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#Edchat Revisited

Posted in Blog, EdChat, ISTE, Leadership, Reform, Social Media, Teacher, Teched, Thought Provoking, Twitter on June 23, 2010| 15 Comments »

When Shelly Terrell and I first discussed the idea that spawned #Edchat neither of us had any idea what it would become. It started as a place to begin, conduct and record some thought-provoking discussions about topics in education that we had an interest to discuss. We created the hashtag, #Edchat, selected a time, contacted Steve Anderson for techy help, and we were off and running. We started with a few people who followed us and we discussed topics on the fly.

We began to involve more and more people, and soon needed more of a structure. Steve developed our #Edchat Poll and we began to publicize the established day and time of the chat. It truly was a case of “If you build it, they will come”. It was that simple. We were not building on other models. We were not pioneers, but more like novices on Twitter. We were in new territory, but we knew that we needed to develop strategies for success. We added moderators as we grew, and we needed to archive the sessions to accommodate those who were not able to attend live. Being educators we constantly assessed, reflected, and modified.

The hashtag, #Edchat, soon grew beyond a hashtag for a discussion. It was now a place for educators to shout out their ideas for education to an audience far beyond the limitations of their personal followers. Anyone following the #Edchat hashtag would receive those tweets. Additionally,we needed to create an afternoon #Edchat to involve the global Time zones. There are now requests for a third chat to involve more time zones. The chats grew from fifty participants to well over a thousand for every session. During an #Edchat tweets come in at a rate of about one tweet every second. We had a need to create a Facebook page to accommodate more people. We also created a Wiki Page to act as a depository for the #Edchat Archives. It has grown far beyond that which we originally discussed almost a year ago.

Considering the size of the chat, and the speed at which ideas fly in, participants need a strategy to get anything from #Edchat. The first consideration is to select a platform to maximize the flow of information. I use TweetDeck others use Tweetgrid. The last thing one wants to use is the Twitter platform itself. I need three screens. One screen follows #Edchat. That screen rolls by quickly with everyone’s #Edchat tweets. The second screen is for my Mentions. Anyone directing a tweet directly to me appears on this screen. The third screen is my DM or Direct Message screen. This is for any followers sending me personal messages during the #Edchat. Others have their own strategies, but this is what works for me.

There is no way for anyone to follow every #Edchat tweet as they roll in at a rate of over 3,000 in an hour. My strategy is to look at this as a very big party. I can’t talk to everyone, but I can pick and choose a few folks to converse with. I start by posting a few provocative educational questions pertaining to the topic. Usually, two or three responses will roll in and we are off and running. More and more people join in as we go. There are many discussions like this going on simultaneously in an #Edchat. The only way to see it all is to review the Archives which are posted shortly after the #Edchat conclusion. The official length of an #Edchat is one hour, but many people hang in longer to continue.

The Live engagement during an #Edchat creates a great deal of energy. Participants are usually enthusiastic and driven in their contributions and responses. The lasting effect of #Edchat, however, does not happen until after the chat is over. Almost immediately educators who participated begin posting to their blogs those ideas that were generated and expanded during the chat. Even more posts appear during the week that follows with more reflection and deeper thought on the topic discussed.

Beyond the great subjects explored during the #Edchat there are a few other elements that I appreciate about this weekly event. The ideas are the center of the discussion. Members of the #Edchat discussions are students, parents, teachers, administrators, professors, authors, and some people just interested in the discussion. These participants leave their credentials at the door and discuss the topic with their ideas and contributions evaluated with equal weight within the discussion. The ideas stand on their own to be reflected upon and evaluated based solely on their own merit without regard to who contributed the initial thought. Contributors do not seem to be limited or discouraged by the 140 character limitations.

I know this has all been said before and written about in a number of Educational Journals, as well as many Blogs, but there is always someone who is just joining us or creating a Professional Learning Network. We are even highlighting #Edchat to educators by conducting a large group participation #Edchat at the upcoming ISTE10 Conference. Anyone having questions may contact me on Twitter @tomwhitby.You may want to join us on The Educator’s PLN Ning at http://www.edupln.com. Visit the #Edchat Page on FaceBook at http://bit.ly/aN71KJ. Check out the #Edchat Archives of all the previous #Edchat discussions at http://bit.ly/c6yowP.

