always learning

Not too many people travel to Taiwan for vacation…

And I have to honestly say, that I wasn’t expecting much when we went last weekend, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. Taipei was exciting, trendy, vibrant city with tons to do, a strong cultural connection, and a real cosmopolitan energy.

We stayed with our fabulous friends in a neighborhood called Tianmu just at the base of the mountains:

enjoyed a fabulous night market:

saw some scary meats:

and some cool traditional snacks:

went to the beach:

went to the top of the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101:

and hiked in the mountains to see some active geysers:

All in all, it was a very cool place to visit! Check it out if you get the chance!

One of my biggest stumbling blocks as I’ve switched gears from middle to elementary school is individual e-mail accounts for the students. Back in middle school, I could always count on every student having their own e-mail account. Even if, for some strange reason, one or two students didn’t have one, I could just ask them to sign up for one before the next class and it would be done. Alas, nothing is quite that easy at the elementary level….

In our case, for lower elementary students, we really only need each student to have an individual, permanent, e-mail address to sign up for other services (not to actually send and receive e-mail). So, in order to get our second grade class up and running with Ning accounts for our Global Village project (which, of course, require a consistent e-mail address for log in purposes – no mailenator for us), and in preparation for all of our Global Communication Center projects, I spent less than an hour today solving my problem, thanks to Gmail.

Basically, Gmail allows you to create subsidiary accounts linked to an individual Gmail account. Check out this great screencast demonstrating how to create linked Gmail accounts that Alec Courosa made with Jing earlier today (I need to start getting the kids to make screencasts with Jing next – what a great way to create tutorials!).

Basically, this means that one teacher can have 20 permanent e-mail accounts that are all delivered into one teacher e-mail account. Therefore, if the teacher account is teacher@gmail.com, all you have to do is add a “+studentname” before the @ symbol to make a linked account. Therefore mail sent to teacher+studentname@gmail.com will go straight to teacher@gmail.com. Of course, given that Gmail terms and conditions require users to be over 18, we did send out a permission slip to all parents to get their formal approval that we create these linked accounts.

This means that all students will have to learn is “their” e-mail address so that they can log into the Ning (or wiki, or whatever) independently, but they never have to actually see their e-mail, check an in-box, or deal with any spam. This also allows us to be consistent in the classroom, with all students essentially having the same e-mail address to remember – only needing to input their name after the “+” sign.

Also, thanks to the filtering and labeling feature in Gmail, the teacher can filter all incoming mail into specific labels for each student, thereby saving passwords and user account info for future reference, just in case. And, with the (basically) unlimited storage that Gmail provides, this should be the perfect place to keep those kinds of records – accessible from anywhere, by anyone with the teacher password (in this case, both myself and the classroom teacher).

As far as I’m concerned this is the perfect solution for our younger students. It took me less than an hour to set up the initial e-mail account, invite all 18 students to our Ning, accept all 18 invitations, and approve all 18 membership requests. Certainly, it’s not ideal to have the teacher doing all this (especially when I’m used to the students being able to handle sign-ups on their own) but it’s far better than actually having individual accounts and worrying about students maintaining them on their own when they’re 7 & 8 years old.

Bring on the global collaborations! We’re ready!

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, email, gmail, globalcommunicationcenter

Here in east Asia, the big regional conference for teachers is the EARCOS Teacher’s Conference. It’s usually sometime mid-March and all of the schools from this part of the world are invited to attend. ISB is a longtime supporter of the conference and the school actually pays for the flight to the conference, along with the conference fees (but not the hotel room), for all ISB teachers interested in attending. Considering this year’s conference is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (where I lived for the past two years – ironically last year it was here in Bangkok), I figured it was the perfect year to apply to present. A great experience plus trip back to one of my favorite cities in the world!

Although it’s still a work in progress, I thought I’d share my presentation here as well:

Workshop Title: Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways for Infusing 21st Century Literacy Skills in Your Classroom

Workshop Description: This session will focus on utilizing web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, podcasts, and wikis, to develop 21st century literacy skills within the core curriculum. Metacognition, research skills, and online awareness help students find what they need, learn at their own pace and safely share with a wider audience. How can we incorporate these exciting, motivating skills and technologies into our classrooms? Examples of completed student projects, along with teacher materials and resources, will be shared.

