait of a Handheld-Enabled Classroom Both teachers and students are engaged in an ongoing learning process, in which content area and technology skills are embedded in lesson activities. Classroom instruction is primarily student-centered, but the role of the teacher is vital in guiding and facilitating learning, as well as helping assess student work. Assessment is authentic and ongoing. Expectations of student performance are extremely high. Technology tools are used transparently throughout the curriculum by students as well as teachers to support the learning environment. Classroom work is characterized by a buzz of activity, a high level of intrinsic motivation, and a spirit of discovery as well as a love of learning on the part of all participants. Students demonstrate mastery of required knowledge and skills tof content, tools, audience, and assessment prevails. Background Information Students are expected to demonstrate skills in self-directed learning, thinking, research, and communication as evidenced by the development of innovative products and performances that reflect individuality and creativity. Research on certain uses of handheld computers in the classroom provides reason for both optimism and excitement. Research from SRI published in September 2002 indicates the following:  93% of teachers believe handhelds have a positive effect on learning.  75% of teachers who let students take Palms home report an increase in homework completion.  72% of teachers said handhelds are easier to integrate into classroom activities than desktop computers.  89% of teachers said handhelds are effective teaching tools.[4] To ensure the effective use of handheld computers with students at the target level of progress required by the Texas Education Agency in the StaR Chart, the Office of Instructional Technology has been invited to participate in a joint initiative with Curriculum & Instruction Department Office of Math and Science Services. Content Area Focus The campus chosen has included the use of handhelds in its Campus Improvement Plan for Math and other content areas. The Palms will be used to help support Math Investigations throughout the math scope and sequence. Teachers will work with the math department to modify Math Investigation lessons that utilize the Palms. In addition, handheld computers will be used to enhance the Foss Science Kits and used for Reading/Language arts activities and Social Studies. The campus will buy the ImagiProbe. The ImagiLab activities have been designed to support discovery by encouraging students to ask questions, make predictions, conduct investigations, and develop lines of inquiry. In Math Investigations and science there are many areas where “Documents ToGo” spreadsheets can be used to support what is being studied. Part of the Professional Development will focus in the area of specifically applying the Palm to the Math Investigations. This will be done in coordination with the Math and Science Department. The campus intends to purchase Imagineer Probeware to interface with the Palms as well. Inspiration on the Palms—graphic organizer software--will support a number of curricular areas. Students will have the ability to detail processes to help create a visual picture in their mind. They will also be able to use it as a brain storming tool for writing and for story webs to help understand the literary elements in a story. Please note that the software chosen for this initiative met the stringent standards set by the Software Selection Committee. The software includes ImagiWorks probes, as well as Inspiration for the Palm. The projects students create can be easily be shared on the web. Participants will learn how to install and maintain the software during training. Professional Learning Participants will attend a 18-hour workshop session initially with additional sessions planned during the 2005-2006 school year. Math and Science Services specialists will also attend training and provide support to this initiative. Participants will also submit copies of their lesson plans online and be shared with others not participating in the project. Professional Learning sessions will also be assessed at levels 4 and 5 of the Five Critical Levels of Professional Development Evaluation (Guskey, Tdevelopment, Corwin Press, Inc). Those levels include the following:

• Level 4- Participants’ use of new knowledge and skills:
• Questions Addressed include: Did participants effectively apply the new knowledge and skills?
• Instruments used will include questionnaires, structured interviews, participant reflections, portfolios, video-or audiotape if appropriate.
• Level 5- Student learning outcomes:
• Questions Addressed include:
• a) What was the impact on students?;
• b) Did it affect student performance or achievement?
• Instruments used include questionnaires, portfolios, and student records.

Implementation Phases Although a timeline is provided to frame the implementation, one can observe the progression via multiple phases (shown below). Phase 1: Train 5th grade professional staff in the basic use of handhelds Phase 2: Train 5th grade professional staff in the use of handhelds for academic purposes Phase 3: Train student leaders in basics of handhelds to help facilitate classroom use. Phase 4: Deploy handhelds to classrooms Phase 5: Support Graebner staff through classroom visits and demonstrations Phase 6: Continue Staff development and support throughout the 2005-2006 Academic year Key Areas to Implementation Success This plan considers 3 areas to be key to the implementation success of this Initiative. Those areas include the following: Infrastructure and Technical Support • Enough Palms to provide ubiquitous access to students • At least one syncing station in each classroom • Software to support and enhance classroom instruction Professional Development • Professional Development for Technical Support Groups • Professional Development for Campus Teachers • Training of student leaders to provide assistance for teachers in implementation Assessment and Evaluation • Ongoing assessment will be provided through the implementation process and conducted by the Office of Math and Science. • Teachers participating in the project will also be assessed using the LOTI Instrument in Spring, 2005, as well as the LOTI Walk-Through form. • Student assessments will be done through the use of authentic assessment measures (e.g. rubrics). • Student products will also be displayed via a web site managed collaboratively by Math and Science Services and Instructional Technology. • Teacher developed lessons will be published via the Instructional Technology web site. Implementation Timeline [Table omitted but it should have these components: Column 1: Action Step Column 2: Office Responsible Column 3: Completion Date] Prompt approval and implementation of this plan will ensure successful implementation. While no plan can anticipate with 100% accuracy the issues that will arise, we can anticipate the Professional Development and Support Structures that need to be set in place. This plan seeks to do this, and your feedback is invited. Please submit your comments to: Miguel Guhlin, Director Office of Instructional Services Email: mguhlin@gmail.com 210-527-1400 ext. 115 Appendix A: Campus Readiness Checklist Hardware Checklist • A computer running at least Windows 98 or MAC OS 9 with functioning internet connection capabilities • Functioning internet connectivity in all teachers classrooms • Appropriate Software • Internet Explorer 5.1 or Higher for PC or MAC • A printer for printing student developed projects • Appropriate hardware support for computers • Willingness to participate in additional training after initial training Teacher Participant Expectations • Each teacher will attend 18 hours of professional development (including during school time and after-hours time as appropriate) in support of this initiative. • Each teacher will sign a handheld agreement appropriate for the Palm Tungsten C. • Each teacher will develop 2 lessons for publication during the Spring, 2004 semester and 3 additional lessons during the 2004-2005 school year. • Each participating teacher will be expected to present at the 2005 Students' Technology Fair with a follow-up presentation at the TCEA 2006 State Conference in Austin. Campus Leadership Team and Campus Administrator Expectations • Integration of Learning in Hand initiative into the Campus Improvement Plan for 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 school years. • Commitment to support with the purchase of additional hardware (e.g. Wireless access points, Ultra-Thin keyboards) and software as recommended and agreed upon by the Campus Leadership Team. • Commitment to support the initiative regardless of campus administrator changes • Commitment to replace Palm Tungsten Cs damaged or destroyed—or other peripherals--during the time of the Initiative (2004-2006).

