Teachers Learning Together

I am sitting at a corner table, sipping my coffee, trying to catch up on email while I wait for the Apple store to open at the mall.

First one and then another arrives, laptop in hand, heading to the back banquette of the Panera.  This is obviously where they regularly hang out.  They greet one another eagerly, then immediately get to work.  There is lots of laughter as they share ideas, tips, opinions.  One of them reaches eagerly across several others to point at a screen.  Another says, "Hey, look what I found."

I can't help myself, so I ask them, "You are teachers, aren't you?"

"How'd you know?" the one on the end asks.

"Who else would be gathering together to provide support for one another as they learn Web 2.0 tools?" I  could say.   But I am more impressed by their spirit of collaboration, their willingness to take risks and help each other out with such collegiality, their eagerness to learn.  It is exciting to eavesdrop on their learning process.

"Which school?" I ask.  "I'm a teacher too."

"Spring Branch," one informs me.

I ask to take their picture for my blog, and they blush and say sure, but they aren't experts at this or anything.  They're still learning.

"Keep at it" I tell them as I pack up.  I know the Apple store is probably packed by now, and I have to go. "Good luck with everything."

Months later, I stumble on their picture in my files.  They are two weeks into the beginning of the school year now.  Maybe they've been implementing something of what they learned by sharing with one another over the summer.  Maybe they email one another for help; maybe they still meet on Saturdays at the Panera.  I hope so.

I hope they are doing what it takes to keep their community of sharing and learning going.  I hope they are adding to this nascent personal learning network by meeting other teachers online and sharing their learning process in blogs.  (See Renee Hawkins's earlier blog on "The Connected Teacher.")

I also hope they can reflect on their collective learning experience and understand how they can bring that experience into their classrooms.  Do their students come into their classrooms eagerly sharing what they are learning? Are their students gathering in a comfortable space, teaching each other,  exploring new tools and resources? Are their students learning how to network and learn and share and network and learn and share...?

I hope so.  "Good luck. Keep at it," I whisper across the Internet with this blog.  I'm sorry I was so much in a hurry that I didn't get your names.  I am sorry we didn't share and connect so that our learning could continue.  "I'll look for you at Panera," I'm thinking.

PS.  I tried to find a good definition of a PLN because I wasn't satisfied with the one on Wikipedia, which I link to above.  Any suggestions?

Gearing Up For The Big Game

It’s Superbowl Sunday and my husband is gearing up for the Big Game. It’s only 9:00 am but he has prepared the menu (enchiladas) and is online reading about the game. He pours over the Sports Illustrated website, along with ESPN’s and the NFL’s. He doesn’t subscribe to blogs or tweet about his love of football.

It makes me a little crazy to tell you the truth.

Why would he not want to go deeper, read more, join a conversation, and share his many opinions on the qualifications of the coaches, the officials, and the players with someone other than me? Seriously. It’s hard to fathom.

Case in point. I shared the following tweet with him:

Translated: To use the night to watch a sport I do not understand, with players I do not know who is. So that I can brag about it on Tuesday.

He didn’t think it was funny. I couldn’t stop wiping the tears from my eyes.

Having a good laugh is only part of the reason I shared it with him. This tiny little exchange is an example of a door that was once shut tight now thrown wide open. I am able to laugh at a joke from a young man from Oslo, Norway because I happened to find him in a Twitter post. I found him in Twitter because people from around the world are pointing their thoughts to one place: #superbowl. I am able to translate Norwegian into English thanks to Google Translate. And I am able to share it with you because of this blog. In itself, it isn’t very significant, but the potential is great. Behold: the power of the network!

I’m the first to admit that I’m new to this. Little by little, I’m becoming more confident using these new tools to connect with other teachers and like-minded individuals around the world. As a child I knew instinctively that reading was powerful, that mastering those skills would be empowering. I feel the same way about the tools I use to connect to my personal learning network.

My network feeds my professional soul. First, I follow smart people. I remind my students that I too, stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether through blogs, tweets, or TED Talks, I learn from the finest thinkers in and out of my field.

