Facebook is my personal network. I connect not only with colleagues from work, but also my family and my old friends from high school. It’s a great place to connect with long lost friends and family, yet also keep in touch with colleagues I’ve worked with in the past and miss very much. Sometimes I share educational resources and insights on Facebook, but most of the time, my posts tend to be more personal. I love hearing about vacations, anecdotes about family, and news about what’s going on in the lives of people I mostly have had conversations with face face.

Twitter, Google Plus (you can only see my public posts), and my blogroll are where I find and share many great educational resources. Once in awhile, I feel like I have something worthy to share, and I post something. Lately, it certainly hasn’t been enough. I also save resources on Diigo and Delicious, and follow other people who share resources I’m interested in. On Diigo, I belong to many groups that share common interests like iPads, History, Math, and Google Certified Teachers. When I gather common resources into a stack on Delicious, those that follow me can get an email. I, in turn, get an email when they share stacks. It’s a great way to keep in touch with all that changes and is new in edtech and curriculum resources. I keep a feed of all I share on FriendFeed. I know Facebook bought it, but so far, they haven’t taken it away. Someday, I’ll probably have to transfer it elsewhere. You can see may Friendfeed embedded on the right sidebar of my blog. I belong to a few Google Groups like Google Certified Teachers, Chromebooks, Google in Education, and a few others. I check my GCT group as much as possible, and the others when I can. I also belong to many other places where I exchange resources with others, from SlideShare to Instagram . All of these sites are what make up my Personal Learning Network.

My Friendfeed

In our reflection this week, we are to think about when these networks might serve as a distractor. For me, my network is always an intentional distraction. Since most of my network is of an educational nature, I don’t really ever feel it’s a distraction, even if it does feel like play most of the time. I think my network might be very different from the networks my students are involved in, since theirs are mostly social in nature. Even many of my 5th grade students are on Facebook, even though they are not supposed to be until they are 13. Some have tried to friend me, but I don’t allow them into this personal network because it’s not a place I want to share with my students. If they used other tools like Twitter or social bookmarking, I wouldn’t have a problem adding them to my network, but most don’t use these tools. They live in the Facebook/texting world and don’t generally use networks for academic purposes. I want to use Edmodo, a social network for students and teachers, but due to the limited opportunities that students have to use the few computers in my room on a regular basis, this hasn’t been an option this year. I love the way some teachers use Twitter with their classroom, and I might try it sometime, but I haven’t yet. Mr. Verduzco, who is our colleague in the Leading Edge Certification class, uses Twitter often with his high school students. That is awesome!

I think it’s important that students learn to use tools to connect them with others who are interested in learning. Edmodo is a walled garden, but many other tools are available for them to use where they can share publicly, in a respectful and professional manner.
In the Networked Student video, Wendy Drexler represents how her high school students learn by harnessing the power of web based, collaborative tools.

I think that we need to teach students to learn find what they need to know by not only using search engines, but connecting with others using a variety of tools. This can’t be done in a week, but over the course of a semester or a year.

Alec Couros created this diagram of what a networked teacher should look like:
I think it’s important the both teachers and students start developing their Personal Learning Networks, so that they know where to go when they need to learn.

Eventually, I would love to be able to have students produce a site like Mr. Marcos has created with his students at MathTrain.tv . These middle school students have a global audience they teach each week with their instructional videos.

I think I am well suited to teach in an online environment. I enjoy the asynchronous environment, and have no trouble checking in frequently to make sure students are understanding the assignments and are completing them in a timely manner. It’s most rewarding to be able to answer questions and guide learning when students need it. I’ve always enjoyed checking in numerous times during the day to make sure all needs are met. Additionally, good teaching requires being prepared, offering multi-modal learning opportunities to meet the needs of all students. I enjoy creating different learning activities that meet student needs, using a variety of media and text. I also enjoy curating resources on a variety of subjects, so I always have a few resources on hand to offer to learners. There are so many rich resources online, that it is exciting to bring them together to create learning opportunities for students.

