Clarify Me

Getting the Message Out

2012-01-24T05:54:38Z

Good communication with students and their parents is a key element of success in any form of schooling, but is especially important with distributed learning. As a distributed learning teacher there are students you may only see face-to-face once or twice. I’ve written about communication with students before, here and here and it is something on which I continue to try and improve.

True phone by Florian SEROUSSI CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

I do a lot of one-on-one communication be it by e-mail, telephone, or IM. One challenge that I’ve been struggling with is sending out broad based messages, the type you might see in a class or school newsletter. One of the issues is that many of my students choose to take paper based courses, so I do not have a way to easily broadcast messages to them. I may have their e-mail address, but a lot of teenaged students don’t check in on their e-mail that often. One of my students once told me that all teenagers have an e-mail account because they need it to get a Facebook account. That’s it–the sole reason for having an e-mail account!

For my students who take online courses in Moodle I’ve also struggled to find a way to efficiently get a message out as I have a lot of different course instances. Sending out the same message in the news forum for each of 15 courses gets old fast. It also means that I’m hitting some students twice.

So over the winter break I decided to take the bull by the horns and come up with a good communication plan. I’ve tried to weave together a number of tools to do the job: blog, Google Calendar, Twitter, FaceBook Page, Moodle, e-mail, and the power of RSS. I’m sure this set up can use some tweaking, so thoughts on improvements are welcome.

Blog as Home Base

My main goal here is to facilitate the sort of communication you might see in a class or school newsletter. I decided to use a blog as my home base–the place where I can send out info to my students and their parents. If all works as it should, then the information I post here will only need to be posted here. I’ve called the blog Thompson ConnectEd and it is on Google Blogger.

Google Calendar

I work part time and within that time I work with a specific group of students off site. It is important that my students know when I will be at the school. I set up a Google Calendar showing my hours and have embedded it on the blog. If there are changes to my hours it is easy for me to go into the calendar and make the adjustments.

Delivering the Message–Social Media

So, how to get the message out? Expecting people to visit the blog all the time isn’t going to be very effective. On the blog I’ve tried to make it easy for people to subscribe by e-mail or by using a feed reader such as Google Reader. But in an effort to try and meet them where they are I’m enlisting Twitter and Facebook.

@ThompsonConnect is the Twitter account that I’ve set up. I’ve used TwitterFeed to set things up so that any time there is a new post on the blog it gets tweeted from this account. If the student or their parent uses Twitter, then they just need to start following @ThompsonConnect and any new posts will appear in the timeline of people they follow.

Now I don’t imagine that a lot of students are on Twitter so, after much humming and harring, I set up a FaceBook Page. Apparently it used to be possible to automatically feed new blog posts to a FaceBook Page, much like what I’ve got set up with Twitter. FaceBook being FaceBook has, of course, taken this convenience away. So I’ve been posting blog links manually on my wall. Although today I realized that I can set up my Twitter account to post automatically to Facebook. Hopefully this will do the trick as I really just want to have to post an item in one place.

Delivering the Message–RSS and Moodle

My colleague had mentioned that you could set up a block in Moodle to follow RSS feeds. I’ve gone into all of my Moodle courses and added the Remote RSS Feeds block–now whenever I post to the blog they automatically show up in this block.

The Marketing Part

I’ve put a lot of time into setting all of this up; now the key is to get my students and their families to start using it! I’ve posted information about this in the news forums of all of my Moodle courses, but that leaves out my paper based students as well as parents. Right now I am going through the process of writing up progress reports for all of my students; I will add information and links about the new blog et al. in that progress update. For all new students I am going to try making signing up for blog updates (through e-mail, RSS, Twitter, or Facebook) part of the orientation process. I’m also thinking that a contest of some sort might encourage people to sign up in whichever fashion they choose.

The Wrap Up

So hopefully I can now post relevant information in one place, the course blog, and have it reach my students and their parents in the manner that suits them best.

Do you use a blog to communicate with your students and parents? What have you found has worked to make it a worthwhile experience for everyone involved? Do you have any suggestions to help me improve things; I’d like to hear from you!

Blogger, Twitter, Facebook and RSS icons are from the Free Social Media Icon Set on the ElegantThemes Blog. They have no official license, but the creator states: “These icons have no restrictions, so feel free to use them however you like. Redistribute, resell, or repackage them – I don’t mind. But if you appreciate the free resource please link back to this post! ” Done!

What a Ride!

2012-01-13T20:22:55Z

This past week I have been assisting Phil Macoun and Brad Ovenell-Carter with their Authentic Global Collaboration Moodle Meet. It has been an incredible experience! I have participated in a lot of online PD over the past few years and the quality of resources and the conversations in this meet were fantastic.

