Tag Archives: Changing Teachers

It’s About Relationships

We tech coaches, when we get together, often bandy about unobtrusive and easy to handle jargon. A term that has been popular lately, describing our role is, “It’s about relationships.” (Actually that is not true. We get together and challenge jargon, but I thought it was a cute way to start this post) Back to relationships- in order for us to successfully integrate, implement, incorporate, infuse (whatever ‘i” word you want to use) technology into school systems, then we need to build relationships of trust with the teachers with which we work. This means not pulling out our hair or rolling our eyes when someone can’t click the keys and magically make their machine do the things we can, or when they take three weeks to understand they must cite a picture in a blog post. We have to be patient and understand that it has taken us years to gain the skills and understanding which enable us to help others understand the often complicated concepts and skills we use everyday.

Learning how to be patient and build these relationships has been both challenging and rewarding for me. I am the kind of teacher who sets high standards and expects effort from all my students. I want everyone to love “it” all, the way I do. I don’t tolerate much apathy and goofing around. Even with my own children, I pursue a sort of zealotry when it comes to maturity, politeness, and quest for understanding. Should I expect anything less from my adult learners?

After six weeks of working with some amazingly dedicated teachers, I have learned a few thing, which I am sure apply to all learners young and old:

We all learn at our own pace and faster when it is relevant and interesting.
We learn best when we have time.
We are so often busy with other things that we cannot focus on what we want. ( I have a group of grade 10 students who seem so tired. They tell me they are interested in what we are doing with Of Mice and Men. They tell me it makes them think and the like our class talks, but they can’t give me more because they are swamped with Science at the moment)
We have to remember that the things we teach are not always as important to them as they are to us.
We have to meet learners where they are, not where we want them to be.
Learning takes time. Don’t expect instant results.

I am sure I could come up with many more, but I think you get the point. Being a Tech Coach and working with teachers is teaching me a lot about learning. I love the time I am spending with our teachers. It is great to see so many great blogs sprouting. I love to see a small group of people entering the Twitter stream and thinking differently about the role of technology not only in their pedagogy, but also in their lives.

In closing, I received this email last night from a teacher from my course, and it made me realize that all the hard work has paid off at least for one learner. As a teacher, should we expect anything more?

I wanted to share with you the ENORMOUS STEEP learning curve I have just been through in the last 6 weeks through this 101 computer course.

At the beginning of October I along with a huge group of people arrived at Jabiz’s classroom all set to go on this 101 computer course for blogging, feeling excited and raring to go. Didn’t really know what blogging was and certainly didn’t know what 101 was all about. Nervous but excited I got rid of my class on time and walked over to the building to find his room, struggled with that bit!! Arrived at his clasroom, sat next to Lindsay ( a mistake in itself) and waited for the course to begin.

The first TWO instructions resulted in me and Lindsay looking at each other in horror as we didn’t even know what to do with these TWO simple instructions:

Log on to MSHS network and Open up your gmail

Already stumped we took a bit of time to even do that by which time Jabiz had raced on with terminology I had no idea about. We sat there for an hour and a half and although I admit I am not particularly well read, would prefer being in the gym to reading a book, I still went to uni, I still have a degree and a post grad and I have enough intelligence to get me through life. After just 10 minutes in the class you wouldnt have thought I had even finished school!!! He talked about..pages, blogs, Rss, categories, creative commons, tags, wordpress, flickr, hyperlinksNow don’t get me wrong I know what each of those words mean independently but what the !!!!!!! do they mean in relationship to a 101 blogging workshop. No friggin idea!!!!

Have to say I left that one an a half hour workshop, feeling;

Deflated

Frustrated

Humiliated

Frustrated

Thick

Frustrated

Sick

Frustrated

Headahcey

And other feelings I simply couldn’t write down like ………off!!!!!!

BUT

I went home, had my favourite drink, wrote some emails to the IT people about my concerns, went into school the next day and was listened to and I did go back the following week.

AND NOW…

6 weeks later I stand here as a different person. A happier, more confident blogging woman who still has a huge journey in front of her but much happier.

I now have 4 blogs, I do know what a page, a tag, an RSS, a category is in IT terms and I have started blogging both at home and in school. Admittedly my blogs aren’t like other peoples thought provoking arguments or off the wall statements, but they are very simple and most of them are about AJ and TJ and my latest one is about Santa visiting my boys, hardly intellectual but it is where I am, it is where I am in the blogging journey and it is something I can send to my Mum to show her what life Is like here, so it is working for me.

