I’m excited about writing this post, because it concerns the EdTech session that was the most thought-provoking for me: Planning a Technology Vision: I Know Where I Want to Be…Now How Do I Get There, by Jeff McCoy, Director of Instructional Technology for Greenville County Schools. I expected the session to be about technology visions and missions and goals, and in a way it was, but not in the way I thought it would be. Confusing? Let me explain.
I am guilty of never having articulated Technology Vision Statement for myself personally or for my media center. The closest I’ve come is that I want to be known at my school as the “How to Integrate Technology (and media resources) into the Curriculum” specialist, not the “Change the Laminating Film and Come Hook Up My Printer Cable” specialist. (And believe me, this is an uphill battle, much more so than I expected when I started this job last year!) So I guess I thought Jeff was going to do my thinking for me and talk about Technology Visions, and I could just piggyback off of his Dreams for a Technology Utopia. What he presented was much less mystical, much more practical.
Jeff is the guy who is responsible for planning and implementing actual technology projects involving hardware, software, ongoing maintenance, budgeting, communicating with board members and administrators, professional development opportunities for users, and ongoing as well as final assessment of success. Whew! I feel exhausted just thinking about it. The project he’s currently immersed in is putting 5,000 Promethean boards into classrooms, training teachers not only to use them but also to troubleshoot their own technical difficulties (!), and demonstrating that their usage (they have 3,000 boards in place so far) is having a positive effect on student engagement and achievement. Technology dreams? Sounds more like a nightmare to me!
So Jeff is all about reality. He took us step-by-step through how to plan for every aspect of a technology project, no matter how large or small. He shared his early failures and his current successes with us, giving concrete examples of each. He outlined each phase of the process, starting with approval from administrators and early buy-in from stakeholders, and ending with plans to continue building on what you originally accomplished. He even offered some strategies for bringing curriculum zealots and IT nazis together to work in harmony! Now that does sound like a dream!
If you’d like to learn more, visit Jeff’s website, where he shares his presentations and handouts, his training manuals and tutorials, and some “Cool Websites” that he finds valuable.
Now, I still need to do my own thinking about technology. After all, the first part of the session title states, “I Know Where I Want to Be….” Do I? I believe it’s time to do some more reflecting on just what it means to be the Technology Integration Specialist at my school, and what steps I can take to accomplish that. How about you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it all fits together.
Well, I was planning to record my EdTech Conference experience day-by-day, but that didn’t happen. I was too caught up in face-to-face interaction Thursday and Friday to take time out for any solitary computer blogging. I do have some other sessions to report on, though, so here goes.
The first session I attended Thursday morning was an overview of some free Google apps. The main reason I attended this session was to learn more about the Google calendar, which I’ve been considering using for scheduling the laptop computers and the Media Lab computers at my school. I’ve heard other media specialists praise it on the SCASL listserv, so I wanted to find out more about it. I like the fact that my invited users can edit it themselves, because I’d like my teachers to be able to put themselves on the schedule rather than emailing me or worse, sending me notes on little pieces of paper asking if the computers are available. This is one of the things I love to see technology used for - removing the drudgery of clerical tasks from my daily life. With my Google Computer Calendar in place, I will no longer have to spend time keeping up with those schedules myself.
What was unexpected in this session was discovering Google Sites, which allows users to quickly create websites that can be made private, semi-public (by invitation only) or public to everyone on the internet. I like the fact that my pages can be kept in a controlled environment (sometimes necessary in the world of education), but the thing that surprised me about the Google Sites pages our presenter, Karen Minter, has created is that they are ad-free. I didn’t realize that Google ever refrained from promoting themselves, but according to Karen they do not run ads on educator-created websites. This was good news, because I really tend to shy away from using sites that run ads of any sort. After all, if my name is on a webpage, I want to be able to control all of the content that appears there. (Collaborative work with colleagues excepted, of course.)
