Well it is time to move

I have finally decided to move. I have a website and have created a word press blog that can be found at www.bethknittle.net/WP_Blog. There is still another copy of the blog there (made in rapid weaver) but that one shall soon disappear. So please subscribe to the new blog.

Thanks

Time to Experiment

If any one has visited my website you will notice that things keep changing. I received the website and domain in December, threw up a quick site to sort of hold my place and well now it is summer. This is my time to play. So I have been trying different styles and tools. With the help of a good friend I will try to get Word Press up on my webserver and try that out - I do like the blogging tool I am using now (part of Rapidweaver) but I also like some of the features of Word Press. This is time to experiment and find what suits my style and needs. The more I play, the more I practice, the more I learn. Isn't that what we want our students to do. Soon fall will come and play time will end, so I hope I settle on something soon.

The New Role of Teachers

I have been trying to keep up on the happenings at NECC. There are so many sources of information. As I am reading the blogs, new post keep appearing – I could do this all day and night it seems. Two of the posts got my attention, Kevin Clark’s REMC Ramblings and Wesley Fryer’s Speed of Creativity. The general tone of these posts is that there are lots of tools, so now what do you do with them and what is the future role of teachers. I left a comment at REMC but started to get carried away. Below is the expended comment.

I believe the role of teachers must change and evolve. I see teachers in the future more like mentors and guides to the learning process. The “state” will always tell us what kids must know. But the teacher takes these goals, students’ interests, strengths, weaknesses and the real learning needs to be a contributing member of the global community and guides the student to meets these expectations. The teacher offers tools, opportunity, suggestions, encouragement and at times focus as the student works independently and collaboratively in creating an understanding of “all that is” for themselves. The student becomes part of the learning community and leaves their mark on the collective body of knowledge. The student learns that knowledge is an ever-growing web, and belongs to no one in particular, but that they can learn from and contribute to this body of knowledge.

Teachers must also learn that they are not the gatekeepers to knowledge, a role that has been engrained in our thinking for decades, that vision must change. Teachers need to realize that they are part of the learning community and they to must learn from and contribute to the global, growing body of knowledge. They need to share their experience and become a guide for others. As we move into this new ground teachers especially must share what is working with their students and what did not. This collaborative effort is what will effect change.

In this day of high stakes testing few teachers will leave the script, there is much fear of failure and reprimands. Yet if our kids are not making “AYP” then something is not working and we need to make a change. Teachers (like myself) are creatures of habit, schools victims of bureaucracy there for change happens slowly. My suggestion is to try out new tools and strategies one unit or lesson at a time. As teachers become more familiar with the skills and change in classroom structure, more lessons, activities will be transformed. And over time, hopefully not too long, the classroom experience will change and then later schools in general.

Moving my blog ????

I received a domain name and website for Christmas last year. I am not very much into self-promotion, I am almost embarrassed when someone stumbles on the blog or website but my husband convinced me it was okay to share my thoughts and ideas with others. So I do. I recently purchased Rapidweaver to create my webpage and it has a blogging feature. So I will keep two blogs for a while one at Blogger and on at my site. When and if I feel comfortable with the Rapidweaver blog I may just keep one. Or to complicate matters maybe I’ll switch to word press. I always talk about providing options to teachers in this case I feel there are too many good blogging options to choose from.

Moodle Anyone?

I am currently taking a course on using Moodle, developing a professional development course to run on Moodle and helping a variety of teachers create their own Moodle courses. I am excited about the possibilities of extending the classroom experience with Moodle, as well as, developing a 100% online class. As I build my course I find myself thinking about the curriculum and its presentation very differently then when I taught face-2-face. In all educational experiences, learning takes place as a result of the learner’s interaction with the content materials and other members of the course. This requires communication. So how do you foster communication in an online experience?

I had a professor who ran a 100% online course. The hardest part for me participating in that course (my first 100%) was feeling connected. She did two things that made me feel part of a group.

1. She kept a social type of forum going. Not related to the class but commented on the red sox, weather and movies. The kind of chatter you hear as you enter or leave a face-2-face class. This helped us to get to know each other and feel more comfortable responding to each other in the content forums.

2. This next was the key - she commented on almost everything we did, she used our names and directed us to other comments by the name of that student. She found sites for our specific needs. She made it personable. She was "in class" and commenting a couple of times a day. This made us want to check in and see what happened. This is a habit I still have today I am always popping in to see what’s transpired in the other online classes I am involved with. She was engaged and that made us engaged. Just as in a face-to-face setting the personality of the instructor helped set the tone for the group. She was upbeat, conversational, and made relevant comments so you felt your contributions were important, not just posted and stuck up there on the site.

An online course is not a static thing but flowing and changing. Right now to me the course I am developing seems flat. There is no one around to give it personality, no one to respond to, nor discussions to participate in. If you look at any face-2-face class curriculum they are also pretty flat. It is only when students and teachers get together and interact do they come to life and learning takes place.

