Week 8: Getting Some Perspective

Waiting for Sir Ken. . .

I believe we are officially half way finished with your hybrid course. When this journey began, even I wasn't sure of the exact path it would take. What I did know is that I wanted to teach you all to fish in terms of using a PLN to grow as an educator. What I didn't know is that I would have grades K-12 represented in the course or that everyone would be doing the curricular unit. . .the 20% project is a good "hook" for many students to see the value of a PLN for personalized learning. However, if everyone could begin to internalize the concepts of what it means to truly cultivate a PLN, then the curricular unit could have been wrapped around the passion that inspires you. Many of your passions were about school/education issues. I'm not sure as to the level that this is happening. Another added benefit of a PLN is that it allows for more personalization of the content you receive. If you begin reflecting on your blog about what interests you, what fascinates you, what you would like to know, what you have learned, then I, and your peers can respond to you in ways that fit your unique learning circumstances. If you do not share what you are passionate about and instead wait for explicit instruction, then you are selling your freedom for comfort. I hope that in your mid-term PLN reflections (see assignment instructions in Edmodo), you can begin to devise a way to more deeply cultivate and personalize your learning. There have been some inspiring blog posts from many of you! I really have enjoyed reading and responding to most of them. There seems to always be a point in the semester at which a student finally "gets it" and lets go of the expectation that this will be a typical class of motivation controlled by carrot and stick. I look forward to this moment and often find myself questioning if it is going to happen. . .My experience says that it will. This transformation also involves trusting that when I say if you truly give your all in cultivating your PLN, in facilitating your own learning and sharing about it, you can choose your grade. I really want to create an opportunity where grades are off the table and the focus is on the learning.

Walking to the convention center from my hotel

Tonight, we are going to discuss some ideas on how to incorporate technology into your curriculum. I also want to share some of the new ideas and tools I discovered at CUE. . .and the ones some of you learned virtually. Hopefully, some of you would also like to share some tools that you find helpful or that you just think are awesome sauce!

This Week's Question: We gave some favorite songs about love a few weeks ago. If you have noticed, most of them are on a Spotify playlist on the class blog. . Tonight I would like to know what is one of your favorite breakup or heartbreak songs? What makes it so?

Week 7: #cue13 Your Virtual Conference

Hello from Palm Springs. Before I give you a conference update I want to thank those of you who have been tweeting and reflecting on your blogs. I know it takes courage to share yourself online and I really appreciate your willingness to put yourself out there in cyberspace! I would encourage you to give your peers feedback on their blogs and to see the process. I tweeted an interesting video from Seth Godin talking about blogging. . .I would like you to check it out (it's short but powerful):





I arrived in Palm Springs late last night and met my friend Kevin, the principal of Palm Academy (the one alternative high school in Coronado) this morning for coffee before the conference. As I have attended CUE for the last 13 years, I am always running into old friends and meeting new people. CUE is kind of the Mecca of the nerdy technology using educator circle. Yes, you can be a rock star in this group with a comb-over and a pocket protector ;-)  I'm actually writing this post in a session about Schoology, which is a LMS similar to Edmodo and might even be a better solution for classrooms with iPads. With that said, I would love to see you all participate in the conference virtually by adding the #cue13 hashtag to your TweetDeck. You should find links to cool resources and discussions of many of the topics we have discussed in class. One way to showcase your participation would be to create a Storify story about the tweets that interested you or one where you grabbed some cool resources.
Hope you all have a great evening with Dr. B. I will be with you next week to talk about ways to integrate technology into your curriculum plans.
jeff

Week 6: Blogging Highlights!

Week 5: Learnist and Learning. . .

This week we have the please of having Farb Nivi, the founder of Grockit and Learninst, speak to our class. Special thanks to Gwyn for making this possible. We will do a Google Hangout from 5-6ish and he will discuss both learning and technology as well as his newest product, Learninst. I am very excited about this opportunity and hope, hope, hope, we have no technical glitches.
On that note, if you have a PC and continue to experience issues like we have been experiencing, I would really like to highly recommend that you make an appointment with ITS. Here is a snippet from an email I think you all may have received last week:

ITS has made some adjustments to our wireless network and we'd like to hear from you if you're still experiencing problems staying connected or experiencing slow speed. Also note that we have instructions for connecting your computer to our ‘usdsecure’ network at www.sandiego.edu/its/connect/wireless - this will allow your computer to log in to the wireless automatically when you turn it on. If you continue to experience problems after connecting to the 'usdsecure' wireless network, please contact the ITS Help Desk by email at help@sandiego.edu or by phone at (619) 260-7900. In many cases there are updates that can be applied to your computer that can help with wireless reliability.