I have been convinced that I CAN use blogging and I am happy that I didn’t quit after that first session and persevered through the pain to begin my blogging journey.

Take it slow. One learner at a time. Teach what you know and love. If you have any teachers who are new to IT or blogging or both, share this letter with them as a sign of hope. Please go to Lou’s blog directly, if you want to leave her a comment.

Building A Culture

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When I first start teaching DC101 a few weeks ago, I had no idea what to expect. I could not have anticipated the level of reservations and anxiety teachers would have about writing. I didn’t not realize the effect that past experiences many of our staff would bring to the table in terms of writing and sharing, furthermore I never imagined the influence these experiences would have on how they view digital citizenship. It goes without saying, that I have learned a lot in the last three weeks.

In short, I am beginning to see that for many teachers with a limited understanding of connected learning and life online, opening up and publicly sharing (blogging) is a much larger obstacle to overcome, than the fear of insufficient technical skills needed to run a blog. The latter are pretty basic and can be learned with some time and training, but the paradigm shift of understanding online life is a much bigger issue. It’s as if people are realizing that running a blog is not very complicated, but writing one is. Perhaps, the early development should focus on writing, on learning, on sharing. Leave the tech stuff for phase two.

I am seeing that many people still struggle with the notion that their voice matters. People feel that they don’t need to add to the noise. Why would anyone care about what I have to say? Is a common question I see. I get the sense that due to time, stress and administrative expectations, the notion of reflections, sharing and writing about their teaching feels superfluous. What if we gave teachers time to blog throughout their work week? We spend so much time and energy on reports, what if teacher reflection and blogging was considered as important to the administration of schools? What if we allowed our teachers the freedom to be learners? Created supportive communities of fellow teachers, who could blog during school time? What if this wasn’t considered a luxury, but an expectation?

At our school, we are trying to work toward a learner based coaching model. We want to encourage inquiry from our teachers as well as our students. In the realm of technology, we are trying to move away from the traditional notion of training and moving towards a more holistic understanding of how technology influences our personal and professional lives. We are not interested in transferring technology skills, but of building a culture of sharing and learning. An open community, where all members have a space (blogs), where they can feel comfortable collaborating and sharing ideas, creating content, communicating and connecting to each other through the use of various tools on a platform we are calling e-hub, which at this stage consists of a system wide multi-user WordPress platform and The Google suite for education.

When I began, I thought that DC101 would be a way to give staff members the tools they needed to access e-hub, but half-way through I am realizing that we need to start with understanding the why first. Once we have e-hub up and running, and every knows how to access it, then what? Trouble is that I find myself in a chicken-and-egg scenario: We need blogs and a basic understanding of how blogs connect ideas and people to build community and culture, but we cannot understand the power of these networks without using the blogs to connect people.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by US Embassy New Zealand

Having said that, things are going well. The conversations are starting. People are feeling challenged I hope, and they are having conversations about things like Creative Commons for the first time. It will, however, be a long road. Culture is not created overnight. This understanding is important for schools hoping to implement blogging and expecting kids and teachers to magically use them authentically. It is not very difficult to set up a few class blogs, or even to implement blogging school wide. It is also not very difficult to train students and teachers to write posts, add hyper-links, add photos, video, etc… but creating an organic system where teachers openly share their ideas without fear, where they read the work of their peers and comment, collaborate and create together is a much more time consuming situation. If you are interested in blogging with your class or in your school, you may want to have some pretty big discussions before hand.

It is clear that we can create blogs as portfolios and have students upload post-after-post of homework. We can create class blogs, which teachers use as administrative tools to share curriculum with parents and students, but is this enough? Is this blogging? Of course not this is content management. You might as well use Moodle or Studywiz. Blogging has to be more than content management. So what next?

I am not sure. We have only been doing this for two months. I should be pleased with what we do have so far, but as always I want it all and I want it now, to quote Jim Morrison. Perhaps, you can share some of your ideas. What does blogging culture mean to you? What can it look like at a school? What do you do at your school that promotes a culture of sharing? How do you get teachers and students to write authentic posts, not just upload assignments? As you can see there are many questions, but very valid ones I think, before we assume that since we have blogs at school that we are really blogging.