I just started a wiki for all of the resources I want to share, but there’s not much up there yet… I’m actually presenting the same topic in Singapore in November (thanks to Susan Sedro for getting me involved) so I will have all my resources posted by the 16th.

What do you think? Feedback? Suggestions?

Update: I forgot to mention that I’ll be presenting using Google Presentations and I would absolutely love for my PLN to be there so I can “pull back the curtain” at the end and give the audience a glimpse into the authentic learning that’s we’re engaging in every day! Time, date and URL to be announced here (and on Twitter just before the  actual presentation).

Tags: 21st century literacy, globalcitizens, collaboration, learning, EARCOS,

This past Monday evening, at 7pm Bangkok time, the ISB Learning Hub team (including our fabulous admin team: Annelies, Struan, and our superstar tech coordinators: Justin and Dennis) got “geeked” as we watched the pre-conference keynote of 2007 K12Online Conference here in our fabulous Learning Hub:

We started by watching the 2006 keynote presentation by David Warlick to get us ready (and to pass the time while we waited for the 2007 keynote, also by David Warlick, to download), all the while taking notes and discussing how we can bring these kinds of 21st century literacy skills into our classrooms here at school. The amazing thing about the keynote, was that while we were here in Bangkok discussing what we were learning, we were also connecting with our colleagues all over the world, via both the backchannel chat that David set up, and Twitter.

I love being a part of these conversations to confirm my beliefs and to stretch my thinking. It is so empowering to feel part of a network of learners that stretches beyond the people I spend every day with. A while back I wrote a post about feeling isolated as an international school teacher (as I am so very often the only teacher in my department for my grade level), but in the last year, beginning with the K12Online 2006 conference, all of that started to change.

Once I began making the connections, through the use of these fabulous web 2.0 tools, I realized that my colleagues are not only here in Bangkok, but also in Korea, Qatar, the Dominican Republic, Singapore, China, the UK, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, all over the United States and Canada, the list could go on and on (and clearly I need to update my blogroll…). And thanks to my personal learning network, and the constant connection, collaboration and creativity they inspire I am learning around the clock!

Sometimes it’s hard to stop and reflect on all this learning, so here’s a start: my notes from the Pre-Conference keynote and from the Fireside Chat. No time to waste as the first of the presentations are starting today!

