Edustange

I was very curious about Google Wave. When my nephew first offered me an invitation I turned him down.  Google Wave was in Beta and I had far too many projects to contend with. Last week I acquired one of those invitations from him and jumped into the water. Wave is collaborative software rather than chat software. Someone using it as an alternative to MSN or a chatroom is seriously underutilizing it. It feels more like a wikispace to me. Eventually people will begin linking Waves together and we will have hyperwaves braided together and linked like the multidimensional universe of the web.

I have begun networking through contacts made at Classroom 2.0. Contacts are everything. Sometimes they are slow to take off. A technology mentor, Dean Shareski, here pointed me toward Classroom 2.0 through Twitter. I found a Thread posted there about Google Wave and joined an impromptu learning group. We began with simple editing using random questions in a give and take. As some of us became more comfortable, the Wave took on structure. Perhaps because Google Wave is still in Beta, there are things to work out and refinements to make (I dislike my inability to move blips or minimize blips like the blog embed code.). I was pleased to learn how to embed a test Wave on a new Edustange page. This is all so educationally relevant.

Social Media in Learning examples.

This link was worth taking a minute to blog about. Alec Couros sent it out in a tweet this evening. Just scanning down the long list of tweets I gained a better understanding of the number of ways to use social media for learning. I only wish I had time to explore some of the programs I am not familiar with.

Reading in the library

I thought I had a bad day and then I remembered of how my day began and how it ended. The day began when I reluctantly shifted out of my comfortable living room chair intensely conscious that I had only had only consumed a third of my ritual morning coffee fix. Fifteen minutes later it was 7:30 and I was greeting the first members of my volleyball team. For an hour and a bit they trusted me to teach them how to be better players. Nine seventh and eighth grade girls giving over precious adolescent sleep time.

I allowed a few frustrations to rattle me at the pool a short while later when my home room went for their swimming lessons. Delays for forgotten swimming suites and the frustration of missing clothes; its a bit difficult maintaining perspective when you are focussed on a schedule and a bewildered student looking for his pants. Those moments temporarily eclipsed  the experience of watching them swim, dive and water slide (well that was recess for them). I was reminded of it all when I was transferring some pictures from my camera to the desktop.

Today was my students’ day in the computer lab. The SLO (student learning outcome) was demonstrating that they could initiate discussion threads on their wikispaces. When they return, we will follow up with replies. Thanks to the delay at the pool, this was all we were able to get through in the morning. My reading period went missing. A student hung back at the beginning of lunch to ask if I could help her brother start a wikipage. He hovered at the door until I invited him in to establish an account and activate the boy’s division email account. His eyes widened slightly with interest when I told him the account was his until he left school. The pair left hurriedly to eat their lunch. The younger sister will mentor her brother for a while and then I imagine he will quickly take ownership. In passing I noticed three students are trying to build their digital portfolios before I am ready. Three students have YouTube accounts now. This started when one wanted to create and upload his own video. His first efforts are embedded on his page now. The three students subscribe to each other’s accounts.

We spent an hour with a First Nations storyteller right after lunch. I was struck by my student’s eagerness to volunteer for the roll plays generated by the stories. A number of boys unselfconsciously acted out the roles from where they sat watching: irrepressible engagement, “Can we stand so we can see better?” Recess was late so all I managed was a brief writing activity before I turned them over to a colleague. He helped me begin the math pre-assessment that slipped my notice throughout September. His time on this was brief. The students ended their day in the library exchanging books. I caught up with them there in order to capture some portraits we will use in a Thanksgiving art project. I had a SST (student support) meeting at the end of the day so I almost missed the departure of my students. A few of them were distracted by their cross country match after school. They were wrapping that activity up when I left a little after 5:00.

I stressed the missed academic classes today. Reading, writing and math benchmarks preoccupy me these days. I marked a spelling assessment as the students swam this morning. The regular classes are feeling fragmented at the moment. Continuity in Social Studies, writing and science is strained for the next few weeks. It is hard to let such things drop.

