Tag Archives: Community

20,000/ 2000 My Voice Matters And So Should Yours

Numbers don’t matter. That’s what we say right? But then in the same breath we sing the virtues of helping students create authentic audiences. Well if numbers don’t matter than who is sitting in the seats?

I hit a bit of a bizarre synergistic milestone today. I reached 2000 followers on Twitter and the exact same time I sent out my 20,000 Tweet.

So what? First off, I am a bit weird about numbers and how they line up. I don’t like the maths but I like symmetry in numbers. There seems to be some kind of secret to the universe or an explanation of chaos when numbers randomly fall into step and align.

So I was excited when a few week ago, I saw that there was a good chance I could make my 2’s connect. Adrienne Michetti even went so far as to publicly mock me for my OCD tendencies, but we are tight like that and I took it in stride.

I will admit that when both numbers were in the high 19’s I did curb a few tweets to make sure that the numbers would sink, but that seems like a tiny step considering I have sent out 20,000 Tweets in a few years and somehow 2000 people seem to care or at least tolerate the random things I seem to spew out endlessly. I have tried to keep the numbers authentic by blocking spam followers, but I am sure that the number of people actively listening is much lower then 2000, but what ever the number maybe it is higher than the 10 or 15 I started with.

And that matters! At least to me. Because that is my audience. These are the people, sorry, you are the people I have painstakingly culled from the entire world and convinced that what I have to say matters and is important. You are the people who read my words, give me advice, and yes often validation, but more importantly you are the people who have chosen to listen, and no matter what we try tell ourselves the larger that audience is the better. If we believe what we teach kids about how their voices matter, and that the new digital age is fantastic because it allows them to articulate, express and share that voice with a global audience, then I feel we too should find our voice and help it grow.

Now, I am not so vain to think that all 2000 people are hanging on my every word, and I would agree that I only truly have close authentic interactions with maybe 50 of you, but as my audience grows there is more of a chance that I will meet a few more kindred spirits who will connect me to a few more and so on and so on. This isn’t about fame or popularity, this is about using the power of a network to help us find our tribes and build communities working toward change. There are many much more intellectual voices out there who can write about the science behind networks and collectivism, I am just writing how I see it, in my own simple way. The more people who care about and listen to what I have to say, the stronger and more attuned our tribe.

A few years ago I had a personal blog my mom read, now I have several blogs, a youtube channel, and many other places online where I spread out my life to share with as many people as I can. I have created remarkable relationships with people all over the world, and have created an authentic audience for my voice. Isn’t that what we are teaching our students to do?

The best part is, I haven’t followed any scripts of what “good” blogging should be, or changed my style or ideas in anyways. I have been honest, open and passionate, and apparently 2000 of you think that is a good thing.

In closing, let me say- Thanks for all the support and energy you spend keeping up with my grammatically error ridden ramblings and for paying attention and caring about what the world looks like through my eyes. Here is to the next 20,000 Tweets and 2000 followers. See you soon at 40,000 and 4000! Bring your friends.

Oh and I must thank Kim Cofino for introducing me to this world of connectivity and offering me advice and guidance whether I wanted it or not. I’ve come a long way since she was my first and only follower. Thanks Kim.

We Don’t Do That Here

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Out here in the Ed-tech world, the Edu-Blogosphere, the Personal Learning Networks or whatever you want to call it we do a lot of talking. We read, we write, we share, we site, we connect, we learn. There is an unspoken decency that keeps all the conversations civil. A common understanding that sometimes leads to the creation of little communities of teachers doing great work, sharing ideas with like minded people and learning immensely.

If you can escape the repetitive echo-chambers of jargon and boot licking of some of the better known Edu-bloggers, who seem to have been saying the same things for years now, you will find a core group of teachers worldwide who are blogging and Tweeting the revolution one classroom at a time.

I personally have met a tight group of teachers whom I respect immeasurably. I have never actually been in the same room with many of these people, but through the sharing of our lives and our work, I know that we see education and many other topics in the same light.

