Bud the Teacher

I’ll be talking about CyberCamp on Teachers Teaching Teachers tonight at 7pm Mountain Time as a piece of a show about summer professional development.  I’ve invited all the CyberCampers, too, so I hope to include them in the conversation.  I hope you can join us, too.

Beginning today, I’m going to be co-facilitating my school district’s CyberCamp, a two-week summer institute focused on teachers building projects that help them to integrate technology into their classrooms.  You won’t see me much here, but I do hope you’ll join us over at CyberCamp’s digital HQ as we do some intense learning and thinking and questioning together.

In fact, I’m counting on it.

One of my hopes for CyberCamp is that we are able to model how transparent and connected learning doesn’t have to be limited to a specific time, place and location, that teachers in my district can learn from you, and that you can learn from them.  We’re all in this together, and that’s a good thing.

We’re putting so much of CyberCamp online in part to honor the wisdom and knowledge of our teachers, but also because we want to model the power of learning networks as professional learning communities.  But that only works if people stop by and join with us in learning and sharing and thinking and questioning and . . . well, you get the point. If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, then you know that I think we’re all better when students and teachers all share and learn and take turns leading.  Teaching and learning can be so isolating - but it doesn’t have to be that way.  CyberCamp, I hope, is an attempt to demonstrate that.

So, I’m writing this post to formally invite you, whoever you are, to come and join in the fun.  And the hard work.  I’ve nothing to offer you except a great deal of learning.  But if you do come and leave a comment or two when you can, our CyberCamp will be all the better for it.  I thank you in advance, and hope to see you at CyberCamp.

Oh, and by the way - we don’t own this model of learning.  There are plenty of folks trying this type of work - and I am grateful to them for sharing what they do as they do it.  That said, I wanted to explicitly remind you that, if you like what you see here, feel free to take it and adapt it to your communities, to your needs.  I pledge to you that I’ll happily come to your CyberCamp.  In fact, I look forward to it.

Tomorrow night, the folks at Teacher Teaching Teachers will be having a conversation with the authors or the book I mentioned in my last podcast.  How timely.  Here’s the info:

Many of us are planning to use Reinventing Project-Based Learning in our Writing Project Summer Institutes and elsewhere in our work with teachers.  The researchers, teachers, and authors, Susie Boss and Jane Krauss will be joining us on Teachers Teaching Teachers tomorrow.

Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

Suzie Boss
Suzie is a veteran journalist who writes about teaching and learning in the 21st century. She and Jane have authored a book on using technology to empower teaching and learning called Reinventing Project-Based Learning. From interviewing and observing hundreds of teachers in both formal and informal contexts, she has seen how innovative approaches to education can engage learners and transform communities. The book is a unique educational resource that integrates interviews with leading experts, storytelling, and suggestions for putting research into practice. She has been an editor for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a freelance writer contributing to wide range of publications, and a community college instructor.

Jane Krauss
Jane is a long-time educator, curriculum writer, and expert in professional development. An innovative teacher and early adopter of instructional technologies, Jane and her elementary classroom were showcased in a video case study that thousands of teachers have used to learn about authentic, project-based learning. As former director of professional development for the International Society for Technology in Education and a consultant for Intel’s education initiative, she has helped educators around the world improve their practice. She recently co-authored a book with Suzie Boss on the effective use of technology in education, entitled Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

I suspect it’ll be a good conversation.  You might want to join in live.

Today’s podcast is a short description of CyberCamp, a summer technology and learning institute we’ll be doing this summer in my school district. I’d love any feedback you have on our event, as well as links and info about similar events. In addition to the book that I mention in the podcast, Suzie Boss & Jane Krauss have a solid blog about the book and their work.

I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year.  This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence.  We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.

The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online.  One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work.  My personal web presence should be like that, too.  But I’m not sure that it is.  I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people.  There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year.  (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important?  Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole?  Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?

I think, too, about what “web presence” means.  Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing.  Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.

These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate.  This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment.  I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back.  My work this weekend will continue to influence that work.  Lots to learn.  Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with.  We should all be so lucky.

    My friend and colleague Jason is beginning some new blogging work with his students.  You might be interested, particularly if you teach IB Theory of Knowledge.  (One great thing about the IB Diploma pPogramme is that all students must take an epistemology course.  I wish that everyone took a class about how we know what we know. Here’s more info on IB’s course.)  Here’s a bit of info:

I’m having the students each host the blog for a week in an attempt to
get them to record for me how people are responding on the blog. All of
my expectations, including my "Blog Log", are found here.

Now that my students are thinking, writing, and recording for me… it all begins.  Now we’ll just see where it takes me.

In other classroom blogging news…
In
2 weeks or so, a new TOK blog will be set up for an international
audience. Schools from Colorado, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, the UK,
and Equador will be talking to each other. I’m still in the process of
formalizing how that will look but I’ll post more info. when I know.

As a plus and an aside, here’s a teaching resource for one IB TOK teacher’s courses, an online community for IB students and graduates, as well as a weblog ring of IB students.  Interesting stuff.

    I’m at the airport in Hartford waiting for my ride to Denver (NOTE: I began this post there.  Finished it @ home. - BH).  I’m sucking down podcast updates on the free wi-fi here at the airport so this seems like the right time to try to capture some of my thinking about the web presence retreat before time gets in the way of the learning that happened this weekend.

