#WOTechTeam

Week One

Well, here we go!

It was truly a privilege to be part of the conversation at CBD last Thursday with all of you awesome WO educators. With all of the things going on as the start of the school year was upon us (not to mention one last "official" summer weekend) after our day in Ada, I wanted to better reflect on what we all have embarked on, and hopefully get the digital conversation going which will continue all year.  

In this post, my hope is to model what I think the best platform for the WOTechTeam is to share our journey as we move through the phases of this technology integration pilot.  You've all agreed to be a part of this WOTechTeam and experiment with different strategies with the help of CBD and each other, but you've also signed on to be leaders to your colleagues.  You are brave.  Risk takers.  We might try things and they might not go well, and that will be GREAT - because you will share your honest experience and the rest of our staff and tech team will be better off for it.  More likely, you'll try things that transform your classroom and increase student engagement & learning.  You'll share that too and we can all benefit!

How Should We Share?

Edmodo seems like a pretty great digital tool/LMS for using with your students.  If everyone is on board, we can continue to utilize it to share with one another.  To be completely honest, I haven't logged back in to check it more than once since last week, and nothing new was posted.  If everyone is more comfortable and willing to commit to the Edmodo platform, let's hear about why from multiple people, and we'll stick with it.

Otherwise, I suggest the following:

1. Every one of us starts a blog page.  If you have one already, that's awesome.  Blogger is nice because Google bought it, but so are a ton of others.  WordPress and Tumblr are also popular, and you could even use your Google+ as a blog if you're so inclined.  Apparently Medium is a new-ish, hip blogging tool that I would probably pick if I didn't have this one already.  Platform is irrelevant, just that we commit to it.  
2. We each post something at least every other week - goal of once per week if you really enjoy it.  Can be anything, hopefully most focusing on experiences you've had utilizing strategies, apps, lessons, units, projects, assignments, etc. that relate to the pilot.  You could even post an app or website review.  They don't have to be dissertations.  It can be a single paragraph or two, just that it's something.  We learn by creating & sharing, and this will help you reflect, I promise.
3. You share your blog post on Twitter using #WOTechTeam, so all of them will be easily searchable for us to find.  Our motto will be what we'll eventually require our students to do: "Publish, Post, & Share!" - Full disclosure, I stole that motto from my friends at Leyden H.S. in Franklin Park, IL.
4. We comment on posts.  Give kudos, constructive feedback, empathy... anything to keep the conversation going and encourage one another.

This is a pretty cool video about why we should embrace sharing our ideas & experiences with one another via the blog!

Let the comments begin.  I look forward to working with all of you, and moving to the right on this matrix:

Back to Work

Guest post from +Anne Armstrong 

So it begins...

Last Tuesday night I hopped in the car with two of my colleagues, leaving my family for eight days, to attend two conferences in education in the Chicagoland area.  Kicking myself and wondering why I had agreed to this back in March, I wasn't too fired up.  I was giving up five days of my summer vacation, missing my three boys, and leaving my husband over our 12th anniversary.  Lucky for me, there was no need to doubt my March self.  

The first conference I attended was at Leyden High School, District 212 (#lhs1to1).  What a great district.  I met educators that have embraced a challenge they feel will enhance student learning and is best for kids. The students were friendly, positive, and excited to show off their school.  In fact that was the feeling the entire 3 days.  Leyden 212 was excited to say "look at this,"  "we did this," "we are proud of this."  The enthusiasm and pride was contagious and I walked away with these thoughts:

• Twitter is key
• Their initiative was supported by those on twitter, around the country and Canada, that were doing similar initiatives
• Twitter connects you to educators that empower, question, and encourage
• Twitter can connect you to people that you never thought that you would or could meet
• Follow me @AnneBArmstrong
• Involve all stakeholders
• Leyden met with students, parents, and staff from the beginning in order to make their 1:1 initiative successful
•  Digital Identities are important
• Professionally and personally you can gain so much as an educator if you participate in a digital community
• Notice I'm blogging (first time ever!)

I'm currently in day two of my second conference, a Rick and Becky DeFour PLC Summer Institute.  I'm amazed at the amount of educators here, soaking it all in.  My own team of fellow administrators is here with me, asking questions, giving feedback, and bonding.  What I am noticing is that everything I'm gaining from this conference, I'm linking to the previous.  What I'm feeling good about is that its doable, all of it.

Take-aways from Lincolnshire to come...

