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.

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.