Five years ago I was quite hesitant to use Twitter. My student assistants found little value in using  it. They failed to see differences between it and, say,  the "update function" of Facebook. I read two books about it, consulted several Carroll alumni who DO use it (thanks Chris G,  Lori S, and Fred K.), and studiedt fellow academics’ twittering experiences documented in publications which I closely read and value.  I objected to the Procrustean process of having  my thoughts, ideas, and communications reduced to 140 characters or less ("thought bytes"). Also, I was petrified at my inability to decrease or at least slow down my communication and information acquisition activities. I very much need and treasure having time to reflect, to read, to assimilate, and to create. Since then, however, I have reconsidered Twitter as a learning tool. "To Twit or not to Twit?" for me is no longer the appropriate way to frame the issue. Rather, the questions for me are: Under what circumstances might Twitter be enable my  capabilities for more successful teaching?  How can I use Twitter to improve my ability to find answers to questions I am investigating? How can I minimize the costs to me (time away from other things; wheat to chaff ratio) of my using Twitter? How can I best manage the tool? Today Twitter is an invaluable personal learning and communication resource that I have fine-tuned for my particular needs. Currently I choose to follow 78 "thought leaders" whom I very much admire.   I am in the process of comparing  several  Twitter-management apps (e.g. Tweetdeck; Tweetbot) which show promise to help me optimize the efficiency of my use of the tool.  Now I need to consider implementing these Advanced Twitter Tips I encountered tonight! @professorDavidS              Filed under: Curious David Tagged: Education, Technology Learning Tools, Top 100 Learning Tools, Twitter

After a wonderful 10 year relationship with the Northwest Independent School District, I have decided to move on and enter into a new and excited role with ESC Region 11 (now known in my head, at least, as "The Reeg"). In many ways, this new role will be a reinvention or revamping of Instructional Technology (Digital Leadership) at the region level.  It’s a huge task, but with our devil-may-care team and fearless leader showing the way, I think it’ll be a challenging, yet fun adventure that will positively affect many thousands of students.  This new incarnation of the Digital Learning Team is just off-center enough to think we can complete the task and enjoy ourselves as we do it (see video above). It’s been 16 years since I’ve entered into this most important and urgent of industries and I can honestly say I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. The past decade with Northwest ISD has been an education in itself.  NISD is, by far, the best district I’ve worked for because it has the best people I’ve work with and under.  Certainly, we all have our warts and we all have our Sisyphean challenges.  Few things in this world are perfect.  But the people I’ve worked closely with at Northwest were always concerned with what is best for students.  They were passionate about that charge and took action to deliver a kind of education that remained true to that goal. I’ve grown as an educator and person under the tutelage (whether they knew it or not) of so many great people at NISD.  Credit should be given where it is due and I would not be who I am as an educational leader with the patience and help of so many other educational leaders. My non-exhaustive & semi-cryptic list of NISD rockstars that I am indebted to: Mr. H - as complete an educator as one can hope for.  He walks the walk. Mrs. Cr - an expert in her field and always asking "How does this help my class?" Mr. G - always asking "How can we do it better?" Mrs. V - always asking "What do your students need and I’ll get it for you?" Mr. Palermo - always suggesting "Do what is right by your students, not what’s in the textbooks or rulebooks." Mrs. C - willing to serve her campuses in any capacity that is true the 21st century learner model and not giving herself enough credit as a tremendous leader Mrs. C - a dedicated educator who will take on Herculean tasks for her campuses without complaint and without seeking recognition.  A powerhouse of intelligence and dedication. Mr. P - never underestimate this guy-a versatile and passionate leader that gets in the trenches with you and loves every second of it Mrs. H - stable presence no matter the situation and quick study of everything The entire English department at BNHS - genius teaching to create other geniuses Mr. M - a great leader who makes every attempt to trust his people and let them do what they do best Mrs. B - teaching to her student’s souls, not just their minds. Mrs. H - pushing her students to be outstanding in every way Mr. R - pouring his soul into his work and then playing it for everyone to see Thanks to you all. I’m really pumped about the transition into this new role that will allow me to serve even more students in the creative and slightly off center way that I do.  I’m pumped to be part of a dedicated and talented team that has been nothing but welcoming.  Finally, I’m pumped about serving visionary school districts that are ready to lead their students into a future that students already own (we’re just taking care of it for them till they get there).  I can’t wait to see the culture of exceptionalism that we all create together.Filed under: In The Classroom

