Even From Here

Clarence Fisher { @glassbeed | http://www.evenfromhere.org/ } who teaches in Snow Lake, Manitoba shared with my class over skype.

A chat with Clarence Fisher from Tyler_JL

Doodle-Notes: John Finch

I am a very visual person and have started putting this into practice when I take notes in class. When I convert something into a picture or graphic I am able to remember it much better. Here are my notes from John Finch's talk with us this week.

Doodle-Notes: John Finch from Tyler_JL

The Human Network

This week Dean Shareski { @shareski, Ideas and Thoughts, Community Manager for Discovery Education Canada, UofR Education Professor } talked to our class via skype.
He shared a lot of good ideas, like:

• Teaching isn't rocket science, it's more complex and demanding!
• We can never find THE solution/method for being the perfect teacher.
• Describe not prescribe. Do over telling.
• We are in the middle of a media explosion, akin to the printing press - we need to be the ones to figure out etiquette, appropriate use and teach it.

Dean had 3 Lessons for us as teachers entering a new and changing educational landscape.

1. Think Differently About Literacy

Normal distribution of Language Arts in class.

Literacy is more than reading and writing now. There are so many ways to communicate with others and so many ways messages come to us, that we need to teach students to how to be informed (read/listen/view)ers and effective (write/speak/represent)ers.
Storytelling is an important part of this. We have so many facts available to us that sharing lists of facts means nothing, we need to deliver them in context and with emotional impact.

This video is an excellent example of this. It shares a lot of facts, but is memorable and engaging because of the story. I've only watched it once, when Dean shared it, but I don't think I'll ever forget the penguin thief, especially if at some point in the future I'm building a nest of "hand"-picked rocks in the Antarctic to try and secure a mate.
Dean addressed the common complaint that internet content is primarily inane, profane or just plain bad. He thinks, and I agree, that creation is a continuum. Practice and training make us better. Most of us will start off terrible, but even making a lolcat is MAKING something!

The question is not "Why is this so bad?", but "How do I help my students get better?"

2. Teachers are everywhere!
The best thing about the internet isn't that content is digital, but that our learning culture is participatory. Most schools still think of the internet as a giant, unreliable and dangerous encyclopaedia. It definitely can be, but we need to teach kids to be resourceful and responsible.
Expertise works differently now. Credentials aren't what they used to be. Excellent tutorial videos for nearly everything are available on Youtube and quite often they are made by children still in elementary school. Dean shared a personal story where through the magic of twitter he connected with a class of teenagers who taught him how to play the guitar through a series of videos they made for him. I learned how to replace a leaky radiator hose online. I didn't to see if the video was posted by a qualified mechanic and my car runs fine!
He also mentioned how teachers continually harp on Wikipedia. Telling students not to go to Wikipedia,  but to go to people for primary resources. Wikipedia is made by people! It is a different kind of encyclopaedia, but it is an incredible work of shared knowledge. {aside: I love that there is a Wikipedia article on the reliability of Wikipedia.} Dean brought our attention to the commentary/discussion section of Wikipedia and the fact that it is completely transparent. We have no idea how what gets into a textbook, or other credible resource, gets in there. Should we have more trust for what an academic's peers reviewed or what our peers have created?
To sum it up, individual connection is still important, it just happens in new ways on the web and a person's small contributions can have a big impact.

3. You are What You Share.
The thought that really stuck with me is that great ideas seem obvious to the people who come up with them. We encounter ideas we think are amazing and beyond our abilities, but our ideas are the same to someone else. So, let's share! If everyone pools their unique ideas and talents together we accomplish more than the smartest individual can ever do alone.
This blog is one of the places I share. Here are a few more:

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Dean is not as interested in curating information and resources as some, instead he curates people. He explained it like this:

PLN 2.0

This last Thursday our Internet for Educators class was visited by John Evans. John is a technology consultant for Manitoba Education. He shared many useful websites, talked about the importance of a personal learning network (PLN), and gave us a quick tutorial on Maple, an upcoming sharing site for Manitoba educators.

John has been compiling sites for a long time. He mentioned wikis, diigo, pearltrees, scoop it and paper.li to name a few. I use diigo myself and love it. I can group and tag my links, share them, highlight parts of websites, and they go wherever I go! John shared his diigo group, Literacy with ICT, and I followed it. There is tonnes of stuff there and I get new additions emailed to me.
Another of the curation sites looked at was scoop.it.

It is aesthetically pleasing and I like how each site, or scoop, is a tile with title, thumbnail and text from the site. I just made a diigo bookmark of John's Professional Learning for Busy Educators. I'm used to diigo, but if scoop.it has a chrome extension that lets me scoop within my browser the impressive display might just be enough to get me to switch.

The meat of John's presentation was PLNs: what they've been, what they are now and why they are important. John stressed that we need to shift from talking about professional development to professional learning, because development is incremental and finite (eventually you are fully developed), but learning is continuous and infinite. This idea really struck me and I plan to remember it throughout my career, especially if know-it-all thoughts start creeping into my mind.
Teachers have been islands in the past. Working alone with only their training and whatever books they could acquire to look to. In multi-class schools colleagues became an added resource to improve teaching practice. Now a typical teacher's learning network looks something like this:

The internet, especially web 2.0 with its focus on collaboration, has dramatically expanded the professional learning opportunities available to teachers. There are so many options available and they are two-way (sometimes n-way), 24/7, at my pace, based on my interests, in real-time or asynchronous.

Conferences and seminars used to only be available locally, but skype, twitter, live streaming and the like have removed the distance barriers and allows world-wide learning. I started on twitter last year for my ICT course and have found in to be a highly valuable resource for learning from and connecting with people. I blog, use diigo, share with dropbox and google drive. However, there is no set things you need to be doing, or sites you have to join, to have a PLN. John stressed that a PLN is not so much a thing, but a state of mind. A PLN starts, and continues to grow, with a commitment to learning and sharing.

With so much available to us it can be overwhelming thinking of where to start, but John gave us a leg up in that too. He signed up our whole class for the beta version of Maple. It's going to be a hub for sharing resources and ideas, and building relationships with fellow teachers in Manitoba. We each have a library of resources we share and can join groups, make events and follow others. It looks like a great addition to my growing PLN.

Literacy with ICT

Literacy with ICT is a developmental continuum for integrating ICT into classrooms throughout the public education system. It also focuses on teaching responsible digital citizenship, whereas past ICT programs have focused on technical skills.

The outcomes of the continuum are split into two domains: cognitive and affective. The cognitive domain focuses increasing analytical and creative thought while using ICT, while the affective domain focuses on responsible, moral ICT use.

As this is an important initiative for teachers of all subjects, at all levels, I started implementing it in my student teaching. Any lesson I did integrating ICT I instructed students as to how to approach the task responsibly. For collages or any other project that required pictures I had students follow along with these steps to practice responsible image searching:

• go to images.google.ca
• click on advanced image search.
• scroll down and click on “Only images labeled for reuse.”
• fill in your search term (e.g. snowflake) and scroll down and click “Search images”.
• double check the licencing of the specific image you want. Follow all restrictions.

With technology fully integrated into our lives outside of the school it only makes sense that we teach our students how to navigate this digital age responsibly and creatively.