Category Archives: Assignments

July 8, 2013 · 10:07 pm

BYOD and “going digital”

One of my colleagues From my now former school tweeted that he and his team are “going digital classroom next year.”

This intrigued me. I want to know what he means by that and what that might look like and how that will play out and what plans there making and I’m planning to interrogate him.

So far I know that the planning adopting Edmodo with their classes. So I’ve decided to use this as a jumping off point to look into BYOD policies, pros and cons and what’s happening in other districts jurisdictions. I’m also going to look more into Edmodo and what it is how it looks maybe compare it to the MS SharePoint alternatives that our district is pushing and look into also am blogging with edublogs as an alternative.
Through my conversations on Twitter with the teachers involved in planning that project of going digital as well as another teacher at our school who teaches the grade 6 MACC class which essentially runs is a one-to-one program I am looking at what’s happening at our school in terms of practical everyday usage devices. As a school we don’t have a vision statement or policy on bringing your own devices, we do have the code of conduct.

Here is an excerpt from the electronic devices protocol contained within that document:
“Based on feedback from students, staff and parents, the use of electronic devices is not permitted during instructional time (defined as all times between 8:40 a.m. and 2:50 p.m. except nutrition break and lunch time) unless directed by a teacher or staff member. Off-site activities including field trips and sports trips are also included in this prohibition. Examples of electronic devices include but are not limited to cell phones, Blackberries, iPods and iPads, iTouch’s, iPhones, MP3 players, cameras, etc. Teachers are engaging in expanding their use of technology to support student learning and as such may ask that students use programs and devices under their supervision in their learning, with the intent that all students develop a constructive understanding of the use and misuse of technology. Valuable items are brought to school at the owner’s risk and should be kept in the student’s locker. The school is not responsible for items that go missing during the course of the day.”

One of my first steps is gonna be reading “Bring Your Own Device: A Guide for Schools” created by the Alberta government. It is divided into three sections policy,practices and planning. It is not “a step-by-step guide” for implementing bring BYOB in schools, what it does is bring up a number of questions and issues for consideration I’ve included below the list from the table of contents which gives you an idea of the kinds of questions the document is asking.

1. Policy
a. What value do personally owned devices bring to student learning?
b. What BYOD models are school authorities adopting?
c. What policies are needed to ensure high quality use?
2. Practices
a. Will students be ready to learn using personally owned devices? Will they be good digital citizens?
b. What pedagogies fully leverage personally owned devices for teaching and learning? What types of professional development help teachers leverage such pedagogies?
c. How can digital content be used effectively through personally owned devices?
d. What infrastructure will be required to support student use of personally owned
devices?
3. Planning
a. What are the key school readiness indicators that ensure effectiveness of a BYOD
model?
b. What are the BYOD implications with the community?

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July 5, 2013 · 2:41 pm

Module 4 part 1:where I was, where I am, where I might go…

What I am looking into and thinking about at the end of this first week:

  1. BYOD, one to one, how does it work? is it a good idea? as a solution to access problems within the school. Who is doing it? who is doing is near me?
  2.  District policy: what is it? who is creating it? how is it being implemented in the district?
  3. Finding out who is doing what in my district with ICT
  4.  Finding/making connections with people who share interests and are working on the things I am working on
  5.  Learning how to organize my own digital intercations and how to help students be organized. Can I use my own personal blog (which I just started this week so that I will share my practice not merely share separately and solely for each of my individual UBC courses)
  6. Pursuing particular resources ie mindmeister, blogger, wordpress, wordle, popplet, pearltree, and so on
  7. Learning how to use this application to do what I want with my blog posts (arg photos and using the iPad are proving to be challenges so far)
  8. Creating developing and expanding my PLN, and learning how to talk to strangers, or even people I already know but do not normally engage in these ways.

I find that my mind is very overwhelmed after each of these classes and I am having trouble holding on to all of my thoughts about things so the above list is merely a fraction of the things that have occurred to me during the last 4 days.

