Miscellaneous Musings

I recently attended a workshop presented by Jamie McKenzie entitled "Beyond Cut and Paste." It was all about authentic learning and encouraging original thinking. If you are not familiar with him, his FNO website is a course in itself. Take a look and find all sorts of learning activities that you can adapt to any subject area. He also employs many of the web 2.0 applications that we have learned about in MILI and I was able to share a few with him that he had not heard of.
Everything we did during the workshop was hands on and constructivist, which has also been our experience in MILI. He really empasizes synthesis and deep learning experiences which is what we know education should be. This workshop experience, my perusal of an article on technology in education, my experiences in MILI and my need to start thinking about a June Tech Academy session of project-based learning , prompted the following reflection this morning over coffee:

Project based learning; problem based learning; authentic assignments…are not new ideas.
I began teaching in the early 70”s and the key word at the time was relevance. That sounds a lot like authentic to me. I recall trying to implement some of this relevance in my American History classes by defending a student’s right to put the flag at half mast during a fire drill in remembrance of the students killed at Kent State only a week earlier. [I was teaching in a school in the greater Cleveland area, only 45 minutes from Kent State.] Within an hour I was in the principal’s office answering queries from the principal, asst. principal, and my dept. head of why I had veered from the mandated history curriculum. I noted that this was history in the making and kids had questions and that all I had done was defend a student’s right of free speech and his right to not be attacked by others when he was not there to defend himself. In other words, I was being called on the carpet for being relevant.
Today teachers are being pushed toward relevance, authenticity, problem-based learning and we have the tools and resources at hand. In Minneapolis we are being coached in disciplinary literacy where students are “apprentices” in their particular fields of science, history, writing, art, etc. So why aren’t we all jumping in there and getting our feet wet. [MILI participants excepted] We don’t have to worry about trouble with the administration for being “out there.” Have we become complacent? Is it easier, more comfortable to stick with OUR content, OUR way of doing things, OUR providing the answers instead of teaching students how to question, question, question?
I think most teachers really want to be authentic and relevant and can see the authenticity and relevance of their discipline, but what is really difficult about this type of teaching and learning is that it is complex and time consuming. That is difficult medicine to push in a culture that has often preferred simple answers [just the facts, Ma’m] and quick results. There are none! We need to remember that and we need to help kids work within an environment where there are more questions than answers, where the process of solving a problem is as valuable sometimes as the solution itself. Where we have to help students to be self aware, mindful and able to see how their lives and their living fit into the larger picture. Maybe all we need to stop and do that too. Maybe we all need some practice in using all our senses….the mind being one of them.
We give kids lots to look at, lots to read, lots to listen to, lots to touch, smell, taste. But how do we teach them to synthesize all this information? How do we help them learn to see, comprehend, truly hear, etc? How do we teach them how to construct their own knowledge and understanding? Is it easier just to feed them ours? To give them “talk radio” education? Cut and paste education? Just listen and take notes education?
Enter technology….
Becky Firth, director of the Anacortes, Washington Technology Leadership Center feels that technology presence may be growing in schools, but many educators fail to conceptualize it as a constructivist tool—as a means to inject more project-based teaching methods into the classroom. [Classroom Technology Integration: Having technology is one thing—maximizing the investment is another. Zach Miners. District Administration Magazine, April 2009.
Thank goddess for MILI and all the great resources we are learning to use with students and colleagues. My tool of choice at the moment is screentoaster. I finally got two podcasts up on our wiki for media specialists and techs with directions for equipment inventory. Not too exciting content wise but efficient and more accessible than screen shots.

Blogging in Bed

I have noticed...be it age, springing ahead to daylight savings time, or the full moon...that I am not sleeping as well as I want. When I wake up at 2 a.m. with all things on my mind, I find that I "blog in bed," i.e. I think of all the things that I am using...Web 2.0 wise....that I should be blogging about but find that I just can't log onto the computer "one more time." So, I "blog in bed" or "in my head." I am using Delicious more and more to help organize my life and those of my media professionals.
Here's the podcast I did at MILI on March 18 about delicious.
I am relying on webinars and other online learning to keep me in touch with web 2.0 media. I am using Google docs to keep my techs uptodate on new equipment that is going out to schools that I need to track. I am keeping up with my Facebook account to track what is happening in the lives of my high school and college friends. Not a small task when one is coming up on their 45th high school graduation anniversary. Now that is scary! Flickr and Twitter are on my radar although I think my tweets on Twitter will remain minimal. Sometimes I think we are just too "linkedin" I continue to counsel my husband who just lost his job to maintain a web presence with a Facebook account as well as a webpage.
I will be attending a conference at Macalaster this week on technology in libraries so should have more to blog about next week.

The next thing I am working on is really getting all our media specialists to think about the next generation of libraries. I am excited about all the information on the AASL website about Learning for Life or L4L. Until next time....

Diving Deep or Just Skimming the Surface?

