\n District Pitch for Shared Lessons<\/a><\/p>\n [youtube]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yp3_C5pIaYA[\/youtube]<\/p>\n Reflection:<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This interactive platform allows people to review, rate, give feedback and follow others that share their interests.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 From the beginning, my priority was collecting feedback and support from colleagues.\u00a0 Buoyed by my peers\u2019 enthusiasm, I emailed a former colleague and a current technology director in the district\u2019s technology department, laying out my idea.\u00a0 He responded, pretty quickly, with a no.\u00a0 That was quite a shock and set back.\u00a0 But later that week, I went to a conference where we met up again.\u00a0 An accompanying friend said, so you\u2019re the guy that crushed MacKenzie\u2019s dreams. \u00a0\u00a0Feeling bad, he agreed to let me pitch him again.\u00a0 David Vogt, my ETEC 522 professor, would probably tell me, that in the business world, you never get a second chance.\u00a0 Well, luckily I did and by the end of my second chance, I had him convinced, which ended up being very fortunate.<\/p>\n By December, I had a meeting with the technology department and pitched my idea.\u00a0 They told me I had 5 minutes, so I made a DISTRICT PITCH<\/a> similar to my SHARED LESSONS PITCH<\/a> in ETEC 522.\u00a0 After my presentation, I had their tentative interest, but they definitely had concerns.\u00a0\u00a0 They wanted to know if I would be willing and able to facilitate the platform.\u00a0 They also had concerns about the technical and hardware requirements on their part.\u00a0 This is where having a technology director on my side was invaluable.\u00a0 He fielded questions I couldn\u2019t answer, gave his support to the cause and even agreed to \u201csponsor\u201d me, i.e. help me bring it online and handle any of the technical problems.\u00a0 \u00a0In the end, he was my biggest supporter.<\/p>\n So it is now the end of March, and we just got the site up and running in the middle of January.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I think this is an important step to ensure that I don\u2019t turn off users with a lot of technical issues or get swamped by unhappy people complaining and refusing to return to the site.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Without this, I can\u2019t make important additions, improvements and fixes.\u00a0 I believe we should be able to work through this in the next couple of weeks, but for now, it remains a stumbling block.\u00a0 And other issues are in the process of redesign like poor functions in Google Chrome and spam-like malfunctions.<\/p>\n Overall, user responses have been very positive.\u00a0 Probably, the most challenging problem has been overcoming fear of sharing work that isn\u2019t polished.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The moral of the story is, we often don\u2019t know what we have and therefore fail to share it with others.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 At this point, nothing can develop without getting my colleagues to supply energy to the system.\u00a0 So far, the colleagues that have contributed are showing considerable interest and have a high rate of return and contribution to the site.\u00a0 However, they are first responders and tend to be more enthusiastic than the rest of the crowd.\u00a0 Which leads me to an important question, how do I motivate teachers to visit and contribute to the site?<\/p>\n Achieving motivation can be especially difficult when the payoff is not tied to marks, money or prestige.\u00a0 So it takes understanding human nature if one hopes to achieve a successful platform outside of these motivators.\u00a0 Many professional communities of practice provide a payoff usually in the form of greater achievement in terms of one\u2019s career or a monetary reward for a successful job.\u00a0 Yet, for most teachers, there is no obvious worldly payoff for sharing or receiving ideas within a community.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 It is this inherent helpfulness and desire to teach others that is utilized by SL built in affordances that enable instant feedback and acknowledgement.\u00a0 This is accomplished when another likes, repins, or comments on your contribution.\u00a0 For which, you receive an email message informing you of the activity.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This contributes to teacher\u2019s feelings that their contributions are valued and appreciated by their peers increasing their likelihood of returning to share more.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 From a research perspective, Rodrigues (2006) noted that recognition and support from peers led to increased motivation and risk taking and that \u201cshow and tell\u201d lessons encouraged teachers to share thinking.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0This was an important revelation during my research on attributes that contribute to the success of online PD sites.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Sometimes I felt like a crazy person saying no, because any support would normally be considered a great asset.\u00a0 But in this case, I agree that an initiative like this needs to come from teachers and be focused on teachers\u2019 needs, rather than administration\u2019s goals, especially considering the current political climate.<\/p>\n Which brings me to another thing that I am learning, as I develop this platform.\u00a0 You can\u2019t focus on the haters (actually, they are more like mockers)!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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\u2019s resources that he plans to use in his practice.\u00a0 As I anticipate the criticism that will likely occur,\u00a0 I remind myself of the lessons I have learned as a teacher. \u00a0 If you have a clear vision of what you want to happen, people will follow your lead.\u00a0 Whether in your classroom or online, if you believe, they will believe. DORI:\u00a0 Wow, that sounded a little \u201ccult\u201d-ish.<\/em><\/p>\n Dori, I can always count on you to keep me grounded.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Never before have teachers been so technologically ready.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And hopefully, their involvement in the site may provide them with the motivation to learn the skills they need to post their own lessons.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That way, as some teachers develop interest in the site, they will have a resource to instruct them on website construction.<\/p>\n Despite being in the early stages, this project is coming together smoothly.\u00a0 This is likely due to the research, planning and decisions made leading up to its implementation.\u00a0\u00a0 However, there are still many challenges in the future.\u00a0 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. \u00a0I presently have received interest from people in other districts wanting to share flip classes with their colleagues.\u00a0 However, Pro-D conferences will probably be my best course of action for getting the word out.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hope that it will enable variety over efficiency so that teachers and education can grow rather than stagnate.\u00a0 And finally, what I hope doesn\u2019t get lost, in my comparison to Web 3.0 and the function of the community, is the uniqueness and significance of each teacher\u2019s individual understanding that is not a synthesis of the collective, but is as varied, personal and important as any one person from another.\u00a0 I discuss this importance in the next reflection on DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY<\/a> and in a former reflection CONSTRUCTIVIST LEARNING<\/a>.<\/p>\n In conclusion, the Web 3.0 metaphor, doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n Rodrigues, S. (2006). Pedagogic practice integrating primary science and elearning: The need for relevance, recognition, resource, reflection, readiness and risk. Technology, Pedagogy \u00a0\u00a0 and Education, 15<\/i>(2), 175-189. doi:10.1080\/14759390600769193<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/macseportfolio\/files\/2013\/02\/Shared-Lessons-4-300x225.png\" "\\"Shared")
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