On Fonts, Forms and Networking...

Looking over my original goals in order to get a feel for where I'm at with them, I am somewhat encouraged by my progress. One of my primary goals was to improve my usage of APA format. To that end, I have purchased a book on APA format and I've been reading through it and improving my knowledge. I have also played with a couple of social networking frameworks, Elgg and Mahara in order to determine whether or not they would be beneficial in a classroom setting. I also have an account set up with SiteGround to host a personal website using Joomla, which is a particulalry powerful and flexible web-site management framework. Through Joomla and it's various plugins a person can incorporate blogs, wiki's databases and any number of minor "canned" applications into his or her website. I intend to use these features to create my own modest web-portal which will present my own information as well as provide embedded and external links to other resources (like you good folks' blog-sites) for my visitors.
As for my goal of improving my online communication and collaboration, I have sadly continued to struggle in this area. Work has been particularly grueling the last few weeks, which is ironic since my travel schedule has actually lightened up. I've been working on some software coding for a demo that my clients require in two weeks so unfortunately my online collaboration time has suffered. The irony of the situation is not lost on my as I have recently commented on the discussion threads that I'd like to schedule some kind of organized chat time so several of us can get together and have a real-time conversation. Nonetheless, despite my lack of progress in this area, I suppose a positive I can take from the situation is the knowledge that often, technology does not necessarily equate with convenience and ease. At the end of the day, good old fashioned organization and time-management are as critical in the new world as they were in the old days of pen and paper.

Progress Ho!

Those of you who have been following this series of posts know that I am currently working on a plan to improve some aspects of my personal and professional technology life. Specifically I have set down some goals to improve in various areas including my proficiency with APA formatting as well as social and collaborative networking competencies. I've also committed to creating some kind of professional learning environment wherein other educators can hopefully glean some insight or find some useful information from my endless wanderings.

Fortunately, I have found several excellent resources that can help me toward my goals in a general sense. A simply search of Amazon for good APA reference guides along with some review of the contents of those books has lead me to a purchase that I feel will help me greatly in finally using APA format consistently and correctly. I have also researched several social networking tools and I've found two that greatly interest me. I don't know quite enough about them yet to give them a full recommendation but I intend to play with both of them over the next few weeks and see if they pass muster.

Elgg (http://community.elgg.org/) is a social networking open-source software toolset that essentially allows a user to create a social networking portal. The Elgg manager can create a site that contains a broad number of widgets and plugin tools that will allow him to add features and richness for his visitors and members. At the heart of Elgg is the ability to create and moderate blogs, chat boards, V-logs and collaborative file-sharing complete with source and version management. I haven't played with Elgg enough to know if it's a perfect fit, but certainly it may turn out to be an excellent tool for creating a social, collaborative network that other professionals can access and contribute to. This could be an excellent tool for both my current software position needs as well as my future teaching requirements.

Another tool Mahara, (http://mahara.org/) is a social networking tool geared toward learning and e-portfolio presentation. Mahara also allows a user to create online-learning communities. One of my goals is to create a source of information for other teachers to access and Mahara may be an excellent choice. There is some significant similarity between Mahara and Elgg, but clearly Mahara is more closely geared toward e-portfolio presentation and career learning. As I play with it more, I'll be better able to determine it's strengths compared to Elgg.

Executing the "Game" plan... or...what I did for summer vacation

As I review my blog post about my game plan, it seems to be a bit ambitious in terms of goals. However, I'm hopeful that with the check-sheet I can at least make some progress on them and perhaps I'll discover that I need to focus on two or three of the goals and then expand to the others later. At any rate, as I mentioned in the earlier blog, one of the main things I need to achieve my goals is a decent book or resource on APA citation. The handbook included in one of my earlier courses just isn't sufficient to help me really learn APA format. I am certain that I can also find excellent resources on the web and likely a great first step would be to complile a list of those sites and references so I can choose a few. As for some of the other goals, I do have access to several excellent tools for networking and collaborative communication. My current company often uses Microsoft NetMeeting to manage remote conferences with people from around the country and I have a moderate understanding of how to use that program. Our education program through Walden also offers several great resources for communication and collaboration, although I've found that almost nobody ever visits the chat room. I should probably also make a list of good message boards and online collaboration resources. I've already located a number of good online blogs and journals that I am tracking through my reader so I have a fairly good start on my professional journal goal, although I'd like to continue tracking down good resources in that area. If anybody knows any good French education blogs I'd be happy to hear about them. As for my final goal of providing materials and aid to other teachers, my blog can serve as a great jumping-off point for that. Hopefully over time, I'll be able to include some videos, audiocasts and voice threads that can help other educators learn about emerging technologies and ways to use them.

Unfortunately I have been on extensive travel for work the last two weeks (hello from Baltimore, by the way). I haven't had much opportunity to do much in the way of 'getting started' although I have begun building my check-sheet in excel so I can attempt to track my progress on my goals.

Improving Educational Technology Integration.