I have been been following the Tuesday cohort bloggers and am impressed with the creativity, diligence and great writing that I see. How you all get that done with your hectic work schedules and busy personal lives is amazing.
Our most precious resource these days is time and we never seem to have enough of it. I am struggling with finding new ways to connect with media specialists to have the really deep discussions that the PLC groups are having within the schools across the district. Given the number of meetings and the size and diverse schedules of our media peeps, it is difficult to find a time when we can meet and have deep discussions on issues that affect our work life with students. We are trying Elluminate this week, but even distance learning takes time in the schedule and that seems to be what is most lacking. So much to learn, moving so fast, when do we get to go deep or don't we?

Movin' on down the road....

Web 2.0 has only been on my radar screen a little over 18 months and I can't believe all I have absorbed in that time. Jean and I have decided to try using Delicious to bring together resources for media specialists into a space that is easily accessible 24/7. We created several MPSMedia tags organized by grade levels: MPSMediak-2; MPSMedia3-5; MPSMedia6-8; MPSMedia9-12 and MPSMediaPro for materials and resources that cut across grade levels and also speak to our professional needs like information literacy and collection development. We will be presenting this again at our District Wide Staff Development Day to get more people on board.
I also learned how to make these tags "feed" to my "Delicious" IGoogle page for quick checks to see if more things are being added.



Since media people have such hectic schedules and we have so many different school hours it is difficult to get people together for face-to-face professional development. Our monthly Curriculum Connect pd seemed to be attracting the same people. So this past week we looked at Elluminate, a web conferencing tool that we have owned for several years but which has been underutilized in the district. An added bonus is the recording feature which enables one to create archives of the pd for later access. This seems like an especially good way to create pd around applications like Destiny and the recorded sessions can then be accessed for review or by persons new to the appication.

In preparation for the Elluminate session with a district mentor, I attended online pd the previous day that happened to be powered by Elluminate. It seemed fairly user friendly and easy to navigate. Not only did I gain experience with Elluminate, but I was also introduced to several new Web 2.0 tools as well as the astounding resources of TeachersFirst resources, especially TeachersFirstEdge which contains lists of Web 2.0 tools for teachers, annotated and reviewed by teachers as well as some general useage tips for Web 2.0 in the classroom.

Thank heavens for Delicious and tagging. Once you use it, you don't know how you organized without it!

Until next time.......

Yes, I Can

If it's good enough for Obama, it's good enough for me. Yes, I can, be a better blogger!!
Hopefully more of us have made that our New Year's Resolutions. "Way to go." Ann Marie, Tanya, Sara and Lynette, for keeping the momentum going. I must say, even though I haven't blogged about it I have gotten into using Google Docs for work here at 807 and also helping teachers set it up at other sites to share work.
Jean and I have also set up an Information Media and Technology Wiki that we have linked from our media page. Karen will be able to access it as a district media specialist. We are creating links to websites, uploading podcasts and uploading files necessary for media specialists.
Jean and I continue to plot how to put media specialists in the spotlight.. Here we are at the Minneapolis School Fair, as the Research Queen and Reading King, overseeing our "realm" of information media and technology. Jean is off to Midwinter ALA to learn how we can better market our media centers and media specialists.
It is also my intent for the remainder of the grant, to not only continue to use the Web 2.0 tools but also to visit the Tuesday participant blogs on a weekly basis. Jean is going to visit the Wednesday participant blogs. In this way we can do a better job of highlighting this project across the district.
I have been successful in reorganizing our access to the ELM resources so that our students do not have to use the public library cards for access to EBSCO databases within the Minneapolis firewall. Thanks to Jennifer Hootman for her help on this. I have gotten positive feedback from media specialists that students like it and find it easier to use.
Finally, I am starting to like the "taste" of Delicious. We are introducing it to our elementary media specialists at our January Curriculum Connect. We hope to harness it as a way to share great websites for media curriculum.
It is my hope that by the end of the year that I will be as adept at podcasting as these students from Pillsbury Elementary seem to be. I love the Snowball microphone!!

Staying Alive

This is a super crazy time of year for an educator. We are trying to get all those ideas from last spring into workable plans for this school year. My mind is a wild monkey right now, feeling a little like the spinning icon on a website, waiting for something to load. Here are a few things I have learned our learned about in the last two weeks that I want to explore more thoroughly but also want to share:

1. A great website for planning, organizing using project-based learning. A great adjunct to the Research Project Calculator when working with students or collaborating with teacher/media specialists.

2. Minneapolis now has their own wiki/blog site that we will bee rolling out this year. This plus our podcasting server will make this a banner year. Media people will learn more August 26th so everyone, keep your ears open!

3. TeacherTube and SchoolTube are going to be great resources for educators. SchoolTube.com is a great place for kids to share their videos, pictures, projects. TeacherTube.com a great resource for teachers. Still waiting for the details of the Roosevelt team is going to be allowed access to YouTube for their new Digital course. Keep us informed, ok?

4. A great print resource for keeping up with web 2.0 and ideas for applications: Information SearcherYou can subscribe to the paper copy which is great, but also download her rss into your google reader. That was so easy!!

Latte’s finished..time to get back to those math textbook files. I do like my Dunn Bros. office!