July 4, 2013 · 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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July 2, 2013 · 6:28 pm

First Post-Survey

1. What policies govern your uses of ICT in your school setting?

Our District has a webpages of on Digital Citizenship which conains a “guiding our Practice page” for taff and a “Rights and Responsibilities” page for students. It even includes a page of ‘cloud’ based apps with permission forms and suggested alternatives. see the link below:

http://www.sd43.bc.ca/Resources/DigitalCitizenship/Pages/default.aspx

Our school also has an “Electronic Devices Protocol” in our Code of Conduct

2. What digital technological resources do you have available for teaching and learning in your school setting?

As of this year each classroom had one desktop computer, one laptop and one projector. Our school uses SharePoint, and using this platform provides each teacher with both a public and virtual website. The virtual website is where we would use blogs, wikis and other things that include student information. The public site can be for announcements and homework works and so forth. I don’t find it all that easy to use though.
We also have a variety of other online resources such as subscription databases and Destiny for the library.

3. Please provide an example of an exemplary use of digital technologies for teaching and learning that you have observed or experienced personally.

One of the most interesting things that I have attempted with digital technologies was using an App called ‘Socrative’. This app, which has both a teacher and student version, allows the teacher to create a classroom which students log into (without having to create an account or give any of their personal information). Each student gives themselves a username for that session and then the teacher can pose questions and all the students,using their own devices, can answer the questions and they can be displayed up on the whiteboard. One thing I like about Socrative is that it could be a way for the more quiet students to respond to questions without having to do so in front of all the other students. Some students feel more comfortable typing in the response this could all be happening during a live conversation so that the outgoing chatty ones can respond verbally while the quiet ones could respond in text and the teacher could choose to make that visible to everyone or not. The teacher can choose to compose short answer, true or false, or multiple choice questions and students key in their responses. One particularly cool aspect is that in the short answer category if you have multiple answers the teacher can choose up to five and then allow students to vote for what they believe is the best of the five responses. I found using this App to be very engaging and interesting for the students and enabled me to get a better handle on what all the students know without having to have everyone respond verbally.

4. Please provide an example of a problematic use of digital technologies for teaching and learning that you have observed or experienced personally.

The most problematic thing at this moment that I can think of is the idea of using technology simply for technology’s sake. For example we have an e-book for the new social studies textbook but if students just read it as an e-book without accessing all the value-added features then we’re not really getting the best of this technology. Whatever the technology, I think that the choice to use it to teach PLOs must be purposeful. I think that some aspect of using the technology has to enhance whatever curriculum you are teaching. Often a lot of use that I made technology is presenting students with choices of presentation tools, allowing students access multiple intelligences and find something that resonate with them that they can get excited about. Honestly I am still not sure what I think about all of this.

5. Please provide a brief history of how you learned to use digital technologies (personally and professionally).

Most of what I know I know from a trial and error approach. Certain apps or programs I have heard about through word-of-mouth, through reading education and tech blogs,and at various ProD activities but in the all of these instances I mostly just learned the name of a cool new thing that you then have to go try out later on your own. The one exception to this is district’s SharePoint platform which I have been part of the learning group for work with my website, although most of that focused on the technical aspects of SharePoint not teaching in the classroom, what it really looks like in a practical sense aspect.

6. How would you rate your digital technological proficiency? 0 = low level of proficiency -> 10 = high level of proficiency? Why did you give yourself this rating?

If I were to rate myself maybe I would give myself a seven or eight. The reason for this is that although I am highly confident in my ability to figure things out, I do not have any formal technology training and I often don’t know the technical vocabulary to explain things to other people.

7. What do you hope to accomplish in this course?

I hope to develop some better strategies for implementing technology in the class because although I know of some cool technologies, I don’t really feel like I’ve ever been given concrete examples of how we would apply those technologies in an educational setting.

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