Hopefully, we can rid ourselves of this Internet demon once and for all ;-) Besides the guest speaker, I want to share out as to how the PLN cultivation is going and to perhaps break up into small teams of similar grade ranges/topics in order to share resources. . .perhaps a few new hashtags? Also, I will discuss the Dan Pink six senses collaborative website project and see if anyone needs help creating a website.

This week's question: What is one of your favorite songs about love? This could be romantic, paternal, or other. . .

Educ 578 Weekly Twitter Highlights

On Authenticity and Relationships

My parents at their 50th wedding anniversary May 2012

My father died last Wednesday, February 20 in his home in Sun City, AZ. He had been battling a condition called neuropathy for the last five years and in the last year, it basically rendered him incapable of caring for himself. My mother has been amazing as both his caregiver and his wife of 50 years. I should have been there. I wasn't. He died at 7:30 PST. Not surprisingly, I was teaching that night, doing the one thing in my life that I do best. Teaching has always been more than a job for me. It has been my passion, my safe haven, my calling. There are so many times that I question every aspect of my life: am I a good father, husband, son, friend, coworker? But not teacher. This part of me feels so natural and I don't have to fake any aspect of who I am when I am in the classroom. I'm not saying that it always goes well. Anyone who was in class last Thursday knows that isn't true. I debated whether or not to teach that night, but I wasn't leaving for Arizona until Friday, so I foolishly thought it would do me good to do something to take my mind off my father's passing. As I was struggling to deal with Internet failure, Storify crashing, and students who appeared to me as if they would rather be ANYWHERE else than sitting in MHR 127 at that point in time, I found myself grasping to try and connect what I was discussing with the lives of the the people sitting in the room. And I couldn't. At one point, I honestly felt like running out of the room. In my twenty years of education, things have gone south countless times, but I could usually count on the relationships that existed in most of my classes to carry me through. Not this time.

Last Thursday, I didn't have the proper relationship with the students in my class, which means I didn't have the trust I needed in that moment to allow me to push a group to do something that I believe will not only benefit them, but their future students. But as I mentioned, teaching is more than a job to me and I would never give up. I believe that it is my responsibility as an educator to establish these relationships and when the student/teacher relationship is solid, we can move mountains, both educationally and in life. We can overcome math anxiety, illiteracy, fear, low self-esteem, unsupportive parents, boredom and whatever else stands in the way of a student and her success. When I asked the class to reflect on who has been your favorite teacher on last week's blog post, all of the answers spoke more about a caring relationship than they did about teaching. I hope that you all aspire to be that teacher. But, to do this you may have to give more of yourself than you can imagine. You don't teach a class, you teach 25 individual students, with 25 individual needs, and you need to see them as individuals worthy of your time and effort. Not every one of them will necessarily want a relationship with you, and that's okay too, but knowing what everyone needs is part of what makes a good teacher great. Be great.

As I bury my father on Tuesday, I can only hope that he knew how much I loved him and appreciated everything that he did for me my entire life. I'm not sure that he did.

Week 4: In My Tribe?

Not only is the title of this post referring to the Seth Godin audiobook experience, it's the name of an old album by a band called 10,000 Maniacs, which could just as easily be the name of a tribe in the Godin sense, right? This afternoon, we will discuss the book and your experiences with learning in a new format. You will also learn a new tool, Storify, in which you can create a very cool story using social media. . . But first, I hope you are reading each others' blogs and commenting. . .The next step is to tweet or retweet a peer's blog with both the #usdedu and at least one more hashtag to reach a larger audience. . . #edchat, or some other appropriate hashtag for the content of the post.

We will revisit the overall nature of your PLN versus web 2.0 tools that you could use with your students. I'm not sure everyone understands the difference. I want do also discuss educational chats, something that I want everyone to do at least once, and using Storify, will make this easy.  Hopefully, you are all not only thinking about you passion, but also thinking about what you might want to learn for your 20% project.

Lastly, I want to discuss how we are going to wrap up the second half of the Daniel Pink book. You will be creating a collaborative web site that takes a close look at the six senses Pink believes we need to be successful in the Conceptual Age.


