…read all over?

I have so much to say and so little time to say it!

We have our new Middle School Lab – my classroom – fully operational. We installed the SMARTboard last week. We have only to add an in-room printer and it will be complete.

When we assembled the table we set the height at 28 inches, which is working very well. We have a carpeted floor so we all have swivel chairs. We also have room for work tables in the center of the room, and plenty of closet space for all sorts of supplies and equipment.

We have four host computers and sixteen clients. We are running N-Computing for our environment. The only drawback is we don’t have a USB in the clients.

All in all, it’s a great space. I hope great things will happen here!

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 only buildings built for ‘public’ activities that are more underused than schools are churches. In most communities many of these buildings could be open seven days a week if the ‘owners’ would take off the blinders of how these places have been traditionally used and let their vision expand.

It drove me up a tree to hear administrators say that we may have to cut back to a four day school week when the price of fuel was skyrocketing. In the face of that pain, throughout most of the communities in our country, the response should have been that we need to work our way to having our schools open seven days a week, not closing them an extra day. And, if needs be, convert some of our space to emergency shelters for folks who cannot keep their homes heated and buy and cook their food.

It did my heart good to see the worship services in our cafeteria when one of our local churches was damaged in a flood.

I am in school often on the weekends and here during the week often after most of my colleagues and students have left for the day. The feeling is the identical to the feeling I had in the churches I served in when I was a parish clergyman. I felt then and feel now as though we are squandering a tremendous resource: that we are not being good stewards of what we have been given to manage.

Our school now has Saturday Academy, Distance Learning, and expanded ’school day’ through the funding that comes through the 21st Century Grant. This is just the beginning. We should ultimately be doing so much more.

This is the beginning of our discussion of being lifelong learners.

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.

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?

I have a new organism for Professional Development – my Personal Learning Network. Based in in Plurk.com and, on balance, in Twitter.com and in Google Reader, it is more rewarding and as demanding as any experience I have in memory. I have decided that I need to reckon my time and reckon whether the attention that’s required is sustainable for me. I can compare it to either the time that teaching a course demands or the time required daily and weekly in the online Master’s I completed lately. Does this seem reasonable?

I fear that if I don’t strike a balance, all my living, learning, and teaching will end up being dust in the wind.

There are so many ways we can collaborate with our students and for our students. In fact, the opportunities to collaborate are proliferating on the Web:

Flat Classroom - http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com/

PBwiki -http://pbwiki.com/

DabbleBoard – http://www.dabbleboard.com/

Zoho Notebook - http://moourl.com/pmy5m

Google Documents - http://docs.google.com/

Global School Net – http://www.globalschoolnet.org/

e-Pals – http://www.epals.com/index.tpl

Website Creation

SynthaSite - http://www.synthasite.com/ – 100% FREE, No experience, No ads, subdomain, works in browser.

Weebly – http://www.weebly.com/ – !00% Free, swtich designs on the fly, drag and drop, host present domain for free.

Wix – http://www.wix.com/ – Free, personal, business, even for MySpace – Flashy interface; many fans

WebNode – http://www.webnode.com/en/ – Free for personal use, run a small business, work from anywhere, host an existing domain

Totspot: A Place For Kids – http://totspot.com./login – A PRIVATE page for your child

ClutterMe – http://www.clutterme.com/ – “Create a one page website.” “Start anywhere.”

myfamily.com – http://www.myfamily.com/welcome/ – Build your family Website, Start in 30 seconds, unlimited storage

Webon - http://www.webon.com/ – Free, interactive pages

sprout – http://sproutbuilder.com/ – Lots of fans, free, beta, widgets building, and mashups