5 Easy Steps

Twitter is a microblog in which you post status messages, links to research, websites or whatever you think is interesting with people in your own personal network. My Personal Learning Network (pln) is made up of edtech and online teachers from around the world.  It has been my greatest source of learning in the last two-plus years.  You can also use twitter to find out whats going on in places.  Take the Iran Election for example.  Average people will post real time messages about what is happening in Iran that you can track if you follow that person on Twitter or simply search #iranelection (all one word and include hashtag).  You can use Twitter to communicate with friends, family, or follow celebrities if that’s your thing.  Its amazing how much information you come across in a day that you will want to share if you know people are listening.

1.  Go to Twitter.com and sign up.  Fill out your profile and make sure you add a clear headline/description and picture.  Click here for an excellent blog post that will highlight the importance of getting off to a good start.

2.  Then go to Find People up on the top bar.  Search mrplough07 and when the results pop up click Follow next to my name.  You will notice I follow about 290 people or so.  Each of them is in the edtech field except for an occasional reporter or website owner.

3.  To begin building a list of people with edtech interests, go through some of the people I follow.  Click on their name and look at their profile page.  I always look to the short bio at the top right which is their personal description.  If they are edtech-change agent-type people, I follow them.

4.  After you click on a few people and follow them, then go to Home and watch your Twitter stream.  Messages that the people you follow will come on the page.  The more you follow the more messages and the faster they will pop up.  Click on links and begin learning.

5.  Let me know if you have any questions.  When you sign up to follow me I will get a notice.  Please send me an email (or direct message in Twitter) with your username so that I can tell my edtech friends to welcome you to the community.

note:  I originally wrote this in a lesson for my grad school class but decided to put up here in case anyone else could use it.

Twitter Avatar, Colored Green to Support People of Iran in their Fight for Democracy, for pics click here

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?

I’ve been writing about once a week for the last year, and while much of it has been about students, online learning, and technology, some of it has been about my charter school.

Working at a charter school is unique, and I haven’t read many blogs from teachers, change agents, or technology leaders who operate in that segment of our public school system.  So, I’ve talked about what its like being an educator at an online charter school.  I have discussed my high expectations, my exultation’s, and some of my frustrations.

Prior to this school year, I had decided to try and be more of a leader at my school.  Whether it was to lead by example, lead vicariously, or just to speak up when I felt something was wrong.  With that in mind, I made some comments in a couple staff meetings this year that I should have phrased differently.  There was a moment where a teacher and I had a discussion in class while students were working that should have been moved to the hallway.  So, I was called in for a meeting with administration.  I was in the wrong and took full responsibility.  I should have conducted myself in a more professional tone, and I have learned from my mistakes.

My blog was brought up in that meeting.

I know that what I say in here can have an effect on my job.  Everybody with a Myspace page should know that.

I feel like I need to change my voice so as not to phrase my blog in the negative tone that affected me at work.  Since part of why many of us write about education is out of hope and frustration, this will take a little getting used to and a possible reconstitution of why I blog.  Until next time…….

In the past couple years, I’ve spent a lot of time networking in order to learn more about teaching with the hopes of using what I’ve learned to help my students achieve more.  I came to the point where I had learned a lot and felt that I should share it with others who didn’t know as much about certain tools, or resources, or research, or methodologies as I did.  That’s fine.  That’s not a bad thing, and I’ve had a lot of fun presenting and working with people online.  However, I’ve lost a little focus along the way.

No longer was I looking to just learn more in order to better teach my students.  I have been trying to tackle too much.  I have high hopes of making online learning a viable option for students and schools across the country.  But, I have failed to do the one thing that really needs to be done ahead of all my other goals, get my students learning as much as they can in my classes. I spend so much time on my classes and really thought that I had been giving it my all, but to be honest, there is still more I can do.

I am refocusing my purpose.  Time that I spend at home on Twitter or in CR 2.0, I can use to call my kids.  Time that I spend preparing for conference presentations, I can spend building better examples for my online students.  Time that I have spent emailing and chatting with people in my networks, I can spend creating audio recordings for my lessons.  There is so much more that I can do to help my kids that I have to refocus all of my energy on that until I figure out what works.

