Alien Pedagogy

I gave a presentation to my coworkers today on Professional Learning Networks (If you read this, you already follow Jeff Utecht whose presentation I attended at EARCOS).

I have long enjoyed being one of the only teachers on staff who knows about RSS feeds and PLNs (like when you hoard your favorite music and hope no one else discovers it), but felt it was time to share with others.

Method:

• POW – Used “how not to use Power Point” and some of the new Google search options to show how my PLN has influenced my teaching.
• Distinguished PLNs from Online Learning Communities (which my group has so far associated with a network designed for students).
• RSS Feeds. Introduced the idea of a feed and showed them my Reader and Bloglines feeders. I mentioned Feedburner, but I don’t use it.
• Microblogging – Introduced Twitter and Wefollow as sites that we can use to rapidly browse the educator’s online community.
• Social Bookmarking – Introduced Delicious as a place where we can rapidly store information and share it with other teachers.
• Provided the staff with some links to educational blogs and set them loose on the Internet. I also sent an email of the links we covered to them.

In review:

• I wanted this to be a completely optional session that teachers could opt into or not. So I tried to make it happen in just a half hour, which was too rushed. Having said that, delivery of content did not take very long; most of the time was spent surfing.
• I found the staff bought into the idea of using RSS feeds.
• I’m not sure that they saw the value of edublogs. If I were to do this again, I’d try to find some of Dy/Dan’s best posts.
• Twitter was adopted by some, but not all. I was not surprised by this since it took me quite a while to get into micro blogging.
• I tried to stress that a PLN is only as good as the time you spend working on it. So we’ll see how it goes.

If you use PLNs, have you considered sharing?

If I want to save an idea, I used to click either “clip this” or else “keep new” on my feeder, but now I just post the summary to Twitter or else I email it to a friend (which archives the link in Gmail).

Either way, I find it much easier to retrieve that data if I interact with it as simply as posting it to someone.

There are times when I’m very proud of the work my school is doing with tech. Here are some things that we’ve started using:

• Interactive White Boards – They’ve just been installed in every classroom.
• Corporate Gmail – Our school’s email system is provided by Gmail’s programming, which I think is superior to any other email platform.
• Cloud Computing – We all use Moodle and have regular peer training.
• Cloud Computing – We’ve begun using Shared Google Docs for daily announcements and for creating community drives. (We also have a server and a private network for security).

Ironically, although we’re shifting to the cloud for some processes, I bet no more than three of us know what it means to live in the cloud.

Ncara introduced me to this series of lectures — streamed and free — through her twitter account. I think I’ll enjoy watching these lectures (though they’re very long and sometimes plodding).

What a great resource, right?

The only problem is that if I don’t really commit this website to memory or record it on my blog or twitter account, I’ll forget it.

Worse, I find it very difficult to track down information that I’ve taken from edublogs or twitter accounts. Twitter doesn’t offer a search engine for the updates your account takes on. Even blog search engines rarely turn up what I’m looking for.

Perhaps it’s that my aggregator doesn’t have many filing functions.

This week, the grade 9s started blogging in order to explore their relationship with the text.

There have been some very strong posts, the best of which was a commentary in which the student compared her response to The Little Prince as a 15 year old compared to when she read it as an 11 year old.

Having read the first round of blogs, some students don’t understand the difference between exploring one’s relationship with the text and writing a book report (in this case, a book report is quick summary followed by a “I would recommend this to…” statement).

Briefly, I encourage students to explore their relationship with the text by (not comprehensive):

• Making connections to other texts, their life, “real” life, and “big” ideas.
• Examining why they are drawn to this text, or why they are not. In other words, what can you learn about yourself if you spend your evenings alone reading Emily Dickinson?

To some extent, I’m concerned that the public nature of a blog discourages students from sharing their “real” response. However, I also think that by reading each other’s responses, the class is more likely to comprehend this concept.