This was really Phil’s baby and I’m glad that he asked me to help out with the Moodle and Webinar side of things. Phil and Brad put together great resources and seeded the discussion forums with wonderful questions. The course evolved over the 6 days as they responded to the discussions and brought in materials that addressed what participants were interested in.

In working with Phil and Brad I also got to meet, virtually at least, Pauline Roberts, an educator in Birmingham, Alabama who is doing fantastic global projects with her students. Pauline assisted with the course; setting up Google Docs, responding to forum posts, tweaking things in the wiki and generally staying on top of things! Clint Surry rounded out our team. Clint is a Moodle Meet veteran and is skilled at drawing participants into rich conversations in the discussion forums. It was great working with such an incredible team of people; I learned tons from them in terms of running a successful online meet.

If you haven’t participated in a Moodle Meet before I highly recommend it. The meets are free to attend and draw in participants from all over the world; this week we had participants from Spain, Serbia, Egypt, India, Great Britain, USA, Australia, Mexico, Italy, Ireland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and of course from Canada. For a list of upcoming meets go here.

And if you get the opportunity to participate in a PD session that Phil or Brad is offering, well, you’d be crazy not to attend!

*Note: Pauline has blogged about her experience in the meet here, and Phil here.

A Plan for Change

2011-12-11T02:18:52Z

Yesterday I came across a post by Dean Shareski called The Paradox Choice. He writes about the tension between making change happen and offering choice. He refers to a TED talk by Barry Schwartz who says that sometimes too many choices is as bad as no choice at all. I encourage you to read Dean Shareski’s entire post. Here’s an except:

As much as I would love to see all the teachers I work with make meaningful change to update their classrooms and curriculum to acknowledge that it’s 2011 and learning has changed, I respect the fact that teachers have choices. I can’t make them change. I don’t want to make the change.

It got me thinking (again) about how I’d approach things if I were in the position of a technology helping teacher / digital learning consultant. First let me say that the technology helping teacher in my district does a great job. I just feel that she could use a sidekick — me Here’s the comment I left on Dean’s post:

This is a timely post for a couple of reasons. I teach in BC where my union is currently trying to negotiate a new contract. The employer is trying to make changes to the contract so that teachers have less autonomy over their Professional Development; having PD driven by the school administrator and/or ensuring that all PD ties to school goals. Ugh. I’m also in the middle of reading ‘Lost at School‘ by Ross W. Greene and I’m definitely starting to see more and more issues through the lens of his collaborative problem solving approach. A process that relies on building trusting relationships and investing time to solve problems.

I think one of the issues is that real, durable change takes time (which can be as frustrating as all get out!) I’ve often thought about if I had a position similar to yours (Digital Learning Consultant) how I would approach it. I’ve written up a list below and was wondering what your thoughts were.
I would focus on (in order of priority);

supporting the willing. They are already on board and if supporting them helps them move from doing good things to doing great things that’s going to benefit kids.

promoting the willing. A lot of times teachers aren’t aware of many of the really cool things that other teachers in their school or school district are doing and the excellent outcomes with students. Showcase this! It may allow more like minded teachers to connect and do even more amazing things. Include both the small and large success alike. Most folks don’t start out as wunderkinds, we need to show easy first steps so that people who are interested in getting involved don’t get scared off.

advertising your services. Hopefully staff are getting interested in what the folks you’ve helped in points 1 & 2 are doing–let them know how you can work with them. If no one is clear on how you can help them and what sorts of things you can do, why would they get in touch with you?

setting up systems to encourage collaboration / building Professional Learning Networks. Lots of possibilities here.

offering workshops.

I guess my hope is that if I focus on points 1 and 2 then more and more people will want to start working on the same kind of change in their teaching practice. It won’t be fast, it won’t get everyone on board, but I think that it will result in more students benefitting from better teaching.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about my list. What have you found effective when trying to initiate change?

Summer Reading: Drive

2011-08-19T04:22:45Z

One thing I really love about the summer holidays is having more time to read. I’ve really enjoyed the books I’ve read so far and thought I would write a few short posts about them. In this first post I’ll discuss Drive by Daniel H. Pink.

Drive

Drive is the second book that I’ve read by Daniel Pink. As with A Whole New Mind, Pink is able to argue his thesis with compelling storytelling.