I am currently in Barcelona, where I have been attended the final face-to-face METIS project meeting. The project finishes at the end of February. We had the project officer with us, Anila Troshani, it was nice to meet her and she had lots of useful, practical advice for us. The meeting provided us with a chance to reflect on achievements to date, it was very impressive seeing all the outputs produced and the number of people we reached through project activities. It has been a great consortium to be part of, consisting of leading learning design researchers from across Europe and ably led by Yannis Dimitriadis from the University of Valladolid. Thanks for the local organisation and in particular the nice restaurants go to Davinia Hernández-Leo. The main activities and achievements of the project centre around two aspects: the creation of an Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE), building on tools created by members of the consortium, and a series of Learning Design workshops, enabling participants to use the ILDE. The target groups were Higher Education (UK), Adult Education (Spain) and in-service teacher trainers (Greece). The project website states the following:  The METIS project aims at promoting the benefits of learning design and related tools for Information and Communication Technology - ICT (ICT), to adopt innovative teaching in daily teaching practices in vocational training, higher education and adult education. The project goes one step ahead of this formal training for professional development by completing professional development workshops with a set of "closed-cycle workshops", which aimed at teachers who will introduce authentic learning situations, applying innovative teaching (e.g. and through collaborative project work learning and evaluation), using learning design tools in an Integrated Learning Environment Design (ILDE). ILDE and the associated documentation are available online. It has been great working on the project and I hope to have the opportunity to collaborate with these people in the future. 

Two soon-to-be graduates Phoumany and Ryan I’m going to miss these two student friends/students/best teachers/fellow conspirators when they depart campus on May 11 as graduates. Thanks, Phoumany and Ryan for all the laughter and learning and for making my Carroll experiences more joyful. Things we’ve done in Dr. Simpson’s Office Over the Past Few Years: (red items added by DumbleDave) Catalogued over 1,000 books (Dr. Simpson most likely has read them all!) Decorated the office for his birthday. Decorated every other holiday. Played Temple Run. We wrote a book! Played nose-goes when the phone rang. Learned how to use fountain pens. Created and Conducted Rogers Hospital Climate Survey. Almost got killed… multiple times. Utilized all furniture in the office. Became PC savy and MAC savy. Played with random trinkets. Conducted "Power of Ten" study.  Researched Purple People Eater 15. Helped Evaluate Carroll University’s Alumni  National Day of Service Food Drive 16. Wrote a winning grant to received IPads to develop a Virtual European Immersion course. 17. Tooled around with most of Jane Hart’s technology learning tools. 18. Made sure that Dr. Simpson ate his lunch. 19. Laughed; cried; cheered; booed. 20. Complained.  Filed under: App Generation, Carroll Reflections, Carroll University USA, Curious David, Jane Hart's Top 100 Learning Tools, technology tools, Uncategorized Tagged: Best Teachers, Carroll University USA, Commencement, Jane Hart, Technology Learning Tools, Virtual Cultural Immersion

This is an archived story of previous 8th ICT collaborate blog responses. [View the story "Mr. Kirsch's Archived Student Blogging." on Storify]

