Plan for FO2010

Brainstorming

To help me think about what I want to get out of Facilitating Online 2010 (FO2010), I created the following mind map in bubbl.us The map is quite large so you will have to drag with your mouse to see all of the map. Here's the link to the map if it is not showing up below.

This is the first time that I have used an online mind mapping tool. I was inspired by the mindmeister mindmap on Online Communities that Sarah Stewart tweeted about last week. I decided to try bubbl.us after polling my twitter network (thanks network!)

The Task This Week in FO2010

For this week Sarah has asked us to make a plan for what we want to learn and explore. Here are the four questions that we've been asked to answer:

1. What do you want to learn to facilitate? Online professional development for teachers. I'd like to work on a model for professional development in my school district that fosters ongoing professional development. I see this as involving a face-to-face component as well as synchronous online meetings using Elluminate and possibly Moodle as a place to archive and collaborate on learning. (Thinking Moodle because would like to see more teachers in my district using it, but am also aware that a more open environment can result in even more amazing connections and learning.) One possible format would be 'Tech Tuesdays' style 20-30 minute weekly Elluminate Live meetings on a specific topic. Another possible format is LAN parties as outlined by North Vancouver's Bryan Hughes.
2. What are you doing now in terms of online facilitation? I'm a distributed learning teacher with the majority of my courses being online in Moodle. I offer my students weekly Elluminate tutorials (these are poorly attended and an area in which I am trying to improve.) I have volunteered as an assistant facilitator with Know Weeks and CEET. Both organizations offer(ed) week long online courses geared towards K-12 educators in British Columbia, Canada. Both Know Weeks and CEET used Moodle.
3. What would you like to achieve, change, or do more of? I would like to improve student participation and engagement in my Elluminate tutorials. I would like to initiate online professional development in my school district.
4. What do you need to do or make happen to acheive your goal? I need to practice facilitating in a safe environment before attempting to promote and facilitate an online professional development session on my own.

Feedback

Have you facilitated your own online events before? What advice would you offer to someone who is planning to offer their first online event? Are there some definite dos and don'ts?

As always, thanks for taking the time to read what I've written :-)

Google Map Mashup for FO2010

For those in the Facilitating Online 2010 course, Chris Woodhouse tweeted

shed53: #FO2010 Never done any mashups but wonder if anyone fancies a map with all the students' locations pinned. Course poster?

So...

Here's the link to a map where we can add markers indicating our locations. Check out the video near the end of this post to see how to do this.

View FO2010 in a larger map

I'd recommend placing your marker in a general spot, like 'Vancouver' as opposed to a specific address like '3614 West 16th Ave, Vancouver'. I had seen this done before when I (briefly) participated in CCK08. Rod Lucier created a similar map and posted on how to add your marker to the map. I've included his video here. If you follow his instructions it will work on our FO2010 map.

Cheers!

Welcome To My New Digs!

Welcome to Hemel by Mr Ush. Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works License

Thanks for stopping by! I've recently moved my blog from Edublogs to here. You can see this post for the reasons for my move. Moving all of my posts and their related comments was relatively easy. The Wordpress2Blogger site has instructions and a converter. It talks about WXR files, but I found that it was able to deal with the Wordpress XML file that I exported from Edublogs. However, any links I had to my own posts appear to be a little messed up. I'm also getting some weird text showing up with many of my images. So it is a slow process right now as I go through all my posts and fix these issues.

If you've moved your blog before, why did you do it and how did the process go? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current blogging platform?

Moving Day?

On Cleaning House and Blog Sabbaticals

Moving Day by Joe_Andrews. Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works Licence

Well, I've been thinking about it for awhile. I'm going on a bit of a blog sabbatical. I know, I know, it's alright if you thought I was already on a blog sabbatical. After all, it is not like I've been posting up a storm. So let me clarify. I'm not ceasing to blog. I'm just going somewhere else to do it. For awhile at least.

Some Background

When I started blogging back in November of 2007, I started out at Blogspot. Two months later I made the switch to Edublogs. It seemed like that was where all the cool kids were ;-) The blogs were more customizable (you could have pages and tabs at the top of your blogs!) There was a big community. And lots and lots of other good reasons. (Unfortunately when I made the switch I deleted my original blog and didn't save all of the posts. So my very first 'Hello World!' post is gone.)

