Philly to Sydney with Year 2
If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made.
It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia. It started a conversation that went something like this...
Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video?
I sure do.
And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise.
I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia last year too, so it was nice to "close the loop" on our virtual meetups.
Kim's idea was deceptively simple. Get our kids to make a short video about a virtual trip to Australia, and in return her classes would make a video about a virtual trip to Philly for us.
With virtually zero planning, I dropped into one of our Year 2 classrooms and asked the teacher there, Lisa, if her kids would like to make a video for these students in Philly and she jumped at the chance. In no time, Lisa and I had a bit of a brainstorm on what sorts of things we might do, and she started working with the kids to write a script using GoogleDocs. The script gradually evolved and took shape over the next few days.
I'd been wanting to do some work with chromakeying, or greenscreening for a while, but had just never gotten around to it. It wasn't something I'd done before, but I suggested to Lisa that if we shot the video of the kids in front of a greenscreen, then it might be fun later to try and drop in the images of various parts of Australia as backgrounds. She thought that sounded pretty cool, so I went to our IT Director and asked if I could buy an inexpensive greenscreen kit. It was one of those things we'd talked about buying for a while, but never quite got around to it. With a reason to need it now, we went online and ordered it on the spot.
When it eventually arrived we set up a date for the shoot. The classroom was transformed into a studio for the morning with lights, camera, and plenty of action. I used iPrompt Pro on my iPad to transfer the script, and then held it up just under the camera lens as a scrolling teleprompter so the kids could read the script as naturally as possible. We shot it on a Sony HiDef camcorder at 1080i/50. It took a few takes to get things right, but the kids really worked hard to do it was well as possible. Being able to repeat a section over and over in order to get it right was a valuable part of the learning experience. When it came time to shoot, we all had fun calling out things like "Quiet on the set!" and "Rolling!" and "Action!", and running things just like a real movie set. I think the kids had a lot of fun recording it.
I took the footage back to my desk and dumped it all onto my MacBook Pro to ponder out the best way to edit it. Although I definitely do want to get the kids doing more video work themselves, getting them to edit the footage was not really the learning goal for this particular exercise... it was all about their performance for the camera. After some experiments with iMovie I eventually decided that I'd cut it together with Premiere Pro instead. Premiere Pro was certainly not a program that I knew well, but this seemed like a great chance to get cosy with it. I'm glad I did... it's a very impressive NLVE tool and I like it a lot more than Final Cut Pro 7.
I always try to make sure we set a good example for students regarding copyright, so it was important that all the background images were available under a Creative Commons licence. I think it's really important that we demonstrate to our students that you can actually make worthwhile digital media without continually breaking copyright law. All the background images are CC licensed, as are the two pieces of music that I included, both from jamendo.com. The two videos were not released under CC, but using their YouTube contact address I wrote to the owners of both and both were more than happy for us to use their clip. One even offered to send us the hi-def footage! Most people are pretty generous if you just ask. Remember, Copyright doesn't mean "you can't use it", it just means "you can't use it without permission", so if it's not CC, then do the right thing and get permission! It's just not that hard. (Publishing works under a Creative Commons license makes it much easier of course because it's essentially an "up-front" permission which is pre-granted as long as you stick to the uses stipulated by the copyright owner)
After a couple of days of editing over the weekend, I did the final render to a 720p .m4v file and uploaded it to YouTube as a private link so the Philly kids (and our kids) could see it the next day. Here's the finished product...
It always nice to ceremonialise things that are a bit special, so we set a date for a premiere screening and invited all the Year 2 mums and dads in to watch. When the Year 1 Philadelphia kids watched it, they all wore Aussie bush hats and set up their classroom like the inside of a plane to watch the video. We had our screening this morning and the movie played to a packed classroom of excited Year 2 students and their parents. Proud parents. Excited kids. Performing for a real audience. Making opportunities to create and practice and iterate. Immediate feedback. And lots of fun and laughs. An authentic learning experience? You better believe it..
