Over 2 years ago, I had the opportunity to be a part of a monthly Critical Friends Group, a professional learning community made up of 10 or so colleagues with two fellow teachers facilitating. Twice a month different teachers had the opportunity to formally present a teaching dilemma to the group, and we used highly structured protocols to help the colleague think through possible solutions, get to underlying issues and expand their thinking around the dilemma.

I remember in particular our 8th grade Spanish teacher struggling with ways to authentically assess her students’ oral skills without it being the tremendous time-drain her current system required. I vigorously suggested some technology solutions, including GarageBand, mp3 recorders, etc. as something that would benefit both her and the students, and while she was intrigued, she simply wasn’t ready. Last year we touched base about voice recordings again, but it still never went anywhere. Still not ready.

This year, something shifted. We installed an LCD projector, document projector and interactive whiteboard in her classroom over the summer, which she’s been using with great relish and success. My colleague and I expanded our roles this year, and are now directly supporting our 6th-8th grade teachers rather than focusing exclusively on K-5. And she’s ready. Simply put, she’s ready.

She approached me two weeks ago wondering about a project she does each year with the kids writing and reciting Spanish “pickup lines” or piropos. She asked whether I had any cool technology tools that might enhance this project, and indeed I did! I suggested teaching Voicethread to her kids, which would allow them to both say and write their piropos, and would provide them with an opportunity to comment (in Spanish) on each other’s work. I showed her a few examples I had collected on my new MCDS Ed Tech Wiki and she was completely sold on the idea.

Today we launched the project with her first 2 sections of 8th Grade Spanish students. Predictably, the kids were thrilled and had a blast doing the work. But most exciting for me was seeing this teacher taking so many risks, figuring things out on her own, learning alongside her students, and the lightbulb going off in a big way. She reminded me that this was the very first time she had ever even used one of our mobile laptop carts in her classroom with students, and told me about two more ways she intends to use Voicethread before the end of the year. I will post about those later.

At the same time, one of my Ed Tech partners-in-crime sat in on an incredibly frustrating grade-level meeting today. One of the grades she works with is about to start a big Social Studies unit and asked her for a way to integrate technology into the mix. She researched and prepared a suite of delicious choices for them to look at, chock full of examples, simple ideas and marvelous rich connections to the content. They couldn’t have been less interested in the ideas she was pitching, and she left feeling frustrated, confused, and sad for the students.

So what’s the take-away lesson for me? That integrating technology is, of course, a process that takes time. That we are planting seeds that may not take root right away, but that eventually will. That we need to shift our emphasis away from making changes this year and look realistically at the next three to five years or even longer. Which, of course, is impossible. Voicethread wasn’t even around nine months ago!

At a recent meeting our Head of School referred us to an image described by Jim Collins in his wonderful book Good to Great — that of the flywheel. The concept reminds us that with consistent effort over time, pushing and pushing will eventually build momentum until there is finally a breakthrough. Click here for a nice description of the buildup-breakthrough flywheel. I found the wonderful flash animation illustrating this concept at http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog which I have embedded below:

(Snake image from http://flickr.com/photos/cpstorm/158374275/)

I decided to use an image from my own school. This photo came from a project one of our Art Teachers did with 6th Graders last Spring. They took a series of photographs that represented who they are. They then used art class to experiment with Photoshop and manipulated their photos in several ways. They also had an opportunity to comment on each other’s work. I love how this photo captures art and tech.

Learning Together, Everywhere

3 Simple Meme Rules:

• Post a picture from a source like Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce. (What is Pownce?)

Tag. Your turn — what are you passionate about sharing with the kids you teach?

• Barbara Bray from Rethinking Learning
• Richard Kassisieh from Kassblog
• Anie from MCDS Book Blog
• Brian S. from Loose Parts
  
• Janice Friessen from Texas Malahini

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/)

 Click here to see the projects.

We had our first meeting today, and while I was thrilled to see that 12 kids showed up, I was somewhat disappointed that none of them were girls. In any event, the boys were eager to get started recording podcasts today and I had to pull back the reins a bit as we had some decisions to make. Were we blogging and podcasting or just podcasting? Was this a blog about life at school or about life in general? Was the target audience the whole world or just the MCDS community? Would each podcast episode have several segments, or would each group/topic do a separate podcast? How would we preserve the students’ anonymity?

In any event, I asked the kids how many of them had already blogged or podcasted outside of school. About 5 hands went up. The subject matter on their blogs ranged from movies to music to skiing. They divided themselves into 3 groups of 4 and got to work right away, and their emphases will be Music, Humor and Movies. This has the potential to be pretty cool.

