Get Connected -- It's Connected Educator Month!

For as many people as a teacher comes into contact with during the day, anybody who has been in the classroom knows that teachers can often feel very isolated from other professionals.

Much of it has to do with the physical design of our school buildings. Much to do with the logistical design of our school day.  Part of it is that so much of our day is spent with and preparing for our students that little time (or energy) is left to connect with other adults in meaningful ways.

During this month, we want to raise awareness, though, that you don't have to go it alone!  Make this the moment when you intentionally reach out to others to connect professionally.  Ask a question.  Share an experience or a practice.  Offer advice, or seek it.  The world is more connected today than ever, and the beauty is that those connections are more flexible and adaptable than ever before!  Connect when you have time or can fit it into your schedule.  There are so many of us who slip these connections in just before bed, or at a late hour when we are up thinking about "educator issues" that just won't let us drift off to sleep.  Maybe that's a moment when you can commit to giving it a try without worry of trying to fit another thing into an already packed day.

Remember the old adage, "Many hands make light work."  Never have there been more connected educators willing to throw in to a fellow educator (albeit an absolute stranger) for the good of the cause.  For those of us who have reached out and started connecting, it's amazing how rejuvenated, supported, and, well, connected you feel to others in your profession, and also, beyond your school walls.  The perspective gained can be empowering and enlightening!

Where to Start?

There are SO MANY great places to start, but being Connected Educator month, one resource I'd love to point out the Connected Educator website.  From book clubs to events to discussion groups, you'll find it all here.  The beauty is that you'll find others who have taken the step forward to become a more connected educator, meaning you'll find people with the same goal of reaching out and trying new things.

On this site you'll also find an amazing tool -- the edConnectr.  After a few minutes of inputting my personal educational interests, areas of educational expertise, and topics I'd like to connect with others on, it put forward a graph of other connected educators I may want to connect with, and as much personal contact information as the person was willing to include. 

Take a look at my graph at right.  

Each pin represents a person or group that I can connect with to start a conversation.  Upon review, I knew a few of these names, but many were local people that I have not yet met.

Perhaps it is time for you to create an edConnectr graph, just to see who there is to connect with.  Take it one step further, and challenge yourself to reach out and connect with somebody, just to try something new and to begin connecting yourself as an educator.

So go on -- give it a whirl, make a personal commitment, and see if you can get connected this month.  

And yes...these resources came to me from people I have connected with in my own Personal/Professional Learning Networks -- and it is THESE relationships that have made getting connected such a value added to my professional life!  Thank you to all of you who I have been able to connect with over the past 8 years!  It has been an absolute life changing experience for me.

You Can't Teach Advanced Use of Technology

In today's world, educators tend to take more than their fair share of abuse from the general public, from lawmakers, and even from parents and students. So, when I get a chance to boast of the talents and dedication of the wonderful teachers that I have an opportunity to work with, I take it.

One thing I have always known about my colleagues in education is that we are among the most resourceful and creative professionals that anyone can imagine.  As a profession, we are tasked to do an incredibly important job, often without the budget or resources to do that job with ease (I'm talking about the budget of an individual classroom teacher here).  Yet, we almost always find a way to get the job done within the budget we are given.  This is just one way we demonstrate how creative and resourceful we are (even though it most often goes unnoticed).

Those two skills, resourcefulness and creativity, are essential tools in all aspects of a teacher's world, including the meaningful incorporation of technology.

Last week I started my first session in a three week session on "Advanced Google Use in the Classroom." The name happened naturally and probably without enough consideration.  We have a Beginner's Guide to Using Google course, and we needed to offer the next level of that.  The Advanced Google Use course was born.

However, advanced use is an absolute misnomer.  I have really thought about this, and I just can't come up with a clear definition or an outline of what Advanced Google Apps use actually is.  I can come up with examples of how Google Apps can be used in a more complex way, or for more interesting outcomes, but I just cannot put my finger on what I would teach in a course titled "Advanced Google Use in the Classroom" that would be all that much different than what we are teaching in the beginner's level course.

That is likely a sign of the perfect design of the tool set.  Google Apps (like other well designed platforms) is easy to use.  The skills learned and used in one tool are often closely related to skills you would use in another tool.  That quality is probably at the heart of my argument.  Once I've taught somebody the concept of sharing (which is truly a beginner level skill in the world of Google Apps), it applies everywhere.  Once I've taught them about the auto-generated URLs of all documents in Drive, that skill wraps neatly into every other tool.  The same is true of image manipulation, text editing, and even embedding (perhaps a "slightly" more advanced skill, but even that I question).

However, there is significant difference between the way a "beginning" Google Apps user interacts with the Google tools, and the way a more "advanced" Google user utilizes the tools.  

If the skills needed to function both as a beginner and an advanced user are nearly the same (and yes, I get that somebody who knows how to script in Spreadsheets has a far more advanced skill than we would teach beginners...that's about the best example I can come up with of a truly advanced skill), the delineation between these two uses has to exist within something the user brings to the experience.