Your comments about this post or #Edchat are most welcomed here.

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Teacher Lounge PD?

Posted in Administrator, Alfie Kohn, Blog, Education, Leadership, Ning, PLN, Pre-Service teachers, Reform, Social Media, Teacher, Teched, Technology, Thought Provoking, Truth, Twitter on May 13, 2010| 15 Comments »

As a supervisor of Pre-service teachers, I start my first meeting with my students with a list of do’s and Don’ts, High up on the Don’t list is a very important rule for all new teachers: Stay out of the Faculty Lounge. Although it is a gathering place for educators, it is in reality not a place to professionally develop.

The teacher’s lounge or faculty room is one of the most important rooms in a school building for some teachers. It is an oasis from the stress, a place to blow off steam. Back in the day it was a smoke-filled room. (That is a great example of “what the hell were we thinking” items.) It is a social room for faculty. It is the virtual water cooler where those types of conversations take place. It is a place where teachers can voice opinions about education with colleagues. Some schools offer Department offices providing a mini-experience of the same things for department members only, an exclusive lounge.

Then there is the “Dark Side” of the lounge. It is a place for student bashing, teacher bashing, administrator bashing, and finally a place for parent bashing. It is a place where careers can be torpedoed by individuals publicly ridiculing colleagues. It is a place that can be very intimidating to new teachers. It is a bastion of traditional ideas and stories of those who got away with things that could not be done today.

The reality is that, it is not a place for Professional Development. It is not thought of as the place where one goes to discuss the latest methods or research in education. It is not thought of as the place where one would see the latest best practices in a lesson for professional development, or videos of the latest speakers on educational topics. Marzano, Kohn, November, Gardner, Rheingold, and Heidi Hayes Jacobs are not names bandied about in the Lounge. Most people are not listening to podcasts, or viewing webinars, or exchanging links. The discussion of which apps are best for which outcomes is a rare bird indeed. As a matter of fact, many of these terms, or at least the experience of use of these things would be foreign to many, if not most, in the room.

If you did not recognize this description, because your school has no such room, or nothing negative happens in your faculty lounge it can mean only one thing. After four decades of teaching, supervising, and observing in hundreds of schools, I never visited your school. I guess that I should only say that this is a description of a lounge in many schools I have visited. Of course the names will be withheld to protect the innocent.

If the exchange of educational ideas is not taking place in the areas where teachers gather, it must take place somewhere else. Perhaps the district is supplying a time and place for the exchange of ideas to happen. There is always the monthly or bi-weekly Department meeting that occurs at the end of the school day when teachers are always open to new challenging ideas.

If educators are to be relevant and literate in this digital age, these are the types of things that need to be discussed and planned for. If we as educators are not discussing this now, we will soon reach a point where it will not matter.

We are in an environment of people being fed up with status quo. We are in an environment where expenditures of money are demanding higher accountability. We are in an environment where people want more bang for less bucks, more effort from fewer people, more education with less time to do it, more testing for better outcomes with less time to teach, because of more time required for test preparation. No matter how fast that mouse runs there is always more of that spinning wheel.

As I discussed this with my friend, Dr. Joe Pisano, he pointed out that maybe the walls we need to knock down with technology are the walls of the Faculty Room and the Myth of educators exchanging ideas for Professional Development. The box that we need to think outside of is the school building itself. We need to involve educators to engage others on a global network of educators. We cannot count on Districts supplying the time and place for needed discussions to happen. They are not leading us to the needed reform to maintain our relevance and ultimately our jobs.

We need to share our digital collaborative efforts that have educators involved in Twitter, Ning, Delicious, Diigo, Wikis, and any of the web tools out there now or yet to come. We navigate an information-rich environment. We are collaborating daily. We are using Blog posts for reflection and deep discussions. As Educators on the Professional Learning Network we do all of this and benefit by it daily, yet we are a minority of educators. We represent the smallest of fractions of the Millions of teachers who still rely on the Teachers Lounge for relevant Professional Development.

