My Blog of Potential

I attended my first SecondLife presentation last night – Miguel Guhlin was presenting TILT – Technology Integration Lead Teachers – at ISTE Island.  There were about 37 ‘people’ in attendance.  Despite feeling very self-conscious about my clumsiness in navigating the virtual world, I found it fascinating to be able to view his presentation and hear his voice live.  We were able to use the text chat to ask questions and make comments, and he was able to read our questions and respond via live voice chat.   I was a bit frustrated with how slow my computer was to render the images of his presentation as he changed slides – I’m not sure if it’s that Time Warner is kind of laggy in my neighborhood lately, or that I need a more powerful video card than the on-board GeoForce that came with this box.  On the other hand, I saw others chatting about the slow rendering, so maybe the problem was not at my end, at least until SL froze up on me and I had to restart my computer.

The take-aways I got from his presentation, other than a wonderful sense of being able to stay connected with other like-minded educators, were several. 

• First that his district uses LoTI to provide a framework or context within which to have those conversations about how technology is and should be used in the classroom. Our district tech coordinator and I have attended LoTI mentor training, but we really haven’t pursued it much further than that.  Maybe it’s time for me to log back into the LoTI Lounge and reconnect with that framework.
• He commented that as a technology department, SAISD was  trying to move away from conducting repeated trainings over how to use a specific application (Powerpoint for dummies, 101, yet again???) – and instead conduct live trainings and discussions about how to integrate technology into learning.  Now that I think of it, I wish I’d asked him how attendance was at those trainings – we’ve tried to hold them in our district and they get cancelled due to lack of enrollment, yet I agree that is really where our energies need to be directed.  He recommended in the case of the specific applications to create the training guide once, publish it online, and let teachers refer to it as needed.  Hallelujah – I’m all for that!  But I think there is still a place for the facilitated trainings for those learners who are not text/visual based and need more encouragement and hand-holding than a printed training guide can supply. 
• He said that he was realizing as a technology director that we must accomplish change one teacher/classroom at a time – again, Hallelujah.  That really makes me feel much better about how I”m doing, because right now that is exactly what I am doing – identifying those teachers who are interested and ready to kick it up a notch in their use of technology, and try to bring them one step further along – allow success to breed more interest in the other non-techie teachers.
• A quote he lifted from NECC is that ‘The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority’ – I wish I knew who said that.  I think I recognize it from the opening keynote remarks by the ISTE president, but maybe not.  Either way, it’s a great quote, and certainly what must happen to bring more and more teachers and administrators on board with integration of technology.  We who have the most technological skills have the least authority to say how and where they are used – sometimes to our great frustration.  I have to keep reminding myself and my co-ITs – we have no authority to TELL teachers to do anything.  We must cultivate and rely on their good will to influence them to want to do it.
• One of his suggestions was to show teachers how blogs/podcasts/and wikis all help to develop the child’s voice. He mentioned Bloglines.com which is a site that will both host blogs and also allow you to organize and subscribe to a bunch of blogs at one location – possibly another way for teachers to monitor student blogs?  In this area, though, I think I must move slowly so as not to overwhelm teachers – I think if we just start with one small school blog and let it grow, then teachers will begin to branch out and read others in their areas of interest.  Maybe I could feature a ‘blog of the week’ on my own IT Help page and try to lure them in that way, much like EduHound does in their newsletter.
• Another suggestion in response to a question from the audience was that we need to model for our students how to deal with the deluge of information we are exposed to, and to model what is the appropriate use of that information.  I would agree, and also that we need to model appropriate use of our technology gadgets.  Instead of sticking our heads in the sand and trying to stem the tide of cell phones in the hands of middle schoolers – why not teach them appropriate etiquettte – no texting while the teacher is presenting, leave phones on vibrate or off during class time, etc.  Even for our teachers, how do we appropriately use all the information we are sent?  Do we really need to email the whole campus with our jokes of the day or to say that Johnny left his eyeglasses in the lunchroom?  I get so many emails a day from the campus mailing list that have nothing to do with me - I just smile and delete them, but sometimes it is a bit overwhelming and I wonder if something important got lost in the volume of stuff coming down the pipe.
• I asked him how we could deal with the safety issues of children who publish too much (meaning too personal) information.  His answer mentioned the site Lulu.com as a place where children publishe their digital writing. – but that wasn’t really what I was getting at.  That site is for children who have written a book, short story, comic book, or other e-publication and want to have it published for sale as a hard copy product.  What I was asking was more the safety issue of students having blogs that can be read by the whole world, like on MySpace or Xanga.  Middle schoolers don’t seem to see the safety issue of writing all their personal stuff in an online diary,including all the rants and raves, heartbreaks and drama that teenagers go through,  and we really need to start addressing that issue in schools instead of just blocking all the sites and pretending that parents are having discussions with their children about what is and is not safe to post.  We need to be talking about cyberbullying and digital discretion and what kinds of things you might not want to have out there, and about legal consequences and that threats made by email or SMS are admissible in court.  Our children and our teachers need to think about their audience, not just the person they are writing to or about, but also others who may read what they wrote and form opinions of them based on their writing.

