ORMS MOOC playlist reflection

Working with other members of the MOOC, continue to develop a playlist that tells a story about the journey in the MOOC so far. How did you feel when you started? How do you feel about Multimedia Tutorials? What do you think about Online Collaborative Inquiry? Where do you think this journey is going? 

 I found the directions for the second post on Monday and immediately started to procrastinate. I had never heard of 8tracks.com. It was a new skill and I had to decide when to find time to learn it. I started thinking about songs, though, and Manic Monday popped into my head immediately. OK. Manic Monday LIVES in my head along with the NPR theme song.

I live a rather busy life. I manage time quite well, and still find time to procrastinate. I usually get my ITDML work done by mid-day on Saturday so I have some semblance of a weekend when school and grad school can leave my brain. Monday morning is the start of a new work week and the start of new learning for class. Things get a little manic as I spin from one activity/opportunity to another all week.

I participated in this MOOC last year. This year, it was fun working with members of the new cohort on the teaching team in the first module. I used the tutorial that I created with some of the freshmen in my building. The students who made the choice to focus learned more than those who did not. Instructing the students to look for specific cues helped students focus better.

I wanted my second song to have an air of confidence. Fanfare for the Common man, to me, is perfect. (Read this paragraph slowly as you listen to the music...) The IT&DML cohorts are made up of common people with diverse technology backgrounds. We came here as individuals, and by working collaboratively together, we are changing. We learn daily from one another. We harmonize, borrow ideas, and help each other out. We are building our knowledge and growing as individuals and as a team. It's exciting.

If you are like me, you gain confidence as the weeks pass. Watching the first cohort present their portfolio helped me to see more clearly where I can go with my new learning. I am getting excited for the grand finale at the end of this coming summer.


 Photo credit: Andre Lira, Brasil.  http://pixabay.com/en/users/andrelyra/

(There was no decent "Fanfare for the Common Man" Creative Commons image.)

ORMS MOOC week 2: Exploring Online Collaborative Inquiry

How can we change the stigma surrounding the use of the internet, ICT's, and open source information in the educational arena? I am addressing the question as a teacher/school librarian who spends most of the time with students in the library working on the computer in some fashion.

The internet can be a dangerous place. "Shock" news makes headlines. Target credit card data is breached! Thirteen year old girl abducted by man she met in a chat room! Cyberbullying determined as the cause of a young man's suicide! There is an almost daily phishing scam in one of my e-mailboxes. How can we expect children to be safe, especially in school?

Even for young children, there are many ways members of a classroom experience being connected and using collaborative tools via the Inernet, without exposing student information to strangers. In a Google Classroom, one must be invited to participate and have a school-supplied account. Edmodo and Moodle learning platforms work in a similar fashion. Some of the sharing tools on school platforms are limited, but my personal school technology theory is, "If you make it complicated in school, the real world looks easy!"

In reality, most high school students act safely, if not always appropriately, on the internet. When my school had eight computers twelve years ago, the boys tried to watch football instead of doing school work. Today, with our BYOD policy, most students don't need the school computers in order to access entertainment, be it Angry Birds, or that next super-important text. Sometimes the wireless is too slow, so they try to "get around the system," but I usually catch that pretty quickly. Unless they are "being funny" or showing off, students are trying to get their work done so they don't have to bring it home.

Some of the old, somewhat paranoid, security is still intact in our building. A junior carpentry student was looking up wire strippers for a class assignment and was blocked for possible pornography. The only way around it was to give him an iPad to use on the wireless network.

Through their exposure to social media, children are warned about the kind of damage inappropriate posts can have on their reputation. I agree with William Ferriter that those at risk in other situations are the most likely to make poor choices on the Internet. A tiered approach, like SRBI, is a great tool to appropriately target the right kids. At the other end of the spectrum, holding up examples of young people in our classes or in the media who use the Internet as a place for learning new skills, from skateboarding tricks to guitar riffs, can reinforce the best possible uses of that medium.

References: 
Ferriter, W. Digitally speaking / positive footprints. Educational Leadership, April 2011. Vol 68. No 7. p. 92-
      93. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr11/vol68/num07/Positive-Digital-
      Footprints.aspx

Richardson, W. A new generation of learners. TEDx NYED. 2011.YouTube video.


ICT = Information and communication technology

ORMS MOOC Module 1 Reflection

I was one of three facilitators for the first module of the ORMS MOOC. I had not gone first before. The good: you set the pace and nobody has expectations. The bad: if you're like me, you are the one with the expectations.

It is strange having folks from the new cohort ask me questions, expecting expert answers. I don't feel like an expert, but I found myself answering with authority. After negotiations, we spread the commenting and questioning responsibilities among us and connected during the week through email and brief hangouts.

I learned so much from the MOOC participants. I always pick up certain things from readings, and I am  amazed at what others connect and discover. We read through different lenses. We come from a variety backgrounds and teach different school populations and grade levels. I like being able to respond on my own time, but it would be really fun to connect face-to-face on some of these issues.

I was particularly impressed with the online tutorials. I recognize that there are so many types of technology that can be used in a pedagogically aligned manner. I still find myself in the "use the technology" mindset, rather than the "can technology make this better?" mindset. Operative word: MINDSET.

