Today is Day 15. If you are just starting today, please feel free to work on this session, or to begin on Day 1.
If there is no sharing, there is no learning.
Bloggers take time to share. They make their learning and thinking open and searchable. Taking time to read educator blogs helps you to learn from practitioners and to challenge your understanding of best practice.
How do you nurture those who model sharing and connected learning?
Take a moment to thank a blogger, to comment on a connection, to extend their thinking or to share a related story. Let them know you care.
Thanks again to Aviva Dunsiger (@avivaloca) for an informative and inspiring session on leveraging social media for learning, connections and community. Here are the resources from the session:
If you came to this page to share, please scroll down to the form at the bottom of the page.
(If you are just starting 30 Days of Getthing Connected today, please see the links to Day 1 and Day 2 on the right side of this page.)
Finding that 10 minutes to connect might be challenging today, but learning to be a connected leader will help your students in so many ways.
You can do it!
As we continue to look at how we collect information online, we will spend some time today looking at resources for educators. By the end of the month, you will be curating and sharing these resources with others, but for today, we will just survey some of the valuable resources available to you to help you with your professional learning.
Yesterday we focused on reading some of the blogs written by Ontario educators and other educators.
Take 10 minutes today, and look at some of the valuable information available to you online.
If you already take time to read and learn from websites like these, what other sites would you suggest? Please fill out the form below, and we will share the responses here for readers.
Consider how much easier it will be when you are connected with other educators and you share the best information from sites all over the world!
Responses (it may take awhile for new responses to populate this page).
In our first video yesterday, we watched how learning is all about putting simple concepts together into more complex thinking.
When we consider what it means to be a connected learner, we can break it down into several components:
Collecting information
Connecting
Curating
Collaborating and Co-learning
Creating and Remixing
Sharing
Today we are going to focus on how we can efficiently gather information. Where can we go to find out what other educators are thinking and doing? How do we stay current with knowledge about learning?
In Ontario, many educators deprivatize their practice and make their thinking and learning visible through blogging. You can find an extensive list of Ontario “edubloggers” (curated by Doug Peterson) here. As well, the left side of this page has links to school and system leader blogs in Ontario. The right side of this page has links to a number of Ontario educators who are leading learning by participating in connected learning through OSSEMOOC.
In your ten minutes of connecting today, take some time to read what other Ontario bloggers have written. How does their thinking align with yours? What new ideas have they shared? What is working/not working for them? What opportunities exist for further connection and collaboration?
We have suggested some Ontario bloggers below. In our resources section for today, you will find more links to other blogs of interest to educators, suggested collections, and some other thinking about the importance of blogging.
As you browse and read, consider following the blog to get automatic email updates when a new post arrives. Most blogs have a “follow” button or a place to subscribe.
If you like the blog, why not check out the blogs that the writer follows? There is often a link to this information on the website.
Is reading blogs already part of your daily routine? Please share your favourite blogs in the comments.
George Couros (Division Principal, Parkland School Division, Alberta)
Kathy Cassidy (Grade 1 teacher, Author of Connected From The Start: Global Learning for the Primary Grades)
David Truss (Vice Principal of Coquitlam Open Learning & Lead Administrator of the Inquiry Hub at School District 43 (Coquitlam)) Update: Winner of the CEA Ken Spencer Award for Innovation, 2015
Dean Shareski (Community Manager for Discovery Education Canada)
It’s not just because warm sweaters and jeans are finally acceptable work attire, but also because Doug Peterson is working his best magic in connecting Ontario educators and enabling the sharing we all need to do to keep up with change.
Doug’s #FollowFriday “Active Ontario Educators” posts on Twitter are the perfect starting place for new and old tweeters alike as we build our online PLNs in social media.
But what is really special, is Doug’s curated summary of the Ontario edublogs that impacted his thinking through the week. What a great opportunity to sample the rich thinking this province has to offer.
So as we embrace this last Friday of October, and think ahead to our November work in nurturing leaders into becoming “connected”, we want to thank Doug for his tireless efforts to connect our thinking in Ontario, and suggest that following Doug’s work is a great starting point for any Ontario educator looking to become a connected leader.
Here at #OSSEMOOC we are often asked questions like, “How do you find time to blog?”, or “How do I find good stuff online?”.
While sharing tools is one approach to answering that question, I like to think of all of these activities as part of the process of curation.
When you have a PLN with strong curation skills, navigating through the vast amount of information online becomes so much easier. In fact, curation is an important skill for everyone.
