The Next Step

Early voting began in Nevada today. I just finished casting my ballot.  When I walked out to my car, a feeling of peace rushed over my body.  Chills ran down my arms and legs.  I had to sit in my car for a minute and gather myself before I could drive home.  My eyes welled up as I sat in the parking lot gazing outward to nowhere, forward to everything.  For the first time in life, my vote will truly change the world for the better.  Wow, what an amazing time to be alive.

When I finally sat down to write tonight, I was going to talk about how frenetic online teaching has been so far this year. I typed up the first couple paragraphs and then deleted it because the post had no heart.  I feel like a part of who I have become as a blogger is gone and I’m trying to find it.

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…….

I’m getting ready to really promote Video Essays with my students in my online courses. They are easy to make.  Webcams are readily available for most students.  They emphasize creation and analysis and they offer quality accommodations for students with written expression problems.  In my project blog I detailed how kids could use this in my class if you feel like reading, or you could just check out the short video below.

Have you used video essays (vlogs) as a tool in your courses?  How did it go? Do you have any suggestions?

I’ve spent the last couple years making my world bigger, now I’m going to make it smaller.  I’m refocusing, I’m dedicating myself to one purpose.

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

The school year is getting ready to start shortly, and that means time to take our piloted social network to the mainstream school population!

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.