always learning

I just spent an hour or so reorganizing the Tech in the Middle wiki to make it more of the kind of resource I know I need (and therefore, I hope, others may need as well). The site is now set up in 2 main categories: Projects and Links. Of course I still have my growing Why Integrate Tech? section since that continues to be a bone of contention no matter how much progress I make with individual teachers. And, since everyone always wants to know the story behind a website, I added an About section. Eventually, I would also like to have a Contributors page where all of the teachers that are contributing to this project can share a bit about themselves. So please, feel free to join the space and add your two cents! Sharing and collaborating is what it’s all about.

In the projects section, I would like to include examples of successful tech integration projects at the middle school level along with the supporting materials (websites, handouts, job aids, whatever teachers use to facilitate that project). I’m currently working on getting all of my resources uploaded, so you will only find links to the completed projects for now.

In the links section, I’m posting all the links that I’ve actually looked at, tested, and found to be helpful or useful in the process of integrating technology at the middle school level. I’m trying to include at least a short description of every link and why it might be useful so that teachers don’t have to spend the time exploring the site on their own, only to find out that it’s not what they need.

I am so excited about the potential of this project! I can’t wait to share successful ideas with other international school teachers and collaborate on new ones!

I am still somewhat flabbergasted (and quite flattered) that Steve Hargadon asked to interview me for the Infinite Thinking blog. Last week he came across some of the projects I posed on the examples of educational wikis page on Wikispaces and asked me (me!) for an audio interview. Wow! Needless to say, I am so flattered to have been been asked to share my work with a wider audience. Check out the interview on Infinite Thinking.

In case you’re interested, this lovely picture of me in a cow suit was taken during Fasching in Munich (the German version of Carnival). The students brought in a variety of costumes and then voted on which teachers would wear which costume (they had to pay for each vote and the money went to a local charity). I quite enjoyed the cow – it was so cozy and comfortable that I was tempted to take it home at the end of the day

I’m very excited about this new project! I’ve sent out e-mail invitations to all the international school teachers I’ve worked with along with a bunch of people I’ve met online. So far a few requests for more information and offers to collaborate have arrived in my inbox. How amazing is it that we have the opportunity to collaborate (from all around the world) on something that may have an impact on how we integrate technology into the classroom?

I thought I would add a few more details about why I started this project here as well:

In my last two international school postings, I have arrived in my classroom with little to no appropriate curriculum materials waiting. I have found myself developing the entire middle school curriculum from scratch, mostly independently, because in international schools there is often only one specialist teacher per grade level. Thankfully both schools have used the same set of standards, and I have been fortunate to have extremely supportive and helpful colleagues and administrators, but nonetheless, no one at either school actually had the exact same goals, concerns, issues, and subject matter as me. I think this is a challenge specific to international schools. We travel from school to school, doing our best work, but often end up re-creating the wheel time and time again. I certainly brought my expertise and experience from one school to another, but I have never had the chance for true collaboration with colleagues at exactly the same level. In essence, we are often working in isolation.

In addition to that isolation, we are also working with an extremely transient population. Many of our students may not be with us from elementary through middle up to high school. At each level of the school, we have a very high percentage of new students that may come from, and return to, different educational systems. Therefore the work of the department as a whole, that vertical alignment, may be lost on them. I believe that this is an issue also specific to international schools, and one that the IBO is working towards resolving. In my last position, I attended the MYP Trainers workshop in Amsterdam and was approved as a trainer, but ironically, I am now working in a non-MYP school. I utilize the technology design cycle in my teaching, but I am no longer able to work within the framework of that international curriculum. This is an element I would like to develop within this project as well, as I truly enjoyed working with the MYP.

Along with those two challenges, I believe IT teachers have a very special challenge – educating other teachers and administrators about the possibilities of technology in an educational setting (especially new and emerging technologies). As an IT integration specialist, I often work with teachers that are afraid of the changes that technology brings, and many times the administrators are no wiser to the developments in the world of technology than the teachers. It is a constant effort to educate and comfort teachers that are afraid of these changes. And, quite often, those teachers have themselves been working in isolation for many years and do not see or understand the impact technology has had on the world today. Nor are they required to utilize technology in their teaching because they do not have State or government regulations to meet in this international setting. It would be a powerful tool to have an entire community of educators contributing their specific middle school success stories and samples of projects that we could share with those teachers. Having this extended community not only reinforces the reality that I, alone, have not determined that these tools are essential to students’ education, but that this, in fact, is going on around the world – and to be able to show them exactly how it works.

