THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

I listened to two very interesting podcast today from Edtech Talk (they all seem to be interesting). Edtech Talk is part of the World Bridges Network, a collection of educational podcasts anyone can take part in, check their calendar for the latest daily podcast.

TTT#98

The first podcast is “Teachers Teaching Teachers # 98 - Learning to be unschooly” The conversation included teachers and students from around the world and its subject was triggered by a post on Youth Twitter by a South Korean student named Soojin. The term schooliness was coined by Clay Burell in his blog. The podcast discussion focused on how to use the Read/Write web to engage students in authentic learning and not as a fancy worksheet.

From elgg to DrupalThe second podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers #99 - From elgg to Drupal, was very timely because I have been having a discussion with our executive director and curriculum director about developing a CMS. I have used Moodle for a couple of years, but it was installed on our ISP, which we no longer use. I have looked at Joomla, Drupal, and elgg, but don’t know much about any of them. Bill Fitzgerald from DrupalEd was in on the conversation and his advice for anyone wanting to implement a CMS is to write in one or two sentences the goal of the CMS. Dave Cormier advised to write a very detailed description of what several students would do in the course of a day using the technology. Dave is the teacher who helped developed “A partnership project helping Prince Edward Island students bring the past to life using tools of the future.” A Living Archives uses Drupal.

The good thing is that there are many quality choices for a school based CMS.

Finding time to write in this blog has not been easy lately. I feel like I have been blogging everyday because of responding to the forums and participant blogs. I was thinking that I should gather some of my responses to the forums and post them in this blog. I do enjoy the back and forth in the forums, but only one or two people read them. Many forum responses get buried 4 and 5 posts deep and never see the light of a flickering screen.

Many of the participants are feeling over whelmed and frustrated with the amount of information they have to process and the software they have to learn. It was a good move to make each session 2 weeks long, I knew that the newbies would need more time to work with each session. To be really effective this should be a series of workshops each teaching only one Web 2.0 tool. Each workshop should be 4 weeks. I would start with setting everyone up with Firefox and Google tools. Then Skype, so that we could use voice and video to teach the other applications. This should be a school year long series of workshops with enough flexibility to allow participants to proceed at their own pace. As teachers new to Web 2.0 get more comfortable with using the tools they will naturally have more confidence in learning each succeeding tools and become more independent learners. Isn’t that what we learned about good pedagogy in graduate school?

After I wrote this post I read Vicki Davis’s blog coolcatteacher.blogspot.com. For those who don’t know, Vicki and Julie Lindsay developed the Flat Classroom Project. Vicki’s blog post is call The 5 Phases of Flattening a Classroom. As I read it I realized this not only applies to student, but also to teachers. The teacher becomes a student when Web 2.0 tools are introduced and moving from the classroom level of connectivity to more complex levels will give the teacher more confidence, just like students. I find that the rush to get every teacher up to speed quickly with technology fails because teachers are use to knowing and becoming a student again means not knowing.

The answer is NO!, according to Alan November. Alan made this point at the MassCUE Technology Leadership Symposium on 3/19/08. An example of his argument is that he has not found any high school that has students taking advantage of the free online courses at MIT, yet over 9000 people in Pakistan are logged on to these courses at MIT.

Dennis Richards, the superintendent of the Falmouth schools streamed the keynote live and now has it posted on Ustream. The video is not that great, but the audio works and that is what is important. As we lean how to use these tool more ineffectually their quality will increase. So take a liste

I have been working on the edtechleaders.ning.com social network the last couple of days. It has been fun customizing it. I would like it to be a place the educators from the Web 2.0 workshop can continue the conversation during and after the workshop is finished. When the Web 2.0 group begins the podcasting session I wanted to have some examples of successful edtech podcasts. The Moodle does not really have a good way to do that, so I created a new tabbed page for Podcasts and then found a podcatcher to embed into the new page. I am very proud of myself for solving the problem.

Just in case you did not know. Edublogs has made it much easier for teachers to create student accounts and/or blogs. I wish they had installed this feature before I spent a day creating 45 student accounts, anyway it looks very easy.