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PLN’s, Parties, and Pajamas.

Posted in Blog, Education, Ning, PLN, Pre-Service teachers, Reform, Teched, Technology, Thought Provoking, Twitter on February 26, 2010| 41 Comments »

A big problem with getting the word out to educators about the incredible collaboration that is growing and improving among educators globally is the means that we use to communicate this. If you found this post on your own, you probably have an understanding of everything that I will now talk about. The people who most need to see posts like this however, will never see it, unless you, or I, print it out and hand it to them. You may check this on your own with a little informal survey. Randomly select 10 of your colleagues and ask each of them two questions. Do you read Educational Blogs? Could you name two that you read on more than two separate occasions? A simpler question might just be “Do you use Twitter as part of your Personal Learning Network?”

This is a guess on my part, but here goes. What’s a Blog? Twitter, you have to be kidding, right? Who has time for that? I don’t use a computer for that stuff. I read the real stuff from printed sources. I don’t get that “Techy” stuff. I need things to help with my teaching, not technology. I spend too much time grading work, I have no time to play on the computer. I read books not screens, I like the feel of books. I don’t use a computer. I have heard these very words or some variation of these answers even before I began talking about Social Media in education. In your quick little survey I would bet that, if the respondents are truthful, probably 4 out of 10 will be able to name some blogs that they have read. Maybe, some might use Twitter. Well, maybe 2 out of 10.

Recently, I was asked by a very progressive and highly respected District Administrator to speak to some Higher Ed educators to explain the idea behind teachers developing a Personal Learning Networks as a professional tool for teachers. These Higher Ed people were working with Pre-service teachers who would be working in this administrator’s district. He was looking to provide pre-service teachers with the tools that they would need to fit into the vision for which he had for his district. He sees his district as a progressive environment using the tools of the 21^st century for not only authentic learning, but also relevance. This would be a great district for any school of education to have their students placed as teachers. However, as future teachers, they need to be prepared to contribute in that environment.

We decided that since I could not fly from New York to Iowa for a brief meeting, Skype would be the next best thing. I prepared for the conference call by putting on a shirt and tie. I looked great in my Skype screen, the epitome of a higher Education professional. They actually commented how professional I looked on the Skype screen in my shirt and tie. Of course my retort was,” Thank you, but I must admit I am not wearing Pants”. I was actually wearing pajama pants. Of course, they failed to appreciate my humor, and I knew I was in trouble. My impression was that they may not have had much Skype experience. When I asked if they understood what a PLN was, my question was answered with silence. I knew that I was in trouble. I was working my way uphill in my pajama bottoms.

This drove home the very words I have said on several occasions. These are words with a meaning that I often stray from. We tend to lose perspective, as we engage with educators within our Personal Learning Networks. We tend to think all educators are participating with us in this network. The truth is that we represent only a small portion of all educators.

The PLN has often been described as a huge cocktail party. Participants can move from group to group within that party and take what they want or need from a group and then move on to the next group. This is a really clever analogy. The problem is that even though a large number of people are attending the party, the larger percentage of educators never even dressed for it. They are still in their houses sitting around in their pajamas. This does not mean that they are not doing their job. It means that they are not interacting with others at a party.

We see the party as very helpful. We move from group to group gleaning useful information, exchanging ideas, and collaborating with other party goers. The question is how do we get all of those others, the vast majority of educators, to the party? These other educators do not live in our neighborhood. How do we connect with them, since they do not communicate as we do. If we did get them to our party would they benefit from it? Would we benefit from it? Do we have time to wait for them? How do we change the culture?

My frustration is that Personal Learning Networks are treasure troves of educational sources, great ideas, and collaborative educators, and I have no way of getting this concept to the great majority of those who could most benefit by its discovery. Social Media is what we can use today, to link up those people who need to link up, but social media is not yet socially accepted by the masses.

We need to deal with PLN’s in Professional Development workshops. We need to Email links to colleagues who do not use Twitter, Nings, or Wikis. We need to have students develop PLN’s as a source of learning. We need to connect those who need to be connected and then we can all learn as professionals in our pajamas.