Deal With The Fire

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It is only 9:00 pm and I am exhausted. Don’t get me wrong; I am suffering from the fatigue that comes from hard work and personal fulfillment. I have been working very hard lately and my brain is a buzz and snapping a bit too quickly at times. Perhaps I need another sojourn into the jungle, or some deep breathing, mediation or a simple dip in the ocean, but a break is not on the agenda for a few more weeks. So I need to roll up the sleeves, plug-in and see where this train is headed.

I started teaching a course called DC101 for teachers at my school. It meets twice a week for one and half hours; it is on my mind 24/7. I sometimes wake up in the middle of night and think about ways to convince people to blog. It is crazy. I have become the school lightening rod for all things digital. This constant need to be the voice for the 21st century can be taxing. Again, don’t get me wrong; I know I brought it upon myself, unfettered passion can sometimes be contagious and you need to be able to deal with the fire.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Dan LXIX

And a fire is what we may have on our hands at school. It is slow in building, but I can feel the excitement and energy of our teachers. Before I continue, let me say that we have an amazing staff. I have a little over 40 people who have signed on for no credit, in their own time, to push their thinking and themselves beyond their comfort zones. It is a beautiful thing. Because of the work we have already done, hopefully a few of them (you) are reading this post from your RSS reader.

We have begun to discuss and share some of the apprehension people are having about a public online life.

The three main things that seem to come up over and over are: time, the feeling of having nothing to say, and fear of the unforgiving permanence of the Internet. I do not have the energy now to write to each point. I hope that we can touch on all of these issues in the next few weeks, and that the participants will come to their own conclusions. I just wanted to share some misconceptions about blogging that I have overcome, in hopes that my sharing will help others.

You are publishing so everything has to be perfect. Teachers are used to being experts in their respective fields, and so they feel that if they are not “publishing” a PHD thesis style post then they will judged and evaluated. Perhaps an administer or parent will question their ability, if their blog posts express doubt or confusion, or worse TYPOS! Be a risk taker. Write from your heart. Do what we ask kids to do. Reflect honestly, authentically. Be vulnerable and your admin and parent community will respect and appreciate your openness to show your learning. Life-long learning is more than a piece of jargon to put on a resume. Jump in and write.

Nobody cares what I have to say. If this is true for you, then it is true for your students. And if this is the case then lets all go home. We tell students that they matter. That they have a voice and that they should learn to share and express this voice. We tell them that when they talk to others, they will learn and grow from collaboration. We tell them that writing is an art, that you craft and improve over a life time. We tell them not to fear failure. We tell them to dig deep and find their passion. We tell them that they are special and that we want to hear what they think and feel….now just tell yourself those things when you don’t know what to write.

It has to all be about tech or education. I don’t like writing about tech all the time. I like writing about things that excite and frustrate me. Find things in your day that you find meaningful. I like to write about epiphanies I have in class. I like to write about ideas that worked and those that failed. I like to use my writing to connect with others, but really I use my writing to help me make sense of my teaching, my life, myself. There is empowerment in vulnerability. Open up a little and see what happens. Take baby steps.

You have to blog everyday and all the time. Write when you feel you have no choice. I guess I have always felt the need to write. I have been wishing for a blog since I was 12 years old. Maybe not everyone has this obsession with writing, but set a manageable plan. A post a week. Set up an hour on Sunday night and make it happen. Make it fun. Not a chore.

People who blog do nothing but spend time online. I have a full life with two kids, a wife, a voracious appetite for books and TV and many other hobbies. But I make time to write. I have a routine: Music and the couch- Me and the my words. Make one up. Stick to it.

I am officially out of gas. It is 9:22. See that took me twenty minutes. I will now crawl into bed, read a bit, watch some TV and try to rest. Hang in there guys. You are doing an amazing job. This, whatever it is we are doing, takes time. The fact that you are excited and here is a great first step. You see the value of connected learning. You see the value in sharing ideas with an audience. You see the value of creation. In short, you are starting to see that technology is not about computers. It is about people, ideas, creativity, passion. It is about “real” life.

When I Say Jump…

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If you do not speak or read techaneese feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph.