For example, I heard about a new webpage aggregator site called Only2Clicks that displays a full-page-view snapshot of all the sites you have stored there. This was exactly what I was looking for to use with a project I was doing for my teachers, and when I took a look at the site, I loved the design and the layout of it. However, there were those rows of little Google ads showing up at the bottom of each 2Clicks page, so I reluctantly decided to stick with using my Netvibes aggregator for the project, even though with Netvibes, the link modules are much smaller and harder to read than those on Only2Clicks, and the Netvibes webpage modules show only the top left corner of a website, rather the the entire webpage. (See an example of what I’m talking about here.) Hmmm, now that I think about it, perhaps I should take another look at Pageflakes to see how they handle website views. If anyone out there is using Pageflakes, maybe you could leave me a comment and let me know…..
Boy, I really got sidetracked from describing my EdTech experience, didn’t I! It’s getting late, and I think this post is long enough; I’ll report on some more sessions later.
Update: 11/11/08 Well, I did try to go back and take another look at Pageflakes, but the site is down, and apparently has been down for at least two weeks. After doing some research, I’ve found that there is rampant speculation on the web that Pageflakes is gone for good. Due to financial difficulties, Pageflakes was acquired by Live Universe in May of this year, and the general web consensus at this time is that the faltering company will not resurface. Too bad.
Well, I’m posting tonight from my hotel room in Myrtle Beach after an eventful first day at EdTech 2008! I attended a couple of great sessions, marveled at the way our keynote speaker - a hypnotist - led seventeen fellow conference attendees to do things they will surely be embarrassed about later, and even won a door prize! I then enjoyed a fine Italian dinner with Renee Inman, a fellow media specialist, before cracking open the laptop for a quick blog entry.
My first session today was on using Web 2.0 tools at the elementary level, where I got a few interesting ideas for using some of the apps I’ve been learning about in the SCASL 23 Things program. The presenter, Anne-Marie Wilcox, also recommended a website that I’m anxious to explore called Jenuine Tech (created by Jennifer Wagner) which offers technology integration projects that teachers can use in their classrooms. The coincidental thing about this is that I just discovered Jennifer’s blog, Tech Thoughts by Jen, last week and was so impressed by it that I added it to my Netvibes blog feed page!
The other session I attended was entitled “50 Ways to Use ETVStreamlineSC.” Okay, we didn’t really have time for 50 uses, but our presenter (Debbie Jarrett) certainly gave us quality, if not quantity. Anyone who is only using the videos from this site is missing out on some great resources. If you haven’t checked out the “Teacher Center” at the ETV Streamline website yet, you’ll be surprised and pleased with what’s available. If you’d like a digital copy of the information handout I received in this session, just email me (junel@sumter17.k12.sc.us) and I’ll be glad to send it to you.
Time for bed now, but I’ll be up early tomorrow for another day of learning and growing!
If you’ve been following my blog, you know that a few weeks ago I created a Delicious account and imported all the bookmarks from my home computer, then spent many hours tagging them. If you’ve seen some of the comments I’ve posted to others’ blogs, you also know that a week later, when I tried to access Delicious from my school computer so that I could import and tag all of those bookmarks, I was horrified to find the site blocked. I immediately sent a pleading e-mail to our district technology coordinator requesting that the site be unblocked, and I found out yesterday that my request had been granted! Whew!
I discovered Delicious just as I was beginning to realize what an inconvenience it was to have two separate sets of bookmarks, one at school and the other at home, so I was immediately attracted to the site as a way of solving a personal problem. Now that I’ve explored it further I am seeing the value of Delicious as a networking tool as well, and this is where the real shift in thinking is occurring for me through the SCASL 23 Things program. After all, throughout my entire career I’ve adopted tools to make my job easier, whether it be something as low-tech as a subscription to a professional magazine, or as high-tech as a computerized cataloging and circulation system, so using internet resources to help me do my job better is really nothing new. It’s the interaction, the ability to connect with other educators to share and collaborate and create that makes Web 2.0 so different and so valuable. I’m not just working in isolation, passively viewing and adopting the work of others, but rather I’m responding and discussing and contributing to the common good. That’s the power of a network!
So, I’ve added SCASL to my Delicious network, along with another user who also seems to be collecting school librarian-type websites. From now on, I will certainly be more aware of which of the bloggers I follow are sharing their sites through Delicious so that I can check them out as well. I know now how take a look at the most popular sites on Delicious, and when I’m researching a particular topic I can do a quick tag search to see what websites others are finding useful. And I’ll be sure to share what I find, too, to keep the circle going.