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My First Post on My Own Blog

Posted in Blog, Education, PLN on January 15, 2010| 45 Comments »

Does every Blogger give a reason for writing his/her blog on the first post? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do feel a need to put something on the screen to form a Mission Statement or at least offer some type of focus for this path I am about to take. After 34 years as a secondary English teacher and now adding three more years as an Adjunct Professor of Education there is one thing that I have enough life experience in to talk about. That would be Snow Days. If there is one thing I look forward to as a New York Educator, it is a good snow storm. A good Snow Day enables us to sleep in late while everyone else goes to work. That is one of the benefits unique to the teaching profession. However, this probably will not offer enough topics for consistent delivery to a blog. Seasonal topics have a limited time to retain interest of the reader. Most people would not have an interest in reading about snow days in July?

That would leave my other education experiences to serve as the stuff of topics. These experiences are not all those of a polished and perfect professional. My career began when education was less of a science and more of a tradition. New teachers were mentored by veterans, many of whom had less training in the latest educational research. I am also not saying that I always did the right thing. It was just the opposite in many cases I did the wrong thing. It was through reflection and research that I began to change. The uncommon commodity of common sense led the way to that wisdom I would seek. There was no internet, so aside from written material in the library, and what were called in- service courses, the only other source was any good teacher willing to share or collaborate. That was the environment in which I began developing my own face-to-face, real-time Personal Learning Network. The skills I needed were simple; Identify the value of a lesson,acknowledge the value of a person with an ability to collaborate. This continued for years. That is the way it was in the day.

Thank God Al Gore came along for then we had the Internet. I don’t know if he invented it, but they both showed up at around the same time. Coincidence? I think not. The Internet added a new dimension to my PLN. I could now use a search engine to search topics for helpful websites. One search could bring 50,000 sites, so with three searches I could clearly spend four weeks reading websites. The internet may have been cooking, but it wasn’t done yet.

After 34 years of teaching I made the decision to retire. I traveled down other paths after teaching, but none served me as well. On a chance meeting with a helpful Nun on a ferry trip to my Fire Island home, I learned of a position teaching Methods classes in a local College. It was perfect. I jumped at the opportunity and soon found myself in need of a great deal of help.I could only hope the Internet became more user-friendly, because ready or not I was going to need it.

As I started out using my computer to explore the internet for material to use in my Methods classes, I discovered a great deal of material, but there was no person to talk to about it. I had email contacts, but that was a slow procedure to exchange ideas. The other problem was that my contact list was very limited. I guess you might say I had no friends or at least professional colleagues. My ability to use search engines exceeded my greatest expectations. I saw myself as a master of information searches, but it was not enough. I needed to talk to somebody about some of this stuff.

I discovered Linkedin after my wife, Joyce, showed me how she posted her resumé and made a number of professional connections. I recognized this as a way to develop professional contacts and share ideas. I found no help in all the existing educational groups, so I decided to start my own, the Technology-Using Professors group. This led to a discovery of Twitter and Four more educational Groups on Linkedin.

I still needed folks to talk to. I found myself throwing out questions and engaging several twitter members in heated educational discussions on a daily basis.Two people who I met through Twitter volunteered to help with an idea to get folks talking about education and archiving the results.Shelly Terrell, Steve Anderson and I have run that idea as #Edchat ever since. Still needing more people to talk to and a place the deposit these links from all of these sources there was one more addition. a Ning site, The Educator’s PLN.

Now I find that I need another outlet for further expression, and more connections. It was a quest for answers that started me on this journey. It is also what drives me to continue further down this path. I have more questions than answers as do most educators. What I have to offer is a wide range experiences of mistakes and successes in education that people can use or not. I plan to ask more questions than offer answers, but I hope to promote thought and discussion. It is my intention to do this on an as needed schedule. I hope to help frame the discussion for improvement of education with a blend of research, collaboration and a little common sense.

Another choice would have been to Blog my way through Julia Child’s cookbook, but that was already overdone, or using the vernacular, well done.

Thanks