I joked with my colleagues that I should never stand outside my classroom door, as I am likely to get asked to do a job I hadn’t planned on. A few weeks back my principal asked if I would present something on Smartboards for the annual gathering of Vancouver Island school trustees which our district was hosting. I asked if I could do something on blogging instead as it is the focus of my action research.

What to say to Trustees?

As the event got closer, I was beginning to wonder what a trustee would know or want to know about blogging. I would have a context for a teaching audience–and a parent audience, but what would be the background knowledge, interests, and concerns of trustees? Enter the trusty PLN –personal learning network via Twitter. I tweeted and got some great responses from Lorna Costantini, Kathy Cassidy, Cindy Seibel and Heidi Hass-Gable, who was so generous with her time that we had a Skype call.

How much to say?

I had to think about how deep to go in the time I had (and that seemed to float–initially 15 minutes, then 45, settling at about half an hour), which wasn’t a lot. Or too much, depending… I decided they might need the context of Web 2.0 and an explanation of the concept of a read and write web. So I created a short PowerPoint (below) and decided to focus on two aspects of blogging that seem to be especially important to my students: their digital identity (pride, confidence, the desire to represent the best of themselves, their learning profiles are less visible or a barrier) and the audience that blogging gives them (family, peers, students around the world). After that I’d share a video of interviews that Paul Hamilton did with five of my students in December. I was then going to tour them quickly through our class blog, Huzzah!, and the student blogs, and then invite questions or conversation.

How it went

I arrived for the set up and realized I could load all the student’s blogs in the lab so the trustees could see individual ones after the fact. A senior administrator popped in, and gave me a really valuable head’s up: the trustees were from an older demographic than he expected. His job was to shepherd the 50 trustees between presentations, and they were getting tired (oh dear). My time was going to be about 25 minutes.

I am pretty pleased with the way that the presentation itself went. I have been living blogging with my students for four months and I am very proud of their growth. I was only somewhat nervous, and the technology didn’t fail me. The questions were interesting: Kathy Cassidy was right: the first audience statement during the presentation was, “You mean anyone can see them?” Other questions after I spoke were about parent involvement and education, one about spelling,  and my favourite, “What did you need to do before you were successful?”. I said I had to fail. I had to learn what blogging wasn’t before I understood what it was. I said I also have to be able to fail in front of my students so I can model the two most important tech skills: troubleshooting and having a plan B (and C, and…).

Regrets

I wish I had:

• first surveyed the audience about their use of the Internet, and knowledge of blogging;
• been more thorough in defining or touring a blog–what a post is etc.;
• edited the video–at eight minutes it was too long;
• emphasized more the need for peer-to-peer teacher support while teachers are taking risks. It would have been the perfect opportunity to get the bug in the ear of people who can make change happen and maybe get technology integration support positions in our district.

Learning

• I have a fabulous PLN through Twitter.
• Drinking water and not wearing under-wire are important to presenter comfort (learned that before–this is gender specific advice).
• I know enough about the richness of blogging with students that I can actually say I have expertise, which surprises me.

No doubt I’ll present again–in fact I have to in April. So I am open to suggestions from your experiences–any advice on how to plan for and deliver to an audience about the power and potential of technology? Love to hear from you.

I know not every tool of value is listed there. VoiceThread is missing, so is FlikrStorm. And some of these tools just leave me scratching my head: Plol- the Pablic Library or Law (hmm, help with praking tickuts?) and Foamy which asks, “Do you owe someone a beer?”.

I am really curious about what drives the creativity behind these apps. Are people inventing tools to create a need or do these tools meet real needs that can’t be addressed any other way? And does this matter? Maybe the true creativity comes after the fact when people find uses for applications that the inventor hadn’t imagined.

Dan Meyer blogged about Animoto and Wordle, suggesting that beyond the cool factor, which shouldn’t be a factor, they have little value in education:

…for classroom purposes we need to stop judging these tools on the quality of their output rather on the rigor of their input and the interpretation of their output.

(Dan did recant his complete rejection of Wordle when a reader named Rich used it to calculate the mode of a set of numbers.)

To Dan’s criteria, I would add that using a tool should create a positive change–in the way a person (user or viewer) thinks, feels, or perceives. And the quality of change determines the value of that tool. In this context, change = learning.

Recently, Sue Waters presented a workshop on personal learning networks, and shared reader responses about their most important tools in creating and sustaining their networks. I said that RSS, Diigo, Nings like Classroom 2.0, and blogging conversations were my lifeline tools. She created the diagram here to show reader responses. Sue, Elaine Talbert, and other contributors may have convinced me of the value of Twitter, and I may take it up before the summer is over.

I am going to use Wordle with my Gr. 6 students: in math for demonstrating mode and the birthday paradox (suggested by Jason Dyer), and in language arts using this clever idea for puzzles from Winston Breen. And maybe, just maybe my students will find another purpose for the tool that no one has thought of yet. That would be cool.

I am about three months into building my online PLN. I have many wonderful colleagues at school and in my master’s cohort, and I love face-to-face learning with them. In person connection is my first choice always.

What the online community provides me with is bizarre combination of the random and the specific. It’s really non-linear. Some things I trip over, and other things I seek out. Both processes give me A-ha! moments. Because I am in charge of my learning (choosing to engage, observe, ponder, reject), I am the do-it-yourselfer–I am my own cognitive plumber and electrician. My best tools at this point are RSS, Diigo, Nings like Classroom 2.0 , and the blogging conversations I’ve joined. What helps my learning most is feedback.

I listened to a ustream of Clarence Fisher’s presentation at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston, and an idea that sticks in my colander is teacher as network administrator. This is not to be confused with the tech support job. We can help our students build their own learning networks by helping them access the tools and learn the strategies to use them wisely and effectively. We can point them at the resources and content that might resonate for them so they can create their own PLNs.

I would love to have a better PLN close to home, but for now there isn’t a good venue to ask the question, “Is anyone trying X? How’s it working? Can we experiment together?”. That would move my DIY to DIT–do it together.

Hmm. Something to aspire to.

Image: sky blues by Saffana Creative Commons license