Kim tells me that her kids are working on the sequel for us, showing us their virtual trip to Philadelphia, so we are looking forward to that.
Lisa, our Year 2 teacher, now keeps asking me when we can do our next global project, and is coming up with lots of cool ideas for how it will fit into next terms syllabus.
Overall, I think I'd consider this whole thing a win, wouldn't you. 
Popularity: 14% [?]
My Edublog Award Nominations 2011
2011 has been an interesting year for blogging.
I feel like my own personal blogging has been really suffering lately, not just from being really busy at work, but also from the endless distractions of Twitter and Google+ which, if I let them, could easily become my sole places for sharing stuff online. Certainly, there are some people, like Mike Elgan, who use Google as their sole online presence and funnel all their other online stuff into G+. It's a potentially intriguing strategy, as the engagement factor on G+ is certainly very high. You could also argue that Twitter has replaced a great deal of sharing that was one done via blogs, and there's little doubt that between the "Big Three" of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the nature of blogs and blogging has shifted considerably since I first started using them back in 2005. I'm blogging less, for sure, and it definitely leaves a void that I miss filling.
However, this was also the year when I introduced a whole bunch of new bloggers to the wonders of blogging. At my school, I encouraged the teachers of Reception, Kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2 to give class blogs a try. It's been resoundingly successful, with the Reception and Year 2 classes in particular really running with it.
Then, our Year 6 teachers, librarian and kids took part in a well-structured blogging project as part of an AIS-funded AGQTP Action Research project. The Year 6 teachers got time away from classes to learn about the culture and skills of blogging, and then they shared it with their students, who each got a blog and used it quite extensively during the latter part of the year.
Our junior school librarian also jumped on the blogging bandwagon too, and created both a Junior School Library blog which she regularly updates with library news and information, as well as a Book Review blog that is growing in popularity.
All in all, it's been a busy year of blogging for many people I work with!
My Nominations
I would love to recognise some of these school-based blogging efforts that have emerged this year by nominating some of them for an Edublogs Award. Bear in mind that these are all brand new bloggers, people that have never done it before and were willing to get in and give it a go. I really admire their willingness to try something new and learn some new skills. I'd love to see their efforts rewarded with some recognition, and of course some additional traffic. I think they really deserve it.
So, my nominations are...
Best Class Blog: From Little Things Big Things Grow: The PLC Reception Class Blog, by Sophie McKendry and Jaclyn Casella - In their simplest form, blogs make brilliant journals, and this Posterous blog has been a fabulous journal of the year's activities for this class of 4 and 5 year olds. With 39 posts over the course of the year, they have added photos, audio recordings and writing to document the many important classroom events from 2011. The reaction from parents has been overwhelmingly positive.
Best Class Blog: The PLC Year 2 Blog by Catherine O'Doherty, Lisa Case and Katrina Avery - This blog has been used to connect, collaborate and communicate with our parent body and the world, and has generated an enormously enthusiastic response from the teachers, parents and students alike. It contains student work samples, photos, audio recordings, scans, and writing. It also documents the adventures of Cocoa, the class mascot. The blog has had 147 posts during the year and over 11,000 views. It's an amazing first attempt at blogging and deserves some recognition.
Best Library Blog: Library Matters by Sandra McMullan - I think this brilliant new library blog deserves lots of recognition. It was started by our junior school librarian, Sandra McMullan, as a way to showcase the many great things that happen there. It contains posts, photos, stories and booklists, all designed to encourage greater dialog and exposure to what goes on in the library. It's a stellar first effort at blogging, and really think it deserves some recognition. In addition, Sandra started a second blog for book reviews which links of the front page of her main blog.
After a fairly full-on year of introducing blogging here at PLC Sydney, there are lots more blogs floating around (including a blog for every student in Year 6). While they are all interesting, I think the ones listed above have been the real standouts, and deserve to be nominated for a 2011 Eddie.
