…read all over?

Lee Kolbert published a timely blog post 3/29/09 entitled ‘Are you a Wimpy Whiner?’ Lee is from Florida and is the author of The Geeky Momma’s Blog. She is wonderfully intelligent, hardworking, articulate educator working in Instructional Technology.

Her district sponsored a conference with national prestige, but when people wanted to use Twitter to have a a backchannel discussion of the keynote address, they found it BLOCKED. It was confusing and dismaying, but a great deal of good has come from that event.

Writes Ms. Kolbert, “I’m particularly pleased to see the conversation take a turn to how teachers can begin to stop suffering in silence and seek a role in advocating for the very change they are seeking. It is always my contention that we should not “wimply whine.” We must take a part in finding a solution. If you are unhappy with the level of security placed on your desktops at your schools, what are YOU doing about it?”

I think this can be universalized for all the faculties and staffs in relation to a whole host of concerns. The issue of filtering is especially important, but issues like assessment, programmatic issues, even scheduling should not simply be whined about but should be researched and concerns presented to administrators in a cool and professional manner.

First TJ Shay wrote this and tagged Pat Hensley; Then Pat Hensley, aka loonyhiker, wrote this and tagged me.

I have written this following the rules written in bold:

TJ Shay’s rules are: “List FIVE changes you would like to see in the educational system. Your responses should represent your perspective and your passion for learning and students…tag the following people…from a variety of perspectives. If you have been tagged, tag as many people as you choose, but try for a variety.”

1. To quote Ryan Bretag, “Leaders <should> tap the shoulders of professionals in the classroom to give them a greater responsibility and a stronger voice to encourage the personalization of learning opportunities designed as a community.

2. School Boards, Administrators-all policy makers and enforcers- must get over the ‘fear’ of digital tools that they manifest and foster. Blocking pornography, conforming to CIPA for Federal funding, should be the extent of the policy for filtering in schools. They have not banned writing implements for what is scribbled in the restrooms, so why do they do what they do to access to technology?

3. Collaboration should blossom face-to-face the way it has in PLNs. Don’t sit in Teachers’ Room and complain, collaborate in research and reporting to make things happen, to make things change.

4. Schools should be open seven days a week. As I said in an earlier post the only places more underused than schools are churches. When fuel prices skyrocketed last year, the first thing you heard from managers was that schools might go to four-day schedules. My gut feeling was antithetical to that – the only way that is a saving is in travel dollars. The extra hardships of childcare and sitting in under-heated houses and apartments, while the school environments are maintained, are unconscionable.

5. Individualize education plans and group students by needs and desires rather than by credits earned and courses completed.

I tag these colleagues from Plurk:

Char Young @charyoung – Homeschool educator and tutor
John Martin @edventures – Technology architect in higher ed
Scott Carter @scarter – ex-Biology teacher, ex-principal, and now a superintendent
Elizabeth Koh @elizabethkoh – Doctoral candidate and teaching ass’t at the National University of Singapore
Kobus van Wyck @kobus – Director of Khanya Program-providing ICT services to disadvantaged schools in South Africa

The winners of the 2008 Eddies are….

1. Best individual blog

The English Blog

2. Best group blog

SCC English

3. Best new blog

Angela Maiers

4. Best resource sharing blog

Free Technology for Teachers

5. Most influential blog post

Order for Closure

6. Best teacher blog

The Cool Cat Teacher

7. Best librarian / library blog

Hey Jude

8. Best educational tech support blog

Teachers love Smartboards

9. Best elearning / corporate education blog

eLearning Technology

10. Best educational use of audio

Ed Tech Talk

11. Best educational use of video / visual

Steve Spangler blog

12. Best educational wiki

Flat Classroom Project 2008

13. Best educational use of a social networking service

Classroom 2.0

14. Best educational use of a virtual world

Discovery Education Second Life

15. Best class blog

Extreme Biology

16. Lifetime achievement

David Warlick

I love to read! I wanted to press on with distance learning, but I needed a pause to mention three of the books I read this past two weeks. Two are by Cory Doctorow: Overclocked and Little Brother. One is by Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book.

Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present

Publisher: Perseus Publishing

ISBN-13: 9781560259817

This is a collection of short stories that was really challenging and enjoyable. Two of the stories “Anda’s Game” and “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” were moving in cyberspace context. The former is an expose of cyber sweatshops where third world denizens labor to win prizes and make money for people who want status in a given game, but would rather pay then paly themselves-the exploitive element is wrenching. The latter  chronicles the effort of the system administrators left alive after an apocalyptic bio-terror attack to maintain the World Wide Web. It is moving, quite moving. One other story that bears mentioning is “After the Siege”. This story is based on the reminiscences of the horrors that Doctorow’s grandmother lived through in the Siege of Leningrad in WWII. It has all of the ‘magic’ to make it scifi, but the gritty details are universal in the human suffering and loss that is the core of war.

Little Brother

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

ISBN-13: 9780765319852

The title is a pun on the ‘villain’ of 1984, Big Brother. The protagonist, Marcus, a seventeen year old from San Francisico, uses ‘w1n5t0n’ for his handle on line, making the connection with Winston Smith in 1984.

Mary Quattlebaum notes in the Washington Post: “His whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.” Marcus is radicalized by the experience and dedicates himself to bringing the Department of Homeland Security.

I Think Doctorow has done an excellent job in rendering the life we have been facing since 9/11 and the issues concerning personal freedom by overstating, exaggerating what would happen if wholesale carnage again occured in the United States.

The Graveyard Book

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780060530921

This is a middle-grade novel with illustrations by none other than Dave McKean. This ‘team’ is so good and gets better and better. Nobody Owens, Bod, is the protagonist of this book. He is the only living resident of a graveyard in England. He came to live there under unusual and tragic circumstances. His guardian is Silas, a vampire, who ‘lives’ there, as well.

