Sep 14 2008
Steal this, please.
I was just looking.
Used to be, I would browse the bulletin boards of my school at the end of the day to get a sense of what other teachers and students were doing. This teaching gig is pretty lonely, so I’d prowl for inspiration. I’d see the products of teaching and learning, beautifully displayed, and I would try to infer the process behind them. I suppose other teachers (and administrators, and parents, and kids) have done this, too. There is a lot of imagination required to figure out the teaching behind the results–and I know I wasn’t always right about what really went on.
Now I’m looking elsewhere.
Personal learning networks have changed all that. Teachers are opening their classrooms to each other and the world. I have learned so very much from others. Case in point: via Twitter, I began reading Diane Cordell’s blog. She shared a fabulous beginning-of-the-year activity to get her students thinking about class rules using images from Flickr as visual prompts. She wrote about the process, shared the links and the finalized SlideShare. The activity got her kids thinking both divergently and convergently about how a classroom can work as a community. I needed to do that, too.
So, I stole her idea.
It’s a good thing.
I used some of the same images, close to the same process, and like Diane, I’ll be sharing it with parents. The ideas the students came up with weren’t always what I expected, as was the case in Diane’s class.
OK, it’s not technically stealing if it is offered to you. I could say I was inspired by her, or motivated by her creativity, or piggybacked on her strategy, but stealing does sound a bit more…subversive. And in a way this sharing across the distances is still revolutionary. She’s in up-state New York, and I am on the west coast of Canada. I won’t ever get to see her bulletin boards. But I won’t need to. With blogs, wikis, SlideShare, Twitter, the Classroom 2.0 Ning, and a host of other networking tools, I have other ways to find inspiration from colleagues I’ve never met in person.
Here’e what my students and I came up with:
Now go ahead, steal this, please. I’ll steal from you if you steal from me.
Image: Peek a Boo by John A Ryan Creative Commons
12 responses so far
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Jan, I loved this idea of coming up with class rules when I read it on Diane’s blog and it is so interesting to see how you have adapted and modified it! And I imagine it must be rewarding for Diane too, to see someone run with her idea. This is one of the great things about our personal learning networks and their culture of sharing. There have always been those fantastic mentor teachers who share; giving new teachers whole units or open access to their file cabinet. With web 2.0 it is just so much more; gotta love it!
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Yes, the connecting gives me such a thrill. It’s like standing on the shoulder of giants. Dean Shareski did a great SlidesShare called Lesson #1: Share, which he subtitled Confessions of a Share-a-Holic. He credits his network as replacing Google.
The whole process of giving to our colleagues reminds me a bit of old-fashioned barn-raising: effort for the benefit of others, freely given. (Sort of like your fabulous blog, Tech Pro-D Tools, “created to help educators learn”!)
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Jan,
I’ll be sharing your students’ work with my class, not in an endless loop, but as a spiral into understanding.
I love the idea of building off each other’s work!
Thanks for expanding my original concept.
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If you like slideshare.net I’d suggest looking into authorstream.com
I’ve been using it for my lessons this year because you can add narrations and set transition times then play them online. It even changes the Power Point into a video that you can download through iTunes or put on YouTube.
SlideShare is great though too.
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I feel so energized when I find ideas that are shared by other teachers online. I remember walking through the halls of a local public school two years ago. I was doing the same type of inferring and “idea stealing”. It’s so much better now that I have this wonderful network of sharing, creative individuals online. I love the slideshare!
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[...] Merritt). They say that imitation is a form of flattery, and Jan’s most recent post is titled Steal This, Please. I have personalized the theme though–right now that’s a photo of my youngest running [...]
Consider this idea “stolen”. I will also share it with my colleagues (I’ve delicioused it for them) and I’m now off to check out authorstream suggested by JD Williams above. I love networking!
Linda
PS Check our class blog – the TeacherTools page has some good links!
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@ J.D. Thanks for pointing out authorstream. For some reason it won’t play nice on my PC (neither will TeacherTube). I have also just seen 280Slides, which seems to have many cool features, too. Ahh, choices!
@Ann, the power of the network continues to refresh to me again and again. I talked with my administrator about how there are so few opportunities to network close to home. I am imagining some other teacher within a few miles of me doing the same stuff, but we just haven’t connected yet.
@Great to meet you, Linda! I enjoy your blog (mega rich with resources and ideas) and I will be adding your 5/6s to our class blogroll.
I am thinking of turning each of the slides into posters using BigHugeLabs’ Flickr Toys motivational posters generator. Having the agreements to refer to in the classroom will keep them front and center I hope.
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[...] Twitter is the new way that teachers are sharing ideas with each other.http://resiever.edublogs.org/2008/09/14/steal-this-please/ [...]
cool picture of the animal there and sorry but you got the riddle wrong =]
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I will enjoy ’stealing’ this from you Jan!
We have entered a new era where we give away and share ideas that we once coveted. But the language is stuck with old terms. ‘Stealing’ makes as much sense as ‘cc’ for an e-mail. Do we really carbon-copy e-mails?
I look forward to sharing more with you in the future, thank you for sharing this great class project!
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@Herky, Ah well, I tried!
@David, you are so right! Stealing is, of course, a bad thing, and sharing is good. This new ethic of the Creative Commons has such far-reaching implications. I wonder where it will take us in the next decade. Seems government is behind the curve on this one.
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