Computer Teacher, Teach Thy Self!

While trying to find something to bring to my Advanced class I found this great post by Jeff Utecht regarding the validity of blogging in the classroom.  More often than not the major impediment that Technology teachers face is the fear of the unknown.

We have all heard horrible stories about what happens to people when they reveal too much online.  What about teaching proper online behavior? What about teaching the relevance of the authentic audience?

I think that this post perfectly articulates the power of blogging and building a network of learners. I am interested in what my students have to say about this post and what it means for that class and for the Student Haley.

I have long wanted to teach students all the amazing things I have learned while blogging. Recently, I have gotten the  opportunity to change my curriculum in my Advanced Computer Applications class.  I am now calling the Advanced Computer Applications” class the “21st Century Skills” class.

As an opener I played the class a video created by Mike Wesch and his students “Vision of Students Today”.  I was hoping that this would be a great eye opener for the kids and to get them thinking about their daily activities interacting on the Web.

Once I am home and have access to Youtube I will embed the video.

The class has only been meeting for one week. So far we have created Netvibes accounts, a twitter account and have subscribed to Weblogg-ed, The Thinking Stick, and The Fischbowl.

I will have the kids also subscribe to this blog as well so they can have insight to my thought process and how I learn. I actually have debated creating a separate blog just for the class, but I want it to be authentic and not contrived.  The beauty of this class is that we meet everyday so we can discuss much in class instead of just using my blog as a directing medium, I will use it for modeling.

Now to the good stuff, today ’s assignment was to read Will Richardson’s post on the Obama speech, and the first 20 comments, and to THINK.

I have to admit I was nervous, I have never taught a course like this and I was worried that I would have to pry responses out of them. I was very pleasantly surprised. Let me preface this with the fact that we were not in school during President Obama’s speech. So, this was a non-issue for my district.

The students were directed to look for the “Lens” of  Will Richardson, and to find the focus of the controversy.

All the observations were great. I even got comments along the lines of “fear limiting what schools can teach”,  some of my students started Googling the debate while we were discussing it, which I totally encourage.  The point of the exercise was to have my students think out loud about the post and its comments.  One of the things I said to them was

“When I say things like: Where did that come from?, or I don’t know what he/she is talking about. I am thinking out loud for you, I want you to know how I think about these things, and so you  become a student of your own thought process. I am not openly disagreeing with the post or the comments, I am just trying to make myself think on them and then I will follow links, think and learn.”

One of the best observations came from Simone who when reading one of the comments said, (I am paraphrasing)

“The more schools are limited, the less we will learn. School already does not prepare us for life, it is only about academics, not life.”

Just gives me more to think about…

Part of my action plan as an attendee of the GTA is to offer a series of free after school workshops for my teachers.  On of the Tabs on my blog is the Teacher Academy which is my ideal vision of offering inservice to my teachers. 

Unfortunately, the opportunity to make inservice credits is not available because of all the budget cuts we are enduring.  I decided to continue the idea to meet my action plan goals, and because I really want my teachers to get excited and not frustrated about technology. 

My first workshop will be Google Docs for Educators. I cannot begin to express how Google docs has pretty much changed everything I do in regards to documents and spreadsheets. 

My premise is that teachers will gladly participate in professional development if you make it meaningful and convienent. My workshops will be only one or two a month, only one hour each, right after school.  I have already had a great response to this idea at work and hope to USTREAM my first session so I: 1. can learn how to use USTREAM, and 2. Will have an archive of the PD. 

Wow, all I can say is wow. A more cohesive post to follow

The Google Certificate says “Be the change you want to see in the World”.  I can’t wait to apply this.  One of the things that stands out for me is the Google concept of 80% -20%.  All employees are encouraged to take 20%  of their time at work and use it to develop ideas they are passionate about.

The whole concept of the Google for Educators was just a 20% for one google employee who felt an affinity for education.  

So powerful and FREE!  With all the problems the economy is having there is nothing that Google does not address!

Since Jeff Utecht’s post about reflection (that spurred me to invest more time reflecting) and the fabulous post of David Hamilton in “Principally  Yours” about refelection I have been thinking a lot……about reflection!

I have been furiously ripping through my aggregator as of late to re-visit some key topics of Web 2.0’s impact on education and I found my self reading Mark Prensky again.  I love Mark’s take on education reform (or the lack there of) and the change in the student mind. But what I found very interesting was this quote:

One key area that appears to have been affected (in regards to the effeciency of the teen hypertext mind)  is reflection.  Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to genralize, as we create “mental models” from our experience.  It is in many ways, the process of “learning from experience” in our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people.

It doesn’t just come down to adaption to digital the “shift” that our students are spearheading, but also reflecting on change.  Better yet, we should be reflecting on the change in our thinking.  Metacognition  is not a buzzword to be thrown about to sound learned in a staff development session.  Awareness of one’s own thought and learning process is a skill that needs demonstrated and modeled for our students. In my mind, the best way to teach toward the goal of metacognition is to practice the skill of reflection on our thoughts. The best way I know how to do this is to blog, and to use my aggregator to read the thoughts of others.

Observation of our learning process both individually and as an educational society is paramount to technology being transformative.

Models of Professional Development, originally uploaded by superkimbo in BKK.

I just had to call attention to Kim Cofino’s last post on professional development. I was actually in a deep discussion today with several educators about the validity of professional development and how often is is transformative.

I really appreciated Kim’s Diagram of the network of Professional development. In essence it is mirroring what we do when we blog everyday. We are signing up for that personal learning time that is custom tailored for us

http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/3015496498/

Oh my gosh I got chills from watching this.  I saw this on Jeff Whipple’s blog,  Jeff’s The Ideal Top Guy post dedicated to discussing the qualities that we need in schools for the 21s century. But in order to start that we need administrators who support and understand how technology should be used.  No one is more aware of that than Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.   The quote

“technology should be ubiquitous and invisible” resonates with me on so many levels.

Is it bad to say when Chris mentioned there were admin openings that I briefly thought of uprooting my family to move back to my hometown of Penndel?  Chris you are an inspiration.

Really quick snippet:

Woot! I am in the Google Teacher Academy! I am so excited! I was on Skype with Jeff Whipple who mentioned two others that he knew of. So then I checked my Twitter and found a few more which led me to this site that was created not more than 40 minutes after they found out! I love the speed of Web 2.0! Now if I could only figure out how to join the site.

Download

Well I am dying to go to this workshop. I know some colleagues who have gone and they have grown in leaps and bounds using the tools for Google Educators.

As part of the application we all need to submit a video no more than a minute long. The topic I chose was motivation and learning. The problem I had though was that I was not sure what to address:

My motvation?

The impact of motivation on learning?

Then came the content, I found a number of pictures some on wiki commons and others by a Google image search. I was dumb founded on what else to include. Since my topic was Web 2.0 and it’s impact on my motivation and learning I decided to use all my various dashboards and aggregator as images for the movie.

Wish me luck!