The first couple weeks of school have been very dramatic, a lot has changed, budget cuts and a reemphasizing of fundamentals has overtaken our school.   These changes and challenges have made me really examine my goals for the year.

Instead of several wide ranging goals like I had last year, I’ve narrowed it down to one.  Just one little thing.  Nothing else.

Get all of my kids to pass all of my classes and learn to the best of their ability.  That’s it.

photo from Flick User: Scott Robbin

Last semester my assistant principal, a couple teachers and I piloted a private Ning network with the hope of creating a place for students at our online school to meet, share, and learn.  It went really well so we are expanding it to the entire school.  It will be voluntary, but has the capacity to have over 700 students and 30 teachers.  Those numbers are the extreme, but we had 200 in our pilot so guessing we could at least see half of our students on the Ning this year.

We moved the network to a private domain for this year, added a chat application, and are conducting an orientation session that focuses on the network.  This should help us alleviate some parent and student concerns from last year.  Namely, our students didn’t like that they couldn’t chat easily and conducting the orientation gets everyone involved from Day 1.

I have high hopes that the network can be a source of change and create a community of learners at our school.  Right now we have a culture of failure, in both our students and staff.

I’m betting that if students can form better relationships with peers and teachers then they will be more motivated to do the work.  I’m betting that if they have easier access to assistance through peer tutoring and teacher availability then they will complete more assignments.  I’m betting that if they feel like they are connected to something at a deeper level than just logging into classes and doing multiple choice assignments then they will have more success.  I saw evidence of this when I interviewed kids last year about using Web2 and social networking in our school. Now, we just need to expand those opportunities to all of our students and hopefully failure and dropout rates will begin to change.

Somehow he has the ability, as an abnormally good Anthropology Professor, to take a pop culture tool like Youtube and analyze it for the scientific affects it is having on our world’s culture.  And, and, he makes it entertaining which is the opposite of what my Anthro teacher did when lecturing in college.  He makes me want to be an undergrad again just so I can go to KSU.

If you are too busy right now to watch an hour long video (I understand, had to literally stop working on my final project for a Masters class to fit this in) then go to your Google Calendar, or iCal, or Outlook Calendar and “pencil” in some time.  This video helps explain the power of the social web in a way we have not studied or read about prior!

If you haven’t see Michael Wesch’s other education related videos, click here and here, heck, watch them all.

I first joined Facebook a year-and-a-half ago as a way to try and connect with my students in a place they were already hanging out online.  I created a group for one of my courses and invited my students to join voluntarily.  A handful did and we ran some discussions and small projects from inside the network.  I wasn’t happy with the use for education and moved over to Ning, administrating (with my assistant principal) a much larger private network last school year.

I basically left Facebook alone for the last year, except when an occasional student would send me a message or a friend from the past would say hi.  Slowly more and more friends began to find me. Then about a month ago it seems like my little high school discovered FB, and we now have reunions happening on a daily basis. That’s a problem. I now have high school friends, college friends, employment friends, random FB friends, and former/present students of mine on FB.  Interestingly, the one group of my life not represented is my PLN.

The risk for something inappropriate (old pics, wall comments, etc) getting associated with my name started becoming a concern so I went back to FB to explore my privacy options.

I was contemplating just creating a separate identity for my high school students and redirecting them to that persona, but was happy to find that I could take care of my accessibility concerns through customizable privacy settings.

The first thing I did was go into Privacy and select Profile.  Since I am most concerned about the Wall feature and an old friend leaving an undesirable message in public, I just turned that off completely. If anyone wants to say hi, they can just as easily send a message.

Now in order to customize my privacy settings I had to create lists to separate people, basically: family, high school friends, college, colleagues, and students. To do that, just go to Friends, and on the right hand side you can select ‘make a new list.’ Add each of your friends to the appropriate list.

