Amherst has to be one of the most liberal town in the most liberal state, yet there is still controversy over who can march in a 4th of July parade - crazy!!! I live is a neighboring town, but I do pay some attention to local politics in Amherst. It turns out that the parade is funded by local business, so it is considered a private event and they can decide who can march and who can not. The business community in Amherst is more conservative and they are more likely to support conservative agendas, which means peace and anti-war groups have not been welcomed to march in the parade. The citizens of Amherst are know for speaking their mind at town meeting so this question of who can march has been a heated debate. This year, as best as I can understand, groups with a political message can march under their banner, but can not carry any signs expressing a political opinion.

So the Vets for Peace and Iraq Vets Against the War were granted a place in the parade. There were about 8 marchers and we carried banners announcing our groups. From the very beginning of the parade we were getting cheers, clapping, and V signs. I had a feeling that we were getting two reactions from the crowd. One was for us showing up and saying we were there and we do not support the past war (Viet Nam) or the present war. The other reason was because we were there despite the effort to keep us out. There was one final effort to keep us out. At about the center of Amherst a police officer approached us in the middle of the parade and told us we were being video taped and if we were not officially in the parade we would receive a court summons. I informed him we had been given permission to be in the parade. I saw one man turn his back to us, but we received a very warm welcome from most of the people in the town.

After the parade we discussed what had happened and we all agreed that the support was quite a surprise. We all felt that the police officer was heavy handed. We must have passed 10 parade officials, all with orange shits, who wished us well.

July 4th should be the day of the year when citizens are encouraged to speak their minds, not silenced to commercial interest.

TTT#98

The first podcast is “Teachers Teaching Teachers # 98 - Learning to be unschooly” The conversation included teachers and students from around the world and its subject was triggered by a post on Youth Twitter by a South Korean student named Soojin. The term schooliness was coined by Clay Burell in his blog. The podcast discussion focused on how to use the Read/Write web to engage students in authentic learning and not as a fancy worksheet.

From elgg to DrupalThe second podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers #99 - From elgg to Drupal, was very timely because I have been having a discussion with our executive director and curriculum director about developing a CMS. I have used Moodle for a couple of years, but it was installed on our ISP, which we no longer use. I have looked at Joomla, Drupal, and elgg, but don’t know much about any of them. Bill Fitzgerald from DrupalEd was in on the conversation and his advice for anyone wanting to implement a CMS is to write in one or two sentences the goal of the CMS. Dave Cormier advised to write a very detailed description of what several students would do in the course of a day using the technology. Dave is the teacher who helped developed “A partnership project helping Prince Edward Island students bring the past to life using tools of the future.” A Living Archives uses Drupal.

The good thing is that there are many quality choices for a school based CMS.

Speaking of podcasting it is time I had my own if I am to teach other how to create and us podcasts. We did create classroom podcasts last year at Glenbrook Middle School, but those are gone now. I want to podcast some blog entries like Wes Fryer and do some interview.

Having the cluster map has maked posting to the blog much more interesting, now I know someone somewhere has at least looked at the blog. They may have been searching for windhorse (a Buddhist term) and this popped up, what a disappointment.

Many of the participants are feeling over whelmed and frustrated with the amount of information they have to process and the software they have to learn. It was a good move to make each session 2 weeks long, I knew that the newbies would need more time to work with each session. To be really effective this should be a series of workshops each teaching only one Web 2.0 tool. Each workshop should be 4 weeks. I would start with setting everyone up with Firefox and Google tools. Then Skype, so that we could use voice and video to teach the other applications. This should be a school year long series of workshops with enough flexibility to allow participants to proceed at their own pace. As teachers new to Web 2.0 get more comfortable with using the tools they will naturally have more confidence in learning each succeeding tools and become more independent learners. Isn’t that what we learned about good pedagogy in graduate school?

After I wrote this post I read Vicki Davis’s blog coolcatteacher.blogspot.com. For those who don’t know, Vicki and Julie Lindsay developed the Flat Classroom Project. Vicki’s blog post is call The 5 Phases of Flattening a Classroom. As I read it I realized this not only applies to student, but also to teachers. The teacher becomes a student when Web 2.0 tools are introduced and moving from the classroom level of connectivity to more complex levels will give the teacher more confidence, just like students. I find that the rush to get every teacher up to speed quickly with technology fails because teachers are use to knowing and becoming a student again means not knowing.