Grateful for Discourse, Desperate for Balance

I had a really nice first day of March break today caving with my kids. In the midst of an ever increasing network of people online, I'm in awe of the opportunities that I'm having to connect with other educators in my PLN and beyond, but I'm constantly challenged to keep the balance between what could become a 24/7 workday and my other priorities: family, learning, and a few interesting pursuits along the way to keep me sane. Conscious of how quickly the kids are growing, I know that the huge amount of time I spend online, largely in the evenings since I'm teaching all day, is coming at a cost.

However, I'm so in awe of the teachers I'm meeting up with online that are so caring about their profession and so passionate about learning! This week I found myself challenged by my friend Gary Stager to speak up on Twitter about my beliefs about students and learning, certainly something I'm not encouraged to do in my day-to-day. In fact, in public education we are so rarely asked to develop a personal philosophy of education that it dawned on me that this should be considered quite worrisome! Whole generations of teachers may spend a good chunk of their lifetime becoming 'expert' teachers (at least in terms of years served) and never think very deeply about what it is they are doing that could change the life of a child. This has not been my experience, as what appeals to me most about teaching is my own learning about learning...I'm thankful to have an online community in which to engage in such rich discourse and thankful that after 21 years, I'm still constantly challenged to become a better teacher; there is always more to learn!


Good examples of learning-centred approaches are all around us, and I'm so grateful to my colleagues for sharing their work. When Mike Anderson organized our Skills Canada event at UGDSB this week, I was so impressed with the collaborative, authentic challenges that were presented to the students to promote problem-solving. Lego Robotics, Toon Boom animations, Lego Mechanics, Video Production with Apple Canada, student created Health and Safety presentations, building wind turbines and designing and building replicas of houses were the focus of this event, with a focus on a constructive rather than instructive approach.

This week I've been checking out Ben Hazzard, who creates a collaborative space for teachers, Alec Couros, a prof from Regina that I've met on Twitter who was u-streaming a conference presentation from Calgary this week, and veteran teachers like Peter Skillen taking on new projects like Adobe Youth voices. Also, Nathan Toft and Jane Smith and their portablePD.ca, Kent Manning sharing his love of digital storytelling and Doug Peterson's regular updates on his blog.

You see what I mean? What is a person to do? Not only do I feel a little guilty for being such a taker, and not contributing, but it's such a challenge just to keep up with all this good stuff and keep doing my thing for teachers and students in my school district.

Expanding Our Boundaries....by Sitting on the Edge

The edge of my ZPD that is...

I've just returned from a fabulous two days with Will Richardson in Toronto, at the Expanding Our Boundaries Conference. I was invited to be part of a tech team helping the 100 people or so with a hands-on BYOL event.

I LOVE watching people teach and learn. It's the exhilarating (and sometimes exhausting) part of my teaching journey...that I can be 20 years or so into it, and still be learning so much in order to hone my craft! Will did a great job of providing a lot of options to many different learners and the two days supported what I believe about the co-learning that can go on whenever experts and novices engage together in the learning process.

He had us all on the edge of our ZPD in one way or another:

-many folks were trying out Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis for the first time, and were led through step-by-step demo-style and with help as needed from the tech team
-a mix of expertise at tables allowed the novices to watch and use the expertise of those right beside them


-dialogue was encouraged in the form of collaboration at tables or in the online chat that went on throughout the day and was archived here
-many of the 'experts' in the room spent their time branching off on tangents and networking to push their learning

So for me, I spent my time engaged in the presentation while continually dropping out to help others and then jumping back in to catch up. I actually really loved that, as it was a good blend for me as a learner and I was definitely in "my element" as Sir Ken Robinson might say.
I'm sure that there was a lot that I missed, but now I've got that chat archive to go back to whenever I want and my new network of incredible people to support me when I need something....just in time learning, basically. Check out Kent Manning's experience where he so wonderfully captured the networking that went on over these 2 days! He mentions so many of the wonderful new people I've met and I really hope that my PLN continues to grow with these folks! Check us out on Commun-IT, I really look forward to the future of this network.

I had some "ah ha" moments too. The biggest for me was the idea of using my network more efficiently to drive my own learning. I have been aware and participating to varying degrees in online spaces (social networks, using rss, IM, skype, email, wikis, blogs) but when Will described this "vibrant learning space that cannot be matched in the physical classroom" and provided me with a couple of new tools to leverage and integrate those networks, the lightbulb went on. I didn't 'get' Twitter before I think I might have a new addiction...but what the heck!