In this post, Sue takes us through the process of discovering and recording information that we need, organizing information, contextualizing, editing and making meaning and then sharing.
She has also described the process in further detail on her personal blog.
As you head into summer, consider how the suggestions in this post can help you make your own learning and sharing more effective and efficient.
How can we help our students develop better curation skills?
As the 30 Days of Learning in Ontario OSSEMOOC project comes to a close, we want to thank, and congratulate, all of the educators who took the opportunity to share their learning. For some, it was their very first time posting their thinking in the blog format. We thank you for taking the time to let others learn from you. We hope that you will continue to share your learning and connect with others doing the same.
Thank you as well to everyone who took the time to comment on the blog. You shared your response and your feedback, and kept the thinking and conversations going.
One of our goals in OSSEMOOC is to have people connect and then create, to go off and learn and share, to sustain those connections and that learning. We were excited to see Deborah McCallum’s efforts to collate the 30 Days of Learning in a new format.
Collaborative blogs give ownership to a group rather than an individual. As co-owners, we all anticipate the next learning. We are motivated to comment and continue the conversation as we are invested in this community of learners. Collaborative blogs encourage new thinking, invite new participants, expand our world and our learning. They give us a focus for reading and sharing.
We learn by watching others. We teach by modelling the practices we value. Collaborative blogging allows us to model the action of making thinking visible.
We all have a story to tell, and we learn from each other. Together we are stronger and wiser. Connected learning takes many forms: observing, reading, asking, reflecting, writing, speaking, audio, video and collaborating. Connected learning and leading is a participatory culture. It takes time, time to jump in, time to create new routines and time to build comfort. Courage is needed to put yourself “out there” and find your voice. It is worth the risk to gain insight, broader perspectives and recognize that “the smartest person in the room is the room”.
In our technology enabled learning environments, connected students need connected teachers and leaders. As educators, I believe each of us owns nurturing those around us and role modelling. As pointed out in one of the blog posts, value encouragement and supporting each other with “just right” feedback is important for adult learners too.
Each of the 30 days of learning bloggers has taken the leap of faith, put themselves “out there” to share their reflections and ideas. Congratulations to all for openly participating in the collaborative learning process.
We often wonder why it is so hard to change thinking in education, to bring people into the world of connected learning. We learned from Tim’s comment that perhaps focusing on the changing world, while validating the work that has been done, is a key component of making this change happen.
This comment on Stacey Wallwin’s blog helped to reinforce the understanding that what you do has impact that you cannot always see. Comments like this are the sustenance we all need to keep doing our work to Change the World #CTW
It’s hard to hit publish. But opportunity can be fleeting. Don’t be afraid to share.
Be more dog and grab the frisbee when it comes your way. Carpe diem!
Mark Carbone and Donna Fry
OSAPAC Co-Leads for #OSSEMOOC.
Change The World #CTW
30 Days of Learning in Ontario:
The Lead Learners Who Modelled the Importance of Sharing Learning and Thinking
Our model pre-April blogger: Rodd Lucier @thecleversheep
My friends Donna Fry and Mark Carbone, co-creators of the #ossemooc have put out a call for us to share our learning during this month of April and, as always, it takes me a little while to get my posts onto the blog!
Luckily for me, I had two great experiences last week, one at the #otrk12 conference and one at the #gafesummit in Waterloo. Starting withStephen Hurley’s examples of passion-based learning at OTRK12 was wonderful and I enjoyed presenting to the e-learning teachers about creating dynamic virtual discussions and seeing Jaclyn Calder’s presentation about the Grader App for D2L with awesome options for providing differentiated and timely feedback to learners. It’s wonderful to see what an amazing teacher like Jaclyn does with technology!
While I could share all the tips and tricks that I learned at #otrk12 and the #gafesummit, I think I’d rather share a few observations that I have mulling around and arising from these 2 great learning events.
A principal from my school board approached me at the Google Summit a little distraught that she had perhaps purchased the wrong technology this year. She has provided her teachers and students with a variety of tools like ipads, laptops, desktops and Chromebooks. She seemed a little worried that she had made a wrong choice and should have bought more Chromebooks. I reminded her, that regardless of how ‘feel good and for the cause of all children and teachers everywhere’ this event undoubtedly was, it was also a Google event after all, and their mission was to make her feel as though Google products were the bomb. Obviously – they succeeded!
I assured her that an effective technology ecology in her school would also include some higher-end media creation tools like her computers and her ipads, and that she’d want to remember that the ability to do some computing with computers is also a really important skill for our students today.