Notes from the K12Online Keynote

• In the 21st Century we learn by teaching each other, we learn by sharing what we’ve discovered.
• Side trips were the definition of my education.
• There are no boundaries any more – walls are coming down – putting kids in contact with what they’re learning about.
• Teachers and students are looking for new boundaries, to find traction to move forward: A common context to work together and accomplish individual goals and shared goals
• Educating a generation without boundaries is not going to work – our task is to find/invent the new boundaries.
• Resourcefully create boundaries to go where we need to go – traditional boundaries are going away, we need to be resourcefully inventing, creating boundaries to move forward.
• I had no reason to believe that my job as a teacher would change for the rest of my life. It would have been impossible for me to predict that my future would look like this.
• Last generation looking at their parents and believing they are seeing the future. Our kids know that things are changing so fast that they don’t know how they will be making a living in the future.
• School used to prepare students for their future
• Freelance workers, free agent educators, maybe a better model for the future.
• For the first time in history we are preparing our students for a future we can not describe.
• The children who are in our classrooms are not the students who we think we’re teaching.
• They are not natives in a land that is in anyway stable – their journey continues, they have grown into these technologies,
• Digital immigrant is not an excuse – it is to get rid of our accent, our children are doing this by accepting that technologies have continued to grow, and they pay attention, they celebrate and adapt to the change
• They learn because they’re part of a network, they’re connected, they may not know how to do something but they have a community they can learn from.
• The real digital divide is that some people are part of a network, part of a community, learning together, collaborating, power in the community – the others are alone, there is no power there.
• Power in the community, there is power in learning together.
• Networked children have “alien” powers: can see and hear through walls (cell phones, texting, etc)
• College students never have to say goodbye when they go off to college – because they carry their friends in their pocket
• Games, social networking teach children how to collaborate, how to work in a team
• We want our students to be the children we want to teach, rather than teaching the children that they are – this is an insult to our children (27 min in)
• The nature of information has changed – information landscape used to be hard, unchanging, ever-lasting, expensive to produce so we wanted it to last.
• How we use, find information, how it flows, what we can do with information has changed: Information is becoming increasingly networked, digital, overwhelm, participatory, reader directed, information often comes directly from the author – without benefit of traditional gatekeepers like librarian or publisher.
• Other skills just as critical to literacy: find appropriate info, evaluate information, organize information into personal digital libraries
• What happens when all information is made out of numbers? what happens to arithmetic – numbers now apply to the full range of content, and we’re overwhelmed with information. We need to decide what information we’re going to use
• Being literate involves producing an information product and message that competes for attention in the same way that products on a store shelf competed for attention in the industrial age.
• Our notions of what it means to be literate must also change.
• Where do I want to be 10 years from now? How able am I to do the things I want to do? What can I do today to prepare myself for that future?
• Health: we still need human bodies to carry us from place to place.
• Information is independent of time and space: we can be disconnected at one individual moment, but still be connected
• Today we can reshape information
• Students can be re-mixers of content, provoking more important learners – it is so much in the grasp of those of us who are paying attention
• Used to want a hilly classroom : teachers up high, learners down low – gravity drives curriculum
• Our students are now publishers (57% of teenagers have produced original content and published it on the Internet, and engaged in conversations with their viewers – how many of their teachers have done the same?) – from perspective of their information experience, many of our children are more literate than their teachers
• Our classrooms are flat: how do we drive learning and curriculum when we can no longer rely on gravity
• Three conditions converging on our classroom, we tried to avoid, contain, block them out
• Best thing for us to do is realize that these 3 converging conditions can become new boundaries off of which, we can gain traction
• They are:

1. We are preparing a generation of students that are info and tech savvy, know how to play the information, but they don’t know how to work the information, they need us to help them work the information. These kids that are coming to us from an information experience that is far richer, far more personal than anything we have in class – there is energy in that. We need that energy to help us teach and learn without gravity. Kids energy comes from their intrinsic need to communicate, to share their personal experience and identity, to ask questions, to accomplish things, form and participate in communities, to invest themselves, to safely make mistakes, to earn audience and attention. There is enormous energy there that we can tap into.
2. New information landscape, networked, digital, overwhelming, participatory, flows and unflows, connects and re-connects. There are opportunities to create experiences for our students where they are working responsibly, sharing themselves and collaborating, within the context of the curriculum.
3. First time in history we are preparing our kids for a unimaginable future. The best thing we can be teaching our children today is to teach them how to teach themselves.

Notes from the Fireside Chat

• Regarding games, if parents get scared about kids spending too much time on their games, they will overreact – at least from the kids perspective, and then the children will be less likely to continue a dialog with their parents about this topic. The dialog between parents and children is so important that you don’t want to loose that simply by overreacting.
• Pay attention to how students learn, and teach them in that way. Kids should be telling the story of what they’re learning, how they’re learning, right now – “give a megaphone to our students.” Get out of the way and listen to our students and they’ll tell us what they need – Sheryl
• Teaching helps you learn – students teaching students/teachers helps them take learning even deeper.
• “Teachers should be the directors of learning, not the teachers” – Arthus, 14 year old student
• 21st century teacher should be a master learning – demonstrate what learning is about, not what teaching is about
• Learners are leaders – leading their own future and the others around them. Learners must respect each other, and be respectable – critical that any notion of literacy include the ethical use of information, ethical practice and habit of learning.
• Any classroom where students are not using digital, networked information, is not acceptable, that teacher is not teaching, they are not preparing students for the future. It is not an option anymore.
• Classrooms need to be about new kinds of conversations. Students need to learn how to engage in conversations about learning with people in their world – around the world – that are creatively crafted by their teachers, to learn what they need to learn. By creating those conversations, and engaging in their learning in a networked way, they are learning authentically.
• What’s new, now, is the conversations that are happening. These are the conversations that are the key to learning.