Now please go vote for them!
Popularity: 18% [?]
Push Me, Pull Me
It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I'm referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year.
The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as "the scattered manual", where the instructions for doing pretty much anything can be found and reassembled in order to learn, if only you have the skills to do so. I hadn’t heard that idea of the “scattered manual” before, but I really like it because that’s pretty much exactly what it is… a collective knowledge of many people scattered right across the network. When one has the skills and ability to decode, reassemble, aggregate the parts of the “manual”, then that elusive “independent learning” becomes a real possibility for anyone who wants (and knows how) to get it.
I think there are two very different and distinct aspects of learning something… one is obviously the learning, and that seems to be a “pull” activity initiated by the learner. Learners need to assume responsibility to pull information to themselves when they feel they need it.
The other aspect is teaching, and that seems more like a “push” activity, where information is pushed towards the learner, usually by a “teacher”, or someone who already has the knowledge, skills or understandings that the learner does not yet have.
As much as we talk about reinventing education by doing away with “teaching” in favour of “learning” (usually as a reaction against the industrial model of education where teachers taught and students were supposed to just absorb it, and in doing so restore learning to its rightful place) I think we need to be careful that we don’t push the pendulum too far the other way and marginalise the act of teaching altogether.
My feeling is that good teachers know when to actively teach, and when to allow students to independently learn. Good teachers know when to push and when to allow pull. They know when to say to a student “this is how you do it”, versus saying “you need to go away and think about this for yourself”. It’s not that Teaching should take precedence over Learning, or that Learning is somehow less tainted with the stink of the 20th Century than Teaching, but rather, we need to know where the balance point is, in various situations, for different students, and apply that balance dynamically so that every student is always right there on the edge of their Zone of Proximal Development. A learner's reach should always exceed their grasp, but only by the appropriate amount, and perhaps the teacher's role is to keep that gap at the appropriate amount.
As a teacher, I want to have the wisdom to know when to say to my learners (including when these learners happen to be other adults), “You seem to be struggling, let me help you”, and conversely when to say “I will not do this for you, as it only deprives you of the opportunity to learn it for yourself.”
I don’t think you should ever do for someone what they can and should be able to do for themselves. The “scattered manual” exists so readily that to deprive learners from the opportunity, and in doing so absolve them from the responsibility, to learn for themselves just shortchanges everybody in the long run.
Popularity: 18% [?]
ISTE in less than 140 Characters*
It's been a big few weeks. I'm currently writing this while flying in an Air Canada Boeing 777, seat 40J, somewhere just south of the equator and slightly west of the International Date Line, chasing the sun around the globe on my way back to Sydney.
I've been in Canada for much of the last few weeks, visiting our Canadian family and friends, something I wish I could do more often. But for three days I managed to slip away down to Philadelphia PA for my first ISTE conference. If you know me, or read this blog at all, you may know that I tend to get around to a few conferences in various places, but the ISTE Conference (and prior to that, a NECC) has eluded me so far. For whatever reasons, I haven't been able to get to this event so when the opportunity came up this year I jumped at it. And I'm glad I was able to… it is an amazing event.
In thinking about ISTE 2011 to decide what to blog about it, there are a few notable things to mention, but for me, one really stands out as the highlight.
First, there was the sheer size of it. With (I’m told) 20,000 delegates this year, the scale of ISTE is unlike anything I've seen before. Pennsylvania Convention Centre was simply enormous and easily housed the hundreds of exhibitors, vendors, workshops, presentations, displays, poster sessions, and of course, the thousands and thousands of attendees. I don't know exactly how big the PACC actually is, but it's huge.