For my part in this challenge, I was thinking that it would be nice to collaborate with other international school teachers specifically. To see what schools are doing in different areas of the world. To see how different middle school IT teachers deal with issues and concerns specific to the international school setting. And, to actually communicate with those teachers on a personal level, to share and learn, so that we can develop a common resource of our own making – specific to the needs of middle school technology teachers in international schools. I love conferences and that buzz you get from working with colleagues in different schools, but all too often, that energy and communication does not extend beyond the days of the conference. I am thinking of this project as a simple way to keep that dynamic going, even after we move on to a new school and a new country.

I have been teaching in international schools for the last seven years (which is when I started teaching, so technically, I have always taught in international schools). First in Munich, Germany, and now in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (this is my second year here). I absolutely love living internationally. I love being able to truly experience daily life and culture in a foriegn country. I love meeting people from a different country every day. I love working with such wonderful and wordly students. And, of course, I love the travel opportunities.

However, there is one huge disadvantage to teaching abroad: no real network or collaboration of colleagues outside of the individual school you work in. You see, many international schools are so isolated that they are a world unto themselves. Many of the struggles I have expressed on this blog trying to get teachers on board with tech integration is because these teachers have been international for years. They are not exposed to the constant professional development available in the States, or to the regulations and expectations for use of technology in the classroom like you may find in your home country. And, of course, we have no “district” or “region” to connect with – we are on our own. Occasionally schools in the same city may collaborate, but so far I haven’t seen that happen. What this means is that we often end up teaching in isolation. Especially specialist teachers, like myself, that are the only teacher for their subject at that particular age group (for example, I am the only IT teacher in the middle school).

So, I was thinking the other day, now that we have all these amazing web 2.0 tools at our fingertips, and everything is free and easy, why don’t some of the interested international school teachers start collaborating? You never know who you will be working with (or for!) in the future, so we can all start making some connections now. Maybe this exists already, and please let me know if it does – I want to join! If not, I had 2 concrete ideas (focused on middle school technology, because that’s my subject and grade level, but there’s no reason to stop there) to start with:

1. A common blog where we can share ideas, experiences and resources among ourselves, but more importantly with the teachers we work with. I know it can be a challenge to get teachers on board with technology projects, but imagine if you had a website with stories of different projects, how they started, what they looked like when they were finished, and how they were implemented. What an amazing resource!

2. A common wiki where we can post links and resources to support those various projects. A place to link all of the projects we have done. A place for all international school teachers to share their work with technology in the classroom. Can you imagine how much easier it would be to transition to a new school if you knew this resource was always available?

Last week I created the Tech in the Middle blog and wiki as a starting point for these ideas. If you are interested, or know anyone, anywhere, who might be interested, please let me know. I am imagining my transition to my next job with these resources in hand and I am in awe of the limitless possibilities if we all work together!

Looking forward to working with you!

Today I was inspired by the educational wikis space on wikispaces (get your own free wiki for educational use here) to create my own “Projects” page here on my blog (check out the tabs above).

I have decided that I am going to keep a running list of the web-based projects that I do on this page so I can easily get an overview of what’s happening here at school. I love the idea of having a central place to find lots of examples student work.What do you think?

Thanks to the recent edublogs upgrade, I am updating my blog with a new look: “Regulus“. It’s far more customizable than my last theme (even though I loved the dusk colors of “Twilight”). Unfortunately I am still having some problems with link categories. I used to have 4 categories, but now only 1 shows up. The only way I can get all my links to show is if I do not have the links sorted by category (which is too confusing). For now, I have none listed, until I can figure out how to get it working properly.

Anyone know how to solve this problem?

