always learning

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.

We’re a little bit behind over here in Bangkok, but we got a great start to Chris Craft’s Life ‘Round Here project today!

The cool thing about this project is that our students are currently doing a unit on adaptation. They’ve studied different cultures around the world and how they’ve adapted to change, which makes this topic absolutely perfect for them.

Here’s what we did today:

The Hook:

I showed a sample video from my sixth grade class last year (feel free to use some of ours if you don’t have a sample – go to the student pages and click on the “create” page of their online portfolio – one especially good one is here). We watched the video one time all the way through, then I asked the students to turn to their neighbor and discuss what they saw and what was especially interesting to them. Once they had a chance to process, we brainstormed a list of helpful tips as a class:

• kept it simple
• you can learn lots of information from a video
• use effects only when needed, when they enhance the content (not so many that they’re distracting)
• integrate different types of images (like screen shots of Google Earth)
• make sure music fits with the slideshow
• use titles to organize your movie into main themes – this needs to be planned in advance
• use categories within categories to further organize
• keep the titles consistent
• photos can represent a lot about a topic

Then, we watched the video one more time, pausing at some of the crucial parts to point out important features of a successful video – things like consistent titles, categorizing images, and symbolic photos.

The Activity:

Next, we broke students down into small groups to brainstorm the main ideas of their movie. Our groups were created based on home country nationality (we have 2 Japanese students, 3 Korean students, 3 American students, 4 European students, 5 Thai students and 1 Taiwanese student) to help them answer the essential questions:

• What is life like here in Thailand?
• How have we adapted to life in Thailand?
• How have Thai people adapted to the influence of Western culture?

The focus of the activity was to develop as many “big ideas” as they could – the “big ideas” will eventually become the organizing sections/titles for their movie (for example: religion, food, clothing, etc). The students who are not actually from Thailand then discussed how they adapted to living in this different culture and the Thai students discussed how the Thai people have adapted to the influence of Westen culture.

Next Steps:

The next time we meet, our students will brainstorm what kinds of pictures will be appropriate to represent their main topics. Students will have some time to search for pictures themselves, but anything that is too time consuming or difficult to find, I will compile for them.

After they have their pictures, the students will put them in order, with the titles they developed today to organize their different topics. Once their pictures and titles are in order, students will write a script to plan their narration for the video.

Next, they will create and narrate their videos – hopefully all in one long afternoon lesson, considering what a pain it is to create videos in iMovie when we have to save all the files to the desktop to avoid rendering over the network.

Finally, students will watch all of the videos (including those from the other schools) and reflect on the process of creating them, what they learned, and how they might do things differently the next time.

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, collaborations, LifeRoundHere, ChrisCraft

One of the fabulous teachers from my previous post was so enthusiastic about collaborating with other schools that we started planning our very own “flat classroom” project today!

Mary is a fellow new teacher here at ISB and she has been doing some amazing things with our Smart Boards already this year (not to make Graham any more upset, but every classroom has a fixed Smart Board, data projector and surround sound speakers), so she is totally ready to kick it up a notch! Our idea is to create a private Ning (which I did today – super easy!) for all of the students and teachers involved so that we can start sharing and learning from each other.

Our goal is to enable students to develop their very own personal learning network so that they are able to construct knowledge with peers from all over the world – just like we do every single day!

Here are some of our ideas:

• Because our students are just about to learn about graphing, our first idea was to create an online survey for each school to complete. We would then determine which kind of graph is best for the data, graph the results and then analyze and interpret the data.
• Next, using our surveying and graphing skills, we would send out a pre-assessment survey about a topic that our class is studying (we’re thinking of using the “sound” unit). Based on the results of the survey, our students would develop an online tutorial (either a video, a VoiceThread, a screen capture using Jing, a Smart Board notebook exported as a video, or any other tool that would work) to teach the other students about sound. The other classes could do the same for us so that we all learn something new and we all have an authentic audience for our work.
• In order to keep developing reading skills, we could create leveled groups of readers – just like we do in class – with our collaborative partners. Each group could have their own virtual group on the Ning. This way, even if we don’t have an ability match directly in the classroom, we can find appropriate partners within our network of classes.
• Our students are going to be studying Australia soon and, thanks to the amazingly well-connected Alexander Hayes, we have a great contact with a rural aboriginal school in Western Australia. How amazing would it be for our students studying Australia to actually communicate and collaborate with native Australians!

These are just the few ideas we brainstormed during our first meeting today. What else could we be doing in our collaborative virtual classroom?

Are you interested in joining this project?

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom, collaborations

One of our school goals for this school year is reading. As a school we are focusing on developing a love of reading in our students and evaluating our teaching practices to ensure that our students are meeting their expected learning results with reading. So, I was very excited to read Wes Fryer’s recent post about using VoiceThread for book reviews. To be honest, I looked at VoiceThread last year, but I was so caught up in all the other things I was doing that I pretty much forgot about it until I saw Wes’ fantastic samples (completed by his very own children!).

Now that I’ve been reminded of what a great tool VoiceThread is, I asked two of our fourth grade teachers to begin a collaborative book review project. Of course they absolutely loved Alexander’s book review, but they were even more excited about the collaborative aspect of VoiceThread. Basically, the author of a VoiceThread can invite other users to add onto their existing Thread – meaning that our students in Bangkok can start a book review about, let’s say, Harry Potter, and students, anywhere in the world, can add their own opinions to that very same thread. The idea that one person’s book review can grow into a collaborative project was definitely the clincher for our teachers. And for me, it’s a stepping stone into more “flat classroom” type projects that I’d like to begin at ISB.

The idea of connecting students around the world to talk about books is also definitely exciting for our kids. I was telling one of the grade 4 boys about the project after school the other day. He started off frowning – I could see the wheels turning, this is clearly a student that does not like to read – and then I mentioned the global partners and his face just lit up. He told me that he doesn’t like to read books but he’s excited about being able to talk to other students around the world. Whatever it takes to get our students excited about reading is good enough for me!

Our goal is to ensure that all of our readers have a place to discuss their favorite books and to get other students interested in books they might not normally read. Each of our students will produce at least one audiovisual book review, then we will share them with other classes and ask them to add onto our existing Threads with their own ideas about the book. These collaborative book reviews will start out between our two fourth grade classrooms here at ISB, but we would love to collaborate with other grade 4 classes around the world.

Are you interested? Please feel free to add yourself to the planning wiki to get started!

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