What I have done as of 2:25 of Friday afternoon:

  1. all the blog posts and all that that we are required of course.
  2. started a new Blogger Blog for myself Adventures in Reading, Learning, and Teaching (which I chose because I have Google and I had already created a course blog for LIBE 465 using it)
  3. in order to get a grasp on my ‘Connected Self’ I have started a list on my blog of links to all of my content on the web including my Showme Account, Prezis, my other course projects blogs, wikis…that is all I can think of at the moment.
  4. I was able to capture all the blogs I had been following from my Google Reader! ( just in time too 🙁 )
  5. started a Pearltree to represent my own learning on started to collect some materials on some of the topics above
  6. started a popplet can’t get the popples to move and they are all stacked on top of one another got mad and closed the window… I’ll go back to it later
  7. I have come to sit in the Chapman Library Commons to contemplate what it is all about.
  8. decided to stop at 449

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July 4, 2013 · 6:14 pm

Module 3 part 1

I’ve decided to focus on definitions for ICT in my own school district. I am feeling in many ways like the district is producing roadblocks for learning through ICT for both teachers and students.
So how is ICT defined in our district?
On its public website the district provides a resource called digital citizenshipwhich has information intended for students staff and parents. Part of this resource is a page called “Guiding our Practice”. On this page are teacher responsibilities and resources divided into four different categories: privacy, copyright, use and access to information, and behaviour.
The resources that are given for use and access to information include
Points of Inquiry and the The BC Ministry of Education doesn’t use the term ICT instead they use ‘digital literacy’. They give the following rationale : “Many organizations use different terms such as ICT (information and communication technology), educational technology, computer literacy, and others. We view these terms as synonymous with digital literacy. In any case, what matters most is the definition, since it provides common understanding and outlines the scope.” It goes on to define digital literacy as “the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others in order to participate effectively in society”

So I assume our district accepts the BCTLA’s definition of information literacy and the Ministry’s definition digital literacy in place of what in this course we’re calling ICT.

How does this relate to librarianship and library teaching?

I find it encouraging that a lot of the work being done on Digital Literacy in our district is being done by District Librarian Heather Daly (also the BCTLA President). It’s coming from the library not the IT department. This seems to indicate that the district feels that TLs have a role to play that is very important in this conversation (I assume that somewhere someone is having a conversation about it). I think that On a practical real-world level it is necessary for the TLs to become the school experts in ICT, to support/provide professional development at their schools, to collaborate and to bring ITC in the classroom. Especially as part of the definition above is “construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others” and students are going to be expected to do that digitally.

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· 6:07 pm

Module 3 part 2: Roadblocks

What are the roadblocks?

Roadblock 1: lack of teacher training in the district in and around ICT. What I find most baffling of all is that the digital citizenship page discussed in previous posts was news to me. I had never seen it before doing the work for this course. It was never pointed out to me at a proD, nor did we receive email from the authors of the pages indicating that they had been added to the district website.

Roadblock 2: making the Internet seem scary and dangerous to parents. The parent resource page contains merely links to cyber bullying and Internet safety related sites.

Roadblock 3: concerns about privacy and cloud computing on US servers have discouraged teachers from using applications that allow students to publish in the real world instead teachers are encouraged to use the SharePoint platform which is all password protected. Makes it nearly impossible for students to “share everything” and “talk to strangers” in any real world authentic sense. (They do provide permission forms for each of the approved applications on the digital citizenship page but as mentioned above I didn’t know about those until two days ago. Not to mention that separate permission forms for every single application seems a pain in the butt.)

Roadblock 4: Access and ease-of-use are hampered by District policies such as the inability to download anything onto network computers and strict controls on District iPads which prevent the purchase of apps and the use of air printers. These policies create the need to call in an IT support staff person to do many simple things.

All that isn’t even taking into account other roadblocks like lack of funding in general and lack of access to infrastructure such as bandwidth, hardware etc. in particular.

BYOD is starting to look like a solution to many of these problems because, left to our own devices, we can work around issues and have more freedom using our own devices!

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July 3, 2013 · 4:35 pm

Module 2: Connected Self and resilience

It is a time of great uncertainty for me personally. I was laid off and am waiting with baited breath for an email from the District Principal of Human Resources to send me an email with my teaching assignment for 2013-2014. I am now, in a way, feeling unconnected. Some of my connections to colleagues have been severed but perhaps by investigating my own online presence and trying to unlearn and learn new ways of thinking and learning with ITC I can create other connections that can help support me in this time.

