Artifacts:
District Pitch for Shared Lessons
Reflection:
My final culminating project, Shared Lessons (SL), has many parallels with Web 3.0, as an intelligent machine in which each person acts as an input and output node of information, all working together for the common purpose of building knowledge about learning and teaching. This platform has interactive affordances and a multilayered system of organization for resources, ideas, questions, people, etc. that provides a socially intuitive user interface that enables individuals to easily make connections that were formerly difficult or impossible in traditional online communities. This interactive platform allows people to review, rate, give feedback and follow others that share their interests.
This project has been in the making throughout my MET journey, but its final form revealed itself to me in ETEC 522, which I discuss in my previous reflection. As I finish the MET program, I leave equipped with a viable and promising platform for online PD to share with my district and hopefully with the province. Although, there have been many stumbling blocks throughout my MET journey, the most challenging have come in the last couple of months as I bring the SL professional development website to life.
Probably my most successful decision during the implementation of SL and one that has had long standing consequences throughout, was garnering the support of some allies before taking the idea to the Department of Instructional Technology. From the beginning, my priority was collecting feedback and support from colleagues. Buoyed by my peers’ enthusiasm, I emailed a former colleague and a current technology director in the district’s technology department, laying out my idea. He responded, pretty quickly, with a no. That was quite a shock and set back. But later that week, I went to a conference where we met up again. An accompanying friend said, so you’re the guy that crushed MacKenzie’s dreams. Feeling bad, he agreed to let me pitch him again. David Vogt, my ETEC 522 professor, would probably tell me, that in the business world, you never get a second chance. Well, luckily I did and by the end of my second chance, I had him convinced, which ended up being very fortunate.
By December, I had a meeting with the technology department and pitched my idea. They told me I had 5 minutes, so I made a DISTRICT PITCH similar to my SHARED LESSONS PITCH in ETEC 522. After my presentation, I had their tentative interest, but they definitely had concerns. They wanted to know if I would be willing and able to facilitate the platform. They also had concerns about the technical and hardware requirements on their part. This is where having a technology director on my side was invaluable. He fielded questions I couldn’t answer, gave his support to the cause and even agreed to “sponsor” me, i.e. help me bring it online and handle any of the technical problems. In the end, he was my biggest supporter.
So it is now the end of March, and we just got the site up and running in the middle of January. I have sent out a limited number of invitations to a number of my colleagues and interested peers, in order to help me work out the problems before it expands. I think this is an important step to ensure that I don’t turn off users with a lot of technical issues or get swamped by unhappy people complaining and refusing to return to the site. As far as solving problems, one of the biggest obstacles has been the districts reluctance to hand over total administrative power for fear of possible site corruption. Without this, I can’t make important additions, improvements and fixes. I believe we should be able to work through this in the next couple of weeks, but for now, it remains a stumbling block. And other issues are in the process of redesign like poor functions in Google Chrome and spam-like malfunctions.
Overall, user responses have been very positive. Probably, the most challenging problem has been overcoming fear of sharing work that isn’t polished. For this, I had to adjust my angle and convince teachers that the point was to contribute and help others, not to impress and awe colleagues. I reminded them of the story, which I told in my first reflection, about a friend that went all the way to Vancouver to learn what he could have learned from a colleague 4 doors down from him. The moral of the story is, we often don’t know what we have and therefore fail to share it with others.
But now, with the site up and running, and many of the glitches either solved or being solved, the major challenge is getting the word out and convincing others to buy in and share their ideas. At this point, nothing can develop without getting my colleagues to supply energy to the system. So far, the colleagues that have contributed are showing considerable interest and have a high rate of return and contribution to the site. However, they are first responders and tend to be more enthusiastic than the rest of the crowd. Which leads me to an important question, how do I motivate teachers to visit and contribute to the site?
Achieving motivation can be especially difficult when the payoff is not tied to marks, money or prestige. So it takes understanding human nature if one hopes to achieve a successful platform outside of these motivators. Many professional communities of practice provide a payoff usually in the form of greater achievement in terms of one’s career or a monetary reward for a successful job. Yet, for most teachers, there is no obvious worldly payoff for sharing or receiving ideas within a community.
