Personal Mentors

One of the things I love to do (and always pray that it works) when I teach about PLNs is to call out to the audience and got to their favorite website, find the RSS feed and subscribe to it in my Google Reader. It is a neat little "parlor trick", but it really does illustrate how fast and easy this is. One of the byproducts of this demo is the fact that I end up with new subscriptions in my RSS feed. Now not everything in my Google Reader pertains to education (shocking I know), but I have good deal of blogs on Art & Quilting as well as on Technology. I've been a Boing Boing fan for years, but recently (thanks to a volunteering audience member) I was turned onto Lifehacker. Lifehacker is not just technology based (just like Boing Boing isn't), and I recently came across a great article on Professional Development How to Get the Right People on Your Team.

When you get that urge to start making some changes in your professional life, do yourself a favor and build in a network of support. If you’re not ready to hire a professional coach, then get yourself someone who will help keep you accountable to set and hold to your new goals. This new model of peer-to-peer coaching is priceless

The article is about building a support network for professional growth - sounds like a Personal Learning Network to me!

It even starts with creating a Mind Map (my how educational of you), of the people that influence you. Dream big and add those authors that influence how you think of things, and practical by remembering those that help you everyday.

But it gets better - see this as a peer-to-peer personalized coaching program. You each take turns being a "mentor" to each other. See Womack's checklist:

• Create your inventory of names of people to work with
• Ask people until you find someone who’s excited to work with you
• Write down three to ten questions you want to be asked each session
• Create a schedule: what day/time you’ll talk and how long each session is (ie, how many weeks/months per person)
• Get your technology in place: sign up for Skype or create a speed dial entry on your cellphone
• Organize a place to track results: create a folder, spreadsheet, or even an online survey
• Dream big. Imagine the life you’d like to be living and design the questions that will guide you to making that your reality.

I hope to get my mind map up here soon. This reminds me so much of the mentoring process I experienced as a first-year teacher by one of my favorite people in the world - Susan Lobasso. I would never have survived without that support, and why can't I have it all the time!

Creating a new kind of presentation

So after seeing some really interesting PowerPoint slides pop up over the blogosphere, I decided to try a new kind of presentation method. Instead of having a theme and slides with bullet points each slide conveys one thing and is associated with an appropriate picture.

It was a lot of fun to create, but it did take more time than I had planned. I used Flickr Storm (http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/) to find pictures. You kind of have to think of one word tag descriptions for what you want, otherwise you will spend even more time trying to find pictures! I then verifyed that they were all liscensed through Creative Commons for use. This way I could use them not only in my presentation, but repost them as well. I always gave photo credit on the image itself, as well as created a delicious tag (http://delicious.com/bethanyvsmith/pp_photo) for all the pictures I used. This way not only was it easier for me to remember where I got the pictures from, but also so that others could find them as well.

Then I posted the presentation on SlideShare for others to use and see. Slideshare takes your presentation and creates images of the slides that can be "flipped" within a webpage (much easier than the way we used to publish PP files to the internet). The only drawback is that since they are images, there are no transitions between objects - you would need to have them on separate pages rather than all on one. This was important when actually giving the presentation for certain slides. In the end I think it worked very well. I plan on tweeking this presentation for an upcoming MEGA meeting, but overall I'm pretty proud of it and will continue to use this method - until the next one comes along!

Creating an Online Personal Learning Network

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter rss)

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25533361@N00/280882501/

Which tool fits the job?

Technorati Tags: elgg eportfolio moodle warlick socialnetworking web2.0 website professionaldevelopment

I've been investigating e-portfolios and Social Networks and CMS and and and and.........

There seems to be a never ending pool of tools, free and expensive that are all geared towards what I am trying to accomplish - facilitating teaching. I have been lost in the sea of, "Do we use one tool?" "Do we try to integrate separate tools?" "Do we try to take what we already have and force it to work?" "Do we try to go where our students are already located?"

Luckily, I am not alone in this frustration and these blogs have helped me along the way. Jeff Utecht's post on his tech plan summarizes how and why we are looking for different products to support one another. The irony is that at a large university like I am we have sometime more constraints on this process, because certain aspects of this plan are already available to our students. Duplicating resources is not only confusing - it is against policy. Jeff discusses 2 major components of what I am looking at - a Social Network & a CMS. We have had a CMS on campus for almost a decade, but I'm interested in leveraging a CMS (specifically a Moodle) for other purposes.

Then, last Fall David Warlick came to speak at a MEGA event and spoke about Social Networks - right when my brain was churning with them. I had been heavily looking into ELGG, Drupal, & Mahara as answers to my social networking debate. I have been coming back to the notion - "Do we got to where our students are?" or "Do we ask them to come to us?" I still haven't found an answer to that, and to complicate matters our campus has restricted the use of any offsite teaching portal for FERPA & ADA reasons. All of the products I mentioned above are open source and can be installed on a server. Yet Ning comes into my life and I fall in love with its ease of use. So now I'm trying to get a local install of Ning and see how I can get that to work on a virtual server.

Then I get trapped in the world of e-portfolios. How do you define an eportfolio? Is it summative or formative? Who needs the data? What is the purpose behind an e-portfolio? We used Taskstream in the past, which allowed for both user created portfolios that illustrate their best work, as well as a formative portfolio that serves as an example for an accrediting body, such as NCATE & NCDPI. But with Taskstream gone, we are creating our own a accreditation portfolio system (to track "signature" artifacts"). Yet, where does this leave our "Student Teaching Portfolio" - an example of our students best work? We go back to web page based portfolio, and discover that our students know NOTHING about webpage design or FTP, etc. (Which is an issue all in itself that I am coming to terms with technology as an elective). This becomes a bear and a burden and even with the best intentions is not working out well.

So I look for a solution - is it a Social Network? Is it Google Pages? or is it a CMS? Possibly a Moodle?

But in the end - the crux of the issue is "What do we need?" and "What is this technology trying to help with?" and eventually "Can this scale up well?" I have come to these conclusions....

Moodle can work for us in three ways
1) It can illustrate to our students how to teach with a CMS
2) It can allow non-university students to join in (All of our Backboard Vista classes are driven by Registration & Records - this does not help with Professional Development needs)
3) What about using Moodle for our portfolios

This last bullet I have been pondering for awhile. It would allow our students to keep their accounts longer that the University dictates, it would be on our severs, and it is Browser driven (no html or ftp confusion). But How......

Low & behold I come across what Georgetown is doing http://www.georgetownprofessor.net/gportfolio/

Now if I can just convince everyone that I may have actually found a tool to fit our needs, we might be in business.

Building Professional Learning Communities

Back in November I had answered a call from EdWeek about Professional Learning Communities and any questions I would like to pose in a chat. So I sent one in and I just found out that my question had been asked in the chat!

Question from Bethany Smith, Asst. Director of Learning Tech, NC State University College of Education: Have you investigated using any social network technologies (such as ELGG or ning) to facilitate a learning community?

Anne Jolly: You, know, Bethany, I'm actually doing something along that line now! I'm working with the Center for Teaching Quality and technology guru Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to establish Virtual Learning Communities in a number of schools. I'm learning a lot about social networking, and it's the most exciting thing I've done in awhile. I constantly look forward to it. Right now I haven't jumped into ning, but if you're doing so, I hope you'll share your work far and wide!

Anne Jolly (according to her bio) is a former middle school science teacher and Alabama's Teacher of the Year in 1994, is the author of A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams. She is currently the project director for professional learning teams at the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

I actually had a meeting with the Director of CTQ last semester about this very idea.

Tres cool....