I just started a new project with our sixth grade science teacher, Maria. The students were just about to start a unit on human body systems using a pre-designed resource called Code Blue from Highsmith. Maria wanted to provide a way for the students to effectively share their knowledge using the jigsaw method within class, but also to be able to share what they learned across all 3 blocks of science classes. So we decided to have the students develop a wiki, this way the information could be viewed and edited by all sixth grade students at any time.

In each individual class, students were put into a specialist group based on a human body system (e.g. cardiologists) and a clinic group comprised of a specialist from each body system. Each student is a specialist doctor in their clinic, and therefore responsible for teaching the other members of the clinic about their specialty.

Students first worked within their specialist groups to learn about their human body system and create a specialist page. The great thing about these specialist pages is that we had only one cardiologist page for all 3 science blocks. This was an excellent way for students in each class to read and see what the other classes posted. We also took advantage of the “discussion” feature to allow students to communicate about their specialist page, even though they are never in science class at the same time. It was amazing to see how much they learned from each other and how careful they work to correct each other’s mistakes to ensure the accuracy of the entire page. This was also a great way to encourage more in-depth study into the topic because each student had to build off of the work from all other students in all other classes – since their were 9 students working on each page instead of just 3.

Once the specialist pages were completed, we had the students shift groups into their clinics to create their clinic page. The had created individual logos on poster-board in the classroom several weeks ago, so we took this opportunity to use the digital camera and introduce basic Photoshop skills so they could add their logos to their clinic pages. On each clinic page, each specialist doctor posted a short (fictional) bio about their career as a doctor. (I would have loved to have each student take and upload a picture of themselves with their bios, but I didn’t want to put student images online).

Now students will use these spaces as a study guide for their “Medical Exam” in which every student in the class must demonstrate understanding of all body systems.

Next, each clinic will receive a patient consultation chart describing a patient with a medical problem. The clinics will have to work as a group to diagnose the patient and prescribe actions to ensure recovery. They will post this information as an additional page on their wiki.

As always, I was so impressed at how quickly the students picked up the skills required to successfully create their wiki. I love watching them teach each other as they learn new things and seeing the excitement on their face when they successfully try new things. This is what it’s all about!

Lately I’ve been lamenting the challenges of getting teachers to hop on the web 2.0 bandwagon, but I really should be focusing on the infinite enthusiasm of my students to experiment with each and every thing I’ve shown them. I’m especially impressed with one of my sixth grade students, Lilian, who has really embraced these skills wholeheartedly. Her blog is always thoughtful and thorough and often includes personal anecdotes or information she thinks her classmates would find useful in addition to her academic work, and, as a blogger, she posts insightful, helpful, and clever comments on the other student’s blogs all the time.

In addition her fantastic blogging work, she even made herself a wiki about school (before I taught her how to do it) just for fun! The best part about it is that she learned about wikis from reading the blogs of my study skills students when they were making their class wiki!

On the “about” page, Lilian explains why she created her wiki:

“I created this wiki for my own learning but also for learning the different technology skills. I never even heard of wikispaces untill I was looking on Ms. C’s study skills students’ blogs’ which had reflections of making a wiki. After that I started exploring the MSstudyskills wiki, even before we started IT. I made my own wiki but didn’t know the basic skills. I now made a new one, for teachers to see my work and friends/family to also see my work online.

I created this so if I have for example, a math project, I can post it on here and present my work in this, rather than just using normal technology skills in Word or Powerpoint. I think in my home country I would have learned all of the blogging things neither wiki’s or using iMovie. I think I’m very lucky being able to “know” the world of technology.

I also made this for fun and for my writing skills and improving my own learning.”

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when this school year began!

I have a question: I have seen so many amazing projects on the various edublogs I read every day, and many of them feature student images or video of students. How do you deal with having video and/or images of students online? Does your school have an acceptable use policy that gives teachers the ability to publish whatever they want? Or do you just post it and hope for the best?

I would love to put so much more student work online (especially videos and images), and I know the students want to see themselves online, but I’m worried about student safety (and parent permission). Our school doesn’t have any sort of official policy, so I don’t really know where to start… How do you handle this situation?

