What goes well with Salty Chips?

A teacher cannot live on 'salty chips' alone. Once the availability of technological tools can be guaranteed, teachers need to be engaged in ongoing professional development. Such PD needs to be ubiquitous, ongoing, and customized.

I've often wondered how we can succeed in harnessing the latest attendance software; or in implementing new report card software, yet we fail to make meaningful use of most available e-learning tools. There are ways to ensure that professional learning is appetizing.

Entrust teachers to bring forth their own agendas. Teach teachers the skills that they are interested in learning.

Provide training throughout the school day/week/month/year. Waiting for system-wide PD days is not enough.

Ensure common 'planning time' among teaching colleagues. This will allow educators to engage in meaningful, ongoing dialogue about how to engage learners with evolving technologies.

Provide planning time in large blocks rather than in small chunks. We need to get creative with scheduling. Small chunks of time are good for little more than grabbing a snack; making a phone call; checking the news of the day; running a few copies; marking a few papers...

Encourage teachers to mentor one another. There are niche experts everywhere. For example: If one teacher knows how to get digital images from a camera - to a computer - to a student's media project, then there is no reason why that expertise can't be shared.

Recognize teachers for using present day tools. Share 'good news' technology stories in your school or board-wide newsletters.

Make optional training ultra-convenient. Provide sessions close to where the teachers work... in their classrooms; or at the nearest resource centre/computer lab. Offer 'at the elbow' support before school; at noon hour; and after school.

Be open to having students attend. Consider allowing teachers to be accompanied by student-assistants. If a teacher has a classroom ally that can help in setting up or using the tools, they are far more likely to be used.

Offer incentives to participants! Salty chips in the form of classroom technology is highly motivating, but don't underestimate the value of fresh fruit, cold drinks, and cookies in creating a welcome learning environment.


Photo Credit: Michael Young

It's Time to Differentiate Support for Educators

Why don't we embrace the philosophy of differentiation in providing Internet and communications technology support to educators?

At the turn of the century (9 years ago!), I spent a lot of time learning about differentiation, specifically in attempts to develop suitable programming for the gifted students in my board. The past few years, the language of differentiation has made its way into all schools in our district. Even the ministry of education is on this tack both in professional development initiatives and in recently released policy and program documents. Maybe it's time we consider differentiating the support we provide to teachers...

Many teachers in North America are turned off of using the Internet, precisely because they find the web filters engaged by their boards to be too stringent. I know that in my board, this blog continues to be unavailable to the very educators I'd love to engage in dialogue. A differentiated approach to the filtering of the World Wide Web, where authentication of a user would grant varying permissions, is I think a logical step. Wesley Fryer sees injustice in the fact that teachers and kindergartners often have to play with the same filter rules:

"If school districts insist on blocking access to sites like YouTube, PBwiki, Wikispaces and Blogger, in my view they should NOT block that access for teachers."

With increasing numbers of forward thinking educators attempting to leverage read/write tools of the Web, school administrators face challenging times. As Will Richardson writes:

"We’re in the “Networking as a Second Language” point in teaching, this messy transition phase that is slowly gaining traction where we are beginning to understand what this means but not quite sure yet what to do about it."

A differentiated approach to teacher professional development may be part of the solution. According to a March 2007 article on Canada.com, the Lester B. Pearson School Board in Montreal allocated significant funding to train teachers in making effective use of modern teaching tools:

"Ped-tech leaders were identified at each school - teachers who were willing to work with technology - and they are being used as the basis for the project. These 180 teachers have each been given laptop computers, a projector and a smart board to really crank up their efficiency. In turn, they will be expected to bring other teachers into the fold and help them become more familiar with and more comfortable with using technology in the classroom."

Teachers have diverse needs when it comes supporting the use of technology in the classroom. My fingers are crossed that some day soon, district school boards will realize that "Differentiation is an effective way to meet the needs of all types of learners... including teachers."

Teacher 2.0 Podcast: "Differentiation: for Teachers" now online.

Sticky Wikis & PLCs

When it comes to professional development for teachers, more presentations need to model the value of read/write web technologies including the importance of informal professional learning networks. Even if we don't have time to develop and deliver workshops on how to use blogs, wikis, podcasts, or steaming video, we can raise the profile of these tools by leveraging them in our presentations.

Even if board presenters elect to use traditional 'sage on the stage' models for sharing knowledge in training sessions, school districts can engage teachers in the conversation. Using the read/write tools at our disposal, leaders can provide pre and post-workshop information; can receive feedback from attendees; and can engage educators in ongoing dialogue about the big ideas shared in a given workshop.