After spending a solid week at school resetting student passwords, working around glitches in the website, and figuring out how to get by without my Polyvision board (or a working LCD projector) -- can my SLO be about resetting LESS passwords?  -- learning from my ITDML colleagues about ways that technology is successfully being used in their schools is inspiring.

Start a blog: reflections about digital identity

"Start a blog."
"What?"
"Start a blog. Use Wordpress or something."
"Why?"
"You're brilliant, well-read, and make amazing connections. Besides, it will give you something to do."

That was the beginning my husband's and my dinner conversation after I read about digital identity this afternoon. I always read the ITDML articles with a lens of "teacher" and "student." It hit me at dinner that blogging is much broader than that.

You see, my husband was an amazing teacher.  Teaching was his second career. He was passionate, practical, and wielded differentiated instruction like a magic wand. Due to school system climate and an unfortunate choice of actions on his part, his career ended after four short years. I won't explain. It's his story.

Anyway, he worked hourly jobs and mourned the loss of his career before cancer struck three summers ago. He now has a clean bill of health, and no job. It's a struggle for both of us. He helps out at a friend's business occasionally, and spends most of his time applying for jobs online, reading non-fiction (mostly history), and cruising social media. Whenever he "teaches" at Men's Fellowship, they hang on his every word. I "Googled" him and found his Facebook page and an article about his termination. He is more than that.

Creating a digital identity is so much more than killing time posting/boasting about yourself. By creating a digital identity, you can rewrite your story, or overwhelm some of the things you are less proud of.

I have been following Kathy Schrock on and off for years. Twenty years ago, my library director (I was Children's Librarian in Huntington CT) gushed about her. Kathy Schrock was a school librarian on the cutting edge of technology back in the early nineties. She overwhelmed me. Before it was common to have an online presence, she was out there. She has since retired from her library media specialist job, is self-employed, and bills herself as an "Educational Technologist." She presents at conferences, holds workshops, works with schools, and maintains an exciting, informative website. I have seen her. She draws huge crowds. Kathy learned new things and promoted her learning. She is a strong role model for creating a digital identity. Maybe she has grandchildren and posts on Instagram, but her top five Google hits are about Education Technology.

My top five hits (that are ME, not some NY financial director or high school basketball player) are Facebook, Twitter, church (the online version of our newsletter), and Google+. I have some work to do...

PS: My husband is starting to think of a name for his blog! So far, everything he thought of was taken. :)

A new world order: reflections on this week's readings

To those who yearn for "standards," such differences appear as evidence of distressing fragmentation of the social fabric (Cazden.)

I am going to date myself. I was born in 1964, months after John F. Kennedy was shot. My whole childhood was defined by the Cold War. I remember looking at photos from Vietnam in Time Magazine and watching 10-year-old footage of people running through barbed wire after the Berlin wall went up.
Modern technology in the classroom was a filmstrip projector. My age-mates still talk about the smell of the mimeograph machine, the copier's predecessor. If we saw moving pictures in the classroom, they came from an old fashioned movie projector, not a VCR.

I remember learning "basic" on the networked computers in high school. I created an endless loop that said, "My sister is a jerk." Yes, coding at its finest. My father was a math teacher, and we had access to a home computer long before most of my peers. It wasn't all that exciting. I could type and I could do simple programming. Whoopee.
The world has changed.
Kids are coding games. Anybody can "chat" with people around the world in real time. We can get almost any information we want instantaneously.... most of it for free. If we think of something we want to buy, we can hunt it down and purchase it without leaving our homes. In a moment of carelessness, we can lose our life savings.
I am so dependent on my connection and at the same time I hate it.
I can find out the weather or the time or the state of the world in an instant.
The flip side of that is that I have no time.
I have a busy mind and I love to know stuff. I spend way too many hours exploring the back-lit box at my fingertips. I hardly read anymore. I spend much less time sewing. I waste hour after hour playing solitaire or checking Facebook.

I am taking this sixth year program because I am recognizing my obsolescence. I understand technology. I use technology. I don't really embrace technology.
 
The New London Group's article, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, has me rattled.What is education for? I always imagined it was to give everyone a baseline - equal footing - in order to be productive, functioning citizens. We all learn to read and do basic mathematics, learn about human history and interaction, and get a grasp on our world through science. Those who get excited about certain topics learn more about them, and those who just want to get out into the world and work, have that opportunity.
Apparently, that is "Ford-ian" thinking, good for an industrial society.
...and we are beyond that.
Since the end of the Cold War, our society become much more money-driven. The new focus is the bottom line. We are working to teach students teamwork because the hierarchical nature of business has changed, but our corporate culture is downright "nightmarish" (Cazden.) Instead of learning to be cogs in a wheel, our students need to learn how to "speak up, negotiate, and engage in critical thinking." Not everyone is built for that kind of interaction. Where can they fit in? Is that honoring their kind of diversity? Or do we now cater to the loudest divergences?

 The new order "spells the definitive end of "the public"- that homogeneous imagined community of modern democratic nation states."(Cazden) Am I ready? Can I help my students be ready?

(Can the politicians call us "The American People" like we are all the same...?)


Cazden, C. Cope, B. Fariclough, N. Gee, J. et al. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.  Harvard Educational Review; Spring 1996; 66, 1; ProQuest Psychology Journals. pg. 60