Will we find a plug-in that allows students the ability to customize their headers, but not have the ability to change the theme all together? Will we be able to figure out how to aggregate specific tags to post to several blogs? Can we subscribe to specific tags or categories? So teachers can subscribe to student blogs based on tags related to their classes not whole blogs? Will we get all the student Gmail accounts up and running by the end of next week? Will the Google Calendars work seamlessly like we planned. Will our server be able to handle the blogs next week? Will we find all the right plug-ins to make for an easy blogging experience? Will teachers understand what we are trying to do? Appreciate it? Enjoy it?

I am nervous. I am stressed. I am terrified. Two days into my new role at school, and I am realizing that things are different already. When you are a classroom teacher, what you do everyday really only affects you and your students, maybe your department, but as a tech facilitator suddenly your ideas, however brilliant they may have seemed at first, take on a much heavier feel. It becomes suddenly clear that they could crash and burn quite easily. It feels like everyone is looking to you for answers. Answers you may have uncovered minutes before. The pressure is already palpable for me. After two days. There are no students on campus and nothing has even been rolled out. Wow. I need to breathe and regroup.

A little context. I am only teaching three English classes this year and filling the rest of of my timetable as a tech coach (We are still writing the job description and title. I have already had a few people come ask me how to add folders in Mail or how to print. We hope to move away from the day-to-day help desk stuff and start looking at deeper pedagogical conversations that lead to shifts in teaching and learning. Will keep you posted.) The big initiative right off the bat for us this year is that we are moving away from a confined VLE and moving toward a system that is made up of K-12 WP blogs hosted on our sever, for teachers, students, and admin. We hope these blogs will act as portfolios as well as communication tools, discussion forums and more. We are building the system from scratch and as I mentioned before it is scary. We are also moving toward a Google Campus for access to Google Docs for back of the house curriculum creation and storage, as well as use of Calendars, Reader and Sites for a variety of things: student work, RSS, and document navigation among other things. It is scary.

Now that you have read the context, let’s spend a few lines on reflection:

The best part about learning is the not knowing. The guessing. The exploration. The trial and error. The failure. But suddenly when you are in front of a group of teachers who are looking to you to know what you are doing, learning feels like a waste of time. They need you to know this stuff. You have to know to teach right? What do you mean you don’t know how to do that? Then why are you in charge of teaching me?

What is lost is the sense that learning begins with not knowing. The one idea I hope to impart on people this year is that technology is not always a smooth path that will make their lives easier. That notion is a myth. It is ironic that we look to technology to make our lives easier, only to spend so much time and energy agonizing about how much of our time it saps. How many times have we watched some poor sap awkwardly stare about room as the very tool he/she was touting as life changing didn’t work? How many times have we been in that spot, “No I swear Google Docs will make this easier.” No one can log in. Tables act weird. Back to the drawing board. So why do we do it? Why do we spend so much time talking about technology and what it can or cannot do? Why have I chosen to try and convince grown professionals that learning about it will make them better teachers? That it will help their learning.

For the last two nights, I have laid awake in bed worrying. Worrying about some of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, but when I wasn’t stressed about Themes and RSS on WP, I was thinking about why we choose to focus on technology when it isn’t always as easy as advertised. This is the analogy I came up with in my tired, sleep deprived brain:

We sell technology as a sprint. It is fast. Efficient. Breathtaking. It makes everything it touches fast, efficient, and breathtaking…but as we all know this is seldom the case. It is often frozen, loading, or crashing. It often feels more like a sprinter who can barely get out of the blocks, let alone finish a race. For me technology is more like a hurdle race. Or maybe a marathon. Or maybe a marathon with hurdles. And motes. With crocodiles. And hot lava. You get the point. Technology is not about ease; it is about obstacles. It is about problems. And understanding that when you have problems you often have solutions. The beauty of technology is overcoming obstacles. Critical thinking. Learning. Clearing hurdles. One after another. One step after the next.

image by studiocurve

I see value in technology for students and teachers because it teachers them, in a perfect world where they are not “trained” or spoon fed tutorials, how to identity problems and solve them. This is what I hope to get across to the teachers with which I work. Technology will break. It will fail. It is not a sprint. Maybe it won’t make your life easier, but damn it, you will learn some things about yourself. Your ability to be patient. To handle stress. To think critically under pressure. You will learn how to clear the hurdles with poise and precision, so that when it is time to sprint you will be all the more able.

Why may you ask, would any teacher in their right mind, with all their teacherly responsibilities, want to enter a marathon with hurdles and lava? Why do we ask our students to it? Why do we ask them to put themselves in situations that force them to learn?

