Lucy Gray is with us all month on Fridays at 9:00am, with the coolest web sites for teachers and students! She is an educator who helps teachers use technology to challenge, engage, and inspire students to learn. Her blog is High Techpectations.
(The dog in the drawing below is from one of her new favorites, Sumo Paint.)
Lucy Gray is with us all month at 9:00am on Fridays, with the coolest websites for teachers and students. She is an educator who helps teachers use technology to challenge, engage, and inspire students to learn. Her blog is High Techpectations.
(One of Lucy's websites this week features things found in this library. What library is it?)
Lucy Gray joins us every Friday this month at 9:00am with fun websites for students and teachers. This week, a lesson on the cuteness of baby elephants!
Lucy's links for this morning.
Get her latest tips on cool websites at hightechpectations.
Back in 1988 as a senior in college, I arrived in Chicago to do my student teaching through the Associated Colleges' of the Midwest's Urban Education Program. I was pretty idealistic, naive and unaware of the world at the time. As I reflect back, I had sort of a missionary attitude as I began my career as a teacher in the city. I quickly realized I had a great deal to learn, and I soaked up much of my student program, particularly because of its leaders.
Not only did we work on basic pedagogical and classroom management skills through this program, but we participated in a course called Dimensions in Multiculture. During this class, we were introduced to social justice concepts via neighborhood walks and discussions with people who participated in the Sanctuary Movement, Green Peace, and Stop AIDS Chicago. I even recall one visitor telling us about how his activism had gotten him banned from South Africa (when apartheid was still going on) and he had to sneak into the country underneath the beds of trucks in order to continue his work. These experiences left an deep impression on me, and while I haven't always been as focused on social justice issues as much as I'd like, my view of the world definitely changed and became more expansive.
None of this experience would have been possible without the leadership of the Urban Education Program leaders, and in particular, Marilyn Turkovich, a noted expert in multicultural education. We've stayed in touch over the years and I am pleased today to share with you her current work, the Voices Education Project (http://www.voiceseducation.org/).
The mission of this is as follows: "We help people understand and transcend the roots of violence by hearing and giving voice to personal stories." There is lots of rich oral history content in this site, and ADES who traveled to Terezin outside Prague in 2006 might be particularly interested in this exhibit: http://www.voiceseducation.org/content/terez%C3%ADn-case-study.
Marilyn would like to bring attention to a new program within Voices Education called Playback. According to her, "We are looking for people who would interview or reflect back on a story of someone who experienced the trauma of war or violent conflict. Voices believes that telling stories can help create peace and that stories pull us out of our skin, connect us, open our hearts. Playback is about hearing a story from the heart of violent conflict, and then retelling it. With compassion. Sharing knowledge. Building wisdom. Stories can be written individually or as a team project. You can comment and add to your own stories and those of others. Get involved. Go to Voices: http://www.voiceseducation.org/ and click on Post your story on Playback. Sign in and follow the directions."
The Voices Education project contains a great deal of rich, primary source content related to peace and justice. I hope that you will consider participating in this worthy project on your own or with your students if appropriate.
Please let me know if you have any questions or feel free to contact Marilyn yourself. Her contact info is on the web site and she is also a member of the Global Education Collaborative!
Today's post is about the nomadic ebb and flow of school administrators. The media talks a lot about the importance of good teachers, and I have no qualms about agreeing with that necessity.
But I don't think civilians know that with every change of school administration, we are like a number of our students -- in parental flux with no real, consistent guidance. And that can't be ignored.
Whew... it's been quite a week. First, I witnessed with my own eyes the phenomenon known as Educon in Philly (more later on this hopefully). I then flew home, picked up my car from O'Hare's remote parking lot and started driving north. I didn't even stop at home as I had little time to spare as I had to drive three hours north to Portage, Wisconsin, for a workshop I was giving today. Right now, I'm ensconced in a motel near the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, as I'm stopping by there tomorrow on my way home to help their education liaison with a Google Apps installation I set up for them.
Today's workshop is on my mind right and I just want to take a moment to reflect on it. Because of my presentations at WEMTA last spring, Sue Fulks and Jenny Casper of CESA 5 asked me to come work with their area tech coaches to build a collaborative learning space to support their work. We talked on the phone a few times over the course of the past few months to plan this event, and I have to say that we came up with a reasonable, varied agenda. See the slides attached to this post.
It's important to note that CESA 5 tech coaches having been working with McREL to employ various learning strategies supported by technology. Their guide is McREL's Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works, and I purchased a copy in order to familiarize myself with the framework. My initial thoughts on the book are that it doesn't seem particularly, wildly innovative, but it definitely provides an appropriate context for using technology in schools that are focused (maybe overly focused) on improving student achievement. While I take standardized testing with a grain of salt, I can see using these strategies to create a targeted plan for trying to address common concerns schools have these days.
So today was the big day, and it was great to work with people that I didn't have to particularly sell on technology. They were pretty competent with everything, and just need help here and there. They were collegial, engaging in thought provoking conversations and were very mindful of making things work for the teachers that they coach.
Our goal was to build a space in which these teachers could collaborate and share resources with team members. Being the Ning nut that I am, I built a basic social network for them to get started ahead of time. Today, we reviewed other online communities that I admire, discussed features that were needed in our space, and really considered how to engage others in a social network. The capstone on this work was a Skype conversation with the talented and generous Steve Hargadon who thoughtfully explained his involvement with Classroom 2.0, the future of social networks, and how these educators could start to think about building community in our newly created space. All in all, the timing of everything was good, I wasn't too overwhelming with information for once, and the goals of the workshop were met. It was a pleasure to read the comments given by participants in the Google Form evaluation I developed for this event, and I look forward to continued interactions with this group over Twitter and in the Ning we built together.
Here are the materials I created for the workshop including my slides, a Diigo bookmarking group containing most of the links cited in the McREL book, and a survey I created for my PLN to offer their wisdom. I'm particularly grateful to the 25 or so people who have participated virtually; it's not too late to participate, so add your thoughts! The survey results are public and can be found here.