Pinpointing what that special something is might not be as hard as it seems.  There seem to be two key elements that a more advanced user has that a beginning user does not.

1. Platform-wide Thinking Related to Product Design

When a user begins to understand how the platform is built, how the tools are inter-related, and how the tools can interact to create a desired "effect," the user can begin to manipulate the tools in a way that they weren't initially intended or that the beginner may not be able to see as possible.

2. Creativity

Once the platform tools are understood, the user can begin to imagine what could be possible, running mental "experiments" on the way tools will perform together before actually developing the final product. In this way, the use is creatively considering what problem needs to be solved or what need must be met, and then developing a way to resolve that issue or meet that need with the

tool set in front of them.

To be honest, this seems to be the advantage that our young people (our "digital natives") have over adults (the "digital immigrants").  They tend to see the inter-relatedness of these products because they have not experienced a world where design wasn't a consideration in the end user experience.  They have an expectation that the tools work together, and as a result, they do not have to put much emphasis on first understanding the platform.

With that said, it seems apparent to me that our emphasis needs to be on teaching our "beginners" not only how the products we teach them to use work, but how they are designed to work together.  It also seems to me that if we find products that are not designed to work together, we consider if they are a product that is truly necessary in our environment, and if not necessary, we consider removing the product.  As Technology Coaches/Coordinators/Integrators, our systems level knowledge of how tools work together mandates us to help remove the hurdle of poorly designed technology from educational environments for the betterment of all!

Once we help our newest users begin to build an understanding of how tools and platforms work together, I know that we will not have to teach "Advanced Tech Use" courses to teachers.  They will begin to apply skills that most teachers have learned, developed, and honed innately -- their resourcefulness and creativity.  That's the moment I am most excited to see in the teachers that I work with, because that is the moment when all of the frustration and stress about using technology clears and a moment of realization and clarity takes its place.  That's the moment they become "advanced" technology users because its the point where the journey stops being about the technology and re-focuses on teaching and learning!

Taking basic skills and turning them into masterful performances is driven by creativity and resourcefulness.

A Teachable Moment: Helping Students to Understand Permanence of the Digital Age

Surprised parents and staff members have been emailing me this week with a concern.  Googling the keywords of our school district's name provides some information about the district along with an image that represents members of our student body, but not in the positive or academic light most of us might hope.

While there is a larger issue here of the district being improperly and unfairly represented in the public eye (we are presently working on a solution to this issue as we want the district positively and accurately represented for the meaningful teaching and learning that happens here), there is something we can use in this event to assist in a meaningful conversation with students and families.

With services like SnapChat and Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, sharing with the world is easier than ever before.  Especially with some of these services, but true for all, users often confuse the ability to instantaneously share with the world with the appropriateness of doing so.  Add to that the sense of anonymity, the tidal wave of information that is being shared worldwide (as in "everybody is doing it"), and the false "promise" of the information existing only in the short term (services like InstaGram allow users to post to the world, but in very short intervals, as in 10-15 seconds, before the post is removed).

However, as so many of us are aware of, the truth is that once data is captured and posted in a public forum (and the Internet is a public forum), even if only for a few seconds, the potential exists for that data to live forever.

This is exactly how the image that presently represents our district in a Google search (not a decision consciously made by anybody in the district, by Google itself, but simply a result of an algorithm written and a change in the way Google presents information for ease of viewing), an image of some young people captured in a dance position while at a school dance that may have made them blush had their parents been present, came to be.  It seems to have been captured and shared online, likely by a student interested in updating others on the fun of the evening.  It probably didn't get much attention immediately.  However, it was picked up in a story by a local news outlet about the appropriateness of student behavior at dances (not just our students...students across the area).  That seems to have gained some traction with viewers, and the image has been viewed many times by many people.  That moved the status of the image up in Google's search rankings.  When the Google Knowledge Graph was created and launched publicly, the ranking of that image, coupled with the search term of our school's name, resulted in the "marriage" of the district's online reputation with a student's behavior at a moment in time.  Something the students likely had not considered or even imagined in that moment.

As unfortunate as any of this may be, there is a teachable moment in this.  In a digital world, our actions (both online and in real life) do not have the promise of privacy.  While we may (or may not) disagree with this reality, it is still, in fact, a reality.  This week's headlines about the availability of private digital data possibly available to government entities supports this reality.

Students need to hear that message -- in a digital world, our actions (both online and in real life) do not have the promise of privacy.  They need to be engaged in the conversation.  They need to consider how that information may positively or negatively impact them in the present and in the future.  These are all meaningful discussions that we, as educators, cannot be afraid to engage in.  Even if we are not technically savvy enough to know all of the latest digital tools, sites, trends, and methods.  We have life experience enough to talk about the value of students holding themselves to a standard that they (and their families and communities) deem appropriate.  We have life experience enough to talk about how decisions made in a weak moment today can forever impact our futures.  This doesn't require knowledge about technology -- let the kids bring that knowledge and experience to the conversation.  Instead, it takes us actively talking with kids and caring about their lives today, and in the future.  And we do care!

That is the teachable moment in this.