For those of you that were unable to attend on Monday night, don’t despair! All of the conference events are posted on the conference blog and will be available permanently – you can even go back and watch all of the presentations from last year!

Check out these links to get you started:

• www.k12onlineconference.org – The main conference blog
• The Schedule of Events – See what’s coming up
• Where do I start? – A guide for first time attendees
• Preconference Keynote – from David Warlick

And, just in case you are still wondering why you should attend this (free, online, just in time, amazing) conference, take a listen to this fabulous podcast by Chris Betcher and you’ll be geeking out before you know it!

Technorati tags: k12online07, k12online07pc

Last week our elementary admin team along with our curriculum coordinators had an excellent meeting about the direction our school is moving in terms of technology and 21st century literacy. Here at ISB we have amazing resources, all the hardware and software you could ever want, and we’re focusing our professional development on authentically embedding technology into our core curriculum units of study. We have the most supportive admin team I, personally, have ever worked with and, of course, a fantastic tech department.

Basically, we have all of the big pieces in place for success, but now we need to really clarify our vision, to create a common understanding of what we want to achieve with all these resources. And, since I am, apparently, the “expert” (and I use that term quite loosely here) in 21st century literacy, I want to take the time to really synthesize my own thoughts on the topic. In all honesty, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages, but keep putting off because it intimidates me. But, we have our next meeting tomorrow morning, so I guess I better get my act together now!

I have been bookmarking everything I find that has the term 21st century literacy involved, but there are lots of variations in everything I read. There is just so much out there that it can be overwhelming – especially for someone who may not be comfortable with the tools, or who may not be aware of the changes that are taking place in education and, more generally, in our society. I have learned so much in just this last year of blogging, and now, in the past few months with Twitter I feel like I’ve already exponentially increased my learning (another post in the works on that whole topic) that the task of distilling all this learning down to a series of essential understandings is a bit scary. But here goes:

The goal of 21st century literacy is to move beyond obsessing about the terminology and the technology, to accept that technology is a crucial and critical aspect of our lives, and that as such, it must be used as a tool to better understand our world, to search for solutions to the problems facing our global society, and to develop a better and brighter future. 21st century literate students and teachers are those who understand that their learning and creativity can, and should, directly and positively impact our world.

All and all, my big three concepts for 21st century literacy are that students and teachers must be:

Effective Learners

Students and teachers will understand that learning is a lifelong process and that the pace of technological change requires us to focus on learning how to learn, rather than learning specific tools. It is expected that neither students nor teachers will know how to use every available tool, rather that they will be comfortable learning how to use new tools independently.

Independent learning requires that student and teachers are able to evaluate information for authenticity, relevance and bias as well as evaluate tools for applicability and effectiveness. As independent learners, teachers and students will be able to filter out unimportant stimuli and information so that they can focus on the important and useful, to be able to navigate graphical interfaces as well as different types of text and media formats.

Lifelong learners are reflective, they routinely practice metacognition to think about how and why they understand what they do, and they constantly strive to look deeper at their own thinking, processes and practices. Lifelong learners are intrinsically motivated to better understand the world around them and to use that knowledge for self-improvement.

Effective Collaborators

Students and teachers will develop the behaviors, attitudes and dispositions required for working in partnership with others, whether in person or over distances. Global collaboration requires effective communication, social and cultural awareness, and flexibility. Effective collaborators actively take responsibility for their role, and are able to delegate or share responsibility when necessary. Effective collaborators are equally comfortable as either leaders or participants. Effective collaborators appreciate and internalize the essential interdependence of all human endeavors.

Effective Creators

Students and teachers will understand that an essential component of lifelong learning is analyzing, synthesizing and applying what they’ve learned to make an original contribution to society. Effective creators are critical thinkers who are able to “think outside the box” and analyze systems to identify and solve problems. Effective creators are constantly innovating and routinely use metacognition skills to evaluate and improve their own work. Effective creators are goal oriented, using time management and multitasking skills in order to work at their highest level of productivity. Effective creators understand that, as members of an interdependent society, their work must adhere to standards of ethics and social responsibility.

What are your essential understandings for 21st century literacy?