Joining what I call ‘Team Layoff’ means many things to me:
1. I have to leave the school I have been at for the last 6 years (I have been laid off before and have been reassigned to the same school, where there have always been a position available for me. I am afraid that there are no positions at the school this year however.) As someone who does not handle new situations or people that well, this is taking me hugely out of my comfort zone. I have made many connections which may be severed as a result (the professional ones at any rate).

2. Any curricular projects and collaborations that I am involved in are now on hold or abandoned as I do not know to what level or subject area I will be assigned.

3. The planning for next year part of my brain is spinning its wheels. I am using Evernote to keep track of ideas for my classroom but they cover all grade 6-8 subjects and are not focused or terribly coherent. Thankfully this course can occupy some of my thoughts, and the ‘when I a library of my own’ thoughts can be given free rein.

4.The school is losing 9 teachers to layoffs. This has made planning for the coming school year difficult. Even planning first week ‘back to school’ activities suffered as ‘Team Layoff’ could not speak for the new staff members who would be occupying their positions in September.

In light of these circumstances I have decided to examine some strategies for teachers to manage when connections are cut. I am looking into ‘teacher resilience’ and how creating a PLN can help teachers with the current environment of change and uncertainty in which we find ourselves.

So far using the search term ‘teacher resilience’ I have found a number of articles linking resilience to teacher retention here is a taste of what I have found so far:
“Teachers resilience: A necessary condition for effectiveness”
“Building Teacher Resilience”
“How Teachers can build Emotional Resilience”

Many of the articles and sites come from Australia where they seem to have a high number of new teachers leaving the profession. I am still trying to find out if there is any network of laid off teachers in BC or my Disrict to provide support. there are mentoring opportunities for new teachers, but this will be great for me AFTER I have a new teaching assignment, not much good to me at the moment.

I’m also looking into Twitter. So far I have created #LIBE477. and looked at #edchat and #cdnedchat.

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· 4:01 pm

Module 2: Response to “Why School?”

In Why School? Will Richardson talked about “six unlearning/learning ideas” for educators to support in the “new school”. In this post I am going to talk about how I relate to three of these ideas.
1. Share Everything (or at least something)

It is impossible to be going through the teacher librarianship diploma program without having some experience in ‘sharing’. In my previous classes I have created a wiki, a blog, and a webpages, in addition to posting and sharing through WebCT, and Connect.

I have not, however, transferred this into my ‘real life’ yet. I have not shared my work with my colleagues or sought a wider audience for my work. Why not? in a way I feel more comfortable knowing that no one I know (well) reads it. I think I am, at heart, antisocial (or maybe I mean shy). I am a passive consumer of content and have not really) branched out into being a creator of content. So I am going to start a new blog for myself, outside of coursework, with prominent links to my coursework creations. I will try to use it to organize my own PLN and document my personal professional development.

2. Talk to strangers

I have not yet even attempted to connect my students with the outside world. In fact I wouldn’t even know where to start. Seems scary. I also feel that my district makes it scarier.

3. Do real work for real audiences
This is an area that I find exciting. I think that the potential to engage students by giving them real world problems to investigate and to allow them to create a product that exists for more than to simply be marked by the teacher (and then be recycled) is fascinating. I have always been left with the impression (from our District) that our students should have NO online presence and that all their digital experiences should be safe within the school website SharePoint framework. Any site that had servers in the US was made out to be a boogeyman and as a result I have been somewhat reluctant to explore creating content on the web with my students. This year I experimented with wikis through the SharePoint site provided me by the district. My students in groups created wikis for each of the political parties to coincide with Student Vote. We shared the wiki with the school community by sharing the link to the ‘wiki page library’ with teachers at our school. I was dissatisfied with the experience because there is no way to provide or receive digital feedback with a wiki like that. In addition, using the SharePoint wiki through our ‘virtual classroom’ page meant that only those who can log in to our school webpage could view it. It is not truly ‘real world’. I have discovered my districts digital citizenship pages (which I had no idea existed until yesterday) which contains links to other tools we might use with permission forms that can be sent home to parents. This has given me some ideas to explore.

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