Why Go Back?

The Ads: When Edublogs started embedding ads in the free blogs I was ok with it--after all I had won Edublogs credits in the 31 Day Comment Challenge and used them to upgrade to a supporter blog, so no ads for me! When my year ran out and I was too cheap to renew I got to experience the joys of ads ads everywhere. First is was links in posts, then banner ads at the top of posts. Particulary irksome is the ad linked to my blog's byline. As I do not administer student blogs, just this little ole blog, it didn't make sense to me to shell out for a premium blog. I tolerated the ads, but kept wondering if I should move to a new home? Perhaps even host my own blog?

Google Goodness: A lot of the blogs that I have been reading recently are Blogspot blogs. I also have a couple of Blogspot blogs that I use for other reasons, and Blogspot has steadily improved over the years. In addition, when I looked into hosting my own blog I got a little overwhelmed (yes, I know that it costs $$ to host your own, but my husband has webspace where I would have hosted it.)

Is It For Good?

I don't really know. I just know that I need to make a change. Starting the Facilitating Online 2010 course has also provided some impetus to clean house. I'll go on this little sabbatical, and perhaps come back with a renewed enthusiasm for all that Edublogs has to offer.

The Wrap Up

Have you made a blog move (or thought about one)? How did it go or what is holding you back?

And finally... please check me out in my sabbatical home!

E-mail is so Old School

And Landlines Too

A common theme in this blog is communication. It is key to so many elements of my job as a DL (distributed learning) teacher.

E-mail

Lately I'm finding it is harder to get in touch with my students. E-mail is so oldschool for them. Students may have their own e-mail address, but often only check it once a week. I wonder if most high schoolers rely on messaging in Facebook as opposed to e-mail? That seems to be the way many of my friends 'e-mail' these days.

Landline

Phoning isn't the old standby it used to be either. It seems that for a lot of families the landline is the number they give the school, but in reality they don't use it much as each member of the family has their own cell. Once you track down the right person's cell number you might be ok. The students, though, they aren't so keen on voice calls. Instead they're all about texting.

These changes have really only come about in a big way in the past year.

Texting

So when my colleague suggested that we needed district issued cell phones for texting our students, I laughed at first and then realized that she was probably onto something! I don't use my person cell that much (and only learned how to text a few months ago--yes I'm a cell phone ludite) so I have a very limited plan. And I'm not keen on giving out my personal number to my students. Come to think of it, they're probably not that keen on giving out their cell number to their teacher!

Question Time

Do you text your students? If so, how have you set this up so that proper boundaries are set, both for them and for you? If you have students at a distance, how else do you keep in contact?

As always, thanks for reading what I write.

Photo Credits
All images in this post are have Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Licenses.

e-mail screenshot by mwoodard
Tyneham - old telephone by Whipper snapper
Stop texting & watch the game by Lorainne DeSabato

Homework

Ah, homework!  To give it or not to give it?  If you give it then how much?  And once you've given it, then what?!

Now, because I work at a distributed learning school (online school or distance learning) really there is no homework.  Or maybe everything the students do could be considered homework?!  Anyways, a recent post by Kate Nowak started me thinking about homework again.  If you haven't read Kate's blog and you teach math, you should definitely give it a read.  In her post she describes a new system for dealing with; assigning homework, getting rid of homework checks, and doing homework quizzes.  In her post she referred to this post by Sameer Shah on his binder system.  Sameer describes a system designed to keep his students organized and motivated to do and correct their homework.  His system is also a more efficient use of his time.  Anyway, both posts got me thinking about the system that I used in my Biology 11 classes back when I was in a bricks-and-mortar school.

First off, I did not plan homework for any of the science classes I taught (gr 8 - 10 Science, and Biology 11 and 12).  I tried to give enough time in class to complete assignments.  If students didn't complete the assignments in class, well then they had to finish them for homework.  They did, of course, have to use time at home to study for quizzes and tests also.