Tags: 21st century literacy, globalcitizens, collaboration, learning, creating, vision, philosophy, understanding

Update: Check out our new wiki: Books Go Global! Please feel free to add your class to our Participating Schools page and collaborate with us! Thanks to Lucy Gray for inspiring our wiki layout with her fabulous Cities of the World wiki (another amazing global collaboration to join!)

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Today I introduced our two fourth grade classes to VoiceThread to get them excited about their next big project. They are going to be creating book reviews on VoiceThread (inspired by Wes Fryer‘s son, Alexander) and then sharing them with partner schools around the world so that their single book review can become a dynamic conversation around books.

Now, I have to admit, I think VoiceThread is pretty cool. When I came into the classroom to show them a sample (thanks again to Wes and his creative family) I thought they would just be blown away by the tool. Plus, Kevin Jarrett had just tweeted about some awesome VT upgrades to be released on October 10th (which will, of course remain free to educators – hint, hint, YackPack), which I also showed the class. And, to some extent they were impressed. But, when they really got excited, and I mean literally shaking with excitement in their seats, was when I mentioned that these book reviews would be shared with other students all around the world.

I find these global connections exhilarating myself and I’m so amazed at how quickly and easily fourth graders were able to grasp the power of these tools. One student asked if she could create her book review in English and her native language, so that friends and family from her own country (who might not speak English) can still enjoy her work. Which then started a discussion about the possibility of a book review being started in Korean, but making it’s way around the world, being translated as it travels. We talked about having partner schools on every continent and ending up with one book being reviewed in as many languages as possible – just like “real” books are published in different languages. What a powerful thought for a group of nine-year-olds.

Little did I know that my hook was not the super cool tool that we’ll be using, but the global connections that our students will make. Clearly they’re reading for world 2.0.

Right now we have two partner classes in the US already on board, the fabulous Lisa Durff, Susan Morgan and Matt Kish – all from the US, but we would love to add a few more continents to the list! Is anyone else interested in joining us on this book-lovers adventure around the world?

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom, reading, bookreviews, VoiceThread, collaborations

As part of our school-wide focus on reading this year, and our organizational goal of ensuring that we engage our highly able students, two of our grade 5 classrooms are creating a collaborative Ning to allow our “high fliers” to share and communicate with each other – even if they are not in the same class. And then of course, we have the fabulous added benefit of being able to connect with other students from all around the world!

The goal is to allow the students to start communicating about their reading, to ask leading questions, to facilitate discussions, to broaden their reading choices, and generally go deeper with their thinking. We are going to model this kind of thinking for the students in the beginning and then ask that they take a leadership role in directing and facilitating their own forum discussions on our Ning. We decided that Ning would be a good tool for us because it allows all students to feel on equal footing (ie: there is not one single owner of the space), allows for easy to manage threaded forum conversations, and has tons of embedded features that may come in handy as the project develops (direct video upload, groups, blogging, etc).

We are planning to start the project only with our highest level reading groups (for a total of about 20 students in our grade 5), many of whom are reading on a sixth or seventh grade level, and then add in the rest of the students as they progress with their reading. During our literature circle times, these high fliers will be introduced to Ning, while the other groups are continuing with their normal discussion groups. Eventually we were thinking we could even add some sixth or seventh grade students into the mix – those that are reading at grade level – to help facilitate discussions and broaden our fifth grader’s reading choices. To get the project started, we will begin with just our students here at ISB, that way we have time to work out the kinks and really plan something exciting and engaging with our global partners.

Speaking of our global partners, so far we have made connections with Jess McCulloch in Australia, Tod Baker in China, Sharon Tonner in the UK, and Linda Nitsche in the US. A pretty well rounded collaboration considering that the idea was born a mere 12 hours ago. Thanks to the power of Twitter (another post in the making) – and one quick “tweet” at 9:00 this morning – we have all connected at some point today to talk about how we can connect our students to talk about reading. I love our network!

Anyone else interested in joining?

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom, collaborations, Ning, jessmcculloch, todbaker, sharontonner, lindanitsche

Ah the fickle world of web 2.0…

I found YackPack last year, used it with my class on our collaborative project with the fabulous Chrissy Hellyer, loved it, preached about it to the masses, and now that it’s somewhat popular, they have decided to charge for their services.