The main premise of this book is that in the last century we needed to motivate workers using extrinsic motivators. Relying on carrots and sticks such as increased salaries, bonuses, and other incentives or penalties. Part of the reason for needing to motivate people this way was because much of the work they were asked to do was very dull. Pink argues that nature of work today has changed; workers are being asked to be more creative. In order to motivate todays’ workers we need to focus on intrinsic motivation. He provides lots of evidence that shows that when people are rewarded for doing an activity, rather than becoming more interested in the activity their intrinsic interest decreases. When creativity is prized extrinsic motivators become a hindrance.

Pink suggests that in order to foster intrinsic motivation you need three things:

Autonomy: “People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it).”
- Task: Fed Ex days and 20% time a la Google are examples of giving employees autonomy over task.
- Time: The Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) is an example of autonomy over time. In a ROWE employees determine when they work and for how long. The focus is on how much an employee gets done, not how much time they put in.
- Team: workplaces where employees have a say in who is hired or allows them to assemble their own teams is allowing workers autonomy over team.
- Technique: employers who allow their employees to determine how their job is done are giving them autonomy over task.
- There is evidence that companies that give their employees autonomy as described above that their workers become more productive, happier, there is less employee turnover and companies end up providing better products and/or services
Mastery: “making progress in one’s work turns out to be the single most motivation aspect of many jobs.” ”mastery also abides by three peculiar rules. Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an assymptote: It’s impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.”
Purpose: “Humans, by their nature, seek purpose–to make a contribution and to be a part of a cause greater and more enduring than themselves.” Pink argues that people who have autonomy and are seeking mastery can do great things, but in order to really accomplish a lot they also need to have a greater purpose.

As I was reading Pink’s book I asked myself if my job provides opportunities for autonomy, mastery and purpose? What about for my students?

In terms of my job, I do have a fair amount of autonomy. After reading Drive though, I realized that some of the areas of my job that tend to frustrate me are where I do not have autonomy. It’s made me think about whether I could make some suggestions that could give me some more autonomy, and that would also benefit my students.

Mastery is a bit harder. When I was in a bricks and mortar classroom I had those days of real flow, when I was totally in the groove. I just don’t get that anymore in my role as a distributed learning (online) teacher. I intend to give more thought as to why this is and see if I can bring Mastery and a sense of flow back into what I do.

When I first started teaching I was so stressed about teaching all of the learning outcomes and trying to plan engaging lessons that I didn’t take much time to think about the big picture and a greater purpose. In the last few years though I have found that my purpose can be summarized in a simple question; Is this good for kids? Any changes my school makes, or decisions we make regarding students I always come back to my purpose question–Is this decision/change good for kids? Is this going to help them to be more successful? As my program becomes amalgamated with a couple of other district programs (see posts on this here and here) I hope that together as a team we can come up with a common purpose that we can all agree upon and get behind.

For my students I can see that there are a lot of changes I should make to help harness their intrinsic motivation. Because my students learn independently (any time, any place, any where as the saying goes) they do have a lot of autonomy however I think that I need to look at how to better structure things so that they are not overwhelmed by how much autonomy they have. It is often a mad dash for students in June to try and get all of their course work finished up so that they don’t have to work through the summer. I also need to make it more explicit that they can tackle tasks differently if they choose. For example–if they are doing a lab I would be thrilled if my students made their final report a video instead of a standard text based lab report. I’d also like to figure out ways to get to better know the interests of my students so that I could help them tie them into their learning.

Throughout the book I couldn’t help wondering how a unionized work environment fits with the examples that Pink gave. Pink didn’t address unions explicitly in his book.

Drive is a short, readable, and engaging book. If you haven’t read it, it is worth a look. If you have read it, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Please also consider making summer reading recommendations below.

Cheers!

Reflecting on the 2010/11 School Year

2011-07-30T03:27:39Z

I’ve been mulling this post over in my head pretty much since the school year ended so here goes…

Change

Time for Change by David Reece licensed CC-BY-SA 2.0

This year was a year of challenges, stress, and change–or at least the prospect of change. At the beginning of this year our district started discussing amalgamating a number of programs, including the program I’m part of (distributed learning), under one umbrella. The proposed amalgamation would allow us to pool our resources (physical and human) and so be able to provide better services for our students. (I wrote here about using a wiki to help pool ideas about this transition.) It is a big shift though and there was definitely push back from some affected staff. Ok, in some cases, a lot of push back. Aside from the push back the process of discussing and planning for the transition itself was frustrating at times. The amount of stress felt by the staff in my program was huge–no more so than on my principal who will be heading up the new entity. The process has also resulted in the lay off of our secretary: an incredible person and resource.