The Impetus Instruction technology coaches who care about their audiences are always looking for ways to spice up the mostly boring "sit and get" sessions that have become the norm. A few weeks ago as my family and I were driving through the wondrous mountains of Colorado avoiding bears (for real…I saw a big brown one!) I was lucky enough to be sliding through twitter and came across Mr. Brazeau’s (@Braz74) #sstlap chat.  In an effort, I think, to get his chat participants to get to know each other he had the chat center around "speed dating". Participants were asked questions in quick succession which made the chat super fast paced.  I thought the chat might become too chaotic, but, to my surprise, everyone was exchanging back stories, lol’ing each other, and having what seemed to be a good time (I even met another teacher from my motherland, Costa Rica…a rarity!). The Experiment The great Tracie Cain (@TracieGCain) and I had the opportunity to implement speed dating in person, during a Ponder ISD PD session. Parameters: Staff or students will be spending 3 minutes maximum exchanging ideas.  This can be anything from a review for a test, to favorite ed apps, to simply a "how do you do" social exchange.  Once the time is up, it’s time to move.  The build up of anticipation to exchange further is what will make the final session so awesome. Here’s the How To: 1) To Begin: The entire point of speed dating is to quickly sift sensory input to make a decision on what you do or don’t like within a super fast context.  This forces participants to think and speak concisely and listen with intent. Let’s assume a positive presupposition: people will like something they hear.  Running with this assumption, it will be useful for participants to make contact cards with their a) names b) twitter handles c) email addresses d) blog sites and so on.  Participants can then exchange these cards quickly as they move on to the next person.  They should also have name tags of course, but the contact card named above might be a more lasting artifact. If you do a name tag try to make these can be fun as well.  They can be serious or funny… I think next time I’ll use the "gangsta name" machine  (or the more PG one here) to produce massive quantums of street cred for my peeps (mine is Big Tricky). 2) Instructions: Announce to your group what speed dating is, why you’re doing it, and to respect the clock. If you like what you hear a more in depth discussion can be had after the rounds during the "smack down".  Whatever topic you’re covering, keep in mind that your staff or students will be spending approximately 3 minutes per person during the "speed dating" exchange.  Overly obtuse topics may need to be avoided. Speed dating is a setup meant to facilitate a quick exchange of information in order to sift what you like and what you don’t like.  If some information is exchange that piques your curiosity, then students or staff should exchange twitter handles or email addresses or somehow identify each other.  It might be useful to set up a Padlet to allow those who are interested in similar topics or exchanges to post experiences or reflections in groupings (much like the beginning part of an edcamp).  Each person can post contact information or reflections in every group or category if they wish. However, detailed reflections should be saved for the "smack down" at the end of the session. This builds anticipation & keeps the momentum moving forward all the way through the entire process. 3) Check list: Each person will have a check list with either a) each person’s twitter handle, name or I.D. #.  As they rotate through the group, they will write notes to help them remember what was discussed and where their interest level was.  This will be useful, again, later during the "smack down". 4) Setting up the rotations: Split the team in half.  One half will be sitting down, while the other half will be rotating from one person to the next in 3 minute intervals.  Each person, once the "dating" begins has 90 second to talk about their topic.  When time is up, the other person does the same.  There are NO exceptions.  After the 3 minutes is up people must move along. You can move in a normal rotation (move to your left each time) or you can trick it up by asking participants to randomly move (move to your right 3 spaces then move to your left 5 spaces).  Make sure that someone who knows how to do math is in the room if you do the latter. 5) Smack Down: Once your rotations are done, gather as a group and have an edcamp type "smack down".  Share, share, share via verbal commentary, on the spot blogging, tweeting, instagraming… Let the current of energy move the conversation out into the interwebs! Note to self…This may be a super useful activity after lunch. Twitter Aside This is why I love Twitter so much!  Speed dating was used in a chat session by @Braz74 weeks ago and @TracieGCain and I facilitated its use during a technology PD session.  None of us could have made this work without the others.  Incredible!Filed under: In The Classroom, Technology Tagged: active learning, active students, classroom activities, Classroom Activity, fun activities, fun lessons, fun PD, Gueri11aEd, GuerillaEd, meetings, PD, PD activities, professional development, speed dating, speedating, speeddating, sstlap, teacher PD, thrasymachus, thrasymakos

  I am currently in Madrid at an EMMA project meeting. It has been a useful meeting and timely, given we have now run the first round of MOOCs. Five providers delivered seven MOOCs in the Autumn. Leicester ran two MOOCs; one on Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) and one on Learning Design. We each summarised our reflections on the MOOCs. Paul Rudman and I summarised the Leceister experience. Each MOOC was 8 weeks long, consisting of three hours of learning each week. Each week was structured in the following way: Activate, Demonstrate and Reflect. The materials consisted of text, images and video, and participants were encourage to contribute to discussions forums and blogs. Each week began with a short summary video from me, outlining the focus for that weeks and associated activities. The MOOCs were adapted from existing materials associated with two Masters level, 30 credit modules. The timing associated with activities were clearly labeled and they were divided into core and extension activities. The TEL MOOC gave an overview of technologies and their implications for education. Participant were encouraged to reflect on the relevance for their own practice. The Learning Design module was based around the 7Cs of Learning Design framework. We were disappointed by the number of people who participated, but put this down to the late advertising of the MOOCs. In addition, the EMMA platform was still in development, so perhaps the low numbers were not such a bad thing. Nonetheless we had around 70 participants start each MOOC. As a result of our experience on this first round of MOOCs and a detailed usability test the platform is much improved. We aim to re-run them later in the year. Other courses run included Climate Change, Search on the Internet and Excel 2010, and e-learning (in Dutch). A second wave of MOOCs will be launched in the New Year, in March and May. Including an exciting one from France on wine! New functionality is planned for the platform, including peer assessment and a dashboard of social media plug-ins. One of the courses offered will be from the METIS project; a Learning Design MOOC based on the ILDE Learning Design tool, this will be lead by Yishay Mor. The MOOC will be 5 - 6 weeks long, consisting of between 3 - 10 hours of learning each week. The main target of the MOOC will be people interesting in designing MOOC, so it is a valuable addition to the EMMA portfolio of MOOCs. This will be the first MOOC offered by a third-party MOOC provider. We have already had a number of institutions/projects approaches us to see if they can use the EMMA platform and as a result we are currently drafting a set of criteria to assess MOOCs offered by third party providers (Table 1).  Table 1 Criteria Description Alignment with the EMMA principles The following are core principles for the EMMA project: focus on European member states, multicultural, open practices, accessible and ethically sound. The quality of the content and activities. The MOOC should be based on sound pedagogical principles, including: clear learning outcomes/objectives, a clear learning pathway, an indication of activity timings, effective use of text, audio and video, and clear assessment elements (if included). Further guidance on creating good quality content and activities can be found in the EMMA good practice guide in the design of MOOCs. Experience of the MOOC providers The MOOC provider should be a subject expert in terms of the focus of the MOOC, and also have experience of designing and/or delivery online learning.   The MOOC should be delivered in one of the EMMA supported languages EMMA currently supports languages in: English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. Other European languages may be included in the future, including French and Estonian. The MOOC provider must be an EU member state The MOOC provider should be one of the 28 EU countries. Attendance at the EMMA Summer School Priority will be given to MOOC providers who are willing to attend the EMMA Summer School. Resources The MOOC provider should provide evidence that they have sufficient human resources to design and deliver the MOOC. It addition they should be prepared to adhere to the EMMA approach, and work within the constraints in terms of timescales, for example time to complete transcription and translation. They should be prepared to adapt their MOOC to fit the EMMA platform. Fits within one of the EMMA cluster subject areas   The MOOC should fit within one of EMMA’s cluster subject areas, which are: Intercultural issues, e-learning and pedagogies, food and the environment, and digital technologies. New cluster subject areas may be added over time.  