However, one of the things that I believe, and has been reaffirmed by my experiences in MET, are that teachers are inherently helpful and get an emotional payoff from helping others. It is this inherent helpfulness and desire to teach others that is utilized by SL built in affordances that enable instant feedback and acknowledgement. This is accomplished when another likes, repins, or comments on your contribution. For which, you receive an email message informing you of the activity. Personally, I find it very motivating when someone decides to follow me, an affordance that lets others sign up to be apprised of your activities whenever you perform any activity within the platform. This contributes to teacher’s feelings that their contributions are valued and appreciated by their peers increasing their likelihood of returning to share more. Creating a large following, in some ways, may even create prestige among colleagues and has the potential to give teachers the confidence to share their ideas in other ways, including in-depth professional development initiatives or enterprising ventures. This type of feedback can be very motivating and often keeps me returning to similar sites like Pinterest or Thumb (a question and answer site). From a research perspective, Rodrigues (2006) noted that recognition and support from peers led to increased motivation and risk taking and that “show and tell” lessons encouraged teachers to share thinking.
One of the strengths, of this platform, is that it is peer driven, a realization that came out of my ETEC 500 Lesson Study research proposal. This was an important revelation during my research on attributes that contribute to the success of online PD sites. And having this knowledge has allowed me to stick to my guns and turn down certain administrators that have shown interest in supporting the initiative. Sometimes I felt like a crazy person saying no, because any support would normally be considered a great asset. But in this case, I agree that an initiative like this needs to come from teachers and be focused on teachers’ needs, rather than administration’s goals, especially considering the current political climate.
Which brings me to another thing that I am learning, as I develop this platform. You can’t focus on the haters (actually, they are more like mockers)! Yes, I know a Pinterest clone site was likely going to attract this type of heat, but it was a working model that was cheap to develop and had lots of features that meshed with what I understood to be important when creating a professional online community. One of my colleagues told me that he prefers the traditional lists of blue links on websites that are neatly and linearly organized verses Shared Lessons more open and interactive organizational style. Although, I remind him sometimes, that with only 10 colleagues signed up to the site and contributing lessons, he has already found aspects of several different teacher’s resources that he plans to use in his practice. As I anticipate the criticism that will likely occur, I remind myself of the lessons I have learned as a teacher. If you have a clear vision of what you want to happen, people will follow your lead. Whether in your classroom or online, if you believe, they will believe.
DORI: Wow, that sounded a little “cult”-ish.
Dori, I can always count on you to keep me grounded. I guess I did get carried away with my enthusiastic can do attitude, but I do think this site is developing at the right time with the right theoretical and practical underpinnings. Never before have teachers been so technologically ready. Even if only 10-20% of teachers have the technical skills to create their own websites in order to post their own lessons, their less tech savvy colleagues can still pin, share links to other resources, comment and be contributing members of the Shared Lessons community. And hopefully, their involvement in the site may provide them with the motivation to learn the skills they need to post their own lessons. Presently, I am working to recruit a colleague, a technology director in charge of the new system for our district, to make videos on how to make a webpage. That way, as some teachers develop interest in the site, they will have a resource to instruct them on website construction.
Despite being in the early stages, this project is coming together smoothly. This is likely due to the research, planning and decisions made leading up to its implementation. However, there are still many challenges in the future. Finding ground level partners in other districts to promote and assist in the running of the project will be important as I attempt to expand this project across the province. I presently have received interest from people in other districts wanting to share flip classes with their colleagues. However, Pro-D conferences will probably be my best course of action for getting the word out. Yet, in the end, no matter how much I plan for future problems, there are going to be unforeseen challenges and learning curves within the community. The way I see it, we will be a community of practice in more ways than one as we work together to make the online platform better for everyone.
Like a living organism, made up of cells that give and receive nourishment, communication, and feedback, SL will hopefully be a symbiotic system of empowerment for teachers. And ultimately, I hope it will also empower teachers to stand up against injustice, falsehoods and predatory technology sold to schools by companies trying to find a new market. I hope that it will enable variety over efficiency so that teachers and education can grow rather than stagnate. And finally, what I hope doesn’t get lost, in my comparison to Web 3.0 and the function of the community, is the uniqueness and significance of each teacher’s individual understanding that is not a synthesis of the collective, but is as varied, personal and important as any one person from another. I discuss this importance in the next reflection on DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY and in a former reflection CONSTRUCTIVIST LEARNING.
In conclusion, the Web 3.0 metaphor, doesn’t just describe my final project, but it also relates well to my struggle to contextualize my learning in MET through the creation of a working online PD community. Taking this vast amount of information and contextualizing it beyond the obvious and into a relevant application is challenging and tests my 2.0 information to become transformed into 3.0 understanding in action.
References:
Rodrigues, S. (2006). Pedagogic practice integrating primary science and elearning: The need for relevance, recognition, resource, reflection, readiness and risk. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 15(2), 175-189. doi:10.1080/14759390600769193
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