Our home will be: http://www.mcdsblogs.org/blogclub and I’ll be sure to post updates on our progress.

• Loose Parts: Our twin sons’ preschool teacher recently launched this fantastic blog, where he intends to explore issues pertaining to Early Childhood Education, anti-bias curriculum, communication between teachers and parents, professional development, etc.
• The K Files: Our next-door neighbor (and close friend) is documenting her school search for a kindergarten for her daughter. She is tackling some rocky terrain, including the San Francisco USD lottery system, public school vs. private school, school readiness, language immersion, etc. Her blog is already receiving a fair amount of traffic and is stimulating some lively debate in the comments sections.
• Abby & Jon’s Pregnancy Blog: Abby, a friend and former colleague, attended my CAIS presentation last spring and decided to make her first blog about her pregnancy & and new parenthood experiences.
• Kindness Mural Project: Armed with successful blogging practices, Abby used a blog to document an amazing global elementary art project she piloted at The Phillips Brooks School last Spring.
• MCDS Book Corner: One of the MCDS Librarians, Anie S., launched a blog this Fall, highlighting what’s going on in our school’s library.

http://k12online.wm.edu/its_elementary/player.html

http://k12online.wm.edu/GradeOneClassroom.wmv

Over the summer, we continued the process of creating a standard classroom technology setup in our 4th-8th grade classrooms. Almost every classroom now contains a permanent mounted LCD projector, DVD/VHS player, stereo tuner, speakers and lectern. In a growing number of classrooms, we have also installed interactive whiteboards and document projectors. Teachers’ feelings about this new equiment ranged from ambivalent to trepidatious to thrilled. We did a brief training in late-August, showcased how some of our early adopters are using their new tools at a meeting in mid-September and have been doing plenty of one-on-one handholding, troubleshooting and training. A few weeks ago, I decided to wander between our Upper School classrooms to see whether I could capture teachers in the act of using their new tools. I was overjoyed to find technology being used in a range of ways, across curricular and grade-level areas.

Below is a slideshow of the Upper School teachers (Grades 6-8) using their new classroom technology on a random Friday morning in late September. (This slideshow was my first attempt at using RockYou and the jury’s still out for me about whether I like this tool.)

[rockyou 87732222]

While several committee members felt excited about exploring peer observation, feedback and mentoring, others hesitated and indicated that for some colleagues, the concept of an open-door policy would be intimidating, inhibiting and uncomfortable. If we do decide that we value a culture of sharing, does it need to be an official “sanctioned” program with parameters and expectations? Or would it work better as a grass-roots “drop in whenever you feel like it” type of thing? Hmmmm…

The concept of “teaching in private” simply wouldn’t work for me in my role. By very definition, a Technology Coordinator must partner with classroom teachers and uncover what’s going in the classroom in order to create meaningful connections to technological tools, skills and projects. My new adventure with teaching kindergartners right in the K classrooms is having the fringe benefit of allowing me to observe my colleagues in action on a weekly basis. When I hear Doug teaching a new Letter of the Week song with his banjo, or see Richard explaining how the classroom spider will eat the cricket he’s about to feed it, or look around the walls of Janet’s room and see classrom documentation showing how they are incorporating math concepts into their morning meetings, I am growing and learning as a teacher.

Download

Doug and Richard are also using classroom documentation to make the process of learning more visible in their classrooms. The ways in which they do this, however, is slightly different in each classroom. Janet posts a daily journal entry to her class website daily. Richard (on the right) posts a month’s worth of daily journals at the end of each month. Doug (on the left) digs into a few individual classroom projects each year, and documents the entire project in great detail. Click below to see an example of Richard’s Monthly Journal and Doug’s recent Earthmover Project:

Richard’s Monthly Journal (.pdf)

Doug Earthmover Project (.pdf)

For Janet, documenting learning in her classroom on a daily basis became an important goal, and she asked for help in getting started. What began as a 1-2 hour process last fall has now been whittled down to a 20 minute/day committment on her part. The steps include taking digital photos, transferring them to her laptop, dragging them into a template she’s created in Keynote, typing up the description and student quotes, saving as a .pdf and uploading the file onto her classroom web page. Here are a few examples:

If you attended today’s session, please be sure to leave a comment letting us all know how you’re intending to use blogs & podcasts in your schools. And once you’ve gotten one set up, be sure to let us know how to find you!

You can download a .pdf (with links) of my presentation (updated as of 8/07) here:
Hello World!

http://www.mcdsblogs.org/trout