My State of Flux

Playing Around with a New Plug-in

Duarte’s Six Tips for Remote Presenting

Duarte’s Six Tips for Remote Presenting.

Some excellent tips on presenting a remote presentation.

Swamped!

photo credit: Muoo Muoo

So you may have noticed the lack of new posts lately. Well, it was a Mad March followed by an Anxious April (I may have spent a little too much time trying to figure out that second alliteration).

The past two months have found me accepting a new job, attending and presenting at MACUL, preparing a proposal for another conference, a variety of collaborations and of course my online classes.  My list of unread tech ed feeds is sitting a little North of 600.  I resolve to start working my way through those and start contributing again to the cloud!

Yet another amazing teacher using technology to reach her students

Grand Ledge teacher honored for technology use | lansingstatejournal.com | Lansing State Journal

Exactly what it says…

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

Steve Dembo: Learning to Speak Digital Native

Posted by mobile phone:
Sitting in a great session on Learning to Speak Digital Native. Great stuff, follow @teach42 he is a rock star!

Reflections

photo credit: MumbleyJoe

So I’ve been preparing for both an upcoming day of in-service workshops with the teachers in my daughter’s district and also my presentation for the MACUL conference.

The in-service is going to be two sessions, about three hours each, dealing with personal learning networks (PLN) and the usual web 2.0 stuff.  I am very excited because I have been asking them about doing this for a couple of years now and I am finally getting the opportunity.  I have planned a pretty open session as they are bringing their laptops and I plan on letting them play and hopefully ask a lot of questions!

As I have been planning these presentations I am continually amazed at the amount of information, tips, tricks, ideas, etc., that have come pouring from my own PLN.  My Twitter, delicious, and Google Reader accounts have been invaluable resources in putting these presentations together.

The wikis that I have developed to support these presentations are chock full of links to places that I have come across thanks to my PLN.  I was finally able to sift through and put to work all of those RSS feeds that I put a gold star next to.  I was finally able to leverage my delicious links that I started collecting two years ago in anticipation of my impending district presentations.

Take a look at my PLN and my delicious links and hopefully you will be able to glean the same kinds of wonderful information, insight, and knowledge that has made my presentations all the better.

P.S.  I will present links to my wikis after I have finished the final touches and presentations.

It’s all about the Social (and I don’t mean studies)

photo credit: scimanal

So Jeff Utecht, over at The Thinking Stick, talks a little bit about virtual learning and the social aspect of school.

Some of the commenter’s also talk about both the strengths and weaknesses of this environment in which I and others teach.

Jeff makes a point about school being a place for kids to meet socially first and a place that they have to go to second. If they can socialize online, which they do, and learn online, ditto, then why do we have these traditional setups in place?

Well, I do agree with what one commenter referred to as the “babysitting” aspect of the current system.  Schools, for the most part, provide parents with a safe place to house their kids while they are out working.  While this may not be much of a concern if the economy continues to tank and more people are left jobless, it is still a concern for a majority of people.  So even if we started to do more virtual learning it would most likely still have to happen in a traditional school setting.  I like the idea of a hybrid situation where the kids are learning from both face to face interactions and also in the virtual world.  We also have to recognize that while a lot of kids have access to computers at home and/or the local library, a lot do not.  Not that schools are necessarily equipped any better, but that is a story for another day.

Another commenter spoke about how it has worked with his(?) kids.  He spoke to the flexibility of having his kids work part-time and take online courses.  Shifting between bricks and mortar and the online environment.  I have had Olympic hopefuls, kids on medical leave, travel hockey players, kids suspended for weapons violations, the online environment worked well for them.  It allowed the kind of flexibility that you just didn’t have back in the “good old days” of education (don’t ask me when these days actually occurred, it may have been June of 1989 for me).

I can speak from experience that online learning is wonderful for a lot of children and I can also say that it is not the answer to all that ails us in public education.  It is an important piece and I think that it is only going to continue to grow and hopefully become a more integral part of our children’s educational offerings.

Is this the beginning of the end?

photo credit: forezt

As I have been preparing for my upcoming presentation and in-service training I have been thinking about how the education landscape has been changing since I was last in a face to face classroom almost eight years ago.

While not much has changed inside a lot of classrooms, I would like to think that my classroom would look much different now than it did then.  I think about how my virtual classroom has changed over the years and I would like to think that my face to face classroom would have also changed.

I would to to think all of these things, truth is, I have no idea.  Maybe my district would not allow me the access that I wanted.  Maybe I would get frustrated with the firewalls and blocked access.  The testing, NCLB, the parents, etc.  I have no idea what it would be like for me now if I was in the classroom on a daily basis and I may never know.  So where am I going with all this?

My feeds and network have been hitting me over the head (in a good way) with all kinds of information that points to the slow death of the current education system.  I say slow and I think I would really like it to be faster.  I have included a couple of links at the end of this diatribe to give you an idea of what I am talking about.

In a nutshell, we have to make some changes if we want to see some changes.  We can not expect continued success if we do not start changing the way we do things around here.  We will not be needed for very much longer if we do not start proving our worth and increasing the value of our product.  Take a look at the stories that I have included if you do not believe me.

The beginning of the end cont… from   Jeff Utecht

A taste of honey from    Scott McLeod

A very cool story from    David Warlick

Is it Live or is it Memerox?

photo credit: Neil101

Came across this little tidbit the other day, apparently a couple of researchers completed a study in which they studied taped lectures vs. live lectures.

In iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?, the researchers take a look at student test results depending on whether the student attended a specific classroom lecture or listened to the lecture as a podcast.

To summarize their study, they tested students that attended the lecture and those that listened to a podcast.  Those that listened to the podcast, with accompanying notes, tested significantly higher.

I think that this lends some credence to the type of things that I do as an online educator and may encourage me to include more taped lectures into some of my classes.

Tip of the Hat to Open Education.