Secondly, the number of presentations taking place at any one time was mind boggling. There was so much choice, so many options, it was hard to know where to be. I only attended a few actual presentations, but the quality of the presenters and the information was very good. Whether your interest was in learning about the various edtech tools, in hearing about new pedagogical approaches, or finding out about new ideas for what works in today's classrooms, there was something for everyone. Some sessions were huge, like the keynotes with 6000+ people, to presentations with a few hundred, to classroom-sized workshops, to poster session conversations; the choice available through the organized sessions was astounding.
There were also the fun events too. The Google Party held at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, held among the dinosaur bones and the fluttering butterflies, was great fun, and being invited to the invitation only Google Certified Teacher cocktail party beforehand was pretty special. The Edtech Karaoke Party the next night (#etk11), where we all had a few drinks and got up and sang, was one of those events I'm sure I'll remember for a very long time.
But the thing that really made the ISTE event most valuable for me was the opportunity to meet and mix in person with the people in my PLN. It was, as someone observed, like having your RSS reader come to life. I was constantly bumping into people I knew, whose blogs I read, who appear daily in my Twitter stream, whose YouTube videos I've watched. Some I'd met before, but most I had only ever known online.
As you've probably experienced yourself, the best parts of most conferences are the serendipitous conversations, bumping into people in the corridor, having a chance to chat face to face. For me, ISTE was all about the people I met.
After the conference was over, I jotted down a list of all the people I’d had a conversation with over the previous three days, and the size of the list surprised me. In no particular order (other than that dictated by my slowly deteriorating memory!) here is a list of all the characters I met, chatted with, or had a meaningful conversation with over the three days I was at ISTE…
The (less than) 140 Characters
Paul R Wood @prwood
Mike Gras @mikegras
David Warlick @dwarlick
David Jakes @djakes
Sharon Peters @speters
Amanda Marrinan @marragem
Roger Pryor @pryorcommitment
Wes Fryer @wfryer
Jason Arruza @jarruza
Vinnie Vrotny @vvrotny
Martin Levins @levins
Angela Maiers @angelamaiers
Kevin Honeycutt @kevinhoneycutt
Carl Anderson @anderscj
Holly Hammonds @libraryquest
Linda Swanner @lswanner1
Melanie Burford @mwburford
Lisa Neilsen @InnovativeEdu
Dvora Geller @teachdig
Mark Wagner @markwagner
Nancye Blair @engagingEDU
Lisa Thumann @lthumann
Wendy Gorton @wendygorton
Cathy Brophy @brophycat
Paula White @paulawhite
Erin Barrett @erinbarrett
Charlene Chausis @cchausis
Cheri Toledo @cheritoledo
Karen Fasimpaur @kfasimpaur
David Wees @davidwees
Leigh Zeitz @zeitz
Brian C Smith @briancsmith
Roland Gesthuizen @rgesthuizen
Marg Lloyd @?
Tony Brandenberg @tbrandenburg
JamieLynn Griffith @jgriffith2
Steve Hargadon@stevehargadon
Beth Still @BethStill
Christopher Craft @crafty184
Maria Knee @mariaknee
Molly Schroeder @followmolly
Dean Shareski @shareski
Julie Lindsay @julielindsay
Lisa Parisi @lisaparisi
Diana Laufenberg @dlaufenberg
Ellen Sheerin @esheerin
Chris Walsh @chriswalsh
Adrian Camm @adrian_camm
Tom Petra @RealWorldMath
Pete Moran @pjmctm2010
Brian Crosby @bcrosby
Maurice Cummins @mauricecummins
Jennifer Garcia @mrsjgarcia
Ginger Lewman @GingerTPLC
Alice Barr @alicebarr
Susan van Gelder @susanvg
Dean Muntz @?