I guess I’ve gotten used to services that seem too good to be true (like VoiceThread, Skype, Wikispaces, edublogs, etc, etc) that I was actually surprised, shocked even, to see that YackPack is making their service fee-based. Maybe I’m naive, but if all of these other companies are able to offer their services for free, what’s the deal with YackPack? We can handle advertising if we must, but Wikispaces is ad-free for educators…. What’s the advertising on Skype? No ads on edublogs….

From my recent communication with BJ, a YackPack rep:

There are no free services like YackPack on the web because what we offer is expensive to provide. If we were part of a large company, like Google, we might be able to offer the service free.

If you can think of another solution, keeping in mind that for a company to survive their income must exceed expenses, then let me know. We’ve ruled out advertising. It’s annoying, and you have to have millions of users before it actually works. The other revenue option is subscriptions.

It looks like YackPack is going to be US$34/year for educators, which is not much, but even if my school is willing to pay (which I’m sure they would), if my collaborative partners can’t afford it, the application is essentially useless.

So, now I’m in the process of searching for alternatives. Chrissy pointed me to Chinswag, which looks a little more “wild” than YackPack (and therefore might not be appropriate for lower elementary – goodbye Global Communication Center idea), and offers “channels” instead of Packs, but it might work. Plus, you can even RSS the channels you’re participating in – now that’s cool!

Anyone know of any other way to allow asynchronous audio communication in a virtual “classroom” type setting (where you can have only the members of your specific classes in the group together)? Or, even better, does anyone have any brilliant ideas for YackPack to help them make the service free for educators?

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom, yackpack,  globalcommunicationcenter

I’m having a little mental dilemma that I can’t seem to work myself out of, and I’m hoping you can help:

Have you ever felt like you were in the right place at the right time? And by being in that right place in the right time, you totally changed the course of your life or career?

Well, I’ve had quite a few of those experiences lately:

One was moving to KL and finding out that just in the year I arrived, a nearby school, ISKL, was starting an Educational Leadership certificate cohort through SUNY Buffalo that would take two years (the length of my contract, and the length of time I ended up staying in Malaysia). Going through those course changed the way I teach, and eventually led to my second example here.

My second “right place, right time” experience was actually being online at the same time as Justin Medved was writing an e-mail about the availability of a certain 21st Century Literacy Specialist position to the NextGen Teachers group and starting a very quick dialog that resulted in a trip to Bangkok 24 hours later, job interview 48 hours later, and position offered and accepted a week later.

So, you can see how I might be inclined to trust the “right place + right time = just do it” equation.

Here’s my latest:

ISKL (quite a leader in the whole PD department, as you can tell) is now, in January 2008, starting an Ed.D. program through NOVA Southeastern University with an actual cohort in KL (the professors will actually teach on site at ISKL).

Interestingly (as you begin to watch the fates align) my best friend, and educational technology superstar, Lisa, is also completing a Ph.D. program through NOVA (she works at Yale and lives in New Haven, CT). Lisa has been pushing me to do this Ph.D. program since she started. I’ve successfully been able to postpone the whole seven-years-of-my-life commitment thing by explaining that Florida is much too far for me to fly to several times a year. Not only could I not afford it, but I certainly don’t have that many school holidays that I could find my way to Florida in February, July, and November – not possible.

Now, ironically, almost the exact same program (except for the Ed.D. vs. Ph.D. debate) is being offered in KL. A mere 2 hour flight away. A mere 2 hour flight away that usually costs about US$50 roundtrip on the fabulous AirAsia. A mere 2 hour flight away that usually costs about US$50 roundtrip on the fabulous AirAsia, in the city that I lived in for two years, loved like my hometown, and where I have tons of friends with comfortable couches.

This very program is coming at a time when I am looking to study educational technology more in depth. For the last year, or so, I’ve been thinking about a Ph.D., weighing the pros and cons, looking for just the right program, thinking about what, exactly, I am interested in, but nothing has jumped to the forefront.