The Classroom Blog

Unlike the personal blog where you only need to look after yourself, the classroom blog is a bit more complicated. As educators we are charged with keeping our students safe. School districts must comply with the Children’s Internet Safety Act and in doing such must come up with tons of policies. So how do you prepare your students with 21st communication skills and comply with all the rules and regs. This is where I have doing a lot of reading and supposing. Here are my toughts on this matter so far.

• Be open and honest about what you are doing. Explain the process of blogging and the purpose of your classroom blog. Talk to students, teachers, parents and administration.

• Be prepared to support the educational soundness of the project.

• Make sure you and your students are very familiar with the AUP. You may need to come up with a separate document that outlines your expectations.

•Remind them frequently that the work they produce is public. Mom and Dad are looking in.

• Model the way you wish your student to blog

• Provide clear assignments and expectations

• Choose a host/blog service, such as Blogmeister, that will allow you to:
o Moderate posts and comments before they “go live”
o Password protected the blog
o Specify members
o Create usernames that comply with your school’s AUP such as students first name last initial

• Have fun with your students and share their and your successes with others.

What insights do you have to make blogging a good experience for students and teachers? Any thoughts and comments are most welcome.

The Personal Blog

I have been thinking about the concerns one faces when you start a personal blog, be it a professional blog or one for your family members. There are some things you might wish to keep in mind as you post to your blog.

• Would you want your employer or future employer to read your blog? I have heard that colleges “google” the names of future students to see what they have posted about themselves, I am sure some employers already do.

• Would you mind the teacher down the hall reading the blog?

• What about the parents of your students?

• How about your students themselves? I see them “google” the names of their teachers all the time.

Most of us are polite and respectful people and intend no harm to anyone. This does not mean we cannot say what we mean. But we can all slip now and again. We just need to think twice before including a name or writing about a specific situation in our schools or districts. We need to model the behavior we wish our students to follow.

I am still relatively new to this all, what else am I missing, what else should we consider?
Please post your comments.

Preparing teachers to blog

I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. I have been spending a lot of time looking at Web 2.0 tools. The possibilities excite me as I read about the tools and their uses in schools. I follow link after link and discover so much good stuff! I am working on ways to introduce these tools to my fellow teachers. I have played around with blogging, and some different Wikis. I have worked with a few individual teachers on Web 2.0 tools. My focus is now how to pass it on to the faculty in general? The largest issue faced by teachers is the safety of their students. It is not the pedagogy of the tools that is in questions – most teachers I have spoken with embrace the possibilities with gusto. But they are brought up short by the “safety issues.” They want all the concerns address before they begin. Therefore one of my responsibilities is to find solutions to these concerns.

So I went to the source Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere, by David Warlick. Though I could find all the information on the Web there is something special about holding a book in your hands and mulling over the ideas. I needed this read it helped me refocus and put things in perspective. To introduce blogging I feel I will take a two pronged approach. First I will introduce the personal or professional blog, secondly the classroom blog. Both have different concerns, I was starting to get them all tangled up.

For the professional or personal blog I will focus on the tools Bloglines, Blogger and edublogs. I will also introduce RSS feeds and aggregators. Then expand that to the classroom here I will introduce Blogmeister. A blogging program created by David Warlick, part of the Landmark project, that address many of the safety concerns. More later on the concerns faced by each type of blog – personal and classroom. In the end I hope next school year to see more teachers and students joining the great conversation in the Blogosphere.

So how do you give more swings?

So how do you give more swings at the bat? Most of my teaching experience has been at the middle school level with some high school teaching mixed in for good measure. I have had little experience as a teacher in the elementary level. So I will offer some ideas at the MS and HS level if you have some suggestions at the elementary level, I would love for you to share them.

If we had all the time in the world, this might not be such a big issue. Just take your time, offer various practice opportunities of different degrees of complexity. But most of us these days meet with our students for four or five class periods a week. Most of us have state mandated curriculums that must be completed by schools end (in reality about a month before schools end when the tests are given). Time is always and issue and we must be come very efficient in our teaching. A way to break out is to extend the classroom through the use of an online class web page. Whether you use Edline or Moodle or your own webpage you can provide your students with another look at the course material.

What do you post to these classroom extentions? You can place your notes, so students who could not follow the class lecture may be able to review it again. You can place any presentations you make to class, students can then review them again at their own pace. You can have a wiki or forum where students can post questions whenever they occur to them and get answers at any time. You can video tape a lab, or create a screencast or podcast of the leacture or class activities. Teachers can post a list of alternative reading or websites for further information. Additional questions or practice problems can be posted. These resources can be of different content and skill levels based on the different learners in a class. There can be links to online activities, games, simulations and tutorials. In our district we subscribe to United Streaming, teachers could post a list of suggested videos and students could go the United Streaming to view them.

Ideally as teachers discovered new things the list of links and resources would grow. As a teacher gave their assessments through out a unit, they may prescribe some of the resources or activities for a student to work on based on the result of an assessment. Once a list of resources is availalble the teacher can more easily provided the correct material for a student who has difficulty reading and the one who is in need of enrichment. What would be even better is if teachers shared what they already have in place, the list would take no time to create.