I am focusing on areas where I feel I need improvement in my usage and implementation of technology based-education. Specifically, I am working on a plan to specifically identify weakness areas and improve my own fluency so I may be better prepared to teach my students and effectively lead by example.
Of the five NETS-T standards, I definitely feel the least comfortable with standard number 4, Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility and number 5, Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership. In order to increase my confidence in these standards, I have set the following goals for myself:

A) Learn the necessary citation protocol for digital information and technology usage.
B) Develop a reasonable strategy for maximizing student access to technology, hardware and software in my learning environments
C) Learn how to work collaboratively and effectively with networked tools so I can pass this knowledge on to my students.
D) Make greater effort to communicate and collaborate with people through remote communication tools so I may become more proficient and comfortable and learn to escape the "lone island" mentality.
E) Make a definite effort to model collaborative and networked technology usage in constructive and meaningful ways so students can see the value of technological collaborative projects.
F) Find and subscribe to professional journals that can help me keep abridged of new developments in the field of educational technology.
G) Provide materials and aid to other teachers around me in order to help them become more comfortable with the tools, software and opportunities that continue to appear around us.

These goals should help me to improve my fluency in the NETS-T standards that I'm least comfortable with. In order to actually reach these goals, I'll need to put a few things in motion. First off, I'll need to find a better source book for APA format and citation. I'm not really comfortable with the materials I currently have and would like soemthing a bit clearer and more thorough. I'll also need to research some professional journals or blog-sites that can help me with current technological trends and opportunities so I can stay up to speed on new developments.
I need to commit more to communicating through blogs, chat sessions and message boards in order to improve my fluency. Using my RSS reader more faithfully to keep abridged of updates on some of my current tracked feeds would also help.
It is also important that I include a segment in my lesson-planning process for technology implementation and simply force myself to consider how I might implement technology in more of my lessons. Simply modifying my lesson-plan template could provide me a concrete reminder so I continue to focus on working technology into my lessons more effectively. I should also consider featuring a section of my blog-site on technology integration so I can highlight things I've tried as well as receive suggestions from other visitors about how they've used technology. This can help me as well as serve as a resource for some of the teachers around me as well as provide a good knowledge base for myself as I continue to improve my technology integration.
I think a good way of self-monitoring my progress in these areas would be to create a chart that would allow me to review my progress in my goals and action areas every two or three months. This would allow me to verify if I'm actually fulfilling my goals and working on the action items I've created. If I see that some items are simply not being fulfilled, I can review the goals and determine why I'm reticent to work on them. For those goals that I have improved on I can identify which actions were successful and perhaps find ways to modify my less attractive checklist items to come more in focus with activites that were successful for me. Once I see what things work well versus what things don't I should be able to modify my plan to give myself a better chance at maintaining the checklist and improving myself in my skill areas.

21st Century Learning Skills in Action

Most educators wouldn't get the slight "geek joke" in the title of this blog. Most of you probably know by now that I am currently in a software position and am responsible for our training programs. I have used the experiences in those training programs extensively for my coursework. Anyway, many of the best software reference books are from the "In Action" series. (Java In Action, EJB In Action, GWT In Action etc) These books generally attempt to teach in-depth knowledge through a series of exercises ultimately working toward a large scaled project. This course served the "In Action" purpose for me.
I was supposed to incorporate 21st century learning skills into my training courses. I assumed this would be relatively easy since I teach adults about web-centric technologies. Ultimately I found the modification of my training to be rather difficult and I had some real struggles to fully implement those skills into the curriculum.
One of the greatest discoveries I made concerned me rather than my students or my syllabus. I had always thought myself very web-fluent. I have very little trouble doing internet searches and generally handle technology very well in terms of discovery and presentation. However as I delved deeper into the course material and tried a few of the exercises I found that I was not a particularly adept searcher, I had merely found ways to work around my shortcomings. I also discovered that I had developed serious crutches for the tools and technologies that I was familiar with but when attempting to expand beyond my comfort zone I was fairly inept. It was quite a challenge for me to incorporate logical, structured web-searching into my curriculum as well as message board seeding and skimming because as it turned out, I wasn't too good at it myself.
I believe going forward I will pay a great deal more attention to the skills that I generally take for granted. I understand now that web fluency is a complicated and ever-changing skill that requires attention and effort to excel. I will also make a much more concerted effort to include the rudimentary information and communication skills into my curriculum that are so necessary for today's employees and managers. For example, the various modifications I made to my curriculum to incorporate more collaborative effort and presentations from the students proved to be very challenging because at times my foundational teaching simply was not sufficient to prepare the students for the tasks I was assigning. Simply asking students to "group up" and work on a project is inadequate. It turns out that without guidance these collaborative exercises more often than not produce additional tension and frustration when they are not properly prepared and presented.
One large part of my updated courses included formal APA citation for the students work. I admit that even now, after all these courses, I do struggle with the APA format and it's quirks and exceptions. From a professional standpoint, I would very much like to 'master' APA formatting so I could do a better job of teaching my students how to write and reference their work. Of course numerous resources exist for this goal so essentially the key requirement is for me dive in and simply master the material. As an English teacher, I admit this should have been done long ago and it is not without some chagrin that I admit this deficiency. However I am committed to improving and doing a better job not only with my own work, but with my ability to teach my students.

