School Leaders and Social Media

Another great post from the Corner-MGuhlin blog:

Moment by Moment - Social Media for School Leaders

 

Source: Image as shared by @BYOTNetwork

Ever wish parents in your school could turn on their smartphone and see a moment by moment update of how their child is learning? Blending social media with web sites, you and your teachers can easily share powerful stories featuring your school’s children with the world. This article provides 5 simple tips you can put into place to provide just in time updates, whether you are a classroom teacher or a campus administrator.

"We've found Twitter to be a really effective mode for two-way communication--where it's not just [the Department of Education] putting out a press release or statement, but ... something that's soliciting feedback from everyone--teachers, students, [and]parents," says Daren Briscoe, deputy press secretary for the Department of Education. (Read Source)

Thinking social media may be more trouble than it's worth? Every educational idea probably faced some opposition!

Read more about Venn Banning

Consider this:

“Thanks for your tweets about last night’s parent meeting!” shared Joyce, holding the left hand of her kinder child in the hallway, with her campus principal. Joyce, a parent on the go who lives on her smart phone, often calls into school to check on her child’s progress, as well as trys to keep track of what’s going on. Contrast Joyce’s experience with mobile phones with the once a day parent, Emily, who visits her son’s classroom web page to find out what homework assignments there are, and catch up on what’s major concepts are being covered in class. “I really appreciate how, when I visit the web page, the right-hand column has pictures of my child working on projects in class!” The updates--which can include images and audio--feature students working in groups on projects at school are fed in by Twitter updates routed through Evernote, a digital note-taking tool.

As a parent of two school-age children, what I desire the most is to know my children are safe, actively participating in engaged learning opportunities, as well as making progress on skills and strategies that will fundamentally change their lives for the better. The 5 tips in this In the Trenches article will help you, as a school leader, reassure parents in your community that these 3 goals are being met. How can you get it done? Strategic blending of social media with face to face meetings you have every day.

Tip #1 - Build a safe online learning space for your school.
Social media tools abound for building an easy-to-update virtual space that can transform how parents view your school. You want parents to see beyond the brick-n-mortar of the school to the spirit captured in images, multimedia, and children’s voices. Think of it as allowing your school spirit to shine through in ways you hadn’t imagined before. 

You can accomplish this by building an online space using a variety of tools such as Moodle, a Wikispaces.com wiki, or a web log (a.k.a. blog). These sites are easy to create an allow us to blend images, video, and sound easily in one place. To protect student names and images, always make sure to have a posted checklist in each classroom of who can be photographed or audio/video-recorded. Setting up a virtual space can be done in a variety of ways, but you can start at web addresses like the following:

1. Wikispaces.com for K-12 Education - This quick and easy to edit web page--a wiki--enables you and your teachers to build a virtual space all of you can monitor and contribute to. These sites are no-cost for educators and advertisement free. You can be up and going in less than a day.
2. Blogger.com - You can take advantage of various blogging providers

Tip #2 - Set up Your School Twitter Account
Many of us have heard of Twitter as a way to build professional learning networks that gives us access to online professional development 24/7. What many school leaders don’t realize is that each Twitter update that is sent comes with what is known as an RSS feed. This feed can be blended into existing web sites, such as the wiki you created in Tip #1. 

This means that all your Twitter updates can appear on your wiki or blog page as they happen, facilitating a steady stream of information sharing for staff, students, and, most importantly, the community! You can set up your Twitter account for your school by going to http://www.twitter.com

For example, a tweet like this one:

...can result in sharing like this:

Tip #3 - Set up an Evernote.com Account (no cost)
Imagine an easy to organize virtual notebook where you could store images, pictures, and text about the people you see as you walk through your school’s hallways and classrooms. Not only that, but you are able to automatically share those annotated observations online in an instant to your safe online space (e.g. wiki mentioned in Tip #1). 

This is a snapshot of my Evernote Notebooks, all of which are shared. Imagine your
classroom teachers' names or room numbers running down the left-hand side, content
you've shared--pictures, text, audio--in the middle column, and the details on the far
right column.

Following this online tutorial (http://goo.gl/NDZpN ), you can post your text observations illustrated with photographs you take with your Android, iPodTouch or iPad mobile device or smartphone to an Evernote Notebook. You can assign each teacher a notebook and update that notebook. Every update you make to the Evernote Notebook is fed to Twitter, appearing in your RSS feed and on your school’s wiki or blog page.