Diane Main @dowbiggin
Benjamin Grey @bengrey
Kim Sivick @ksivick
Becky Crawford @Becstr9
Scott McLeod @mcleod
Bethany Smith @bethanyvsmith
Sam Gliksman @SamGliksman
Rob Griffith @rgriffithjr
Gail Lovely @glovely
Henry Theile @htheile
Chris Lehmann @chrislehmann
Bud Hunt @budtheteacher
Gary Stager @stager
Jim Marshall (Promethean)
Frank Augustino (Luidia)
Jason Orbaugh (Smart Tech)
Johann Zimmern (Adobe)
Adam Frey (Wikispaces)
Anita L'Enfant @anita_lenfant
Paul Fuller @paulfuller75
Linda Dickerson @?
Kyle Pace @kylepace
Michelle Baldwin @michellek107
Steve Dembo @teach42
Robin Ellis @robinellis
Dorothy Burt @dorothyjburt
George Couros @gcouros
Liz B Davis @lizbdavis
Kelly Dumont @kdumont
Kristina Peters @mrskmpeters
Alfred Thompson @alfredtwo
Bernie Dodge @berniedodge
Pamela Livingstone @plivings
Jason and Dawn (from Wisconsin, not sure of last names, met them on the train back to PHL airport)
That's nearly 100 people and nearly 100 great conversations. (*I was aiming for 140... there were actually about 120 people on my original list but thanks to the lack of an undelete feature in Pages on the iPad, I lost a bunch names that I now just can't recall! Grr! My apologies if I left you off the list!)
I think it just goes to show that the real power of an event like ISTE is in the people you meet and the conversations you have. That's where the real connections are made and strengthened. Between the catch-ups with people I already knew quite well - like some of this year's significant Aussie contingent - through to the folk I have previously met in the past, to the many who I have only ever known through our online connections, meeting in person and having the chance to connect and share and talk was what made ISTE truly priceless for me.
Thanks for being part of my network! See you in San Diego next year?
PS: If I have missed your name, or was unable to include your Twitter contact, please let me know so I can include it.
*PPS: Apologies (or thanks) to @lasic for the idea of the name for this post
Popularity: 29% [?]
Name that Network
By default, your computer's drives usually have creative names like "My Computer" or "Macintosh HD". Home wireless networks usually have equally uninteresting default names, like "linksys" or "netgear", or that ultimate of all default SSID names, "default". USB Memory sticks and portable USB drives often have even less interesting names, usually based on their brand, or a series of random characters.
Some people give their computing equipment names that make them a little more interesting, or at least a little more unique and personal. I've seen people use names of planets, Greek gods, fictional characters, and many other esoteric collections as the source of inspiration for the names of their networks and computing gear. I once worked as the network manager in a Catholic school where all the servers were named after saints. IT geeks often have an unusual sense of humour, and it commonly shows up in things like this.
As I was running some backups tonight on my two main home computers, my attention was drawn to the names I've given to my own machines, drives and home network over the last few years. There is a common, albeit fairly geeky, thread behind their names.
See if you guess where I got my inspiration from... if you think you know where these names come from, drop me a comment below.
My MacBook Pro's hard drive is named Raskin and the backup drive is named Atkinson. My iMac's hard drive is named Hertzfeld, and it has a backup drive named Engelbart and several terabytes of attached storage on drives named Wozniak and Tesler. Finally, my wifi network is named Espinosa.
If you can tell me what all these names have in common, without Googling them, then you are obviously pretty darn geeky yourself!
Popularity: 26% [?]
You Don’t Have To Like It
I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology. The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology (whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it...
Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.
I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important. No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to the hangar".
Computers started appearing in classrooms back when I was still at teachers college more than 25 years ago. There has been an expectation from EVERY school, school system and government policy that I've worked under in the past 20 years to embed and integrate technology into the education process. Using technology in the learning process, and having some understanding of it and what it enables our students to do, is NOT something that was dreamed up in the last few months, or that appeared suddenly with the DER/BER/<insert acronomyn here>.
I'm so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked because it's "too hard". As educators - actual professional educators, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a living - we do NOT have the luxury of choosing whether we should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or whether we think it's relevant to the learning process. It is, it's part of the job and if people don't think so, then they ought to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to take seriously without it impacting on our future generations.