So, I stayed up way too late last night, got my TweetDeck going, set up my igoogle page and moved my feeds from bloglines so they stream into my browser homepage along with some better connections to the things I'm working on (docs) and the people who help me learn (chat, email, social networks). I also cracked Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky which has been in my 'to read' pile for ages!

Other new stuff for me:

http://www.fanfiction.net
http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
http://www.diigo.com/
http://ccmixter.org/
http://www.jingproject.com/
http://voicethread.com/#home
and who could forget: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

So, I am trying to manage my own learning in this "world where content is not scarce", as Will mentioned this weekend, in order to help my students and my own children build their PLN in exciting f2f and online environments...an exciting challenge!

Aren't you glad we aren't alone in all this? I agree with Doug we need each other! :)

Concept for my final project

I'm jumping for joy today because I've finally got a solid concept for my final individual project. It is meant to be a resource for teachers to learn about constructivist uses of technology in education, and I've been struggling with how to use stories to tell about different kinds classroom experiences with technology in a way that lets readers construct their own knowledge and perhaps build upon the website and tell their own stories.

I've loved the term bricolage (referred to by educators such as Seymour Papert, Gary Stager, Mitchel Resnick) which I think can, in this case, relate to what holistic educators believe about uniting the parts of a learner: body, mind and soul....hands, head, heart. Bricolage is defined as a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things, and aptly describes the idea that technology, in it's widely varied forms, can be used flexibly and purposefully by learners in order to construct knowledge. The idea of making something, called Constructionism by Seymour Papert, has been an important one to me, and will be reflected in my web project.

And so, I've got a title Bricolage: Connecting Playfully. Now, the scary part is to put my text (which I'm really good at collecting) into a story that somehow reflects me...my holistic attempt at constructing a product from a variety of available things! Yikes!

Mentoring and Freewebs....some thoughts

Well, it's been interesting to be a mentor during my CTL1799 course, although I'm not sure that being known for technology aptitude is helping me 'break out of my box' and explore other areas of holistic approaches. Instead of exploring the art, music or spiritual sites provided by my instructor and countless classmates, I find myself doing what I'm already quite addicted to doing...searching the web and learning how to debug little (oh sure...they never are!) problems.

I've finally decided NOT to go with Freewebs as a web tool, although it's really easy to use and there are a lot of very cool add-ons. The issue that has finally decided that I'll using iWeb is the browser issues. Tonight I went back to one of my pages on the site to copy a link, only to find that all of my quotation mark are now question marks. Arggghhh! This is not okay! I can't believe how long this decision has been in coming...but iWeb it will be. I also maybe consider purchasing RapidWeaver that integrates with iWeb if I need more flexibility.

Group Project

This was a challenging project for our group, but in the end I think we've created an excellent product about the importance of Community and Collaboration. We created a website called Professional Learning Community: Teacher to Teacher Dialogue

and we feature 4 connections: Learning (PLCs), Writing, Social Networks and Bookclubs. It was a great experience to work with this really dedicated group of five who were very concerned with both academics and aesthetics and were very respectful of the busy schedule and strict timeline that needed to be followed. We had excellent trust and openness that allowed for flexibility and creativity, and by choosing parts of the task to focus upon, we were really committed and engaged in our learning.

I learned a ton about Net Generation Learners, something that will be useful next year when I'm talking to teachers about advantages of integrating technology use into their programs. If you are interested in hearing about these learners check out this podcast from Net Day and Educause.
My course is moving along at a frantic pace, probably because it is a 6-week course with many of the assignments requiring partner or group work online. I'm finding it hard to have the time to journal here, and have begun drafting my reflection paper. I've discovered that it's difficult to journal online for the purpose of writing a reflective paper...there are some things that are just best recorded in a private space, although really....who reads your blog anyway?

Putting the Learning Together

It's been an interesting week for me as my work on Social Networking for my group project is morphing into a study of Net Geners (born 1982-91) and the fascinating ways they are using technology and particularly what they would LIKE to be doing in schools. I'm finding this so exciting, because as it turns out we shouldn't be afraid of how kids want to use technology....in fact, they have the same goals as we educators!
Net Geners want:

• communication
• collaboration
• self-directed learning
• and more ways to construct and demonstrate knowledge.

Perfect!
What I've always believed to be the best learning approach then, project-based learning (PBL), is even more important today. PBL allows students to ask the really hard, important questions, to collaborate deeply, and to construct knowledge. Technology is a crucial part of making this learning more engaging, more interactive, faster, and more multi-modal and globally connected than ever before.

For more information on the Net Generation listen to this podcast.