Occasionally, though, someone ignores the rules of common decency and acts inappropriately. These transgressions can be ignored, for they never cause much harm, but if we are trying to create a new way of communication for our societies, if we are serious about the things we teach our students, things like: cite ones sources, be honest with the work and ideas you use, never steal other people’s work and pass it off as your own, then we must call to the table when one of our own acts irresponsibly.

I am not writing this post to admonish the perpetrator for his action. I am seldom in the mood for confrontation these days. I am writing this post as an act of solidarity and support for a good friend. I am writing this post as a learning opportunity. I am writing this post as a tool to share with students about plagiarism. I am writhing this post as a way to correct a wrong done to the community of which I am a part and one in which I take pride.

Here is the gist of what has happened: Keri Lee Beasley wrote a post called Ten Great Ways To Use Audacity With Your Students over at her blog The Tip of the Iceberg over a year ago. She recently sent out a Tweet dismayed that Alan Cain had simply cut and paste her post verbatim and put it on his blog. It was word-for-word down to the title. He never made any mention of her work or cited her in anyway. You can find the post here. Judging by his Tweets, it appears that Alan simply shares resources and tools. Seems harmless enough; we have all had some spam blog take our work, but this seems different Alan appears to be a flesh and blood educator. So why would he do this? Doesn’t he teach his students about plagiarism, about Creative Commons and the need to give credit where credit is due? Sure! Share the tools. Use Keri-Lee’s work, just say that you got it from The Tip Of The Iceberg. How hard is that?

Don’t get me wrong, I am no longer a fan of copy righted material. I think once you put something onto the Internet it should be used by as many people as possible. Let our ideas be shared, tweeted, and made viral. Let them be altered and changed. Let them evolve into something new, but I do believe that it is common courtesy to credit the person who put in the blood, sweat and tears.

Why not write a post about Audacity using your own ideas and then link to Keri-Lees post as further reading? It is so simple to create a hyper-link. This way not only are you being respectful you are making connections and expanding the network, giving value to the community?

I am curious if this was a case of misunderstanding or laziness. I hope in the next few days we here from Alan. I hope that he will explain why he came into our community and sole something that belonged to one of our members. I am sure if he is honest and explains himself we will take him in and help him. We are a forgiving bunch. Like I said no one is looking for confrontation or to be possessive. It just doesn’t feel right to have something like this happen in your neighborhood. You can also read Keri-Lee’s response here.

The ball is in your court Alan…

Talk Back

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I had an interesting talk with my 6th grade students yesterday. We were discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy, lower-level thinking skills, homework, busy work, work, and why teachers assign it and why they do it. I was explaining to them that in the information age, simply naming, listing, memorizing information is not enough. We need to do something more with the knowledge we acquire. I challenged them to look at the work they are being assigned by teachers and try to place it on Bloom’s pyramid.

“If you are working on an assignment or taking a test that is simply asking you to memorize “facts”, a unit that goes no further, you should speak with your teacher and ask them why they have chosen not to challenge your thinking? Ask them to explain to you the purpose of the assignment.” I told them to keep in mind that all teachers, myself included, are sometimes guilty of relying on the easy way out due to various stresses. We will all sometimes assign a worksheet here, a quiz there, but ultimately a unit of study should extend their thinking and encourage them to create something new from acquired knowledge.

They gawked and said, “Yeah right! We would get in so much trouble. We would never ask a teacher that.”

This left me thinking about the power structure of schools, the relationships between teachers and students, and the image students have of most of us. I had a brief discussion on Twitter about standing up to authority figures. The following post is the result of my ruminations:

I don’t want to be an authority figure. I don’t want to be the type of teacher who students are afraid to face, to challenge, to argue with, to understand. Do not get me wrong, I believe in running a tight ship. After ten years, I am beginning to find a classroom management style that works for me, and it is based on The Golden Rule. I treat my students how I wanted to be treated when I was their age. I respect them and their opinions. I understand the struggle, pain, and confusion they deal with on a daily basis. I want to encourage their passions and help them find their voice, their curiosity, and desire to learn, grow, and evolve.