Before implementing my system (which I'll describe soon) I was frustrated with the following scenario; students do an assignment, hand it in, there is a delay for me to mark it and get it back, they get it back (by which time they can't even remember doing the work), they look at the grade but they do not read all the wonderful feedback I've given them and life moves on.  I found this particularly frustrating when it involved lab reports; so often students have difficultyunderstanding why it was they did the lab and interpreting their data.

My system:

• Students are given time to complete an assignment.  If not completed in class then it is for homework.


• Next day--students take out their completed assignments and start working on the  'opener' questions that have been posted on the screen or if it is a simple assignment--not a lab--the answer key is posted and they are to start their corrections.


• I walk around and check the assignment briefly--making suggestions to students as necessary (full sentence answers please, remember to do your drawings in pencil, oops--forgot the conclusion to your lab, that sort of thing.)


• Each student gets a happy face stamp on their work; right side up if the assignment is complete, upside down if it is only half done etc.  This way I don't have to keep a record--you'll see how the stamps help in a bit.


• We go over the assignment.  We do this briskly.  Students are expected to mark their own work and make corrections in a different coloured pen.  Theoretically all of the students should have a completely corrected assignment.


• At the halfway and end points in the course (I taught semestered courses) the students were required to hand in a portfolio of their work.


• The day before the portfolio was due they would get the list of assignments required for the portfolio.  There were usually 10 items.  For some of the items the students had a choice (eg hand in lab 2a or lab 3b, choose your best opener questions etc) and for others they did not.  The list would include the date that the assignment was assigned, the full name of the assignment, and if the assignment was a series of questions from the textbook I'd include the page numbers.  I encouraged students throughout the course to properly date and label their assignments as this would make organizing their portfolios easier.  They were expected to write out a table of contents and to number the pages of the items in their portfolios.  One of the items was to write a page long reflection of their learning (most interesting thing they learned, what they thought was the best example of their work and why, their strengths and/or where they need to improve.


• The only thing the students could prepare ahead of time was the title page and their reflection paper (I offered to comment on their draft versions).


• They were given time in class to assemble their portfolios.


• They had to include the original work -- not write out good copies.


• When they handed in their work I would mark it according to a rubric that the students were given ahead of time.


• My stamp system (see above) allowed me to tell how complete the original assignment was.


• Corrections needed to be evident.   If a student made a good first attempt, but got a number of parts wrong, that was ok if  they did good corrections.

With the first couple of assignments, the students did hand them in so that I could get a good look at their work and provide a lot of written feedback.  I wouldn't necessarily grade their work--just provide a lot of suggestions and get an idea on what I needed to clarify with the class.

The benefits of this system were:

• I got to go over the work with the students right away.


• if students were away the day that we went over the assignment, they were motivated to find out from their peers what their corrections should be.


• my informal homework checks allowed me to talk to students and make suggestions on how to improve their work so that they were handing in their best in their portfolios.


• students were motivated to keep their work organized.


• students had to reflect on what represented their best work.


• students were more likely to pay attention to the feedback they'd been given.


• less grading and more on-going feedback.

The drawbacks of this system:

• once the portfolios were handed in, it took a fair amount of time to mark them all .  On the up side though, the students didn't need them back right away as we had already gone over the individual assignments.


• I had to constantly remind students that they needed to keep all of their work as it may be needed in their portfolios.  For some kids it is just force of habit to throw out an assignment once they think the teacher is done with it.

Now I need to ask myself what's stopping me from using a system like this for my distributed learning students?

What is your system for making assessment authentic?  What would you change about my system?  As always, I welcome your feedback.

Annual Tools and Sites I Use List

It's time for my annual "Tools and Sites I Use List'! Here's my first list from January 2008 and my second one from January 2009. I was originally inspired by a Will Richardson post, and Will was in turn inspired by Tech Crunch's Annual List. You can see this year's Tech Crunch list here.

tools mosaic by m kasahara licensed CC attribution, non-commercial, no derivs

My List

So, in no particular order, these are the tools and sites I use. I use all of them on a weekly basis and I use the starred ones pretty much daily:

• Twitter*


• Seesmic Desktop*--a twitter client that allows you to organize the folks you follow, keeps track of your searches, and also keeps you up to date with your Facebook friend updates. It doesn't have quite the same strong following as Tweet Deck, but I really like it.