I remember when Nicholas Negroponte from MIT started to predict that ubiquity would be a game changer in our adoption of technology but that rather than getting simpler, as they should over time, there was this interesting phenomenon with computers called ‘featuritis’ whereby software developers keep the software getting more complex and complicated (bloated and expensive) rather than cheaper. Google seems to have figured that out. Make the browser do most of the work, and the machine could remain inexpensive, although not as robust. Maybe robust is not what we are looking for in education anyway. Easy (for teachers) seems to be the preferred approach when it comes to technology. I’m not in complete agreement with this, but I’m learning to accept it. It is what it is.
People often ask me if I think things are suddenly changing, and while I’m hopeful, I’m still cautious because I’m not sure it’s the technology that has been holding us back. We’ve been able to connect our students around the world with blogs since about 2005 and with global projects using forums and list serves since the 1980s. How many of us jumped on board? We’ve had extremely rich sites sharing how-to’s of authentic learning and Project Based Learning for more than two decades. Were we on board then?
We have had Ministry Licensed products that allow multimedia creation and assistive technology for our students for another decade or so. Were we all making use of these? When I tell people that my students and I were blogging with other classrooms across the world almost 10 years ago now, and we did this by taking turns all throughout the day on two desktop computers, they sometimes look at me strangely – like they couldn’t imagine doing that without the Chromebook cart rolled down to the classroom or students 1:1 on their own devices. They complain that there isn’t enough technology, and yet their classroom computer is often sitting silently in the corner reserved for teacher email. What’s up with that?
I’m reminded that early adopters will always be willing to put in the countless hours that lead them to mastery of technology tools (and other things) if they feel that will transform their classrooms – that hasn’t changed much since computers were first introduced into classrooms.
Despite my observations, and my confusion about slow progress in educational technology, I refuse to become cynical. Instead, I’m telling myself that it’s the ubiquity and access that will make the difference this time around. Now that educators can leap ahead with their own learning through connected networks, they are not bound any longer by the limits of their own school building or in-services for learning…they can connect with and support each other and learn not only how to use these tools, but what effective use looks like.
Now that we can share our success stories and connect more widely through social media and through networks like the #ossemooc there is no reason to ‘wait for the learning’ – we can just go out and get it! It was exciting to see so many educators at OTRK12 and GAFE Summit finding their community and learning together!
Last week Donna Fry challenged us to share. Through this #OSSEMOOC post, she asked us to write a blog post about what we learned today.
The day that Donna sent out this challenge I had spent the day working with a TLLP team in my school around the next steps of our project. The first order of the day was to share what we had learned already. Each teacher wrote a blog post while we were all in the same physical room. For many of us, this was one of our first blog posts. Our goal was to share at least one good thing that had happened in our classroom as part of our journey towards 1:1 BYOD Blended Learning.
What I learned from the process was the power of support in sharing. As we all sat together in the workroom and people learned how to work the blog platform, embed samples of student work and write up their learning in an engaging manner, teachers talked and chatted. Many felt that they didn’t have anything exciting to share, but once we started talking, others in the group jumped on board and started encouraging each other. Pointing out the great practices that were embedded in their classroom activities and how they may adapt the activities to fit other subject area and classes. Teachers even commented on each others blog posts. The atmosphere was amazing, supportive and critical.
What really resonated with me during the process was the importance of support (moral and technical) to start sharing. We talk about the importance of sharing the good things happening in our classrooms, and becoming connected educators – but how often do we embed the time and support to do the actual sharing as part of our professional development?
This morning of sharing and supporting one another has to be one of my favourite days working with colleagues.
When I posted my 4th instalment in my “Gedding It” Series yesterday, I knew it was still way too long. In this age of the global information trough, I knew no one would get to the end. So why did I sweat over it so much?!?
A few months ago I saw Seth Godin’s blog and thought: that’s what I need. Short quick posts that don’t need a lot of time to read or write.
And then it came up this afternoon again, in a SimpleK12 webinar on the value of making short chunked screencasts — for students and teacher PD!
OK universe. I finally get the message!! (-:
Make it quick, get to the point. Provide links for the people who want depth. Don’t sweat the small stuff (except the links). Imperfect’s better than not done at all.
And that just makes everything a whole lot easier on everyone.
Written and shared by Cathy Beach
Recently Retired and Loving I.T.!
Optimistic about the future of education; still busy learning and sharing the connected learning.