In order to this, I have to have an open door. I don’t speak to them, but talk with them. I put my guard down. I am vulnerable. I have to share my ideas, my thoughts, and my struggles. Don’t get me wrong, I am not proposing being their friends or the “cool” teacher that everyone takes advantage of and doesn’t respect. I am simply saying that if we want to guide are students, if we want them to feel comfortable coming to us when they are lost or confused or when they want clarification, we must build trust. You cannot do this if your students are afraid of challenging your authority.

I don’t know about you, but I have never trusted an authority figure in my life. Back to my point about my students not feeling like they are able to speak to their teachers about their own learning. Their apprehension goes back to the antiquated notion that teachers are the experts and that students are simply receptacles of our infinite wisdom.

Much has been said about educational reform, technology and the new classroom, but the way I see it nothing will change until students are not afraid of their teachers. We are not equals. That is not what I am saying. Teachers, after all, have years of training and life experience under our belts. The best way to change student attitudes is to be aware of their perceptions of us, be open to helping them change those perceptions, and build honest, trusting, relationships based on respect and a shared goal- Learning.

In the next few weeks, I hope to write about some of the things I have done to build these relationships. I will share some success and failures, but in the meantime, what do you do to build closer relationships with your students so they are not afraid to come to you for guidance? Or do you think an authoritative teaching style is more effective then the mentor model I have described? Is there a hybrid model, what does that look like? Please leave some comments. This is an important topic for me and I would like to explore I further.

Last Child On The Web

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I love ongoing online stories that chart a series of connecting events and people. On September 24, I wrote a blog post called Singing Hearts, in which I highlighted a photo essay created by my three-year-old daughter Kaia and the reaction it elicited from @wmchamberlain’s class in Missouri.

I am happy to report that the story has continued in a dramatic way. After reading the story or becoming familiar with it through @wmchamberlain, Dr. John Strange, @drjohnhadley, a Professor of Professional Studies at The University of South Alabama, decided to make my daughter’s blog and experience an assignment for his students.

Shortly after, I began to see a deluge of comments come pouring into Kaia’ blog, which led me to google the term: Kaia Edm 310. I was pleasantly shocked to see over 50 blog posts written about our work. I also set up a Google Alert to try and filter all of the blog posts that were still being written.

Unfortunately I haven’t the time to comment on each individual blog, so I have chosen to write one comment to be shared collectively with the students in EDM: 310

Dear Students,

It was such a pleasure for me to see your reaction to Kaia’s and my experience. I never would have thought that our simple afternoon activity would elicit so much attention. It just goes to show that people are looking for ways to connect. We so often here people comparing “real” life and “virtual” life as if there is really a difference. When in fact we are all simply living our lives and hoping to share them in whatever meaningful ways we can.

That was the real aim of posting Kai’s pictures online- I was hoping that someone somewhere would find our experience relevant, engaging, human. And by the range of responses it is clear that our story was all of those things.

As we share the daily minutia of our lives, we are able to see how small the world really is, and how similar our experience can be, when we stop and look at what we are all doing. People often criticize social media as a vain and narcissistic way to flood the world with the meaningless details of our lives, but I refuse to follow that route. It is in these very details where we are most human and open for connections.

I think Kaia’s blog is a great example; what started off as a simple way to share pictures with family, has blossom into a portal where students in Missouri are connecting with students in Alabama.

I think this episode demonstrates that using technology should not be some kind of administrative mandate. We can all use technology in various ways. Another misconception of technology is that its user are only interested in various ways we can be digitized. Where as I only see these tools as methods of sharing and documenting my non-digital life. I use these tools to help my daughter understand how a camera works. We speak to our pictures to begin learning about story telling and metaphor. I am simply using these tools to slowly teach her to be aware of her world. We would have gone outside and taken photos with or without social media, but social media has allowed us to connect with you.