Your government, your state, your diocese, your school system, your school, have all been mandating this technology integration requirement for at least 20 years that I'm aware of. Every school I've ever worked for has dedicated many hours and dollars to providing professional development, training, resources and equipment to make it happen. The fact that we are STILL having this conversation about teaching professionals who are not up to speed with this stuff after all this time is downright embarrassing to the profession.
It makes me crazy when I hear people talking about using technology in the classroom as being "hard", as though it's also optional. Every job has hard bits, but if they are part of the job, you just learn to do them.
You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
Popularity: 85% [?]
Tiny Bursts of Learning
Despite the fact that I know many teachers who would rank Twitter as the most valuable and powerful networking tool they have access to, there are still many more who simply don't "get" the value of Twitter. I've been to lots of conferences over the last few years where the enormous value of belonging to a Personal Learning Network was being touted, and Twitter is nearly always being suggested as the ideal tool for building that network. At one recent conference I asked for a show of hands for who was not yet on Twitter, and many hands went up... my response was "Why not? What are you waiting for? How many times do you need to hear people say that Twitter is the most valuable tool they have, before you actually try it for yourself?"
I spoke to a group of preservice teachers recently who were basically told by their lecturers that they needed to join Twitter. Despite the fact that it was being promoted to them as a powerful way to learn and network with others, most of them seemed to join up simply because it was part of their assessment requirement. Because they joined Twitter "under duress", I don't expect them to actually buy into it, use it well, or continue to use it past the mandated requirement to use it. And that's a bit of a shame.
In contrast to all this is the general sentiment among many teachers that "we need more PD!", or the always-amusing "How can they expect us to learn new things if all we get is a few PD days a year?"
If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.
Learning needs to be ongoing. The world is changing. There are new tools that can help students learn, new ideas about learning, new brain research, new emerging technologies, new social structures, and so on... to think that you can maintain a professional outlook by attending two or three PD workshops a year is almost laughable. To keep up with new learning, you really need to be plugged in to an ongoing source of professional discourse and resource sharing. It needs to be something that happens regularly, at least several times a week. Like so many other aspects of the 21st Century, some of the "ways we've always done things" don't really cut it anymore.
So how can something at simple as Twitter possibly be used to stay professionally current?
How I use my Twitter PLN to learn
I've been keeping an eye on my Twitter stream for the past 10 minutes or so. Using the Twitter app for Mac, it sits in a narrow vertical window on the right side of my screen and as the people I follow add their tweets they flow by in a steady stream that updates every few moments. How fast this flow happens is obviously dependent on how many people you follow... I follow about 2600 people, so it tends to be a pretty steady stream of tweets, but yours might be more or less. Occasionally I glance at this "stream of (networked) consciousness" and spot little gems that look interesting.
For example in the last ten minutes I've spotted the following things...
- A great quote about writing from Bud Hunt
- A link to a promising new open source 3D animation tool
- A good article on landing your dream job in a networked world
- An interesting question about URLs posed by Jim MacMillan
- News about Twitter's new advanced search features
- A link to a thought provoking article about game based learning
- A great teaching idea from Penny Coutas about using Xtranormal for language learning
- An link to interesting article about the relevance of the social sciences
- A student work sample of an excellent global collaborative project
- A link to a list of the top 10 lazy email habits
- A link to an article about the effectiveness of online learning for young students
- A link from Alec Couros to a 5 minute video called "Cultural Differences"
- A fascinating article about Facebook scams
...to name but a few.
In the same 10 minutes worth of tweets, I also responded to a couple of questions from other people that I felt I could help them with, saw a funny story about Moodle, watched an amusing exchange between some people I know, and ended up getting invited into an Elluminate session about developing Moodle courseware.
Just ten minutes. Even just skimming through that list of things would give me more relevant PD than most teachers get exposed to in a whole year. And those of us who use Twitter in this way are able to tap this stream of information any time we like.