• Google Chrome*--I really like this browser; it has a clean appearance with very few buttons and menus, it feels speedier than other browsers, and I love that there is just one box that allows you to both search and put in URLs. Chrome is not perfect though. Ironically it seems to have problems doing certain things in Google Docs. Chrome doesn't have quite the wonderful array of plugins/extensions that FireFox has, but I'm hoping that will change (I used to be a big FireFox user, but it was just getting too buggy.) The biggest thing I miss from FireFox is the CoComment extension. I'm finding it difficult to keep track of comments on the various blogs I visit. It's a pain, but not a big enough one to get me to switch to using FireFox again. By the way, if you have a good way to keep track of comments if you're using Chrome, please let me know. If a blog has the option of 'e-mail follow up comments' I select it, and I will subscribe to comment feeds, but often you have to subscribe to all comments from a particular blog as opposed to just the post I'm interested in.


• GMail*--Love the way you can tag messages, the interface is great, and I can have my e-mail my way on any connected computer


• Google Calendar* -- Keeps my personal and work life organized. My colleague and I use Google calendars for our students to help them plan their timelines. You can see an example embedded on my school website here.


• iGoogle*--it's my home page, where all the things I need at a glance are there for me; Gmail, Google Calender, Weather Widget, Google Reader, Tasks, Top Stories...


• CEET -- A social networking site for BC educators called Community for Expertise in Educational Technology. It was created back in the spring, but really seemed to take off this fall. There are some wonderful people facilitating and participating in the community. I've posted a number of questions and gotten fabulous feedback.


• Moodle* -- My school district moved to Moodle this fall and I've written here about one of the features of Moodle that I really enjoy. I have a lot to learn about Moodle, and I am looking forward to further customizing my online courses to suit the needs of my students.


• Microsoft Outlook* -- only because I have to :-p (my work e-mail all has to go through Microsoft Outlook.) Using it though makes me appreciate GMail even more ;-) I do like the calendar in Outlook and use it for all of my work related appointments. The alerts are very handy and it is easy to notify others in the organization of meetings.


• Google Search* -- I can't imagine being on a computer and not using Google search. Every year I find out more cool things that Search can do.


• Wikipedia


• Delicious* -- I still haven't spent the time to figure out the social part of delicious, but I love having one place for all my bookmarks.


• Edublogs -- my blog host


• Skype


• YouTube


• Elluminate Live! -- to offer tutoring to my students and to attend meetings with colleagues

The Analysis

This year my list has shrunk from 29 to 16. Perhaps I'm being more selective? Or could it just be that I have a bad memory ;-). New this year are Google Chrome, Seesmic Desktop, and CEET. Moodle is back on my list after a one year hiatus. No wikis on here aside from Wikipedia. Last year I spent a good deal of time checking out Wikispaces, PBWiki, WetPaint, but the whole wiki thing just didn't take.

Sadly missing from my list is KnowWeeks. KnowWeeks were a series of week long Professional development sessions that were offered in the Moodle environment. They were free for BC educators and they were wonderful! Sessions on using wikis, photo editing in Gimp, Browserless blogging and on and on. The facilitators included folks like Kathy Cassidy, Grant Potter, Sharon Betts, Bernadette Rego to name but a few. Last year I got the wonderful opportunity to train to be an assistant facilitator in KnowWeeks and it was awesome PD. They didn't get funding this year and I think that CEET is meant to fill the void left by KnowWeeks.

On The Horizon

I *think* I've decided to do the 2010/365 project where you take a photo a day for a year and post them online. I tried last year but fizzled out before January was over. I hope that things will work out better this time around. If it does, I'll be using Picasa 3 to organize photos on my PC, or iPhoto if I get a chance to use our Mac ;-). Both of these programs help you to organize your photos, do simple editing, create slideshows/screensavers/wallpaper/etc, and they both have facial recognition. I'll be posting my photos to Flickr and you can check out my photos so far here).

Wrap Up

Of course it is not about the tools, it's about what you do with them. The tools on my list help me to communicate, collaborate, create, investigate and learn. If you're inspired to write your own post on the tools and sites you use, please leave a comment below so I can check it out. Are you surprised by some of the items on my list, or some that aren't? Do you have questions about any tool I've mentioned? Then leave a comment below!