community | Margaret A. Powers

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Preparing for the School Year

Posted on September 8, 2012 | 1 comment

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus for the past two weeks as I prepared for and started a new position and a new school year. I am now a Lower School Technology Coordinator at an independent school, working specifically with PreK-2nd grade teachers and students. Given my experiences focusing on the developmentally appropriate use of technology for these ages, I was excited to begin and start talking with teachers to learn more about which tech tools might be a good fit to integrate into their curriculum and classroom projects.

In addition to talking with teachers, I have been working on setting up a number of different pieces to be ready for the year. These include:

Classroom Setup:

Pre-Classroom Setup

My “home” in the school is a computer lab with 21 PC desktops, nine bulletin boards, a large whiteboard, two flat screen TVs and one document camera. I took some time to plan out how I wanted to set up the various bulletin boards and how I could add some color to the white walls. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to start the year with a board for digital citizenship, one for global collaboration, one for lab rules, and one for a “tool of the month.” The rest of the boards I am reserving for a hands-on, experiential learning project with my first graders, who will help me build a 3D keyboard.

The Digital Citizenship & Global Collaboration Boards

To add more color to the walls, I also created a technology alphabet which I posted around the room (e.g., A for Audacity, B for Browser). Then I checked all of my equipment and tested out the TVs to make sure everything was set up for the first class. Finally, I created the content for my bulletin boards, making sure to add more color and lots of visuals for my younger learners who cannot read yet.

Tech Coordinator Setup:

Another important setup piece was figuring out all of the organizational systems and tools I would need for my position and all of the foundational knowledge I would need to work with the teachers and students. I received my weekly schedule to meet with each grade (my school is working towards a philosophy of tech integration vs. pulling out for tech work) and integrated that with a calendar of other duties and meetings. Then I put all those dates into my Outlook calendar which syncs with iCal where I have RSS calendar subscriptions for school events and then I synced that to my mobile devices. Next, I explored the capabilities in Outlook to create rules since I was used to using Gmail and color-coded filters. Finally, I set up a folder system in my school’s Google Drive and on my computer, so my files would be organized as well.

Once those organizational pieces were set, I moved on to finding ways to learn more about each teachers’ current knowledge and tech learning goals. This was accomplished through a mix of face-to-face meetings and a Google Form I created. Then I built another form for teachers to submit tech questions, resource requests, suggestions/ideas, and learning goals so they had a quick and easy way to communicate with me (and Google kindly organizes them all into a spreadsheet so I can keep track of it all!).

With this foundation, I began to plan specific projects with each grade to fit their goals and needs. It looks like we will be exploring Voicethread, ebooks, edublogs, typing and digital photography as part of different classroom projects to start the year!

Community Setup:

In addition to setting up my physical space and preparing systems and plans for the school year, I realized that I needed to learn more information about the school community. I would like my classroom community to mirror the larger practices of each grade and the school as a whole so that when students do come to the lab (versus me working with them in their classrooms), they feel that there is consistency in the expectations and rules.

My rules for the computer lab

I visited different classrooms to get a sense of what their systems were and I read more about how Responsive Classroom practices (a school-wide initiative) are used in non-homeroom classes. I decided I would adopt at least one Responsive Classroom technique as part of my classroom rules (i.e., having children use a red cup to individually indicate they need help). I also appreciated the practice of having a morning message and hope to do that with children in the lab.

Mental Setup:

Finally, in preparing for the new school year, I discovered that it was important to also think about my “mental setup”. What goals, hopes, and dreams did I want to set for the year? What routines and systems did I want to create to help myself feel prepared and ready to engage in teaching and learning? I took some time to pause and reflect on my specific goals and record them in my professional development plan and I also identified people who could be mentors and allies to help me during my first year. With all of these setup pieces complete, I felt both calm and excited, a bit nervous to start, yet itching to begin and overall, optimistic about the beginning of a new school year and a new job. I’m looking forward to seeing what the year brings and sharing my teaching and learning journey here online.

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Tagged #EarlyEd, #kinderchat, Academic term, Bulletin board, Classroom, classroom setup, community, computer lab, Early childhood education, edublog, education, Educational technology, Educators, global collaboration, Google, independent school, mental, new job, new school year, Professional development, responsive classroom, setup, Teacher, teaching, technology, technology coordinator, voicethread

Let’s Share More and Duplicate Less at #ISTE12

Posted on July 4, 2012 | 4 comments

Recently, I blogged about my first ISTE conference experience. After having some time to reflect, I want to share a few more thoughts and questions that have continued to bounce around in my head.