Using Twitter as an Educational Tool

I love learning in depth things about tech products I already think I know well.  Whenever you think you know quite a bit about something and can't learn more about it, you're in trouble.

Before you continue reading, if you want a site that has quite a bit of introductory information about Twitter, click here.

The last few days have been spent at Leyden High School for their Chromebooks 1 to 1 Summer Symposium.  They were amazing hosts, and we learned invaluable information during those three days.  That's for another blog post that I'm working on that has much more information about what I took away from the conference.

What surprised me is how fully and quickly everyone at the conference embraced Twitter for real time sharing, commenting, and networking.  Thinking to myself: "I already know that Twitter can be a useful tool", I started Tweeting using the set #LHS1to1 and got going.

It was awesome.

People were FAST sharing all day.  During Keynotes especially (and they were great) from +Jaime Casap, +Chris Lehmann, and +George Couros - each time there was a powerful and/or witty quote? BAM! Tweeted with the hash tag.

+George Couros even shared a list he created in Twitter of great tech follows (you can see his list here) for everyone to check out.  I did, and he was right.  There's some awesome ideas being shared all the time on Twitter from educators all around the world.

That inspired me to create my own list of Educators and school accounts for West Ottawa.

The BEST way to follow everything at once while at a conference or event is to watch that hash tag in real time either on the Twitter.com website and searching the # of your choice, or by using a really cool web app called TweetDeck. (pictured below)

With TweetDeck, you can see multiple feeds at once of different things, all of which is easily to customize.  In my example above, I've got my own timeline, then any interactions (anytime someone else mentions me, retweets me, or favorites one of my tweets), then Tweets from anyone on the "WO Follows" Twitter list I just created, plus any Tweets from the conference hash tag, #atplc.

It was great to see other educators sharing their thoughts and perceptions of what we were experiencing as they were happening at the conference.

What ways can we utilize this tool more effectively to communicate with teachers, students and parents?

Paper.li

It's been quite some time since an update, so here's one:

1.  Paper.li
This is such a cool idea.  Sign-in with your Twitter or Facebook account, focus around a topic of your choice, then start adding some of your favorite follows on any number of services including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  There are settings to pull weekly, daily, or even twice daily from up to 20 feeds of your choice, and the site does the rest organizing them into a nice looking format.  I was eager to connect several EdTech sources, along with some Google Apps in Education follows.  Take a look at my attempt here, or by clicking the screenshot below.

Why Google+ Is Totally Awesome...

If you've suffered through one of my rants recently about why I'm smitten with Google's (relatively) new-ish social media platform, or if you yourself have already signed up and started exploring, this might not be news to you. Many of you might be, as I once was, a bit leery of social networking (a'la Facebook), but I hope you give it a try and see the benefit of using this product.

IT'S NOT FACEBOOK

Arguably the best part of Google+ is that it's not Facebook. Admittedly, I'm a FB hater. Partially because, in my job, it can often be the source of discontent between students which spills into out-and-out mean behavior in the school building. Cyberbullying can (sadly) occur in any social media platform, Google+ notwithstanding, but if we teach students to use social media wisely, it can and should become a very powerful communication and learning tool. That's a post for another day.

Google+ differs from Facebook at this point in its evolution because it is being used more for making connections with other people that have the same interests & passions that you do, NOT for keeping in touch with people from your past. As it currently stands, most of my "followers" (though not many) are people I don't know and have added me to circles based on my posts.

I heard the difference described best watching an OnAir Hangout (Google-lingo for Webinar or Webcast) about Google+, in which one of the moderators explained his use of it something like this: "Facebook is to see pictures of and stay in touch with people you went to high school with, and Google+ is for learning from and discussing your passions with people you WISH you went to high school with."

I still like that description.

DON'T FEAR, LEARN

I'm not naive. I realize that promoting a product for teachers to use that is similar to Facebook may open the door to potential problems if poor decisions are made with a very beneficial communication tool. However, social media is not only here to stay, it is and will continue to be a major part of our students' lives. It is up to us to show students the positive ways it can and should be used. The biggest reason why G+ should not be brushed aside or feared by educators is that it's very easy to maintain Circles of those whom your posts can be seen by. Cute pictures of your kids that you want to share but not publicly to all of your followers? Share them only to your "Family" and "Friends" Circles. Want to share an article about reading strategies in the classroom with your colleagues that your cousin might not be interested in? Share to your "Education" Circle. Additionally, if G+ is something you want to use solely for professional reasons, there's plenty of room for that.