Tip #4 - Hashtag Your School’s Tweets
If every one in your school knew the secret keyword to search for on the Internet, wouldn’t this make it a lot easier to find information about your school? Currently, educators have conversations about various professional learning resources, such as #edchat and #cpchat and many others. These not so secret keywords are called hashtags and enable you and school community to share information specifically via Twitter. If you search on a Twitter hashtag for your campus, any 140 character tweet that includes the hashtag will be discoverable.

Tip #5 - Encourage Sharing Online
It's tempting to want to control all the tweets and online sharing that can go on by parents. Focus on creating a culture of empowered learners--adults or students--sharing what they are learning as they are learning it. With shared hashtags, you can easily pull in content and share excerpts from that in your virtual space.

Note: This is the long-winded version of a lighter, better written 200 word version submitted for publication (rejected...sigh).

A Good Discussion on Education Techology

As we seem to be rapidly going  toward IPADS in the classroom, below is an interesting discussion from the Around the Corner-MGuhlin blog:

Defining Success in 1 to 1

 

If you can't learn, your leadership will be seriously impaired. If you can't set goals and measure progress towards them, holding yourself and others accountable, then you're setup for failure unless you have a self-motivated team that holds itself accountable for its own learning. And, finally, if you can't be social as a leader, you're destined for failure. Leadership is a contact sport.

Source: http://goo.gl/ygGjV

This comes to mind as I observe school districts embarking on one to one programs. What's really neat is stumbling across off the record conversations in the midst of PR marketing the school district is pushing. You know something like this:

"How's it all working for your 1 to 1 deployment?"

"Yeah, it going great!" then the pregnant pause. "We've had to monitor and adjust."

When you run into those "monitor and adjust" type of comments, you may do what I do--lean in and say, "Tell me all about it." For me, a real deployment or implementation begins at the point you discover that your plan has failed in some way.

"When you take all the friction out of the experience, it stops being fun."
--Gamification, the New Loyalty (language warning)

That's what makes this conversation that Rusty Meyners quotes via G+ so much fun to analyze, right?

“I think it’s important that you define the goals for 1:1 early in the process of establishing the initiative,” Morris explained.“.. outcomes should be defined, and they must be measured,”
“I agree completely that BYOD can increase the digital gap,” Morris responded. “Or it can force all users to the lowest common denominator.”“Good point,” tweeted Pierce. “Schools should have devices for kids who don’t have their own… and use web resources that aren’t platform dependent.”

“We have 1st hand experience with 1:1 comparing 1 year of laptop (Mac) and 1 year of iPads,” tweeted @vANguyenC17.“All three 3rd grade teachers strongly favor going back to Macbooks.”“Interesting,” Pierce responded. “Was that [because] they had more capabilities?”“Laptops allow much more productivity and creating; iPads are limited in apps’ ability to create, limited features in Word,”@vANguyenC17 wrote.

As you can see from the conversation, there are some important elements in the observations and assertions above. Let's review them:

1) Content we create to use with during 1 to 1 needs to be platform agnostic.

2) Define outcomes and measure progress towards those.

3) Find tools that allow for more productivity and creating (e.g. Macbook laptops) rather than limit students (e.g. iPads).

Don't you think it would be worth meditating on these a bit more?

1) Content we create to use during 1 to 1 needs to be platform agnostic.

During the Flipped Classroom webinar, I made a similar point--flipped classroom content needs to be platform agnostic because our kids are going to access your video/audio content on a variety of computers. Google's vision of a cloud-centered world--with all the security concerns and issues that suggests--calls out to us, the truth is, it's not difficult to imagine making stuff that works on the most types of technology.

For example, when I consider this question--what file formats are platform agnostic--I realize that I limit myself. What if we're not discussing just file formats? What else is there? In the meantime, let's live within the limits.

What video formats work on multiple platforms?

• Video - MP4, AVI are two popular video formats that work on just about every device out there. I'm able to view content in these formats on Android, iOS devices, Linux netbooks, Windows/Mac computers. (Although I thought that HTML5 video/audio would work on everything, it doesn't on iOS!)
• Audio - MP3 is another popular format that seems to work just on about everything.
• HTML - Put all your documents (MS Office, LibreOffice) in HTML.
• ePub - A format for ebooks that works on about everything. 

What viewer/reader software do you need to have to get access to these formats?