This Week's Question: Who has been one of your favorite teachers at any level and why?

Week 3: What Get's You Up in the Morning?

As we work our way through a variety of web 2.0 tools I hope that you are beginning to see a use for these tools in your life to create your personal learning network (PLN). While there may be multiple other tools we could use, the point of any of them is in their ability to allow you to connect and learn with others in a global society. For me, it's about using the tools to fuel my passion. . .
I will introduce one or two tools this evening but the majority of the class will be discussing Dan Pink and the concept of communities of practice. My hope is that everyone will have at least two posts on her/his blog from last week's assignment. Once we get everyone's homework on their blog, you will be reading and commenting on each other's work. The goal is to show you how to use the Internet to allow students to publish their work and share with a wider audience than just the teacher, as well as receive feedback from both peers and, hopefully, a larger audience.
I do believe it is also Valentine's Day, I expect we can get our work completed fairly quickly and let you go celebrate this occasion in proper fashion.

This Week's Question: What is your current favorite or past favorite teacher movie and why?

Week Two: "When You Learn Trasparently, You Become a Teacher."

Kids are engaged with technology - even without instructions!

The title of this post comes from George Seimens, a professor from Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. He is one of the fathers of a theory of learning called connectivism and has done a lot of work with MOOCs (massive open online courses). I love this quote as it really speaks to the value of creating and cultivating a PLN, or personal learning network. While we are on the topic of PLNs, your second class will be devoted to setting up the web tools you will need to cultivate your personal learning networks and a discussion of how they all fit together. With the cooperation of the Internet pixies, we should be able to accomplish this in our time together. While an iPad or tablet may work to do this, I would strongly recommend that you bring a laptop to make the evening go smoother.

Last week, we discussed the syllabus and everyone was able to publish her blog. You should see your blog linked in the left sidebar of the class blog (although, the links won't work completely until you publish your first post, like Angelica has). Not to worry, I will explain the why and how of the class blogroll and how you can put one on your personal blog. I expect you to have the books purchased, except for the Godin book, which can wait until next week.  The only other thing I asked you to do was to complete the "About Me" page on your blog. To edit, you click on your about me tab and you should see a pencil icon to edit (assuming you are signed in to your blog). This is not the same as the about me sidebar item that connects to your Google account. You need to include a brief bio of yourself and include a picture.

Sign on the door of a JCCS classroom

Based on our conversation about web identity and who you want to be as an educator online, we will target the same user name for your web tools. If you have yours figured out, feel free to get ahead of the game and create accounts with the following tools: Twitter, Diigo, Scoop.it, TweetDeck, and Google+ (started in class last week).

I will usually leave a question at the end of each blog post that you will answer in the comments section. You only need to be signed in to your Google account to comment.

This Week's Question: What should every teacher know about you?

Welcome to the EDUC 578 Experience

I would like to welcome you to EDUC 578 the "Hybrid Version." I guess we could call it Educ 578 2.0. We are going to combine our efforts with Dr. Buczynski's Educ 535 (Assessment and Curriculum Design) course to create an interactive, 3-D experience that will surely be the highlight of your Spring 2013 semester. Based on your course/program need, there will be some slight variation in your assignments, but we will be learning together. This is the third time I am teaching this course, and as with every course I teach, no two are ever the same. For me the experiences and learning desires of the students drive the direction around each course topic.This course is particularly fun for me as I am fascinated with learning in general and specifically, how technology can assist the learning of anyone.  I am definitely much more of a techie than an expert on learning theory, so we will take a hands-on and self-reflective approach to this topic.

My daughter Lily learning how to do the splits

My goal for this course is to consider all aspects of learning, both personally, and for your students.  I see technology as a medium of instruction as well as a driving force behind most school reform.  With that said, the focus should always be on the learning and educational outcomes rather than the technology.  That is what I mean by having technology be the "medium" of instruction, not the point of it. This is why I am less concerned about specific technology tools than I am about how to utilize technology to enhance learning and instruction.  The tools that will be in the classroom in ten or even five years have probably not even been invented yet. This is why it is more important to get a broader picture of the concept of technology integration in schools without limiting ourselves to current technology.

To this point, you will be creating a personal learning network (PLN) and utilizing a variety of web-based tools to investigate your learning. You will also be completing a 20% Project that will allow you to explore a learning experience based on a topic that fuels your passion.

I look forward to learning with you.

peace,

jeffery heil