This past summer when I started the 12 Things program through the School Library Journal website, I came across a blog entry from The Thinking Stick by Jeff Utecht that intrigued me. The post is entitled Stages of Personal Learning Networks Adoption, and it outlines the path most educators take when they begin changing the way they teach, learn, and interact:
Stage 1 Immersion: Immerse yourself into networks. Create any and all networks you can find where there are people and ideas to connect to. Collaboration and connections take off.
Stage 2 Evaluation: Evaluate your networks and start to focus in on which networks you really want to focus your time on. You begin feeling a sense of urgency and try to figure out a way to “Know it all.”
Stage 3 Know It All: Find that you are spending many hours trying to learn everything you can. Realize there is much you do not know and feel like you can’t disconnect. This usually comes with spending every waking minute trying to be connected to the point that you give up sleep and contact with others around you to be connected to your networks of knowledge.
Stage 4 Perspective: Start to put your life into perspective. Usually comes when you are forced to leave the network for awhile and spend time with family and friends who are not connected (a vacation to a hotel that does not offer a wireless connection, or visiting friends or family who do not have an Internet connection).
Stage 5 Balance: Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you. A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all right now.
Well, I realized last weekend that in exploring the SCASL 23 Things this fall, I had definitely followed this path up right up to Stage 3, and it wasn’t good. I was feeling totally overwhelmed by how many tools were out there just waiting to be discovered, and I was despairing of ever mastering them all. Suddenly it seemed appropriate to revisit that blog entry in search of some perspective and balance. As I scrolled down and began to read the comments on Jeff’s post, certain sentences began to jump out at me. The first commenter said, ”I find that a number of people will reach Stage 3 and then decide that it is all too much and drop their PLN altogether.” Hmmm, others must experience that feeling of “so many tools; so little time,” too.
The second comment was even more to the point: “Somewhere between Stage 3 & 4, if we hope to make it to Stage 5, we must first admit we have a problem. That’s what it feels like–an addiction that can consume us. I’m glad to hear someone else’s spouse is fussing, reminding him that life does exist beyond the keyboard and glowing screen. “ Wow, I’m not the only one experiencing this determination to learn everything about 2.0 or fall asleep over my computer at midnight trying!
Obviously it was time for some Stage 4 Perspective! According to Jeff, this usually occurs when a user is forced to leave the network for some reason. Well, with no vacation, computer theft, or extended power outages in sight, I just had to give myself a time out. I took last week off and, except for whatever e-mailing, etc. had to be done at work, I stayed completely away from the computer. I read no blogs, listened to no technology podcasts, played with no new flickr toys, and created no new web accounts.
It really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, as much as I have been enjoying these learning exercises, it was actually a bit of a relief to devote my evenings to something other than the computer for awhile, which is probably a sign of impending burnout.
Remember earlier in this post, when I said I was despairing of mastering all of these tools? Well, I’ve realized I don’t have to master everything, and certainly not immediately. My attitude should be that I’m surveying the web, sampling from the 2.0 buffet, not loading up my plate and stoically eating my way byte by byte through it all.
My goal now is to be a more thoughtful user of Web 2.0, putting more time into the activities that are meaningful to me, rather than spreading myself too thin over a larger number of applications. After all, by beginning with the end in mind (remember the 7 1/2 Habits?) I can always go back and learn what I need to learn, when I need to learn it, for any project I might care to undertake. And that’s surely the path that will lead to Balance.
Well, I finally finished tagging all 355 of my bookmarks in Delicious! This was one of those mind-numbing organizational tasks that just has to be done, like sorting your email into folders so you can find that important message from your principal a month from now. But something good actually came of reviewing all the sites I’ve bookmarked up until this point: I reacquainted myself with all the wonderful content that is available on the net. I took a second look at some sites I want to share with my teachers. I dusted off those plans to start a book discussion group with some of my students. And I reminded myself that the content has to drive the technology, not the other way around.