This is what happens when you go away for a week – not that I’m complaining about vacation, it’s the return from vacation that’s the killer :

You spend a relaxing week in the sun, enjoying fresh air and new cuisines, and the freedom of being officially “unplugged”. You return home feeling rested and ready to start a new week. You open your aggregator on Monday morning to find thousands of new posts to read. And of course, this happens to be the very same two weeks that the K12Online Conference is on, so not only are you behind in regular reading, but with all the exciting conference stuff too! Panic begins to set in. You spend every waking moment of the following week trying to read everything you missed, while, of course, catching up on your work at work. The weekend finally comes and you give up all hope of a social life in an effort to get back into the swing of things…

One problem that’s still in the forefront of my mind is the struggle to promote the constantly improving web 2.0 apps that I am enjoying discovering and using in my classroom. It’s good to know that I’m not alone in this struggle, though. I just read Jennifer’s post and it looks like she’s facing the same challenges. We know that this is the world we live in, it’s unavoidable, these skills have to be taught, and we have to do the teaching. As I responded to one of my colleagues who questioned the validity of teaching technology at all: I think the point is that we have to teach technology. This is the future. This is our world. We ignore technology and we are ignoring communication, literacy, and productivity. If we do not teach them how to be responsible with technology and how to use technology appropriately, where will they learn? Sure, they have fun with these tools at home, but these are the tools of the workforce and they need to learn how to harness these tools for work, not just play. The fact is technology is the future. We can’t ignore it and hope it will go away. We have to learn how to use it and how to teach the students to use it appropriately. And, as Will very accurately points out:

“Many of our kids are already doing this without us. Many of them have much more of a clue of what it means to learn using these tools than we do. Imagine if we could teach them to leverage their connections even more powerfully, if we could show them how powerful they are in our own learning. That we are not just engaged teachers but engaged learners. That we’re not afraid of what’s ahead because we know how to learn.”

But it’s frustrating to feel that we’re beating our heads against the wall. How can we get all teachers to see the validity of these new tools? For the most part, I think it is fear of the unknown, fear of students knowing more than they do, fear of not knowing what will happen once they “put themselves out there.” We all know that teachers have a tendency to love always being right and being in control. Why wouldn’t they fear losing that control? I started teaching as an IT specialist, but with a liberal arts degree, so I always knew that the kids would know more than me. There was never any hope of me being the “sage on the stage” or the holder of all knowledge for the class.

Since I never started with this feeling of control over the class it doesn’t scare me to lose it. Just this week I released the chaos with my middle school IT exploratory classes. I showed them the basics of a wiki and told them that they would record the class curriculum in our short 9 weeks together. They were so excited to start that the e-mails notifying me of student updates started pouring in at 3:05 (school ends at 3:00). I know that all teachers want their students to be motivated and excited about learning in the same way, but giving in to the chaos is a complete change of perspective, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

I think Brian, at Learning is Messy is right when he says:

“You can’t just show most people – you have to show them and explain it to them and then answer their questions and then show it to them again and then explain it to them again and then show them how this relates to things they already do – takes the place of this and makes it even better and does this and this and this!”

Teachers need to feel safe, they need to trust you as an individual before they will follow your advice. They need to see it working time and time again and they need to see “regular teachers” succeeding before they feel comfortable enough to start. As Wes says at The Speed of Creativity, we have clear need for

“teachers to be aware of blogs and use them, not just for their own news and idea consumption, but principally for their own publication of student work. Teachers need to have experiences using blogs themselves. Most will not start using them if they just hear about them, or see them used in a workshop. … Only through experiences with read/write web tools will larger numbers of teachers come to embrace and utilize them for instructional purposes.”

I know my colleagues are often interested in the things I’m doing, but I also know they are thinking to themselves, “oh she can do that because she’s a tech teacher, she already knows how to do everything.” I guess what I need to get across is that I don’t. I’m learning just like everyone else. Maybe I found out about a new tool first, or maybe I catch on quicker because I’m used to the technology, but everything is changing daily, how can any one person know everything? It’s a mind-set more than a skill-set. We just have to want to try and learn, to be open to new challenges, and open to the possibilities of both success and failure.