Looking Ahead

Despite the stress of the past school year, I am really excited about the new changes. The amalgamation means that instead of me being responsible for:
Science 8, Science 9, Science 10, Math 8, Math 9, A&W Math 10, FMP Math 10, AMath 11, EMath 11, PMath 11, Earth Science 11, Biology 11 and Biology 12

I’ll only be responsible for:
Science 8, Science 9, Science 10, Math 8, Math 9, A&W Math 10, and FMP Math 10

I should end up having a similar number of students as last year though. My grade 8 – 10 humanities colleague will also see a similar reduction in the number of courses for which she is responsible. This will help us to focus on providing better resources and support for our students which is wonderful. As things were we were spread too thin and spending too much time on non-teaching tasks (putting students into courses, ordering materials, etc ) and not enough on supporting students.

I’m also looking forward to working with the Alternate Program teacher and his students. In September the other grade 8 – 10 DL teacher and I will be working out of new digs which we will be sharing with the Alternate Program. It will allow for collaboration with the Alternate Program teacher and all three of us are excited about that.

Having a new location and configuring our program differently also allows us to take a renewed look at what our goals are and what we want our program to be. The possibilities are exciting, if a little overwhelming!

The Wrap Up

So, it was a tough year at times. I felt that I needed to write about that, but not to dwell upon it. The prospects for the future are exciting though and that is what I’m focussing on now. I’m going to get to work with talented people and we’re going to be able to provide even better support for our students. What’s not to like about that!

Intro to Twitter Workshop

2011-06-10T04:21:31Z

The Workshop

Today I gave an Intro to Twitter workshop for a small group of teachers and school administrators. There were some people using iPads and a couple using cell phones. There were a few glitches as the wifi was a little slow and frequently booted us off, but overall I think it went well. I haven’t tweeted using a cell phone, so my support for those folks wasn’t as strong as it could be. Everyone made a few tweets, learned how to use hash tags, and started following conversations and people. It was hard to know what to cover as Twitter is such a big topic. Below is the slide deck I used (click on the link). I tried to ensure that all of the images I used were either Creative Commons or Public Domain, and links for all of them can be found on the last slide.

slide deck

I shared the link to the slide deck on Twitter too, but I have to admit that I really hesitated before doing so. I was wondering how relevant it would be for people; it was not meant to be a stand alone online presentation, so some of it won’t make sense as I used some images as prompts for specific talking points. I also was nervous as it is not super polished. But as I hesitated I thought about advice I got from Dean Shareski early on in my web 2.0 journey; share everything. Warts and all.

PLN Power

What was really neat was that I tweeted before the workshop asking for suggestions on school admin to follow on twitter and asking folks to say where they were from and why they use Twitter. I don’t have a huge network so I wasn’t sure what kind of a response I would get. I was pleasantly surprised; some great links were sent our way! Conversations after the workshop with folks in my Twitter PLN also really enhanced the whole experience for me. I’ve got a great PLN!

So… if you are giving a workshop or presentation consider getting your Twitter network in on the act. For me, today, it felt like I was learning with the people in the room and with folks on Twitter. Double the learning, double the fun!

Feedback

Have you presented and made your Twitter PLN part of the process? Did it enhance the experience for you? For the participants? Let me know in the comments. As always, thanks for reading.

Transition Wiki

2011-05-27T15:05:19Z

My school is part of a merger with some other programs in our district. We are three small schools/programs and we will be merging both our programs and our physical space in September. The transition is occurring over a very short time-frame and there are a lot of details to work out between now and September.

Fork / Merge by Sam Grover Licensed CC BY-NC 2.0

As there are staff in three different buildings who are involved in this transition, I thought using a wiki to share ideas and to plan would be a good idea as our face-to-face meetings will be rather limited. I pitched the idea to my principal and he was keen to give it a whirl.

I chose to set up the wiki on Wikispaces. I have accounts on a number of wiki providers, but I chose Wikispaces because it is very easy to set up and I thought it would be straightforward for my colleagues to use.

It’s been interesting to see the activity on the wiki. Some folks started posting right away while it took a few weeks before others took up the invitation to become members. I suspect that the folks for whom this was a brand new experience were reluctant to sign up for an account and dive in. As more and more info was posted on the wiki and discussions were taking place there, there was more of a draw to be a part of it.

A month after starting the wiki almost all of the staff at the affected programs have joined, and everyone who has joined has posted info or participated in the discussions. I hope that as our face-to-face meetings start to ramp up, the wiki will still be a place to go to post ideas while they are still fresh in our minds. There was definitely more activity on the wiki directly after our last face-to-face meeting.