My Learning Theory - Redux

In reviewing my personal theory of learning submission from the beginning of the course, I must admit that I haven't significantly changed my approach from a philosophical perspective. I still believe in collaborative learning and constructive projects that provide students a chance to create something new and ideally useful from their recently acquired knowledge. The simple restraints of time, resources and endurance do dictate that sometimes other methodologies must be used as well. While I would love an environment that provided students constant opportunities to work together and create literary artifacts, that simply isn't possible all the time. What I would like to focus on his finding ways to harmoniously blend different learning philosophies in such a way that students who respond well to specific methodologies (behaviorism based students, for example who live to destroy the grade curve) can receive instruction that caters to their strengths while they are still exposed from time to time to different theories so they can learn to excel even when the instructional format isn't necessarily their favorite.
A couple of tools that I was impressed with have some different utility. Voice-threads and concept maps were admittedly new concepts for me and on the surface they seem to be relatively trivial technologies. However, these tools can help give students ownership of their knowledge. Concept maps can be used by students to organize thier information on a topic and apply learning connections between ideas and information so they can better remember. Furthermore, the concept maps, created by the students can serve as tremendous study tools. Voice-threads form a tremendous collaborative 'work in progress' construct that students can use to continually evolve their work and produce a team-centric information presentation or simply a running study group converstation. The tool has value both as an organizational construct for the students preparing it, but also a presentation format for other students who want to review the information and gain an introduction to the pertinent points.
I have already started working on a long-term wiki project for my S1000D training. My goal is to provide a centralized knowledge repository where professionals who work with the specification on a daily basis can contribute and benefit from the collaborative brain-trust. I have also considered building a tool I'm tentatively calling a blog-folio which allows teachers, students, parents and administrators to maintain a long-term portfolio of work that can be collaborative and iterative, utilizing input from all involved groups to improve the contents. I began thinking of this concept while learning about the voice-threads. It occurred to me that the voice-thread tools merely incorporated a number of common and well-known technologies into a collaborative platform. It seems to me that the same kind of thinking can be applied to a body of work from a student, incorporating everything from study notes and chat-transcripts to written assignments, quizzes, tests, submitted videos, speeches, or other presentations. Furthermore, feedback from teachers, administrators and input from parents and the students themselves can all be bundled into a manageable format that allows a holistic view of a students' work over a long-term sampling.

Constructivism, Behavioral theory and ... some soup.

When I teach my Junior English class, one of my favorite units is something I call the "isms". We go over the ideas of Classicism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism and Gothicism. My students often groan good-naturedly when I bring up the isms because I enjoy this part of the curriculum so much and we review a good deal of work from these various genres.

In many ways, teachers can look at learning theory as the 'isms' of teaching. We have behavioral theory... or "mouse in a maze-ism" where we reward students for proper behavior and repetition of a task or concept. We may also withhold reward or even provide punishment to students based upon their performance. Mouse in a maze-ism can basically be boiled down to the idea that students LIKE consistency in how they are taught and they LIKE to consistently produce work that pleases their teacher and subsequently provides them with cheesy-good grades. From a technology standpoint, a number of standard tools and technologies that students can learn and rely upon help them to develop a solid reliable relationship with their learning. For example, learning a word-processing tool like Word is generally very reinforcing, because the student is able to learn the various controls and reproduce reliably some work that will provide them with rewards.

One of the other ism's that teachers use more and more of is constructivism. This is a strategy that asks students to create some new and exciting artifact that they can show to others. An artifact could be an oral presentation, a movie, a webpage - even a rock that is painted nicely. the idea is that a student works to create something new by aggregating and synthesizing material into something unique and personal. I like to think of this as "build a better mouse-trapism". (Actually, I prefer constructivism to behavioral methods so the whole mousetrap catching the mouse in the maze is appropriate... sort of.)

There are other learning theory components that tie in to both of these major theories. Dr. Orey has suggested that people learn by classifying items, placing them in little mental boxes and then finding ways to associate all the different boxes in our minds (Laureate Education, 2007). This concept ties in more or less with some of the tenets of behavioral theory. The goal is to help students not only create these "boxes" in their minds but through repetition and personalized episodes help them create numerous links to those boxes so they can find the memory and reproduce it whenever needed.

Another sub-concept of constructivism is the idea of collaboratively working on some artifact. This brings several students together working on some project or deliverable and puts them into a social environment where they not only learn from the material presented but from eachother as well. Environmental theories suggest that students learn from the environment, people and situations around them. Therefore, teachers can combine better mouse-trap-ism with collaborative concepts to maximize the rewards of constructivism and social learning.

references:

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Program 4. Cognitive learning theories [Motion picture]. Bridging learning theory, instruction, and technology. Baltimore: Author.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.