We should not want our students to learn to blog, use wikis or go on Facebook for sole purpose of using tools. We must teach them to look critically at reality and find ways to share what they see with others so as to have a better understanding of the human experience. I see the Internet as the new novel, except that we are all authors and we are all constantly writing the chapters one blog post, one tweet, one Facebook update at a time.

So what did you write today? How will you teach your students to be open and brave and connected? How will you help them see that their lives are worth sharing?

Regards,

Jabiz Raisdana

In closing, I would like to add that one of the students from Alabama sent me this great clip of her daughter reading Kaia a book.

Here is our response.

There's No Such Thing As Virtual: It Is All Teaching

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It has been an interesting week in Doha. The government Supreme Council has decreed that all schools stay closed until October 4th in an effort to curb the spread of Swine Flu. What makes matters more complicated is that this announcement came on the tail of a weeklong holiday for Eid, so I haven’t seen my students in over two weeks. The decree caused a lot of anxiety for all the schools here in Doha, because no one was sure how long it could last. People began to speculate and spread rumors that Qatar may follow the examples of other Gulf states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia who will remain closed until November, but it looks like we will be back in school sooner than that. This temporary closing of schools, however, has brought to light some very interesting aspects of distance learning. (E-Learning, “virtual” learning)

Because my school does not have a virtual school platform like Moodle or Blackboard, we have opted to simply asked the teachers to post pages, links, .pdfs and .doc to our school’s CSM run website. While this presentation of worksheets and online activities is limited in scope, it is still better than nothing.

The American School, where my wife works, is fairing a bit better and has even received some press for their use of Blackboard. For years they have been encouraging teachers to use Blackboard for such an emergency, and while teachers have begrudgingly posted a few assignments here and there the tool has largely been unused till now. Now that the emergency is upon them, however, teachers are scrambling to quickly learn how to become “virtual” teachers, and in doing so are finding the limitations, not only of Blackboard as a tool, but they are also realizing that teaching using online tools is more than simply posting assignments on a web storage space.

Teaching online, or being a virtual teacher, is more than a skill set; it is a mindset and a philosophy. Teachers who are well versed in a variety of tools, not just Blackboard will fair much better in times of crisis and will be better prepared for finding ways to reach their students than say teachers who rarely use technology at all. Teachers who themselves are connect and use many tools for their own learning will barely miss a step. While I understand the unease these teachers are experiencing, I think their apprehension speaks more to the limitations offered not only by blackboard, but of school philosophies when it comes to technology use and pedagogy.

This crisis has clearly illustrated that creating a valuable web-friendly ethos/community of teachers well versed with technology, is the first step in creating a sustainable system to deal with not only emergencies, but in helping to maintain strong ties between teachers and students beyond the classroom. Communicating with students outside the classroom whether through Blackboard or other free online tools must be an ongoing activity for the entire school. If students are used to checking a blog for assignments or working on a Google Doc with a peer, then not being in school will not impact their schooling as much as say a student who has no way to contact their teacher beyond email.

I am not writing this post to make teachers feel bad about their or to discredit any schools. We are all doing the best we can. I just want to point out that using technology is not something that schools can force their teachers to do only in times of emergency. Teachers who are not familiar with a variety of tools that will help them connect with their students will stumble and become anxious when forced to change the way they teach. Schools must imagine different possibilities:

We need to imagine a school where everyone blogs- teachers, students, parents, and administration. Imagine a school that has its own youtube channel and podcast space. Imagine a school that uses chatzy as a back channel even when school is in session. Imagine a school where students are constantly working together using Google Docs and wikis. Imagine a school where almost every knows how to use several tools to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Imagine a school where the school day never ends, and the work can be done anywhere any time. Imagine a school where the teacher uses class time to coach and guide and not lecture or “teach.”