However, I probably will need to improve my writing skills, since that is my weakest skill. I tend to procrastinate when I need to write, so that is something I need to work on. However, over time, writing becomes easier the more it’s done. I think the most important thing to remember when writing is that facial and body expressions are non-existent in an online environment, so writing needs to be clear and explicit. It also helps to make sure writing is as concise as possible.

I look forward to teaching in an online/blended environment. I find this type of environment most rewarding, and I don’t anticipate my having any problems with the technical side of managing an online course.

Image Credit: Teachers as Connectors by shareski on FlickrCC
Quote from Will Richardson from this Edutopia Article:

http://www.edutopia.org/collaboration-age-technology-will-richardson

Effective Online Learning
I’m no stranger to the online learning environment. About 8 years ago, I took every class possible that LAUSD offered online through UPDATE Online, because I found that this type of learning environment suited me perfectly. Superficially, I was not only earning 3 salary points for each class to count towards my salary increments, but I could do so from the comfort of my own home, after all my family and work obligations were taken care of.

On a deeper level, I found that the online environment not only stimulated my passion for self directed learning, but offered an intense online community of learners from whom I could learn through group discussions and resource sharing. I was hooked! These courses took much more of my time than traditional face-to-face courses would have taken, but I found them much more rewarding and interactive than any learning I had ever done in a traditional setting.

These are precisely the qualities conducive to being an effective online learner, as highlighted in our readings and online surveys for this week. Students need to know if they have the type of learning style necessary to be successful in online learning. The resources below, curated mostly from the resources for this course, will help me provide students with resources that will help them decide if they have the necessary skills to be effective online learners.

I eventually became an online UPDATE instructor. We took a demanding online course to prepare us for being online instructors, much like the course we are now taking. I was able to facilitate several online courses before the closing of UPDATE Online. These courses I facilitated were amazing in that I often learned as much from my interaction with the students as the students were learning themselves. I truly became a learner along with the other learners in the courses.

Creating a Community of Learners
The reason I share this experience is that I want to make clear that my goal for this course needs to be much more developed than just learning to effectively facilitate a course. I want to be able to learn to be an effective facilitator and designer of quality online learning. I think an effective online facilitator not only needs to know how to stimulate discussions, but needs to understand that the course is not about you, but about developing the learners.

Recently, I read an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, co-founder of PLP (Powerful Learning Practice), a blended learning community of learners who learn through community interaction. In this interview, Sheryl discusses effective methods of developing an online community. What really stuck with me is her description of an effective online community leader (facilitator). This role is very different than being an effective NETWORK leader, because the focus is no longer on the “me”, but the “we”. We need to be able to draw out the passions of the learners, sometimes putting aside our own commentary. I think this must be one of the hardest things to overcome as an online facilitator.

That’s going to be one of my goals in this class; to learn to be a quality facilitator, who can ignite and sustain the passions of the other learners. Often, when I facilitated a course in the past, I brought in a little too much of my own passions. I think there needs to be a balance, where bringing in your own passions is counterbalanced by igniting and culturing the passions of the learners you are facilitating.

I think the key to being an effective online facilitator is creating a community of learners, able to ask really good questions, sparked by curiosity. The online environment nurtures the ability to cultivate an online community of curious learners like never before, due to the firehose of information available to question and develop thinking. Michael Wesch, Professor of Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, encourages educators to bridge the curiosity gap that exists today in student learning. Students need to be knowledge-able instead of just knowledgeable, using the new digital media they have at their fingertips.

Posted via email from Janice Stearns’s Posterous

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Last week, we took our first adventure into screencasting. I used the Explain Everything App for the iPad. I prefer all the possibilities this app has to offer. In this screencast, a student explains how to find prime factors using the Factorization Tree strategy.

I think this is one of the best formative assessments I’ve used so far. Not only does it inform me that I have to be more explicit with my math vocabulary, but it allows the students to meta-cognitively think about their own learning, teach others, and reflect on their sharing. They can compare their explanations to what they watch on Khan Academy (example: Prime Factorization).

Additionally, my students will learn from each other. That’s the best part!

The only thing I regret right now is that I don’t have time to do this in class, and have to wait until after school to do this. Hopefully, we will get to the place where this can happen in the classroom. I can’t wait until next week, when we get to do some more!

http://schinker.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/the-death-of-21st-century-skills