Second, I seek out master teachers in all disciplines. Thanks to my participating in the Powerful Learning Practice community, I was able to connect (literally) via Elluminate with Silvia Tolisano (@langwitches), who shared the documents she uses to help her elementary teachers to “21st centur-ize” their curriculum. Bill Ferriter, (@plugusin), a 6th Grade social studies teacher, shared examples of student learning that facilitates social change. Dolores Gende, (@dgende), an AP Physics teacher, who so engages her students in their own learning, they speak of having a “passion” for science. These are my teachers too. The examples they so willing share help guide and improve my own practice.

Third, I need help. That’s the substance of tweets I send out to the world. I’ve asked for help to learn more about Microsoft’s Kodu programming application for young students and the qualities of a 21st Century Technology Coordinator. Recently an acquaintance that works for Facebook wanted to know if teachers were using Facebook in their classroom. I went straight to Twitter. Later, I asked for feedback “to gauge the reach and effectiveness of my network.” She replied,

“I think that it was really useful, especially once I picked up on the #edchat and #edtech conversations. Got some great stuff culling through those, some of which I was able to use yesterday and some of which I'm sure I'll have occasion to use in the future.”

Fourth, my network extends the reach of my students. I can use the relationships built through Twitter, blogs, and Ning discussions to find readers and commenters for my students’ work. Because my reach is global, so is that of my students. Are you a teacher looking for collaborators for a VoiceThread project? Would you like to give your students the British perspective on the American Revolution? Have your students gain a global perspective on something in the news (#Egypt, #Tahrir) or the President’s State of the Union address (#sotu). Twitter can help make it all happen, often by employing a powerful tool first put forth by Twitter users themselves: the hashtag.

How about helping your students build a readership for their blogs? Send out a tweet using #comments4kids and ask the members of your network to help you spread the word. It may take a while and require some persistence at first, but it’s worth it in the end. Once your students have a real audience they are no longer students, they are writers. I get excited when I discover another red dot on the Cluster Map in my blog. Can you imagine how motivating it is for a Fifth Grader?

Making the effort to grow and cultivate a personal learning network is essential to today’s teacher. It should be part of our professional toolkit and viewed as important as face-to-face, bricks and mortar, professional development opportunities, maybe even more so. As I thought about this, I sent out the following tweet:

Here are some of my favorite answers:

We model so much for our students, why not the building and use of a personal learning network? Why not demonstrate the learning power embedded in a connected world? Why not demonstrate the learning power embedded in a connected world?

This blog is cross-posted at Voices From The Learning Revolution.

How Did I Get Here?

I used to be a perfectly ordinary English teacher, someone who highlighted her books, typed up tests on mimeos, and left her classroom now and then to get coffee in the faculty room. So, how did I get here?

One day in the late 1990s, I asked my students to submit their homework on Jane Eyre to me via email.  I was overwhelmed by the response.  First, I had twenty-some emails to process – how was I going to manage all that?  Next, I couldn’t believe how good their thinking had become overnight.

Sometime around Y2K, my friend and colleague Renee Hawkins gave me a “Website-a-Day” calendar for Christmas.  I had to admit some of the websites that were popping up were really cool.

I took an online course on teaching critical thinking at Goucher College.  Amazed, I had to figure out how to be a different kind of student.  I took another course about creating basic web pages for my courses.  Before I knew what was what, I was participating in discussion forums and designing online courses and had a certificate in “Educational Technology Leadership.”

One spring day, one of my former students, Emily Brecht, came back to visit from college.  She said she had been spending all of her time commenting on other people’s “status” on this new thing online called Friendster.  “Why would anyone want to do that?” I asked her.

Spoiled from having used online course platforms for my own learning, I looked for a way to bring the excitement of learning online to my classes.  My school had blocked my website, so I needed some way around their obsessive controls.  We couldn’t afford something like Blackboard, and there was no way I could convince them to include this free new tool called Moodle on our school server, so I began to look for another way.  I found something called Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA) and began using it for my 10^th grade English class: the discussions that spilled over into class after discussing online made my earlier email revelation look like small talk. 

