Jumping Back In!

Realized that I haven't revisited this blog in quite some time. I could blame it on a lot of things - but I won't. Instead - I am going to attempt (once again) to focus and to capture where I am in my learning about "21st Century Literacy."

I am not even sure that is a good term any more: 21st Century. We are already here. And much of the reading I have been doing seems to indicate that much of what is being touted as a 21st Century skill is really "old school": creativity, problem solving, collaboration. The thing is - it is incredibly urgent now.

Yes - I said urgent. By now all know the world is flat and we should think with a different side of our brain and we need to find the tipping point in our wikinomic world to create a new digital citizen. Things are changing exponentially. The trick is - how?

How do we move an out-of-date and entrenched educational system into a new way thinking? Of doing? Of being?

Please don't look here for any answers. Please look here for more questions and for what I have been learning and to push my thinking so that I don't live in an echo chamber.

Tweet! Tweet!

Lots of people have been writing about Twitter lately and the role that it might have/has in education. I was slow to jump on board the Twitter-wagon but am now pretty hooked!! This weekend I was able to have some face-to-face time with Tweetchers in my network - which makes the virtual network even more meaningful!! (Let's face it - there are some things that just can't be tweeted!) And being able to virtually share the excitement of the recent election with my Twitter friends was an experience not to be missed!

Angela gives a great overview of Twitter and how educators are using it on her blog - so if you are not familiar with it, you should click here to read about it. I spent a great deal of my early Twitter days working off of the main home page but hated that I always had to manually refresh. I've moved to TweetDeck because it has a nice little "tweet" when there are new "posts" so I can flip to it when I need a break from whatever I am working on. As with the main Twitter page, there are some glitches at time but there are always other options!

Thinking about how I use Twitter, I realize that it is much like how I read blogs only the information is shorter and quicker to read. In many ways, it also acts much like my RSS feed as many of the people that I follow tweet when they have updated their blogs. With my local network - it has very often been a lifeline for me. I can tweet out a question or participate in any one of the numerous conversations we have on topics like formative assessment or use of certain tools. When I am stuck for a resource, they are there faster than a speeding bullet!

I also find myself posting blog entries less often, particularly on Grand Rounds, because the interactivity of Twitter allows me to process with a network rather than create some grand posting where there may or may not be a comment left. (I guess that is why Twitter is micro-blogging!) That is probably better for the folks who read my blogs because I can get the "beta" version out with the folks via Twitter!!

What is interesting is the turn many of us have taken with respect to sharing links and resources rather than just sharing what we are doing (although that is a nice aspect as well.) I think much of that can be attributed to Angela Maiers as a result of this post and her Twitter engagement formula. I can't say that I follow that formula exactly but I do work on it!

As the Twitterati (thanks Mrs.BrownDog)share resources, I find that I cross over into another social networking tool and tag most of them in my Delicious account. I have different people in that network as well, so if I want to share these resources with them I can tag them. I had been having my Tweets update my Facebook account as well, but as I realized that my friends there didn't quite "get" Twitter and therefore I was heckled more than I needed to be about the updates, I took it off.

The only thing that I wish I could do is snap a picture with my cell phone and easily use that to update on Twitter (or a Twitter-like program). Since I have working so hard on capturing visuals, it would fit nicely into my work. Fisher1000 shared TwitPic today and while I had seen it before, it didn't seem to have the ease I wanted. I am going to hang back a bit and see how he uses it before I take the leap myself. That is yet another great thing about Twitter - I can see the learning of my fellow Tweets and they can see mine.

It is interesting to see how my social networks are crossing and inter-weaving - that some people use one tool but not the others. I am wondering what was the tipping point for each tool - so that I can think about how I introduce them to teachers and can share our learning.

New Beginnings

I am not sure how anyone else felt last night - but it felt like New Year's Eve to me. Anticipation, celebration, a new beginning this morning. I was connected to what was happening not just by the media reports but by my Twitter friends - I had more updates than I could count. I was so glued to the technology keeping me up to date with a friend in NYC, my friends here in Buffalo and my virtual friends everywhere that my phone was actually taken away from me for an hour to have a conversation with the friend actually sitting in front of me. Perhaps I was too connected?

This morning - the Twitterverse and my feeds have been alive with comments and blogs and links and oh so much to read and take in. If as Cindy Citizen I feel this way - how must President-Elect Obama feel? So many Monday morning quarterbacks referred to him as "our first Internet President" this morning that it made me really think about the power I saw on display yesterday. Power of people, power of connections, power of the process.

In thinking about helping our students process this a bit - so that the results of this election continue to have meaning in our classrooms - I put the words of McCain's elegant concession speech into Wordle:




I then searched to see if someone had already done the same with Obama'a acceptance speech (many had!) and I liked this one:



I think this would make a great compare/contrast exercise for students to think about the emotions and words that each man portrayed on this historic night!! And a great use of one of my favorite visual tools!

Thinking about visuals

Low tech day today but full of visuals.