COMMUNITIES

My favorite aspect is a new element called "Communities", which allows you to join groups whose members post topic-specific articles, resources and experiences to the group. Users comment, discuss and ask questions about the post. My personal favorite Communities are: Chromebooks EDU, EdTech, Common Core, Educators on Google+, and Google Apps in Education. This is a great place to pose a specific question, or browse posts for interesting articles or to participate in the dialogue with like-minded folks about what you're interested in. While I've mostly been exploring technology in education kinds of Communities, at this point, there's likely one for anything you may think of.  Also, for iOS users, the Google+ app is really nice looking and user friendly.  Below is a screenshot of a good portion of the Communities I've joined.

POSSIBILITIES IN EDUCATION

I'm planning on throwing the question out to some of the above Communities I've joined to learn how some schools have started to use G+ with students, but for now, I am really enjoying the collegiality of learning from other educators across the country and around the world.  The articles that are shared and the ideas that people are willing to throw out for discussion are useful, relevant, and yes, sometimes pie-in-the sky, but that's what makes it fun!

The potential use for G+ in a 1:1 setting is what has the potential to be really cool down the road. Several colleges & universities have begun to embrace Google+, especially the Hangout feature for group projects and professors hosting live discussions and office hours.

For now, I would advise any educator that has yet to give social media a try to jump in and see if you like Google+.  CLICK HERE for a nice introduction to G+ that will help you sign up, if you so choose.  You'll need a personal Gmail account - which I would advise you should have anyway at this point - as most districts (including ours) do not have Google+ turned on for users within their domain.

Try it out, and happy +1ing!

Google Drive Refresher & The Bigger Picture

Getting Google-y.  Peace out, Microsoft Office.

This school year has been a deliberate attempt for me to create entirely outside the Microsoft Office environment, sort of a personal goal.  As it stands, I have not yet opened Word, PowerPoint, or really even Excel anymore to CREATE (occasionally I paste large quantities of data in Excel to print it... maybe I'll give Google Sheets a try next time!).  Disclaimer: Keynote, Pages, and Notability for iPad are awesome, and I've created plenty with those, but still almost always end up converting and organizing in Google Drive for easy access and sharing purposes.

We recently held a brief session after school to offer some tips and useful features of Google Drive. Our school has been a "GAFE" (Google Apps for Education) school for about a year and a half at this point, and I believe we are just scratching the surface of the potential it has as a tool to positively impact teaching and learning. Our agenda for the hour-long session was simple, yet hopefully helpful to people wanting to feel more comfortable working, creating and sharing in the Google environment, and could use some reminders of the functionality within Drive.

Take a peek at the agenda here.

The Bigger Picture

It is always energizing for me to work with staff on this issue specifically (especially during a time of the year when I'm heavily involved with state testing), both because I truly enjoy every aspect of it, and I very much believe that education is headed in a direction in which mastery of these kinds of cloud-based tools will be paramount to inspiring a generation of students that are growing up with smartphones and iDevices glued to their persons, and they can search for any factoid you can imagine within seconds.

That's why it's exciting.

"Kids today" are not jaded and spoiled by too much technology, but they do need direction & digital citizenship lessons.  Through proper utilization of tools like Google Drive we can focus even more on teaching them HOW to sift through the rubbish, analyze quality sources, think critically and form their own opinions; ones which will define them as they grow educationally and become lifelong learners beyond the walls of our institution.

Thanks to the staff members that chose the option to check out our "refresher course", and to many that have invested quality time becoming accustomed to getting Google-y already!  For you Chrome users, the Chrome Web Store was just opened for us in the domain to explore - there are some GREAT free apps for education.

If you haven't yet, indulge me and stay up-to-date on this little blog experiment of mine. Also, do yourself a favor and create a Google+ profile ASAP with your personal Gmail account - many businesses/institutions don't have it turned on - , and follow me (and many others) to start exploring your own specific educational and technological interests.  Think of it as a smarter/nicer/cleaner/generally better version of Facebook.

Jump in. The water is nice. (Not to be confused with: "Drink the Kool-Aid, everybody's doing it!")

Cheers,
J

Adding Images to Google Forms

This process is a bit cumbersome, but at least it's possible! A few teachers have asked about this early on as we began to use Google forms more and more, and the thought of using them as an online quiz option was a bit limited if you needed students to identify or refer to a graph, chart, or any other image.

View the post with instructions here.

Thanks +James Eichmiller & +Bryan Weinert  for the post & video.