One summer, I had a conversation with my step-daughter, who was interested in pursuing writing professionally.  I suggested a writing workshop like the MFA program I had attended, so she could have readers who could provide feedback.  “I have lots of readers online,” she said, “what do I need to take a workshop for?”

I transferred to a new school and tried out the ICA there.  Then I had to shut down the class because my freshmen were getting carried away with political trash talk during the Bush-Kerry campaign.  My students responded by creating their own ICA class so they could talk all they wanted to without any teachers or other adults breathing down their necks.

I moved and started teaching at a school in the middle-of-nowhere Texas.  I also became an administrator, so the other teachers didn’t want to talk to me about teaching any more. I missed my friends and former colleagues terribly.  I started blogging to the void, pretending that I was modeling ways of thinking about teaching for the teachers who wouldn’t talk to me. I joined networks of teachers on Classroom 2.0 and Independent School Educators Network.  When someone I didn’t know responded to an idea I shared in a discussion forum, I got really excited. I really did have someone to talk to about teaching, and especially how my teaching was changing radically as I was influenced by all these new ways of communicating.  I couldn’t believe my luck – my colleagues were now – could this really be? – from all over the world.

I started a new blog, “The Flying Trapeze,” with my friend, Renee Hawkins.  This was a lot better than blogging to the void – at least we had each other.  I overcame my jitters and tried Twitter, though it still seemed a little silly.  I created a Facebook group for my students; I posted pictures to flickr and had one chosen for an online travel guide; I kicked around with blonde hair and a guitar in Second Life.  I got brave enough to lead a discussion at EduBloggerCon at the ISTE conference in Denver (2010), and suddenly I was being followed by smart people like WhatEdSaid on Twitter.  Renee and I started accumulating dots on our blog’s Clustrmap. I began having the richest conversations of my professional life by participating in a year-long investigation of best teaching practices with a band of amazing, inquisitive teachers through a group called Powerful Learning Practice.

I have found myself in the midst of an acronym, what people now refer to as a personal/professional learning network, a PLN, and my life as a teacher and learner has been utterly transformed.

Becoming a Connected Educator

I just discovered this wiki, TwitterEd via a tweet from rkiker this morning. It has loads of examples and ideas for using Twitter in your classroom. The ideas are innovative and demonstrate the reach and power of a PLN (Personal Learning Network) that teachers around the world are finding indispensable.

As someone who is relatively new to Twitter, I say, with absolute conviction, that Twitter has become an invaluable tool in my own professional development. I tweet to learn, in other words. If you are considering using Twitter but can't quite figure out its place in your classroom, this is where I'd start: Tweet to learn. Find experts in your discipline, follow them, and share these tweets with your class. I've found that these tweets are sometimes just a comment, but more often contain a link to a treasure chest of resources (see above). As a Moodle school, we can pull a Twitter feed into our course pages where students have access without setting up an account.

To really appreciate the power and reach of Twitter, however, teachers need to build a personal learning network. Your reach is determined by the number of people following your tweets. Currently I have 38 followers and many are groups or organizations (NAIS, Edutopia, etc.) Yes, I follow teachers, really smart ones (suludavis, larrykahn, zandrews, smcmanus, rkiker), but I know that to extend my reach, to become a truly "connected educator," I need to to expand my list of followers. I want a global reach, not only for myself, but for my students too, because my network benefits them. Take a look at the examples in TwitterEd. A teacher sends out a "calling all experts" tweet and students are lifted out of the classroom, provided links to rich resources, and challenged to question, think, research, and respond (via the teacher's account for younger students) to real people, in a meaningful way. Connected teachers connect their students to other students to collaborate and create with one another without the limitations of time and space. This is my goal for the year: expand my network, expand my reach, expand my (and my students') opportunities for learning.

At Alan November's BLC Conference this summer I attended a session given by Jeff Utecht (jutecht), the Technology & Learning Coordinator at the International School Bangkok. He said that when he was being interviewed for the position he was asked what he would bring to the school? "6,794 people from around the world" who he could reach out to on behalf of the students at ISB. When Jeff sends out a tweet to ask for help or to share something his students have accomplished, people are listening and responding. It's no longer just what you know, it's who and how many people you bring with you into your classroom.