But at any rate this was a very interesting way to meet online with other educators and start some discussions of things that we need to be confronting.  I will be eager to see how SL continues to grow as an avenue of professional development.

I am still trying to make sense of the experience of NECC last week.  So many passionate people, so much positive energy.  How do I bring that back to my school district?  I feel as if the digital divide is not so much between the haves and have-nots, as it is between the do’s and do-nots.  We have this enormous gulf between on the one hand, the digital natives and digital immigrants ‘gone native’ , and on the other hand the gatekeepers.  We have within our school system hardware limitations that are very real, and cost a lot to overcome. Limitations on numbers of computers available (we’re nowhere near 1:1), limitations on bandwith (even though we keep increasing it, demand is always about 20% more than what’s available), and limitations of the perception by administrators (network and otherwise) that social networking is too risky to allow our students access.  I know that some students would use it inappropriately – heck, some teachers do and are invited to resign or be fired, but is the misbehavior of a small percentage a good reason to prevent everybody from using the tools?  By that definition, since a small percentage of people use their automobiles recklessly, we all should be back to walking or riding horseback.  (Which may solve the fuel crisis while making grain and oats scarce – to every action there is a consequence).

How do I begin to try to bridge this gap?  I feel as if I’m standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and I want to walk across to the other side, but that first step is one heck of a long way down.

I do see some hope – some of our newer building administrators are putting a premium on having their teachers use technology – they’ve put their money where their mouths are and prioritized their budgets to provided laptops and smart boards to all the teachers at one elementary school.  With that kind of financial support from the building level admins, that puts lots of pressure on the sys admins and technology directors to loosen up and allow the teachers access to the tools they want to use.  Problem is, they  had the luxury of extra funds from a bond election to refurb their olderr building, other campuses do not have that kind of leeway in their annual operating budgets.  So the change is starting little by little- it’s just frustrating to me because I want it NOW and getting things to change in a suburban school district is like trying to turn the Titanic with one small rudder.

From today’s TSTA (Texas State Teachers Association) briefing

IRS Clarifies Deferred Compensation Rules

Some may recall the brief flurry of concern last year when the IRS rules seemed to indicate that educators might owe additional taxes for deferred compensation for receiving their annual pay over twelve months rather than ten months when the pay was given across calendar years.

There is a new ruling effective for the taxable year that includes July 1, 2008.

The new ruling exempts educators from this requirement as long as the educator receives all of the deferred compensation within thirteen months of beginning the service for which they are being paid and the total amount of deferred payment does not exceed an IRS allowable level ($15,500 in 2008).

The specific example provided with the new ruling was for an educator working a ten month school year that began Sept. 1, 2008 and ended on June 30, 2009. The person could continue to be paid through the end of August 2009. To exceed the $15,500 allowable deferred compensation amount that person would have to earn more than $232,500. (emphasis mine)

Somehow, I don’t think anybody I know on a 192 day contract has anything to worry about.

I just learned of this free tool from an article on the blog Remote Access called ‘Ending the Year with Wordle’ The Java-based applet will take a string of text, or any website  with RSS or Atom feed, and generate a word cloud that can be customized to some extent.  Just out of curiosity, I let it make a word cloud from this blog – since most of my entries at this point discuss my experiences at NECC last week, I was curiously encouraged by what it came up with.

But at the same time, I was surprised.  While the words that it emphasized were ones that I am sure I used many times, it also picked up words that I know I only used in one post in the entire blog – still, I think my Language Arts teachers could enjoy using this tool to start some class discussions sometime.

I came back later and tried putting the Declaration of Independence into a wordle to make a cloud – here was the result.  You may want to click on the picture to get a larger version – there are 300 words in there.  You think that could start some discussions in a U.S. History class?

Or better yet, the Preamble to the Constitution

What would NECC have been like without the Internet?  I am not being facetious – I remember when I first started teaching.  It was 1986, the Mac SE20 was a big deal (that’s 20 MB, thank you!), and I was very excited to have an Intel486 with a COLOR MONITOR with its own dot matrix printer in my physics classroom.  Teachers was isolated to what we could do in our classroom or sometimes by combining classes with the teacher across the hall.  Computers were interesting, but more as a nice way to enter and graph your data – if you didn’t know how to write programs, then they didn’t do much more.  Flash forward – now because of the ubiquity of the Internet, we can communicate and collaborate across the building, district, state, country and around the world.  Publishing and sharing of information is the name of the game – so our emphasis as teachers needs to shift from teaching content to teaching how to sift through and evaluate the overwhelming amount of information we get thrown at us every day.  I’m not sure how important it is that biology students learn exactly what Golgi bodies are, but they need to be able to read the website on the latest and greatest diet to come down the line, and know how to locate and evaluate the accuracy of that website.  I don’t how much longer we can continue expanding the breadth of what students are expected to know and do on high stakes testing before we reach a tipping point – right now high school graduates are expected to know almost everything about almost everything, and yet we aren’t really giving them the tools to evaluate the new information that will be thrown at them after they leave high school.  I remember being in a staff development 20 years ago when the presenter said his job as a teacher was to help students turn on their ‘crap detectors’ – and I think those words ring truer now than they were then.