The novel is terrifying at times and an endearing coming of age story at other instances. There are wonderful ghouls, spirits, and humans. I think anyone will enjoy the book who enjoys Neil Gaiman or J.K. Rowling.

On the face of it, there are two more issues that need to be set in place to complete the foundation of this discussion:

1. Online learning for professional development;

2. The applicablility of online learning for the community-at-large.

After these issues are reflected upon, we can begin to build our ’school for lifelong learners’.

Should we enrol our students in schools like Virtual High School (VHS) – http://www.govhs.org ?

I have been both a teacher and student in online learning milieus. I have launched experiences, as teacher, individually online in Moodle (on a 3rd party site) and other ventures, as well. I am today going to focus on VHS.

Virtual High School is well into its second decade of existence. They offer well over 300 courses and have been exceeding over four thousand students per semester for the last two years. I think it is an ideal addition to almost any school, but especially for smaller schools. If you have fifty seats per year it is well within the realm of possibility that your student s will take fifty DIFFERENT courses in the course of a school year-Think of how that broadens horizons.

The school has four membership options, as copied from the VHS site as follows:

• “Fully Participating School – Our most popular option!
  Sponsor one VHS course and provide 50 students (per year) the opportunity to experience an online course through VHS.
• Student Only School
  Provide 20 students (per year) the opportunity to experience an online course through VHS.
• Individual Student Tuitions
  Try VHS by purchasing one or more seats for a semester to see if VHS is right for your school.
• Consortium Memberships
  We offer a volume discount option for Educational Service Providers, or for a cluster of schools interested in creating a VHS consortium.”

There are several considerations that should taken into account:

• The cost of training (a one-time expense) and paying a Site Coordinator;
• The cost of a one time of and mailing materials for the course that is being sponsored if the course your sponsoring uses materials that are not online;
• Mailing cost for sending back materials your students have received from other teachers;
• Paying the annual fee to VHS;
• Paying for the training of your teacher and VHS for the sponsoring course development; A semester course for developing an additional section of an existing offering; A whole year to develop a brand new course. The annual expense of paying the teacher needs to be included.

In the best of all possible circumstances, in my opinion, a school or district would have the same person be the Site Coordinator and teacher. VHS would be a regularly scheduled class, with independent study allowed on a case-by-case basis.

The teacher would develop an additional curriculum component or use the services of VHS to extend the class for the full school semester.  VHS offers class fifteen consecutive weeks with NO BREAKS, so the students are at loose ends if nothing else follows the completion of that course.

This is the matrix for a small school in Washington state, except that the teacher teaches two online classes that provide the students with a hundred seats in VHS per year in any course in which they may enrol. This is a full-time position – two classes a day for the students in her school, two periods a day for her to teach her online students and one period for her coordinator and admin work.

On the other hand, if the Site Coordinator’s duties and teacher’s responsibility can be a part of the school day by reducing the face-to-face responsibilities, that ongoing cost would be negligible.

Should successful completion of an online course be a graduation requirement?

This is a difficult call to make.

I feel it should be a requirement for a high school diploma and for an associate’s and bachelor’s degrees for students in our country. And, just as firmly, I believe that there should be suspensions or modifications allowed to the requirement, as well.

I have taught online for more than five years, completed a master’s online, and have continued to take courses on a pay-as-I-go basis ever since. I have explored adding moodle to my face-to-face courses. I have looked at several other options including commercial options (of which I have taken advantage).

Obviously, my skillset and learning styles make online learning something that is workable, desirable even, for me. We are really in the first few seconds, metaphorically speaking, of the Digital Age. If we can manage to survive the current economic and environmental  crises intact, we will continue to rocket into this the Digital Age that has only two other events in history of comparable impact. If we are going to become a community of life-long learners; If we’re going to leave no child behind; We are going to do it by embracing the tools, and the lives we fashion with these tools.

Online learning is one of these tools.

Is online learning worthwhile? Why? Why not?

Since teaching is my third career, I’m a rather a newbie at this. The first time I had heard the phrase ‘life-long learner’ in context  was six years ago. It sound so bright and exciting and I could understand the lack of enthusiasm on the part of my colleagues who had been teachers for a while.

It wasn’t long until I realized that every district or school mission statement I came across contained that phrase. For my colleagues it had become a cliche. Worse, it was an empty cliche – No one ever explored or discussed what this meant and how it would be facilitated.

One of the paths that can be provided for people to be life-long learners is through online learning: Joining classes on the World Wide Web.

There are several places a prospective online learner can go to read enumerations and discussions of the pros and cons of online learning including:

http://www.edu-center.org/distance-learning-pros-cons.htm

http://www.learn-source.com/schools/pro_con_online.html

http://www.elearners.com/resources/elearning-faq5.asp

If you are out of school-either high school or college-online learning should be an option in continuing your own personal growtth and development.

This is the first of several opportunities to consider online education.

Online learning is growing by leaps and bounds.

I am a teacher for Virtual High School (VHS), the longest-lived virtual school in the United States. I think that virtual learning as in a virtual ‘classroom’ is a rewarding experience for my students. Michigan now requires  passing an online course as a graduation requirement. Various school districts and schools around the country either have or are contemplating doing the same.

Is online learning worthwhile? Why?

Do you think online learning should be a graduation requirement?

Should we enrol our students in schools like VHS?

Should states step up and build statewide, online schools?

How will this education be funded, if it’s not on the local level?

If, when, and how should a teacher express social and political opinions in his or her classroom?

Do you answer questions when students ask you directly?

Do you try to spur debate by telling students who your candidate is?

Do you try to spur higher level thinking in students’ minds by explaining your decision-making process in relation to a social and political issues?