(I hope you also noticed that I still don't know what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch, or what crazy antics Charlie Sheen is up to. I don't care about that stuff, so I don't follow those people, so I don't see those tweets. Twitter works because you get to make choices about who is part of your network. You create relevance for yourself.)
Now, before you assume that I spend my whole day getting sidetracked by Twitter, let me assure you that's not the case. I'm telling you about this 10 minute slice of time to make the point that Twitter, when you build a network of relevant people, is an amazingly rich sources of ideas, inspiration and connections.
I don't read every tweet. I don't follow every link. I let most of the tweetstream just flow by me, only dipping into it if I get a moment. If I spot something interesting I hit the star to favorite it and come back to it later. If anything really good turns up in the stream and I miss it, it gets retweeted over and over so the chance of me seeing it is still pretty good. But mostly it's just there, flowing by, ready for me to dip into it and pull out a few gems whenever i have a moment. Do that every day and pretty soon you have a substantial body of PD building up.
I understand why people find it hard to get their head around Twitter. I understand why people are still skeptical when they hear others say things like "Twitter is the best PD you can get!" It sounds like complete hyperbole... How on earth can a random collection of short messages from strangers possibly compete with professionally organised training and PD sessions?
It competes because it's more relevant, more timely, ongoing, interactive, daily and personal. Traditional PD just can't offer all that.
If you're one of those people who resist Twitter because it just doesn't seem logical, please just suspend your doubt and give it a go. Don't just join and do nothing; give it a proper go. Follow a bunch of relevant people - at least 50 or 60 - get a decent Twitter client, and open yourself to the possibilities of what a network offers. You won't regret it.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:04 — 7.0MB)
If you want to share, say so!
I took part in the Open Content Licensing for Educators online course that ran all last week. It was run by the team at WikiEducator and was a great insight into the many copyright issues that can be addresses by creating Open Educational Resources using clear and open licensing terms.
I know that many educators don't think in terms of "licensing" their work, but really, whenever you make something that can be used to help either you or others teach, it's a "resource" and the way that you indicate how you are prepared to let others use that resource can be considered a "license".
The thing that became screamingly obvious as I worked through the online course content last week was that...
a) All educators need to get much, much better at MARKING our work (where we're allowed to) with some form of designation that indicates how we wish to share it. We all produce resources, but very few of us consciously consider marking those resources with a "license" to indicate how we want to allow (or restrict) others to use them. Creative Commons is ideal for this purpose, but there are other options too, such as AEShareNet.
The point is, whatever you choose to use, use something. (I know that some of you will rightly point out that the copyright for work you produce for your employer is technically the property of your employer... I don't even want to go down that slippery slope right now... I'm just saying that, where you are able, when you are allowed, PLEASE add some indication to the resources you produce to indicate how you will permit further reuse and remixing of those resources. I'm sure we have all experienced the frustration of finding a good resource that we'd like to reuse, but cannot find any mention of how the creator intended to share it... when it's not marked as shareable then have to assume it's covered by full All Rights Reserved copyright, and therefore we are technically unable to use it until we get permission... it's a pain in the neck!)
And secondly..
b) For education, the best type of license is a CC-BY or a CC-BY-SA. These are the only two CC license types that are classed as "Culturally Free", meaning that they allow real sharing, reuse and remixing by others. Adding the well-intentioned NC (Non Commercial) or ND (No Derivatives) to a CC license can still make it difficult for people to use your stuff easily and legally, and in some ways are almost as restrictive as full copyright. There are obviously places and situations for all six of the various CC license types, but for education and to allow real freedom to share, BY or BY-SA are the best ones.
Whatever terms you decide to use (although I'd encourage you to use the most free - libre - license you can) please mark your work - worksheets, powerpoints, IWB presentations, videos, etc - with something to let downstream users clearly know what they can and can't do with your work.
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