Tag Archives: district

July 13, 2013 · 11:04 pm

Making meaning of week 2

Where I was:

  • consumer of content
  • introducer of content
  • collector of resources
  • list keeper
  • social media phobe
  • user of tech to do course work but not elsewhere

Where I am:

  • blogger
  • connected educator
  • collaborator
  • contributor
  • curator
  • organizer
  • ICT appreciator
  • learner and enthusiastic user of ICT for learning

Where I am going(what am I going to do…)

  • continue to develop my PLN
  • use PLN to improve my practice
  • encourage students to create there own PLN to pursue their ‘spark’
  • use ICT to for many purposes:
  1. to connect better to students
  2. to allow students to connect to each other
  3. to allow students to create and share creations with the world
  4. to connect students to experts and sources of local interest/expertise
  5. to connect better with parents

I am also trying to find out what is happening in our district and why I don’t know about it, and how I can help others know about it. For example I just found out about the social networking tool called yammer which apparently is available in my district. It is sort of a corporate Facebook style interface, so my next job is to find out about that and why we have it when nobody’s using it and maybe encouraging people to use that as a tool within our district for connecting and collaborating and sharing ideas.

Our sociological discussions this week about socio-cultural homeostasis, dynamic conservatism, institutional isomorphism, autopoeisis, structural coupling and linguistic cognitive domain, have been thought-provoking, interesting, depressing, hopeful, daunting, energizing and inspiring.

Out of all of that what I feel at the end is that what I need to do is to work on using ICT resources to further my own practice, to learn to create exemplary lessons in which students learn with, through, and about technology. I have to learn To take more risks to allow learning to be more students centred than ever before. As I do this I have to leverage my connections, my connectedness to try to inspire, influence, or persuade others to join the ICT side.

I think providing inspiring examples sharing successes and being a reflective learner and teacher, and sharing what I’m doing is a way to effect change slowly, authentically, sustainably, and organically. Certainly that’s how I’m starting to learn from other people. One of the first things that I’m going to do in the wider school context (providing that I am at the same school) is to bring the idea of asking why to more aspects of our practice. Why did we bring iPads into the school? why are we doing what we’re doing? I think we go back to the why we will do more well.
If I’m not at the same school if I am in a new school environment I think that the way to deal with the dangers of institutional isomorphism and other factors against innovation and radical change is to continue to seek out people outside of my school (PLN) with whom I have common goals, so that I can continue to develop my own practice.

Looking back at this post I notice that I’ve got lots of adjectives and lists of adjectives I wonder if that’s a symptom of how full my brain is.

2 Comments

Filed under Assignment Two

Tagged as , , , , ,

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.

1 Comment

Filed under Assignment One

Tagged as , , , ,

· 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!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Assignment One

Tagged as , , , ,