The theme of all of these ideas is the search for consistency from one’s educational philosophy to practice. I think many educators feel that their teaching philosophy is one that focuses on the student. It is a philosophy that values engagement, creativity, open-ended inquiry and exploration, as well as empowerment and respect. A philosophy that entails fostering collaboration and sharing among students and the creation of projects and meaningful products. Yet, when we step back and examine our practice, often times parts of this philosophy are missing, especially when it comes to practicing these tenets amongst ourselves. When we gather as educators, shouldn’t we practice our philosophy with one another?

Today, we talk about flipping the classroom but when will we flip the conference? While many of the ISTE conference materials were made available online during or after the event, they were rarely distributed prior to sessions in a way that would allow attendees to show up ready to discuss and engage in the material. ISTE was an amazing and rich experience but I believe it could have been even richer if there were less lecture and unidirectional dialogue in sessions and more collaboration, sharing, and discussion. In watching the post-conference Twitter feeds and blog posts, I’m continuing to learn so much content and I almost wish the content could be distributed before/after the conference so that sessions would be freed up for debate, sharing, questioning, and collaborative thinking.

The conference is such a unique opportunity for collaboration, creation, and communication across disciplines and roles, as people travel thousands of miles to gather face to face in one place. It seems like the perfect opportunity for people to sit down and deepen relationships, move beyond tools to think about their purpose and plan for technology use. It could be a chance for groups to make concrete plans and next steps about what we can each do for our own professional growth in using educational technologies and how we can share what we’ve learned to make a difference in our districts, our schools, and our classrooms.

We ask our students not to be consumers of media and technology tools but to be producers and creators of innovative works and collaborative products. What are the products that we each created at #ISTE12 that we can use to contribute to our local communities and the larger global education community?

One product could easily involve the many tools, resources, and ideas that were being shared across sessions, disciplines, and devices. I would love to see more unified collaboration and sharing, especially when we have so many tools at our disposal (e.g., Twitter, Google Docs, Evernote notebooks, Symbaloo mixes) to help each of us to share notes and links in real-time during the conference and asynchronously after it ends, so we can take advantage of being part of such a thoughtful community. I’m also guilty of curating my own tools, resources, and ideas from the conference and I understand that we each might be gathering specific resources for specific goals but I wonder if it’s still possible to share more and duplicate our work less. I was so excited to see this new compilation of posts with ISTE 2012 reflections and this Google Doc full of collaborative notes. I know many Google Docs and other backchannels were shared out during the conference and I hope we can gather them all in one place.

In addition to curating these resources for ourselves, I think it is just as important to document our learnings from the ISTE conference for others who could not attend or had not heard of the conference. While at ISTE, in a session where I ended up knowing most of the content, someone asked me why I was tweeting. I replied that I wasn’t tweeting for myself, I was tweeting for my PLN.

As an educator inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach, I believe deeply in the power of documentation to prompt reflection, demonstrate learning, and capture inquiry. I also believe that we need to model and practice what we are looking for in our classrooms and from our students. So I work to create products to document my own learning (e.g., blog posts, tweets, pinboards) so I can share it with others and engage them in a discussion about how, when, why, and if various tools and approaches I have learned about would fit in various educational settings. I worked hard to tweet throughout the conference but I was disappointed at the seemingly small number of people I saw tweeting through sessions and sharing out their ideas, tools, and questions.

I know (but at times struggle to remember) that social media, while an amazing tool for professional development and networking, is still new to many. I want to help use tools like Twitter to demonstrate to others how one person, attending one conference, can affect so many when knowledge is captured and shared globally online.

Curious George, my curiosity mentor!

I know one blogger (@engaginged) was recently discussing the challenge of breaking into the key networking areas at ISTE and as a newbie myself, I found this to be true. I appreciated his challenge to try and find a way to connect everyone at the conference into the same conversation and maybe, if more of us begin to tweet, blog, and share openly during the conference, there will be more space for inclusion and collaboration. And maybe to give things a little push, ISTE could even consider partnering new attendees with mentors who have experience in using tools to share during the conference, visiting the various networking lounges, and migrating new relationships to online spaces so they can continue after the conference. What do you think, would you want an ISTE mentor?