I’m in the process of revisiting several resources that have influenced my choice of online teaching tools. This post focuses on the book by Steve Johnson (2011)—a thoughtful and concise compendium of his thinking about today’s "tech-savvy" (high school age) learners and how to prepare them for their digital future. He systematically  evaluates over 30 "etools" he judges to be useful for engendering collaboration, creation, and publication across the curriculum, and offers concrete suggestions for how to get started (and how to keep up) as an instructor. Among the many tools that he recommends that I have personally found especially useful for my teaching at the college/university level are the following: I have grown to like Animoto as a vehicle for creating and sharing video-like productions, despite its constraints of needing to use Adobe Flash and accepting only MP3 formatted music files. I have elected to have an educational account with them. Here is an example of how I have used it. WordPress is now my blogging tool of choice and the blogging tool that I teach to students. I myself move back and forth between WordPress.com ("David in Carroll Land") and WordPres.org  ("Curious David in Carroll Land"). The latter gives me far more creative freedom (e.g. the use of plugins) but at an additional cost (both financial and time I need to devote to its higher learning-curve). Here is an example of a WordPress.com blog piece in which my student research assistants shared  "sand box" activities while they explored for me the value of some beta version software which showed promise to me of eventually being useful in the classroom.  Here, on the other hand, is a recent blog piece co-written with my students using the WordPress.org blogging software (which I still am at an early stage of mastering). Without doubt, my best etool  evaluators are my highly trained student assistants. Google Docs is becoming an increasingly important tool for me. Indeed, I would love to devote the time to create a Google Apps course for our students.  Richard Bryne, an educator thought leader whom I follow on Twitter and whose contributions I benefit from, has created a wonderful comprehensive guide to this tool. Presently my students are more facile with this learning tool than I!.  We regularly use it as a means of collaborating and sharing documents —photos, videos, journal articles, rough drafts, spreadsheets. Just today one of my senior research seminar students shared with me, on Google Drive, a wonderful video she had made of her interviewing her twelve-year-old son about his experiences with a form of Asperger syndrome. Keri and I shortly shall be incorporating this video and her insights about parenting such a special child into a blog piece as a first step in assisting her in writing a book to share her knowledge.  Filed under: App Generation, Blogging, book-writing, Carroll University USA, Curious David, Jane Hart's Top 100 Learning Tools, LucidPress, technology tools Tagged: blogging, Carroll University USA, Education, Higher Education, Research Seminar, Technology Learning Tools, Top 100 Learning Tools

Source: docs.google.com Great resource to keep track of weekly educational twitter chat hashtags. See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Etymologically speaking, I’d rather be an educator :) Nourushing, rearing and training sounds a lot better than showing, pointing and training. Dogs get trained…kids shouldn’t. Filed under: Government/Civics, In The Classroom Tagged: blog, classroom, educator, etymological, etymology, gamification, good teaching, google, inspiration, inspirational, instructor, iPad, iPhone, teach blog, teacher, teaching