My personal view is that every workshop should be supported by the use of a wiki. At the very least, the wiki can provide direct access to hyperlinks, handouts, and presentation materials. At best, the wiki will be open to contributions from visitors. and will include threaded discussions that extend the conversation. I contend that such workshop sites will be sticky, leading to collective sharing and community thinking on a wide range of topics. Informal networks of teachers may well spring from the regular use of wikis, and might further develop into lasting professional learning communities.

The spin-off benefit, beyond the support for current training initiatives, might include teachers who will begin to think about how they can leverage similar tools in their own classrooms. Knowing that it is so easy to contribute to a wiki, a teacher might write her first web page by using a wiki connect with parents, students and fellow teachers. Indeed, when curriculum leaders teach teachers through the use of read/write tools like these, they teach more than they realize!

Unsure about how wikis work? Visit the Teacher 2.0 Sticky Wiki episode , or check out the video below. In the interest of full disclosure: I like WetPaint for my wikis and I think Common Craft does a great job explaining things.

You Call 'This' a Normal Day?!

I was just reflecting back on the different applications I've used today... pretty much a normal day, and I'm coming to the realization that there are many tools that are a normal part of my workflow.  Consider the following rough timeline:

Midnight: Access my Del.icio.us bookmarks to find the name of the 'wakeup call' website I'd recently bookmarked.

12:02 a.m.: Set up a 7 a.m. wakeup call at http://www.wakerupper.com/

7:00 a.m.: Awake to the sound of my cell phone ringing... Upon answer, a mechanized voice reads back to me the message I'd posted 7 hours earlier.

7:10 a.m.: Load Camino web browser and with one click, open my 'Daily' bookmarks folder to read the news of the day. 

7:20 a.m.: Quick check on Twitter to see who was up to what last evening...

8:00 a.m.: Early arrival at the workshop site provides me with time to a few recent skating photos from iPhoto to my Keynote presentation

8:10 a.m.: My district e-learning contact is not yet on site, so I decided to select a topic from my Xpad notebook and to record a quick little Podcast using Garageband

8:18 a.m.: Convert podcast to MP3 format in iTunes.

8:20 a.m.: Upload podcast to Libsyn and ping the iTunes server.

9:00 a.m.: Share Keynote presentation with workshop attendees (various 'photos of ice-skating', zamboni, shovel man... as a metaphor for e-learning).

9:15 a.m.: Open multiple tabs in Camino to highlight e-Learning tools in Ontario.  Work with participants on course customization in their browser of choice: MS Explorer (yuck!)

10:30 a.m.: Highlight for participants how Flickr and Audacity can be used to create more memorable communications in the online course environment.

11:00 a.m.: Tweak 'how to' documents in ScreenSteps and send PDF versions to participants via First Class

11:45 a.m.: Check on my work mail for urgent messages via First Class

1:00 p.m.: Assist district ICT consultant in mini-workshop to tame Google Documents, and Wet Paint wikis as places to host online course materials.  My take is that these tools can be leveraged by students for electronic portfolios.

1:30 p.m.: Assist district e-learning contact in enrolling students in courses by using an Excel spreadsheet (csv format)

1:45 p.m.: Phone Desire2Learn to investigate internal email issues in the learning management system.

2:00 p.m.: Partner with district ICT consultant to highlight how Google Analytics tracks web traffic (my RPT site has hits from 162 countries to date!)

2:30 p.m.: Review evening ice skating in Komoka movie created in iMovie and uploaded to blip.tv to complete the metaphor: "If you build it, they will come."

2:45 p.m.: Time to drive home... Catching up on my favourite CBC podcasts on the 2 hour drive

7:00 p.m.: Visit the recording of an Adobe Connect e-learning session on 'course customization' that I missed while driving home

7:20 p.m.: Open Flock to check on my 'network' of education bloggers, twitterers,  and social learning networkers

7:40 p.m.: upload new links to my my Del.icio.us bookmarks

7:45 p.m.: type this blog entry in Flock

8:20 p.m.: upload blog entry to Blogger


There is nothing exceptional about this day... in most ways it is a mirror of my 'normal' working day. My exposure to multiple applications the past ten years or so make this seem all so natural and seemless.  I'm sure that this is far from a 'normal' day for a teacher, but with the way my day flows, I rarely reflect on the apps I'm using.  Then again, maybe I'm just a 'geek'?

Does anyone else think about their daily workflow in terms like these?

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