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?