The beaming person in the picture attached usually smiles. Its hard not to think he had a good day. Volleyball, swimming classes, social networking, a Cree storyteller, library and a cross-country run, the Student learning outcomes are not always clear and there will be no end of year assessment. Well perhaps there will, when the students look back on what they learned and what they did. It is really a very prosaic sort of day in an elementary school I think.

My | Prezi.

Two days have passed and I have not commented on my Tuesday Digital Portfolio Session. My schedule is too tight for quiet reflection at the moment and the Outlook To Do list is growing, not contracting at the moment. This is typical of late Septembers generally I suppose. The Digital Portfolio session was information rich and very engaging. A group of like-minded professionals and I arrayed before our laptops weaving a social network for a new community of purpose. Well I get excited about such things, though I notice no sudden burst of discourse over at the Division Forum.

This sense of excitement does not die the moment I step back into my prosaic classroom routine. It wraps around me now as I work with colleagues, share learning through instructional technologies with my young students, or sit with an arm around my wife using Skype to have a final (but not final) conversation with my son before he embarks on a six-month dream trip to Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand.

My fourth and fifth graders swarmed me yesterday morning pleased to see me back in the classroom. It might be our working relationship, but the first remarks referred to the substitute teacher failing to use the Promethean ActivBoard during instruction. Eyes lit up around the classroom when I made a brief explanation for my absence and showed them yet another opportunity to learn and share themselves. I confess I multi-tasked at one point during my day. The class was in the lab and emails stared coming my way querying me on my whereabouts and activity. How quickly they embrace it all, but we have known that for decades now and many of our colleagues are the product of our early efforts. I found out four of my second and third grade health class students are on Facebook. I am old enough to be surprised by that.

Dean Shareski casually introduced us to Prezi, eye candy for presentations. It speaks to my affinity with concept mapping and I will definitely learn how to use it. Our meeting discussed formats for Digital Portfolios and it came to me that students might embrace Prezi as a logical way to present their learning. Imagine my fifth grader starting with the whole map and then zooming in on the learning outcomes and the media demonstrating their achievement. They would love it. I have a few brighter technological lights I want to share this with. Some people are more linear so they might like the sequential page. We are all learning here so I will see where it goes.

I suppose inserting this I should have some explanation, but I really don’t.  I just thought I was very cute.  I suppose the thoughtful conclusion would be that we all have our own mode of communicating and our predispositions can become both frustraters and obstacles to reaching our students and colleagues. I have an interest and predilection for electronic communication these days. Others don’t share that. They are on other wavelengths as it were. Something always worth remembering. I stopped in at the Division forum and felt the usual disappointment that there had been little change. To be effective, we need to adapt. xkcd cartoon

Forums – Powered by vBulletin.

I seem to have a compulsion to involve myself in different forms of social networking. We all follow different paths to this point. For me it was two decades of living in very small communities. I usually found it difficult connecting with educators who shared my professional or personal interests. During the ten years I was an administrator I confess I was desperate for this sort of forum and made tentative efforts to interest other administrators in coming together in a social network.

I’m in Moose Jaw now. I find that all things considered the isolation within one’s own school continues to be a constant. There is a great deal of support within a school, but I still find myself reaching out trying to build or join a broader community of purpose. Communication within the school is not always as extensive as we might like either. We tend toward our geographical spaces and departments. Conversation with the colleague next door happens sporadically.

Forums like this can bring us together around a single thought or idea. Presented asynchronously, the thread has a chance to mature in a way a remark passed in the hallway or at a meeting cannot. I have enough experience with forums to know this will grow slowly if at all. Much of the success or failure of a forum rests with a users communication skills. I always head to the bottom of the forum thread and subscribe to it. That way if someone responds, I know. If they don’t, well I put the thought out there and I can move on.

Despite my interest in blogging, I still find a web site, or in this case a wiki the best way to manage my student’s access to the internet and their approved social networking tools.

It is a simple way to connect learning resources and division services like email accounts and online libraries. Even eight and nine year olds have most of the tools they need to navigate the web, but this portal offers control. I have talked about it in earlier blog posts.

An evening with WordPress has left me feeling more comfortable. I will keep working with it this fall. I suppose I have spent far too much of the time puzzling out the sequence required to place picture into the text. It is not as user friendly as I might hope.