I started the day with asking teachers to select a black and white postcard from my vast collection to help with the following analogy:

"The word assessment makes me feel like (black and white photo) because....."

As luck would have it, one of the teachers was an art teacher who was teaching photography to her students and had just finished their unit on black and white photos!! I wanted to stop the workshop right then and there to tap her brain to help me take better photos but I resisted!

At the mid-way point of the day, I asked teachers to do a reflection of their learning and at this point had given them color coded shapes that corresponded to reflection prompts:

Square = This idea is square with me, it get it
Triangle = Some important points to remember
Circle = These ideas as circling in my head, I have questions about...
Cloud = Some things I am thinking about related to this are...

The teachers needed to do at least two shapes for me before they left for lunch. What was great for me about using the shapes (instead of my handout with the shapes on it) is that I had a really quick and easy visual of where the group was in terms of their learning. In this case, most of them had a square and the questions easily stood out and I could address them when we came back from the break. Since the topic was formative assessment, reflection on how I used that exercise as an assessment went to the "quick and easy" which was something the teachers wanted to do more of in their classrooms. We had a great conversation about color coding and use of visuals to help with that.

What was very interesting was that as we got to the end of the day and the planning for implementation phase, many of the teachers were thinking of ways to incorporate visuals into their planning. Whether it was a visual prompt as a reflection tool or summarizing learning using visuals or having the kids take their own pictures, we certainly had the right sides of our brains working. Even better, the collaboration with the art teacher was very high and I see some real connections happening with that group.

I did have the chance to sneak in a Flickr and Picasa reference or two but didn't want the technology to start to overshadow what was happening in the room. Thinking about how I could use the technology next time to model it as well so I have added a page to the wiki to start to capture those thoughts. If you have any others, let me know so that I can add them!!

Change:A Visual Summary

As I was sitting reflecting on the past two days and how much I have learned, a notification comes across my TweetDeck (a new toy) and I find that Liz B. Davis has posted a new idea:

What if a teacher asked her students to find an image each week representing their learning. Fridays the class could go through each of the images and students could share why they chose them. Students could use Flickr to find their images where pictures are tagged with words like "citizenship" and "courage."

Liz goes on to make even more connections to what the lesson could look like including tagging, copyright, and creative commons. Since it connected so closely to what we had been thinking about, I immediately went to Flickr to do a search. I knew without a doubt what my search word was: change.

Immediately, I was gifted with the ideal picture in one of the very first images. Normally, I would have snagged that picture and posted it right away, right here for you all to see. But then I remembered asking Sara about how to cite those pictures that I love to use. I clicked on the picture and low and behold - all rights reserved. I could use that picture but first I would need to ask permission. And that certainly wouldn't be timely for this blog post.

I half-heartedly dug around Flickr for other things that were tagged with "change" but nothing struck me as much as that first image. And then I remembered that I have a camera and while I am not as gifted as the photographer of that image - I have set a goal to exercise and flex that other side of my brain every once in a while. Here it is:



I posted the other shots on Flickr with the tag "change" and "pluggedin" if you would like to see them - I clearly need to work a bit on lighting!! I was going to add why I selected this particular view of my change jar but then I thought it might just be better open to interpretation. Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments section!

Where to begin?

A small but very knowledgable group of educators gathered in a room for two days to discuss, debate, learn about "new literacies" and develop a plan to implement them back in their districts.

A scene from a science fiction novel? An administrator's dream? An administrator's nightmare? Nope - reality right here in Western New York.

In planning what this year-long work would look like with Sara Kajder (our literacy/technology anchor) my vision was to have many, many more people in the room who were ready to take the leap into bridging student technology literacies into their classrooms. Alas - issues with substitutes and budgets didn't allow that to happen. However, the group that was here was thoughtful and committed.

We talked about why bringing the literacy of our students into our classrooms in order to enhance the "traditional" literacies. One of the most important pieces that I was able to walk away with is Sara's notion of starting with with ME (what can I integrate into my life to make it more efficient/more meaningful/more connected) then move it to the WE (communicate/use what I have learned in an intimate and safe community) and then finally to the SEE (launching it out to the world and making it public).

As we move forward with this year - the goal is to focus on making one small change based upon a "problem" that we have in our practice. (Technically, action research.) We will have five months to work on making that change, noticing what we did that worked, reflecting on what did not and just taking that small step forward to plug in and create one small pocket of change.

This blog will be my place to wrestle with making that change and pushing myself to things differently, rather than spinning my wheels and complaining. I've created a companion wiki (Lifelong Kindergarten) to act as my sandbox and to point readers to in order to highlight the work of the teachers that I can get to join me on this journey. Unlike Writing Frameworks (which focuses on writing) and Grand Rounds (in which I wrestle with professional development and educational issues along with a colleague), this blog will be my "beta." The place where I test out thoughts about making changes is smart and purposeful ways or share my experiences with different technology tools.

If you are game - follow along, push against my thinking in the comments or tune in once and a while while I try to change my pocket of the world.