Tag: Twitter

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Your Mission is Life-long Learning: A Video How-To

Most school mission statements include a reference to “fostering life-long learners.” Nonetheless if you walk through most schools you’ll find an information landscape that seems designed to suppress that goal. Far too many adults telling students what to know – as if that will inspire them to take responsibility for their learning. 

To explore the meaning of life-long learning at your school, I suggest you show this video (and a few of the comments it received) at your next faculty meeting. I’ve included a few questions for your follow-up discussion. 

Background: “help with a bowdrill set” is a YouTube video posted by a young man looking for help in using his bowdrill to start a fire. After detailing his materials and techniques, he states “I know I’m doing it wrong. Please comment down below so you can teach me how to do it.” If you view his YouTube post you’ll see that his video has over 8500 views and fifty people took the time to offer concrete advice. I trust he’s now successfully starting fires.

Guided questions:
1. How would you define teacher and student in this video? What roles / responsibilities do they have?
2. What information / skills / strategies did the young man lack? What did he have?
3. In what ways is the teaching / learning environment of this video similar to / different from your classroom?
4. What does all this suggest about the paths to life-long learning?

 

Tip of the hat to Angela Maiers and Ben Grey. I first saw this video at their 2010 ASCD conference workshop   Link to my Prezi coverage of the conference 


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Social Media Engagement for Schools

Educators who are already using Twitter (and other social media) know the power of interaction with your own personal learning network. It’s like a never ending seminar that you can freely visit to learn, share, and reflect. By far, the best professional development going! Likewise, more of our students are using social media to learn and to share their thinking / creativity with an authentic audience of peers.

While many teachers and students have embraced social media, most schools still lag behind, struggling with the question of whether they should formalize social media networks for their students, teachers, and community. 

First step – help school leadership better understand what social media is and how it can be effectively utilized. (Hint: it’s more than Twittering about what you had for lunch.)

My hats off to Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School, who has provided a great video that introduces the potential for social media engagement for schools. He even simplifies it to this tidy equation …

(Engagement + trust) x targeted audience = impact

Which translates into…

(social media + shared authentic conversation) x personal learning network = quick useful resource

 

 

When your done with the video be sure to take a look at the great wiki page resource that his PLN created.

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87 Free Web 2.0 Projects For the K-12 Classroom

Web-2.0-projects Web 2.0 sites become more useful as the number of users grow. Fortunately for teachers, there's loads of free educational 2.0 applications that can be utilized in the classroom to help students research, collaborate and share what they've learned.

Hats off to British educator, Terry Freedman, who has solicited lessons from 94 teachers from around the world and edited them into a free downloadable book Download Amazing Web 2 Projects 2 online version  (2 MB pdf) Hint: If you're not following Terry on Twitter (as I do) here's his Twitter link. The book also includes Twitter links to all the creative contributors to the project.

The book is organized by grade level and has curated links to all the web resources utilized. Each project includes a teacher-friendly "how to" with benefits, challenges, management tips, sample screen shots / links and learning outcomes. Terry's project is a great example of how the internet can be harnessed to share and collaborate. Who knows, the projects might even inspire your students to collaborate with their peers on their own book!

BTW – If you are a big fan of Wordle, you might like to see another international teacher collaboration "Build Literacy Skills with Wordle".


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ASCD Conference 2010: My Arrival – a Prezi

I arrived at the ASCD conference in San Antonio today. So much to plan for over the next few days. Thought I'd try to capture it in a Prezi. Click the arrow, give it moment to load, then click to advance and navigate. 

For a full screen version  - click ASCD 10 Friday

      Made with Prezi

For more of my coverage of the 2010 ASCD conference check out these posts:

Twitter Visualization: What are the Key Words being Tweeted at ASCD Conference 2010 

Use Wiffiti to Follow the Twitter Backchannel at ASCD Conference 2010 

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How to Use Web 2.0 to Create On-line Professional Development

As a former assistant superintendent for instruction one of my responsibilities was organizing the district workshop days. It was valuable time – the entire faculty and staff was available – but also a challenge to develop programs that delivered meaningful PD that were also easy to manage and cost effective. Recently I received an email that introduced me to how one district is leveraging free technology to move their PD day to an online environment.

The email said … “I’m @steelepierce on Twitter, following you, and also following your Copy/Paste blog.  Would you be available and willing to have a telephone conversation, preferably Skype, with our Teaching & Learning Department?  Topics: 1) our using your ideas on summarizing and notetaking for a professional learning online “workshop” we’re creating for our staff (550 teachers!) and 2) your coming to work with our teachers in August 2010. Thanks for your consideration. Looking forward to hearing from you”

It sounded interesting, so I Skyped with the TLC at West Clermont Local Schools – M.E. Steele-Pierce, Cheryl Turner and Tanny McGregor. They developed a PD module based, in part, on my blog post, “How to Teach Summarizing Skills.” I shared my input via Skype and also by recording comments into the training module. They built the lesson using Voicethread and delivered it online to faculty across the district during their recent Professional Learning Day. In addition they used Wallwisher (at end of this post) to gather teacher reflections.

 Click to view the training module. Advance or return using arrows. Click thumbnails to see all slides. Use mouse to zoom in / out of slides.

These are challenging times for school districts – and relentless budget cuts add to the challenges. The team at West Clermont shows us how the innovative use of free tech tools can provide PD that is cost effective, builds local capacity, and models the instructional practice we want to see in the classroom.

For more ideas on how to develop quality PD, see my post “15 Essential Questions for the Successful Staff Developer.” For information on learning strategies for the classroom, see my post “18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers – Defining, Summarizing and Comparing”