I’m sitting in a meeting in an 8th Grade English classroom right now. I grabbed Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier off the shelf, which I haven’t read. Here goes:

“And I wiggled my sack onto my back and walked on.”

This past Fall, our Upper School (grades 6-8) Division Head decided to incorporate some Web 2.0 tools into her administrative repertoire. Rather than passing out the thick 3-ring binder with paperwork at our August division meeting, she created a series of Google Docs which she updates monthly. Before each Division Meeting she sends us an iGoogle tab with the Google Docs front and center, and features widgets on the tab that teachers might find useful and interesting (Spanish Word of the Day, This Day in History, NASA Image of the Day, etc.)

She has also been asking us to bring our laptops to each division meeting, where we have been taking the first 10-15 minutes of meeting time to leave comments on a blog she set up for the division, in part to address inevitable technical issues on the spot, and partly as a way to ensure that everyone contributes. Several colleagues immediately balked, asking “why are we taking valuable time away from our meetings to type our thoughts instead of talking face-to-face with the people here in the same room?!” She persisted.

This month she posted a series of questions on the blog ahead of time about some Fall professional development events we’ve participated in. She asked us to leave comments on the post PRIOR to our division meeting. Here’s a comment I just noticed this evening:

“I must confess that my initial reaction to the blog requirement was not especially favorable because I couldn’t quite see the advantages of pecking away at my keyboard instead of sharing oral comments in a face-to-face setting. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that this served a need for which I have long advocated: some sort of a public forum for colleagues to share their thoughts about guest speakers and large-scale meetings. For example, I was disappointed in certain features of J’s presentation (e.g. she rushed through the more nitty-gritty material in the second half of the talk and she passed out 22 pages of hard copy to each individual while espousing sustainability at all levels.) On the other hand, I am encouraged to hear through the blog that many of you felt inspired and well informed by what she shared (which has modified my own reaction to the presentation.)”

And here’s another:

“I think this is a great process (the blogging) because it frees up time for other things in meetings. I will defer to the teachers about what those things should be, but it seems like a good use of time to prethink and communicate with each other and not rehash all this in a meeting setting.”

Alas, yet another example of one of the most important personality traits an administrator ought to possess which I sorely lack…patience with the process.

(image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soulphoto/365740316/)

1. iGoogle – Our tech-savvy Upper School Division Head has made the radical decision to go paperless with her fall teacher “notebook” at our upcoming division retreat. Rather, she has put all of the important parent letters, schedules, meeting agendas, etc. into Google Docs. She will then send each of us an iGoogle tab with the Google Docs gadget front and center. Also on the tab will be a variety of gadgets she wants to highlight as possible teaching tools. Each month she will send us a new tab with new gadgets, always keeping the Docs front and center. As we’ve been playing with this idea, I’ve been creating my own personal tabs to keep track of my favorite new gadgets and an aggregator for my favorite blogs.
2. Ning – On the heels of the fabulous Building Learning Communities conference this past July, two of our 7th and 8th grade teachers have decided to set up Ning Learning Communities for their students. One teacher is an English teacher and looks forward to giving each of her students their own blog space through the Ning, and hopes that it will become a safe place for her students to experiment with their writing. A math teacher plans to use his Ning as a place for students to discuss homework, work on group projects together, and to show their step-by-step work somehow. Can’t wait!
3. Scratch – My Ed Tech partner-in-crime, Jen Cronan Flinn, and I attended a full-day seminar at MIT this summer and had the opportunity to learn how to use Scratch, the latest educational programming software to come out of the MIT Media Labs (home of Logo.) We are excited to pilot Scratch in several grades, and one of our goals is to come up with ways beyond math to integrate this fantastic program.

I’ve been stuck in bed sick with my own 5-year old twins all week with this terrible flu/plague that’s been going around. After enough rounds of the card game War, enough chapters of Harry Potter, and every Disney DVD ever released, I downloaded a few episodes of The Electric Company to watch with my sons while we all coughed our heads off in unison. I have vivid memories of many of the show’s sketches (remember the silhouetted faces singing “ch…air….chair”? or “It’s the plumber! I’ve come to fix the sink!”)? Sure, I remembered that it was funny. And that it was very cool. But what I didn’t remember was how incredibly educational it was.

As my sons and I watched, I marveled at how Fargo North, Decoder indeed was teaching how to decode sentences using methods I’ve seen so often in our first grade classrooms. Or the series of skits and songs about the silent “e” changing a kit into a kite, The Adventures of Letterman rescuing a man who had been enjoying his tub only to have it turned into a tube, etc. and by dinnertime, my boys were talking about the silent “e,” punctuation and apostrophes. While they are certainly interested in letters and writing, and are showing many signs of pre-literacy, this was downright dramatic. I’d like to go on the record as saying nothing currently on our television airwaves comes anywhere close to the pedagogy, creativity and energy I watched with my sons in these Electric Company episodes. What a brilliant show! The question I’m left with, of course, is how to bring even a tiny kernel of this kind of teaching into my classroom.

But of course, the most fun was seeing Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Violet the Blueberry from Willie Wonka, Bill Cosby, and hearing the voices of Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. So for your viewing pleasure, I’ve found a little clip of a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader, the grooviest reading cat in town. To quote Easy, throughout my childhood The Electric Company always helped me to see that “Top to bottom, left to right, reading stuff is outtasite!”

In early January, I used my commute time to listen to a podcast of Ed Tech Talk’s Women of the Web show featuring Konrad Glogowski. I was completely inspired by his story of how he set up individual blogs for his Canadian 8th Graders and gave them four glorious weeks to blog and write without any guidelines or instructions, only to write about what they were passionate about. (click here for that show’s podcast and show’s chat notes.) Newly inspired to challenge my own 6th Graders, I gave a little speech at the beginning of our most recent Blog Club meeting and challenged them to write about their passions, interests, things they weren’t writing about for school assignments. I followed up with a few examples, none of which anyone took me up on, but they got the general idea.

Toward the end of the Club, one of the quieter students asked me how to create links to individual songs in iTunes. I noticed that the two songs he was linking to were by Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, two of my own personal favorites. I asked him about his interest in classic rock and he instantly lit up and went into an animated rant about how none of his friends understand that this is the music that started it all, that has the best musicians and that everyone his age should be listening to. I looked at him and said “That’s what you should be blogging about.” He responded by saying “I can write that kind of stuff?!” YES! He lamented the fact that our club meetings are so short and I reminded him that he can write posts onto our blog from anywhere with an internet connection, including home. He immediately began typing away, and by the end he exclaimed “This club is so much FUN!” Woo hoo! (Disclaimer: he hasn’t finished his post yet. I’ll link to it as soon as he’s done.) The Blog Club’s blog lives here.

(Jimi Hendrix photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/toofarnorth/134541124/)