Proposal Writing - Type #1 Quick Proposal

I often find myself in a position where I have to quickly throw together a proposal, an implementation plan or, what I affectionately call, "implementation notes." Each takes a different form, although the purpose of each is to obtain approval/permission to move ahead. Sometimes, proposals are labelled "executive summaries." Again, the purpose of each of these documents defines them as proposals rather than anything else, like an executive summary or abstract. For lack of a better title, I'm simply going to name this as a "Type #1: Quick Proposal" form to distinguish it from longer proposal formats. Type #1: Quick Proposal This is a really quick proposal form that I put together for a NECC 2008 Professional Learning Leadership initiative. The main headers include Proposal, Research, Cost, Registration Process, and Give Back. It looks like this: Proposal This proposal recommends that SAISD fund attendance at the NECC 2008 Conference taking place June 29-July 2 in San Antonio, Texas for 80 principals and/or campus instructional coordinators. Administrators play a pivotal role in determining how well technology is used in our schools. Enabling administrators to attend NECC 2008 enables SAISD to define what administrators need to know and be able to do in order to discharge their responsibility as leaders in the effective use of technology in our schools.

"Integrating technology throughout a school system is, in itself, significant systemic reform. We have a wealth of evidence attesting to the importance of leadership in implementing and sustaining systemic reform in schools. It is critical, therefore, that we attend seriously to leadership for technology in schools." — Don Knezek, ISTE CEO

Research School leaders, especially at the campus, need access to professional learning opportunities that help them to better understand the best uses of technology in educational settings. Some research regarding the role of the campus principal and leadership:

• Obstacles that impede teachers' ability to adopt and integrate tech into their teaching include lack of time, expertise, access, resources and support.
• Technology's greatest impact on student learning appears only after teachers have sufficient skills coupled with an understanding of how various technologies can be used as cognitive tools, and are able to weave tech experiences into their daily practice. This more robust level of understanding comes over time.
• Administrators do not appear prepared for their emerging role in technology and their lack of understanding and resources sometimes creates barriers to change and improvement.
• In many districts, superintendents have remained withdrawn from the technology discussions, leaving to staff the leadership roles of planning and implementing technology.
• Expect principals to take the lead in ensuring that all teachers in their building work towards adopting technology.
• Get principals to make sure that teachers included technology goals in their individual professional development plans. Source: Shuldman, M. (Summer, 2004) Superintendent Conceptions of Institutional Conditions That Impact Teacher Technology Integration. Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Based on this research, as well as others not cited here, it is clear that the role of the principal in effecting use of technology in classrooms is incredibly important. Cost The cost of sending approximately 80 campus principals and/or campus instructional coordinators is based on a cost of $285 for every 10 staff members. For 80 participants, the cost is $22,800. Registration Process To register campus leaders for the NECC 2008 Conference, the Office of Instructional Technology Services will take the following steps: 1.Notify principals and campus instructional coordinators that there are 80 slots available on a first-come, first-served for NECC 2008 registration. Participants would be expected to register via the Office of Instructional Technology Services and submit critical information needed by no later than Friday, May 16, 2008. Registration is now open online at http://snipurl.com/[REMOVED] 2.Once funding source(s) is provided by the Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction, the Office of Instructional Technology Services will register campus leadership who have registered by Friday, May 16, 2008. Give Back Participants at NECC 2008 will be expected to deliver 2, two-hour presentations about what they learned at NECC 2008 and submit a short form sharing how they are going to implement that learning at their campus for the 2008-2009 school year. Give back completion must be recorded by December, 2008.

The Innovative CIO

The Innovative CIO

 

The Innovative CIO

Abilene's top technology officer Mark Gabehart shares his ideas on change and innovation.

By Miguel Guhlin

Mark Gabehart, the new chief technology officer for Abilene Independent School District in Texas, actively embraces change in his work. School CIO spoke with Gabehart about innovating in K–12 districts.

Q. Before you took your current role at Abilene ISD, you were the executive director for technology initiatives and support at La Porte ISD in La Porte, Texas? What was your role?
A. I was responsible for overall technology initiatives implemented in the district. This involves technology integration—ensuring that technology applications and essential knowledge and skills are integrated with core content areas. Applications we used include PLATO Learning for credit recovery, Scholastic Read 180 for struggling readers, and Renaissance Learning to encourage kids to read books. It also involved managing administration to ensure that the staff job appraisals are done in a meaningful way and as seamlessly as possible. Finance system, time and attendance system, applicant system—they all need to work together.

Q. What role does technology play when it c