Back Story

At the beginning of school last year, I decided to call all of my students to welcome them to my courses.  I had about 150 students.  It took me 3 weeks to call them.  I was making calls at night and on weekends, averaging about 5-10 per night.

Usually I don’t need to call every student, just the ones who have fallen behind.  But in a school, a district, and a state that has difficulty graduating kids, we have a lot who are behind.  Enter Phonevite.

Here Comes the Great Tool Part

I can now call 150 students in 5 minutes.  Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit.  First off, I don’t have 150 students this year, I have under 100 (wish I would of known about Phonevite last year).  Secondly, it takes a little more than five minutes.

You have to set up your phone book.  I currently have 55 contacts which took me about 30 minutes to input over a couple sittings.  This is the longest part of the process.

Then you have to record your message.  I try to keep my messages around a minute.  My last one said something like ” Hi, this is Mr. Plough calling.  Your child currently has under 55% in my course.  Please give me a call back so that we can come up with a strategy to help them succeed.”  Of course, that’s the abbreviated version, and you can add as much or as little as you need in order to get the parent’s attention.

One of the negatives is that you can’t answer all the calls that blow up your phone right after your call goes out.  And, many of the parents calling me back wouldn’t leave a voicemail.  I could see they called on my ‘missed call’ list, but I feel a little awkward about returning a call when someone didn’t leave a message so I have to take those for a loss.

The best part is that parent’s get your messages, most of them listen to the entire message (you can check on Phonevite), and student’s start doing work. Immediately.  The teacher is connecting, albeit with an automated message, to the parents and then the parents are sitting down with their kids, or giving them that extra push they might have needed, and the assigments start rolling in.

Even though I’m excited about this tool, it is not the end all for contacting students.  I still have to meet them in their classes, call the parents personally and have long discussions, and send dozens of emails everyday.  But, this tool makes communication easier than it ever has been in my five years of teaching online.

It’s one week before the first quarter ends, and I have my highest passing rate ever at this point in the year.  Coincidence?

Yesterday, late afternoon, I was working (watching a video) at my desk (dining room table) with half an eye on Twitter.  A tweet came up from Kelly Dumont who, in the relativity of a global social network actually lives fairly close to me.

Instantly my ears perked up and my eyes widened.  I started thinking, wow, thats the closest any of my Twitter friends have been to my little neck of the woods (St. George is a beautiful little town in Southern Utah which is only about 2 hours from me).  So I tweeted back:

My comment obviously wasn’t one of my intellectually shining moments because Kelly said right back:

When I made the previous comment, I hadn’t been thinking about meeting Kelly at NECC, only about seeing a Twitter friend near Vegas, and I never saw Kelly when he visited my campus last school year (but had heard the story so still should of known better .  So, I responded in my normal sarcastic way that also acknowledges I had obviously said something foolish:

From there the joking took a turn, and this is where a Twitter conversation turned into a life experience that I will appreciate for a long time:

I checked out the site he linked me to and saw he was presenting about using social networking tools in school at a conference that caters to student and faculty tech leaders in K-12 schools throughout Utah.  I quickly thought about what the next day held, and since I was working on projects that could be put off an extra day I said:

From that point, we figured out the logistics through a series of more tweets and in a little more than 12 hours from the beginning of the conversation I left Las Vegas for St. George.  I arrived about 20 minutes before the presentation began, said hi, quickly outlined what we were going to be talking about, and ended up co-presenting at a 3 hour workshop this morning with Mr. Dumont.

I had no idea Kelly was going to be in St.George before he posted that first tweet so to be able to go from joking around on Twitter to presenting at a conference in less than 16 hours was quite an experience.  Kelly and I don’t have each others phone numbers, we have never emailed, we have never Skyped, but we were able to seed and grow an idea in a matter of minutes that brought us together at a place to teach.  A power of Twitter.

For the past year-and-a-half I’ve been meeting, collaborating, sharing and learning with people in a variety of online personal learning networks (PLN).  I turn to them when I need some help.  I turn to them when I have research to share.  I turn to them when I need advice or a recommendation.  I turn to them when I want to discuss personal achievements.

I’ve learned a lot about a few people, and a little about a lot of people over that time.  Even if I have never had a discussion outside of following someone’s updates on Twitter, there is an interesting connection.  It’s hard to understand but many people that I talked to this week described similar feelings about their “friends.”

I had never knowingly met anyone from my online networks before EBC this weekend.  But what’s really interesting is that didn’t matter.  In fact, it even enhanced the conferences.

When we met face-to-face for the first time it was like we had known each other for years, even if we had just met on the NECC Ning the week before.  All those walls that people throw up when they are in a social situation in which they don’t know anybody were completely torn down.  Conversations were instant, passionate, and left off right from our online discussions or posts or thread or comments.

Everyday my belief in PLN’s is reinforced and this weekend/week proved the most powerful of all reasons for having online social networks.  Even if I never meet the people I learn from, and that learn from me, we still have something important online.  However, there is just something really special about the experience of meeting those nodes from my network that strictly online connections can’t ever quite equal.

flickr user: Kasia/flickr

I’m sitting here at Blog World Expo with about 300-400 people listening to Ed Sussman interview Matt Mullenweg the founder of Wordpress as the opening keynote session.
It’s pretty cool how the world has changed and geeks are really cool now. At least in my world, but in a lot of other people’s also.

PhotoMatt is Mullenweg’s blog.

Q: What makes a compelling blog?

A: Passionate content. Uniqueness.

What Matt loves about blogging is when he says something dumb someone tells him. People don’t tell you face to face, but he loves the comments section of his blog because people are frank and it gives him perspective.

If people make an interesting comment on his blog, he will often go back to that person’s blog. If you comment, it helps your work get noticed. This is news for me because I only comment on one blog. If I really want to get my ideas out there than I need to comment and get better with my labels.

Talking about why he likes the Craigslist model. He asked Craig why there was no advertising on his site and Craig responded “Because the users didn’t ask for it.” That’s a really interesting comment. If you can run something with user influence as the main source of reasoning, that’s fantastic.