Podcast #7 SW MSTA PLN Ning workshop

The previous post introduced this presentation.  This presentation by SW regional President-Elect, Stephanie Paine-Phillips, was to teach local MSTA presidents how to use our new Professional Leadership Network.  The network was created using a Ning to help local MSTA presidents collaborate, communicate, and learn.  Our region is excited to lead the way for our state MSTA.    MSTA already has a state PLN in the works.

Unfortunately, this workshop  started off with people having trouble logging-in.  Several helpers (including me) circulated during the workshop to individually help people get logged in.  Stephanie did a great job despite any glitches.  Give a listen.

 

 SW MSTA Professional Leadership Network [19:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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E-Podcast #6 Professional Leadership Network

On April 23rd the Southwest Region of the Missouri State Teachers Association launched their Professional Learning Network.  I’m currently Vice-President of the region.   When the region officers met this year.  We wanted to help support our local MSTA presidents in serving their members.  We wanted to help them communicate with, collaborate with, and learn from their fellow presidents.  Social Networks seemed to be a natural fit.

This slide cast is the introduction I gave at our Leadership Conference on our Professional Leadership Network.  It is an overview and rationale for using the network.

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Where I’m learning

Jennifer Waggoner’s blog post today How My Network Is Impacting Me got me thinking about my online learning through my professional online network. She reflected on examples of her learning and ended with:

So — how has your network impacted you??

I feel a need to respond.

Through my professional learning network, I have learned that blogging is about more than posting my thoughts online. It is more than asking people to comment on my blog.

It is about the learning, the growing, the criticism, the stretching, the conversation, the contribution to the larger online community. A blog is only one cog in the network gears. My networks is made up of my blog, my class blog, blogs on my iGoogle reader, Ed Tech Talk, Twitter (somewhat)

Image via CrunchBase

, Ning/Diigo, and podcasts downloaded through iTunes.

Through these various social networking tools, I build my relationships with educators around the world.  We post and respond in a global conversation.  I am not passively taking in my learning.  I am responding to and interacting with my learning.  By making my learning active, I am: understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  Collaboration helps me see educational issues and approaches from various perspectives, giving me a much more three dimensional view of the big picture.

In the 21st century we do not have the luxury of closing our door and teaching.  Our students will be a part of the global community when they graduate and using the network will be an essential part of their jobs.  If we don’t do it, then we certainly can’t teach our students to use these Web 2.0 tools effectively.  If we don’t teach them, then who will?

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Reflection on full day school workshop

    The kids were off for Martin Luther King. Jr.’s birthday, but the teachers had an all-day inservice.  I was kind of look forward to it because our speakers were supposed to tell us about how Ruby Paine’s Framework for Understanding Children in Poverty  would help our kids.  Nearly half the kids in my class are on Free/Reduced lunch, so I was very interested in how I could help them to achieve better.

The people who showed up were 3 administrators from Hutchinson, KS USD 308 school district.  The proceeded to tell us about the impressive gains their district had made on No Child Left Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress.   Over half their students live in poverty, but they pulled their students’ achievement above the ever-rising AYP proficiency bar.  It’s impressive, and I wondered how they did it.  They credited it to 5 things:

1. Ruby Paine’s program  $$$
2. Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures program $$$
   
3. Koality Kids / Quality Keys program  $$$
4. Data driven curriculum alignment and assessment analysis
5. Technology integration

They spent some bucks on the first three training programs.

They spent the rest of the day telling us about what the Ruby Paine program, Koality Kids program, and data were, but very little about how we could use it in our classroom.   I was excited to hear that they had successfully implemented Cooperative Learning and Technology integration into their district.  That’s what I wanted to hear.  Nada.

Instead we got cramped points full of lists and words too small to see.  We got a birds-eye, administrator overview. Each presentation, Koality Kids, Ruby Payne, and data, was abstract.  Each presentation had 5 minutes of sunshine that gave me an activity or graphic organizer I could use.  I could have gone without the other 55 minutes from each.  I guess it’s par for the course for full-day inservices.  I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

I still would like to know more about Cooperative Learning structures, address the needs of students in poverty, and technology integration.  I guess I will still have to search for it on my own.  Do you have some good ideas for resources?  I’ll include here ones I find useful in my classroom.

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Reflections on Workshop 2.0 - Blogs as Classroom pages

I just finished my first workshop for this year. It was on Making Classroom Web Pages with Blogs. It was open to all teachers in my district, only 4 came. I tried a new, modified format which had mixed results.

Workshop 2.0 - I wanted a workshop that was more interactive than a standard “sit and get” workshop.
Overall the workshop was a success. The participants learned a lot of what they wanted to know through our conversations and left with a classroom web page (actually 3 pages). I’ll do a 3 hour version of this workshop next month at our local Southwest Center for Educational Excellence. Upon reflection, I think there are some things I would like to change for next time.

1. I showed them 3 places to make web pages: Blogger, Edublogs, and Wetpaint. I think I will leave out Blogger next time. The purpose I put it in was to show them how easy it is to make a blog, but it took more time than it was worth.
2. I think I’ll invert the agenda and show Wetpaint first instead of last, since they have to sign up for it anyway to edit any pages. I ran out of time to show them more about Wetpaint, even though we used it for the whole workshop.
3. I had a separate notes and agenda page. The notes page was unnecessary because it involved too much flipping back and forth. We could just use the agenda page for notes.
4. Instruct the participants on how to flip back to the wiki on a separate tab to take notes. I don’t think they understood that it was Ok to edit the agenda. I could ask separate people to add various notes to the agenda during the workshop. Collaborative note-taking on a wiki is a very new idea, and may take a while to work out kinks.
5. Most participants still wanted to use pen and paper to jot notes on. I guess I’ll give in and copy an agenda for them to take notes on.
6. The beginning workshop writing prompt needs to be more open-ended, but not general in purpose. Maybe, “Why do you want create a web page?” This needs to be one wiki page instead as comments on a blog entry. They will also need an overlap task for those who finish their answer early.
7. To get participants to use the treaded discussion, I need to teach it, give a stimulus video, then give them some time to think, type, and reflect.
8. I need to be prepared to talk about Edublogs control panel.
9. I should include how to add a Feedjit map and Voki script to the blog.
10. Quit 5 minutes early to allow reflection time at the end to comment on a “Takeaway” Edublogs post.

There were also many things I liked.

1. I loved using the Wetpaint wiki as an online handout while teaching about the Wetpaint wiki.
2. I think it would be Ok to integrate more about 21st century skills: internet safety, blogs, wikis, connected networks, collaboration, Creative Commons, global focus, and the role of creativity in learning. They were curious about the direction technology is moving in education.
3. The discussion was great.
4. The examples of how I had used blogs, wikis, and my classroom web page in my classroom were very illustrative.
5. They were fascinated by the Feedjit and Clustermaps map of visitors. (It’s one of my favorites, too.)

Workshop 2.0 is a new approach, but I think it has tremendous potential after some adjustments. Read/Write Web interactions will have to be taught, though. If you have ideas or comments, please leave them below.

• Since it was such a small group, the workshop turned out to be a good mix of lecture, discussion, hands-on, and one-on-one just-in-time learning.

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