• Android
• HTML - any web browser (although I prefer Opera)
• Audio - any audio player
• ePub - FBReader is my favorite.
• Video - Depends.
• iOS Devices
• HTML - Safari, but Puffin browser works better with other content
• Audio - iTunes
• ePub - Stanza, iBook
• Video - Depends
• Laptops running Linux, Windows, Mac
• HTML - Chrome, Firefox
• Audio - an plethora of tools
• ePub - FBReader or Sigil or iBook
• Video - VLC Media Player but there are many others, too.

Still it seems silly to make these lists. We are approaching ubiquity of content access across platforms that proprietary solutions can't restrict. Perhaps a better question is the media delivery system that we use to get the content on these devices.

A media delivery system needs to be agnostic, as well. One of the key pieces of advice offered during a BYOD/T or 1 to 1 deployment is that you better be using something web-based, like GoogleApps for Education (GAFE), and/or Moodle course management system to make content easily accessible. You simply can't touch every machine students and staff are carrying around.

Other tools can also be used in combination like wikis and cloud storage solutions (e.g. Dropbox, SugarSync, Box.net come to mind). Each has its limits and figuring out the configuration of the tools is critical but...do-able.

What other questions to ask, and what responses to find?

Source: http://goo.gl/7IZxZ

2) Define outcomes and measure progress towards those.

When I first started as a director in edtech, one of the first things I did was develop a who will do what by when plan. You may remember these monolithic documents more traditionally as a Goal, Strategies, Objectives, Time Frame, Person(s) Responsible document in the form of campus/district improvement plans.

Assess­ment is always an impor­tant topic for edu­ca­tors. Those one-to-one schools that have focused on truly chang­ing teach­ing and learn­ing also need to think about address­ing assess­ment dif­fer­ently. When stu­dents have access to unlim­ited infor­ma­tion with the click of the but­ton, edu­ca­tors are forced to con­sider new ways to address assessment. (Source: Nick Sauers, Rethinking Exams)

These litter the school district sites, and I honestly wonder if the real benefit of these is their development, rather than their implementation. The time we spend in conversation, planning, reflection about goals, strategies, objectives provides the value of these experiences rather than the actual plan itself.

How do you measure outcomes and measure progress towards those? Consider something Barbara Bray shared:

The teacher is a co-learner with their students and not the sole expert of the content and/or technology any more. No one can be. The world is a different place with Google. You can google any term or phrase. The problem now is for students to know what is authentic and valid and how to think critically on their own. Teachers have to reinvent what teaching is. The school needs to support their experimenting and risk-taking. The teacher is more of a practicing researcher with real people. Each student brings something interesting and special to the class. Now they are bringing their own device.

How are you rethinking those outcomes and progress monitoring approaches? Would something like the Baldridge Model work in this case?

P – Planning a change in the budget processD – Implementing the change in how the budget is developedS – Studying the effect of the change with key stakeholdersA – Translating what is learned from studying the budget process into action

3) Find tools that allow for more productivity and creating (e.g. Macbook laptops) rather than limit students (e.g. iPads).

Though none of these points come as a surprise, I'm pleasantly pleased to see this particular point arise, given that I've explored this point in detail. Macbooks are wonderful, versatile machines that can do quite a bit (I own one and use one at work). As powerful as iPads are, they constrain creativity to accomplish the primary goals of schooling...and until schooling changes, full blown laptops are the way to go (IMHO).

Particularly telling in the original quote was this remark:

“We have 1st hand experience with 1:1 comparing 1 year of laptop (Mac) and 1 year of iPads,” tweeted @vANguyenC17.“All three 3rd grade teachers strongly favor going back to Macbooks.”

That's not to say entire populations of school children won't be carrying iPads in lieu of traditional textbooks, etc., but that traditional laptops will continue to have a place in schools. Time will tell.

Can It Happen in Rock Hill?

Everyone is trying to find a reason for the events at Chardon High School this week. The media refers to Chardon as a suburb of Cleveland OH, and many folks in South Carolina probably have a different mental image of Chardon than it actually is. For sure, some folks work in the Cleveland area, but suburb really doesn't apply. I was in Chardon twice last year.

Chardon is on the edge of Ohio's Amish country with well kept houses and lush yards and gardens. During the 4th of July, all the street poles had hanging baskets with red, white, and blue flowers. There were American flags on the poles and most of the older homes had American flag colored Bunting across the front. Not only did you feel safe, you felt like this was America.

If this can happen in Chardon, it can happen anywhere. Our thoughts are with the folks in Chardon.