I’ve taken a few short courses on using wikis and I’ve puttered about with them, but I’ve never used them with students or with colleagues before now. Setting up this wiki has allowed me to see the full potential of using wikis not as glorified web pages, but as real collaborative spaces. We’ve been using the discussion feature, myself and others have subscribed to the wiki in Google Reader so that we receive notifications when changes are made, and we’re learning together how to use the various features of the wiki.

Have you used wikis before? If so, what has your experience been?

PLN In My Pocket

2011-04-27T14:42:03Z

As a distributed learning (DL) educator in BC, the big conference that is a ‘must do’ is the Digital Learning Spring Conference. (As the rules for DL here change frequently, so too does the name of the conference–it has been known in the past as the VSS Anual Spring Conference and the BCEd Online Conference amongst others.) Last year, probably because education dollars were so tight, the conference was held entirely online. It was… ok. No offence to the organizers–I just missed the face-to-face. This year it was back to it’s original format–yippee!

PLN In My Pocket by Claire Thompson Licensed CC BY 2.0

So what about the ‘PLN In My Pocket’ bit? Well, two years ago when I attended it seemed like there were only a handful of folks tweeting during the conference (I did have the neat experience of meeting two folks from my Twitter PLN f2f for the first time). A lot has changed in two years. This year–lots more people tweeting. Lots of people from my PLN attending (it probably helped that the brothers Couros–Alec and George–were headlining!) There was that cool feeling of sitting in on a session, realizing that some folks from my PLN were in the room and tweeting, and trying to figure out where they were.

Attending the conference with so many people you know, even if you know them just through their tweets and their blog posts, made the learning that much more powerful. It was easier to go up and talk to people; ‘Hi, I follow you on Twitter…’ usually followed by a thank you for sharing great resources, or answering my questions. The whole networking and connecting with other educators just seemed to flow better.

So take a great conference, sprinkle in a bunch of folks from your PLN and you have a powerful learning experience.

What’s your experience when your online PLN becomes part of your face-to-face learning?

Friends For Life Parent Program Online

2011-04-17T06:00:31Z

The other night I went to a presentation that introduced the new online resources for the Friends For Life Parent Program. According to the website:

FRIENDS is an evidence-based, anxiety prevention and resiliency program for children and youth this is delivered by teachers to all students in the classroom, so everyone can benefit.

Since some studies indicate that around 20% of children have an anxiety disorder chances are that you know a few parents who might be interested in the resources on this site.

On Open

2011-04-04T02:50:10Z

CC by Franz Patzig on Flickr Some rights reserved Creative Commons Attribution license.

Last week I got the wonderful opportunity to learn more about Open Educational Resources (OER). I attended the week long online course Open Content Licensing for Educators facilitated by Wayne Mackintosh on WikiEducator. There were approximately 300 participants from all over the world (see map below).

Open Content Licensing For Educators Participants Map

View OCL4ED map in a larger map

The course was really well set up; the resources and activities were excellent. I felt that I learned more in the week long course than I have for a long time. When it is offered again I highly recommend participating.

Highlights

Engaging with educators from all over the world.
Understanding what the free in free software or free OER means ”This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”” Read more about this here.
Wrapping my head around the different Creative Commons licenses.
Understanding the reasons why not to use the Non-commercial limitation CC-NC license. See a great article about it here.
Appreciating the course design from a student’s perspective (the course material is available on the WikiEducator site, but it was also available in Moodle which is where I accessed the material.) The variety of activities was wonderful.
Finding out about where to access OER that I can remix and use.
Lots and lots of great links! Here’s a link to the ones that I bookmarked.
Seeing materials designed in eXe; free open source authoring software that allows you to design web-based learning and teaching materials without having to know a lot of HTML or complicated web publishing applications.
I am now much, much more aware of copyright, copyleft, and creative commons licensing

What It Inspired

Since taking the course I’ve been inspired to…

Download eXe and start using it to design an Earth Science module for a Science 10 course
Search and find some great OER to use in the Earth Science module
Attend an Elluminate session put on by Math 2.0 demo-ing OER Glue
- OER Glue allows you to curate online content by using is where it lives. They explain it best over at the OER Glue website.
- Very cool application, not sure if I want to abandon an LMS to use it… yet
- Got a beta version, but haven’t done much with it yet
Explore what is going on in BC re: developing OER for K-12

Questions

How do you license work that you create (if you are not setting a license the default is copyright)
Do you search specifically for creative commons or public domain images etc when selecting resources to use with your students or in your presentations?
If you teach, is copyright something you talk about with your students.

As always, thanks for reading what I write!