    This post is probably more useful for those of you who are affiliated with the National Writing Project in some way, as I’m going to slip into NWP-speak a bit.  Ask in the comments if something doesn’t make sense.  One note as I begin.  When we (those folks who are writing project people) usually talk about those entities that are affiliate local writing project organizations, we call them local sites.  So, for example, I work for and with the Colorado State University Writing Project.  I usually call CSUWP my "local site."  When you start to talk about websites, then it gets tricky.  "Let’s take a moment to think about our site’s site."  Get the point of potential confusion?  So we on the planning team for this event began to distinguish between a web presence and a local site.  So throughout this post, I’m going to refer to a local site’s web presence, meaning the web stuff associated with a particular local site.  The larger point here is that with any group or network, there’s a shared language that can sometimes be both an aid and an obstacle to understanding.

    I want to remember that and try to use language precisely, as jargon can make things helpful — or can completely destroy meaning for folks.  But anyway — on with my reflection.

    Saturday was a very long day, as we began to walk the retreat participants through a process of examining their respective local sites, thinking about what they do, why they do what they do, how they work, and who they’re made up of.  We intentionally spent the first half of Saturday away from our websites, asking folks to think about who and what is important in their local WP sites.  As a way to model everyone’s thinking, we asked the local site teams (each local site that participated had a team of two people there at the retreat) to build a visual representation of their local site.  (Yes, there was yarn involved.  I’m beginning to wonder if I should own some stock in a yarn production company.)  The end product of all that examination was to develop an inquiry question that would help to guide the rest of the time we spent together. 
    I was really struck by the depth and the range of the questions that folks were and are asking.  Some sites wanted to know how to turn their great resources of people and programming into useful online tools and resources.  Others were interested in using their web presences to develop communities that would support the work that their members were doing as well as to help them keep in touch.       

Once we had a handle on individual sites and the work that they do, we moved off to a computer lab to explore various research interests arising from the inquiry questions that we created for ourselves.  From there, we asked each site team to think explicitly about how they would go back to their local sites and further the conversations that we were only able to begin.  I do hope that folks returned home feeling confident that their time was well used.  I got the sense that most people did.

    There are plenty more details that I’ll be thinking further about and digging out of my notebooks and notes over the next few weeks.   But for now, I want to share a really great metaphor for thinking about web presence that Symmetris and Amanda from the AAMU Writing Project came up with during the visual representation section of the day.

    They thought about their work as a house with two stories.  The first story is where everyone is invited over to share and to take part.  When you have a party, you don’t have it upstairs — you invite your friends, neighbors, business acquaintances over to your house and have the party in the living room or the dining room.  Some folks get to go upstairs in the house, but not everyone. 

    The first floor of that house can represent the very public work of a WP site - sharing writing resources, working with schools and teachers and principals and everyone that wants to come over and dig in.  The second floor of the house is for the work that WP sites do that is not necessarily for everyone.  Invitation only workshops, institutes, programming, etc. 

    Thinking about the web presence of a WP site, or of any project, as the windows in that house is very helpful, I think.  The windows on the first floor are usually more open.  Perhaps the blinds are raised so that lots of light can get in and people can see in or out.  The windows on the second floor are more thoughtfully open.  Not every window is open, some are obscured by blinds, but they’re still there.  We share lots of information about the first floor stuff and less about the second floor. 

    But we still have windows upstairs.  That’s important, and I’m glad that Symmetris and Amanda were able to help me think about that.

    I’m not articulating that metaphor as well as I would like to, but I will be returning to it in my thinking over the next few weeks.  I hope that others will share their experiences and learning from the retreat, too.  We’ll be sharing some of that work via listserv, as it was a second floor or upstairs experience, but I do hope some of it makes its way to the various web presences of those folks who were there.  I learned a great deal, and I hope to continue to.  More information and resources are available at the wiki if you’re interested.

    On a side note, it was a special treat for me to get to meet some of the folks in my blogging network.   Kevin, Gail and Bonnie have all taught me a great deal, and it was a pleasure to chat face to face.  (I promise my ABC movies will be in on time, y’all.  Well.  At least close.)   Susan is becoming a blogging comrade, too.   Now if I could only get the rest of the folks that were there to start a blog, or to tell me where I might find theirs  .   .   .   .

    Been quiet lately.  It’s one of those weeks that’s about introspection. 
    I’ve been writing a little, though, and I thought I’d point you to the post I just put up at the CSUWP Advanced Institute Mother Blog. Take a peek. 
    If you’d like, you can join us in our Book Club which begins in about a week and will run up until the start of the AI.  The book, Working toward Equity, is available as a free download.  It’s a book of and about teacher research.  Feel free to join in on the discussion.  Check out this post for details and a reading schedule.

Cindy, director of the CSUWP (check out the new website — lots of great interactive stuff!), wrote up her experience at the first session of our Advanced Institute on technology and inquiry. 

    I’m part of a team that’s putting together a really neat opportunity for some NWP sites to gather and think strategically about their online presences and how they can support their site work, and vice versa.  I’ve got plenty of thoughts about tools to use and examples and whatnot, but I’m trying to think right now about particular resources that we might make available both at our retreat as well as to others who want to think strategically about their online work. 
    When I say strategically, what I mean is that instead of thinking about what we can do, we want to encourage folks to think about what they should do, who should be involved, and how that can impact their sites, their work, and their different stakeholders.  Basically, we want to encourage strategic and critical thinking about online work. 
    Just because we can build something doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, right? 
    It’s a tricky question for me.  I stand very proudly(sometimes) in the "look how cool this is!" camp — even though I know that good teaching and good tech implementation is about more than just the wow factor.
    There needs to be a good reason that we do what we do.   Neat, as I’ve said before and will say again, is not a pedagogically-sound reason to do something.
Anyway, before I wander too far into reflective land, what tools or resources might you be using to think critically about the online presence for your school, group, or organization?  How do you make these types of decisions?  Whom do you involve?