It’s easy to be wowed by all the flashy 2.0 applications that are out there. It’s easy to get so caught up in exploring all the “cool tools” that I neglect to spend time implementing what I’m learning in my media center program. And what’s worse, it’s easy to start a project like a blog or a wiki or a podcast and then fail to maintain it.
For example, ever since I learned about Google Book Search in August, I have been using it to keep a list of all the books from the Alice Drive Elementary Library collection that I’ve read since I started teaching at the school last year. It’s linked from my media center webpage so that my students can see what I’m reading and hopefully find something they’d like to check out. I realized today that I haven’t posted any new titles in over a week! This is partly because lately I’ve spent more time with the computer than with a book, and partly because I just haven’t taken the time to add the books I did read. Will the kids notice I haven’t added anything new this week? Probably not. But it’s a slippery slope when you start to let those projects slide.
So I guess this blog post is really more of a reflection on the need to keep my technology priorities straight, rather than a description of my experience with Delicious. But that’s okay; it’s just part of sharing The View From Here.
How easy it is to get sidetracked on the web! I was just working on editing my bookmarks in Delicious (one of my 23 Things this week is setting up a Delicious account, and when I imported my bookmarks I was staring at 355 sites to be tagged! But that’s a different post!) when I came across the Bubblr site. I had bookmarked it earlier when we were exploring MashUps, but hadn’t used it yet. I did a quick experiment with it so that I would know how to describe it in Delicious, and here’s what I came up with:
Unfortunately, the text is too small to read here, so if you’d like to see a larger version of my comic strip, go to: Lori’s Blog? by Lori
It was fun, and it took almost no time at all. Bubblr has a Flickr search tool right there on the cartoon creation page, so when you type in your tag(s) it immediately displays matching photos at the top of the screen. Drag and drop the one(s) you want to use into the cartoon frames, drag in a thought or speech bubble, type your text and voila ~ you’re a cartoonist!
p.s. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was having trouble embedding a flash image into my blog. I again had trouble embedding this cartoon, also flash, so this time I turned to The Edublogger for advice. For those of you using Edublogs, Sue Waters does an amazing job of posting explanations of how to do anything you might possibly want to do with your blog. I always search her posts before I go to the forum for help. Click here for her post on embedding code.
I just spent a little while playing around at ImageChef, and apart from one piece of code for a flash image that just wouldn’t work in my blog, this site is very easy to use, and you can quickly generate a variety of fun images!
Here’s an image I personalized from the Fun Category.
It’s as easy as choosing from the menu of background options and typing in the text you want. I just used the templates and images available at the site, but you can also upload your own photos for many of the projects. Registration is optional; you can create and access the resulting html code without signing in. So what are you waiting for? Go try it out!
Okay, am I the only one who found Technorati overwhelming?! My focus right now is on using Web 2.0 in education, but since “Education” wasn’t listed in the Technorati blog directory, I took a look at the “Web 2.0″ category under Technology. Boy, were there a lot of blogs for tech geeks listed there! I didn’t understand half of what I was reading!
I did find one new blog to add to my Netvibes page, though. ReadWriteWeb is a blog that provides web technology news, reviews, and analysis. It’s not something I really need to check daily, or even weekly, but it should be interesting to scan the posts every now and then to keep up with the trends and buzz words in the 2.0 world.
To be honest, most of the blogs I’m following, such as The Blue Skunk, are ones I found out about by looking at other people’s blogrolls. For example, Cathy Nelson has some great ones listed at her blog site, Techno Tuesday. By checking out the blogs she follows, I found additional links to still more good blogs. It’s good to be part of a network!
Using a newsreader is actually something I’ve been doing for awhile now. I took a look at the Bloglines website, but I confess I didn’t spend too much time on it because I am extremely happy with my Netvibes page. Netvibes is actually a personalized start page which allows me to put all of my web content in one place, using customizable tabbed pages to keep everything organized. Through the use of widgets I can easily add RSS feeds for podcasts, blogs, and news, but I can also include photos, bookmarks, webpage modules, html, pop e-mail, and more.
Netvibes allows me to have a public page to share with the world in addition to a private page that only I can access. I have transferred some of my private items to my public page, Keeping An Eye On…, to show just a little of what you can do with Netvibes, and you are welcome to take a look at it.