And then, this program comes along. The degree is actually Instructional Technology and Distance Education, which initially I was not at all interested in. Then, I got to thinking…. Isn’t distance education what we’re doing when we design globally collaborative projects? Isn’t distance education what all of our students will be doing in the future when we’ve finally adapted to life, web 2.0 style? Then, isn’t distance education the future of education? And, by golly, if it is, I want to be there.

Oh, and have I mentioned that because this program is an Ed.D. (not a Ph.D.) it will only take three years, and because it’s an international cohort it’s about a quarter of the price of a traditional Ph.D.?

So, you can see how this program might just be appealing to me.

But I’m still not sure. For starters, it’s not a Ph.D., and there’s just something about the prestige of a Ph.D. that I like. Secondly, it’s still mighty expensive – no free rides here. Thirdly, and most importantly, I’m in my first year at a new school, a new, intense, busy, school, and this is going to eat up my free time like nobody’s business. Lastly, I’m currently in an online course to get my library certification – a 30 credit certificate program – almost enough for another masters!

So, brilliant edubloggers, what do you say? Should I Ed.D. or not?

(Seriously late) UPDATE:

Thank you to everyone who offered advice here – it was so good to hear all the different side of the issue. In the end, I decided not to do the Ed.D. It was a tough decision, but I’m glad I finally decided, now I can stop thinking about it!

Basically, given my new job, the fact that I’m currently pursuing another degree,  the location of the program (KL is close, but I’m not sure it’s close enough) and the reality that the actual program specifications don’t exactly exactly match what I’m interested in, were all reasons I decided against this particular program.

However, I did just meet a colleague from ISKL who is going to do the program, so I should get the inside scoop on how it works – just in case they decide to run the same course through ISB here in Bangkok. Either way, I still think I’ll go for another degree, eventually, but this one just isn’t quite right enough to spend all that time, money and energy…

Not every global collaboration has to be a time-consuming, classroom changing, priority rearranging project. Sometimes, you come across one that is so simple (for the participants – not the poor, overworked, organizer) that it’s just impossible to pass up (have I mentioned that it’s practically impossible for me to say “no” to any project?)…

Voice of the World is just such a project. The amazingly talented Sharon Tonner is collecting audio files of students and classes from around the world and compiling them into monthly podcasts. From our Ning:

I am currently working on the children’s area with all our completed vokis. The plan is to diplay all the vokis in one area – wikispace. I am then going to take all the audio from each voki and create a podcast so that it is like a show. I can do this for everyone this month as each file is very small but in later tasks there may be an element of only selecting specific voices for the podcast but still displaying the main task.

Just a wee bit background on the project, i initally created VOTW as an E-twinning project to unite voices around the world. to make it the world I need to branch out of Europe hence why all you lovely teachers are involved.

Because the site is popular I have to adapt to the interest and realise that some of my inital ideas might not be feasible anymore due to the size as it would not be interesting to the children to listen to a podcast that lasts over an hour. When using different voices and languages children need to be kept focused and entertained.

To do this I will incorporate a different piece of software each month that you can use from the internet so that not only are the children participating in a global project using their voice they are also learning new ICT skills and hopefully some teachers too.

Briefly, the next themes are National Anthem, Nursery Rhyme, Jingle Bells, Hopes For The Future etc. All these will be in the child’s language but this should not present a barrier to understanding as the children have already completed the task and know understand the concept.

The power of the voice and sound are amazing tools if used in a structured environment.

Our first task was to create a class Voki and record our students saying “hello” in the local language. Of course, as usual, I went a little overboard (these elementary kids are just too cute) and had our second grade class sing (a capella) a short “Welcome to ISB” song that their music teacher taught them. Sadly, Voki does not allow group avatars, so I had to choose the most generic, cutest looking character to represent our whole class…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://vhss-a.oddcast.com/voki/voki_player.swf?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fvhss-d.oddcast.com%2Fphp%2Fvoki%2Fgetvoki%2Fchsm%3D6c41f0666c0dcd5e12caf6953775dd38%26sc%3D53751" width="300" height="500" wmode="transparent" /]

Aren’t they adorable? Check out all the Vokis here!

Because I’m not sure which class is interested in participating in this project and because each month’s activity seems to be possible as a stand-alone and because the tasks are super quick and easy, I think I’m going to spread the love and let a different class participate each month.