From the Board's Eye View blog:

....my heart goes out to the parents, family, and friends of the victims of the Chardon, Ohio, shooting. And to school personnel at Chardon High School—this is when you earn your angel wings.

Everyone is asking themselves, How can we know?

I know that educators all over the country are now huddling with their school security officers and school counselors and social workers. They are reviewing their building entry and lock-down procedures and reviewing the student suspension files, to look again at the records of children who may have been kicked out of school for carrying a weapon or threatening to harm someone or—or what? Everyone is asking themselves, How can we know?

The answer is that we can’t. But what we might consider trying, as the next few sorrowful days unfold, is resolving to get to know our children, whether we are a parent, friend, or teacher. When we are able to look into the hearts of children, we will, of course, find their angels. But we will also find their demons and must help the child to banish them. That can happen only if we spend time with them. Not long before the terrible tragedy in Chardon I was discussing discipline and classroom management with a teacher in Dayton and she told me, “We don’t have discipline problems, we have feedback problems.” She meant that our first duty to children is to pay attention to them.

Just yesterday, at a meeting of our local school board’s curriculum committee, a special education teacher was trying to explain to a social studies teacher that the road to student motivation runs through the ear.  “Listen to them,” she exhorted. “It is so important to make these individual connections to children. Then they will open up and then you can reach them.”

Our sincere condolences to the children of Chardon.

Another Comment on Technology

From the Bionic Teaching Blog site:

4 bAD rEASONS TO sWITCH TO dIGITAL cONTENT

BY TOM | FEBRUARY 24, 2012

There are good reasons to use digital content. They don’t seem to come up that often in the articles and posts I’ve been reading lately. Below, with some degree of hyperbole, I mock them. I’m not saying these arguments ought to be negated in their entirety but there are certainly better reasons out there. Granted, they aren’t as easy to chant or fit into pithy catch phrases.

1. Physical texts are out of date by the time they’re published! Mars is not a planet! The idea that we’re regularly having major revisions in the kind of knowledge published in k12 textbooks is crazy.¹ As a matter of fact, I’d rather have a textbook with errors assuming the teacher knows what’s right and what’s wrong and can help students challenge things.
2. Digital textbooks will be more engaging!/Kids love technology! We wouldn’t expect crappy a writer to suddenly become awesome because they switched from printing their books to using ePub. Traditional textbook authors seem to come to digital content with all the baggage inherent in their previous medium. I don’t know if they’re the right people to be rethinking things or at least they shouldn’t be doing it in the isolation they currently appear to be in. Adding movies students don’t want to watch to the text kids don’t want to read doesn’t really do anything but take up hard drive space.
   Kids don’t love technology. Kids like the fun and interesting things technology enables. That’s a fairly large difference. Adding technology does seem to make unpalatable things slightly more palatable but that’s a far cry from real interest and engagement (warm dog food vs cold dog food).
3. Digital content is cheaper! Maybe but I doubt it. This is one of those things that’s likely to be misleading. There’s no way so many companies would be so excited about digital content if they didn’t see ways to make more money than they’re making now. There are also some missing cost pieces that need to be considered. If the content you want is above and beyond a PDF version of the print book you need to start thinking.
   • What people do you have in place for device repairs, device management etc.?²
   • What about bandwidth infrastructure?
   • Do teachers need PD?³
   • Is the ebook-ish thing in its own LMS? How many LMS’s will you end up with? What is your strategy for getting content build by teachers out of these silos if you go with other publishers in the future? etc. etc.
   • Have you thought through all the AUP, student content, parental communication issues?
4. Backpacks are too heavy and are crushing our children! If your child is bringing home a 50lb backpack and the child weighs in at 60lbs, the issue is not that books are too heavy but that your school is apparently requiring insane amounts of homework. Don’t treat the symptom.
   In other cases, I wonder what a mixture of helicopter parents, an absolutely shameless panic promoting media, and an obesity epidemic is doing to our expectations of student capacity. This article on the terror surrounding heavy backpacks is a good example of why I have to put the word “news” in quotes.

¹ I also don’t care if you get the last leg of President X’s term. If it’s recent, wouldn’t I be better off using the actual real news? I also have no faith that any textbook company would do a good job updating their books aside, possibly, from fixing typos or pretending they didn’t say slaves were happy fighting for the Confederates.

² Maybe you can escape this with a BYOD but you’ll still have to provide and manage for economically disadvantaged students.

³ Probably so if you’ve got a product that isn’t just a PDF book.