See you in the comments…

(note: Sometimes technology can be a sprint. Sometimes it can be an amazing flight, but tonight I was mired in stress and I needed this. More posts coming soon, I am sure.)

Vision 2011

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Exciting things are happening at our school. Big changes. Changing roles. I can feel a big shift on the horizon, and I am lucky enough to be part of a team involved with reshaping how our school views not only technology, but what our school should look like as a learning community in general. For the last few months, we have been busy self-examining what it is we want from IT, but more importantly we have been looking closely at what kind of institution we hope to be in the near future. After all the discussions and meetings, we came up with a draft proposal for our new vision, a statement and subsequent document that would guide the direction of our school. Because it is still in draft form, I will not share it here.

We have identified a few key first steps, but know that we must have a larger more encompassing vision of who we are. Nonetheless at this point, I was asked to present some of the major ideas to our staff in hopes that it would excite them to become more involved and offer their input. Given that task last Wednesday, I hunkered down and got to work!

I will stop here and share the presentation, but if you are interested in my reflection on the process continue reading after the clip. Unfortunately, no one at our school was switched on enough to record it live, so I added some music and did a narration at home. Enjoy:

I am proud of it. Let me get that out there first. Some comments from people around school

That was like a Tedtalk!
That’s as good as any professional presentation I have ever seen.
Loved how you told it like a story.
Great script. You really seemed to know what you were talking about.

Like I said I am proud of it. I worked hard. I learned a lot and it shows. It is this process of working hard, stumbling, learning, sweating, and growing about which I want to talk about further in this post. As I mentioned in the clip, I had never really worked with Keynote before, and all told I must have spent two or three hours a night for about four nights putting this together. That is roughly twelve hours of time on the machine, not to mention the many hours I stayed up at night conceptualizing and thinking about how it would all look!

I can already see the heads shaking, “TWELVE hours on a presentation? Who has that kind of time?” Most teachers have too much on their plate to sit home at night and go through every single build in and build out of a Keynote, or to practice layering slides, or to come up with work-arounds for unforeseeable problems. Most teachers want someone to come in and show them what to do. I see this as a fundamental problem with the concept of teacher training versus professional development.

Learning takes time. It takes energy. Passion. Determination and desire. And most importantly it takes time. Unfortunately time is the one thing teachers have little of, but if we, as professionals really want to learn new things we have to make the time, or demand from our institutions not only to set expectations, but to give us time to learn, grow, play. There are no easy fixes. I am not saying that every teachers needs to sit at home every night and agonize over the perfection of every slide for a presentation, but if we are truly serious about learning how technology can help our teaching, we must make the time to learn something. We must set goals and find people who can help us grow. We can no longer expect to have others show us what buttons to push or what tools to use. I see teachers determining what they want to learn and my job is to help them get there. I am a firm believer in the concept that we learn tech tools to help us learn other things. For example, I did not spend twelve hours learning how to use Keynote. I spent that time learning how to use Keynote to give a presentation- how to tell a story. Next I will spend twelve more hours presenting a Pecha Kucha for Learning 2.011. Which brings me to my next point: the coaching model.

I have been so lucky this year to be working with an amazing grassroots team of teachers determined to push our school into cutting edge territory. We have an extremely supportive and excited administrative team, and we are doing some great things well. I mentioned some of the changes in the presentation, but we are also rethinking the role of the tech facilitator and looking toward a more mentor/coach style of developing teacher confidence. I am sure I will write much more on that soon, but for now let me say that I am learning everyday about what it means to work with others and help them activate and become excited by their learning.

In closing, I wrote this post to share the fruits of not only mine, but our whole team’s labor, with you-our fellow learners, in hopes that it might prove useful to you. I will also share it with our staff in hopes that perhaps it can be a starting point for a bigger conversation about what it means to admit that we are all learners and what to do once we have admitted that.

If you are a member of staff, please take the time to share some thoughts. Remember the point is not all accolades and back patting. I’ve already mentioned that I am proud of what I created. The point is to start conversations and share ideas. What do you think about all of this? What stuck out about the vision? What excites you? What scares you?Let’s begin to have these discussions out here on the open web. Leave a comment. Take the first step.

Feel free to answer these questions even if you are not at our school and are reading and watching from some place else.