This is the type of school I am trying to build. You can use Blackboard, but the beauty of the Web is that it is all free and available to us all. We simply must be able to take some risks and trust our students to learn from their mistakes.

Here are some examples of what is possible:

I had planned to use this week to get my students started on our online 2.0 journey. I already have two classrooms, one in Canada and one in Thailand, waiting to meet us. We have sketched out some rough ideas of how our three classes will interact, but I needed to start showing my students the tools and skills they will need to make the kinds of connections I want them to make throughout the year. I was going to walk them through each step in class, but due to Swine Flu we were forced to “just do it.”

I was actually a bit excited when I heard we would not be in school. Rather than fumble around with how I would deliver my traditional material, I began instead to think about how I would help my students quickly learn about and use a variety of tools that would help them connect and stay tuned with our class community. I was not interested in posting worksheets for them to complete. I wanted to recreate our classroom online, so we could have conversations. It is this sense of community that I feel is missing from Blackboard.

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The first thing I did was launch our class blog. I had planned to start blogging soon anyway, so it was perfect timing. I used the blog as the central place to communicate with the kids. Unlike Blackboard where individual classes are closed and hard to access, a simple blog allows me to share information, media, and much more in an environment that inspires commenting, conversations, and community. The hope was to quickly create an area where we could meet and move onto completing a variety of tasks.

Once the blog was published, I had to find a way to direct the kids to it. Out of 50 students I had the emails of about 29; I started there. I posted a link on our school website under the page for English work, and on the first day I had 81 visits to the blog. Because my students are not yet familiar with RSS, I had to find a way to let them know when there was going to be new posts.

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I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page, (I have asked that adults not become a fan of the page yet. I want my students to feel safe and really understand what we are doing, before I introduce our network to the bigger global network.) In three days already has 23 fans. I embedded a Facebook feed in the sidebar to allow students who do not have Facebook a chance to stay tuned with announcements. I can now also send the group updates straight from Facebook. I now have an easy way to share class announcements with the kids in the place where they spend their time online. Instead of hoping that they would check Blackboard, I know that they can simply get an status update telling them to take a survey on the blog as they chat with their friends.

For the first task, I asked students to create Gmail accounts. Later in the year I want to use Google Docs and Google Reader, so I felt that this was a crucial first step. With little help from me, I now have 23 students created Gmail accounts. A few students had problems so I set up a chatzy chat room to answer questions. I experimented with various video conferencing sites and dodged a major bullet and didn’t use Tiny Chat due to some inappropriate material on their site, but found TokBox to be very useful and I hope to use it in the future.

I’ve used Youtube as a way to create videos for my students who are not native English speakers and may not be able to read all of the text on the site. As the students perform each task, I give them a little more to do. They have in three days: created Gmail accounts, commented on a blog, signed up to be a Facebook Fan, responded to some quotes and images, and finally answered a survey I posted from a Google Form.

Not only have I not fallen behind this week, I have actually helped my kids learn real life skills by doing and not just talking about it. By quickly building our online community, I think the kids will better understand the power of these tools and how they can use them to help their learning.

I hope you will stay tuned to what we are doing throughout the year. I have big plans for the year and this is a great group of kids. We will create individual blogs next week, as well as set up RSS on Google Reader, begin to think about tagging bookmarks with Delicious, and we will set up a class wiki and Flickr page. Why have I chosen these tools? I see them as the most vital for my own learning. I use them often, feel comfortable using them, and I really understand their value in creating a network.

Empowering teachers to use these tools is a huge first step in creating a school that can function on or offline without missing a step. Swine Flu or no Swine Flu, I know my class will be connected and ready to learn, share, and teach others. The question now is how do we get other teachers on board and feeling comfortable using these tools?

If you are interested and want ideas on how to be a more effective virtual teacher join us on our journey. We are learning as we go, but would love the company. What do you think? How has Swine Flu affected your teaching? What has worked for you? What has been hard? Do you find Blackboard useful? Do you use any other tools to connect with your students? Let the conversation begin!