Once I created lists then I could determine who could see what throughout FB.  Since I didn’t want my students to see any videos or photos with my name, I just went into each of those categories and selected Customize, then excluded certain groups (note that I put family in the same exclusion category as students….haha):

Im pretty sure with these changes I’ve created an environment that allows students to still find me, to private message me, and to chat with me when they want but have eliminated the possibility of my personal life overflowing into my professional one.

This is the only network I belong to that has any students or non-professional friends on it so had to take extra precautions. What have you done on FB, or even Myspace, to ensure professional integrity?

Wordle is one of those sites where you can enter in text and it gets turned into a word cloud.  You can copy your url, a blog post feed, your delicious account or just simply paste some text. I came across it here, and after reading Karen’s post wanted to try out my own blog to see if my ideas were being backed up by my words.   Glad to see they are.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I’m always looking for little quirky Web 2.0 programs that I can introduce to my students so really enjoyed coming across Stripgenerator in one of Larry Ferlazzo’s many posts about about web tools.  I see it as a tool kids can use for making introductions to unit projects or spicing up presentations.

At NECC Week, I had been playing with a Flip Cam that my work bought for students taking my Web 2.0 class next semester.  I needed to learn how to use it in case kids had questions , so brought it along and recorded a few short clips.  I was more interested in playing with the camera rather than making a video, but decided to put together a pretty disjointed compilation of what I was able to record.  It has a few highlights though, some scenes from EBC including, Ewan Macintosh’s request for Pearson Learning to turn off their cameras (he was intimidating so I did too after that).  It also has a bit from David Warlick’s session, from Steve Hargadon’s Social Networking in Education session,  and a few other snippets if you’re interested.

Author’s note: this blog post was not designed to stand alone without explanation.  This is a joke, sort of.  Please read following post to see how it all fits together.

Motivating students who have failed in the traditional classroom setting is a key to success for credit recovery programs. The flexible and self-paced nature of online courses can motivate; these attributes can also remove the social stigma of credit recovery. Online courses may be more engaging to some students than traditional face-to-face classes. In addition, programs that use online courses can address mobility issues of students who move regularly from one school in the district to another.

This is the hardest part of our job.  We need to develop better methods of engaging students. Florida Virtual School states they pass 90% of their at-risk kids in credit recovery courses. Does that mean online schools should just design separate credit recovery courses in addition to mainline and advanced courses? There is no separation at our school and we pass half that amount.

Online learning is particularly well suited for students recovering credit because it allows for individualized instruction, both by the teacher and through the use of course management technology. Online curriculum must be rigorous to ensure that students are learning the material, and not simply moving through the course. Diagnostic testing that allows students to demonstrate mastery of the elements of a subject that they learned in their previous attempt to pass the course, and to move on to the parts of the course that they need to focus on, keeps students engaged.

I’ve long been a proponent of diagnostic testing but none of our courses currently offer this.  The rigor of a course has to be enforced by the administration.  Individualizing instruction (and assessments) is the role of the instructor but if your school employs instructors who are trying to teach traditionally online than this won’t happen at your school.

The self-paced aspect of online courses is particularly valuable to at-risk students, who may associate education with difficulties and stress, compounded by learning deadlines imposed  by arbitrary calendars or school hours.

This is also one of the most difficult aspects.  Often these students do not have basic organizational skills or the ability to evaluate course responsibilities and schedule accordingly.

Providing credit for work or community service allows students to be engaged in a valuable activity outside of school and to have this experience count towards graduation. It also
motivates students to complete the program.

Most online programs serving credit recovery and at-risk students—but not all—have a
significant face-to-face component. The blended approach is important because it provides
expanded student support and face-to-face contact. The online component—whether fully
online or blended—provides 21st century skills to a group of students who often have less
than average exposure to computers and technology.

We have kids come in once a week for four hours of face-to-face contact.  Should we increase this to make it “significant?”

Programs that keep students from dropping out or attract students back into the school
system may pay for themselves—or at least defray costs—by capturing the state public
education dollars tied to those students. Online programs are particularly scalable and able
to expand more easily than programs based entirely on brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Success stories and anecdotes regarding the benefits and value of online learning for both
at-risk students and the schools serving them abound. The need exists for federal funding of
quantitative research in this area.