High Techpectations

Social Media and Mobile Learning Workshop at #CoSN14

New Leadership for Mobile Learning Project Director Marie Bjerede and I will be hosting a workshop next at week at the Consortium for School Networking's annual conference. The focus will be on using social media in conjunction with mobile devices and the purpose will be to give school leaders more direct instruction with using social media effectively. It seems that many administrators don't have the time and/or inclination to dive into the world of Web 2.0 tools, and we want to provide an opportunity for such types to play with tools that will potentially enhance their work. 

That said, we are not going to cover every single hot social media channel out there during this three hour workshop. Instead, we'll explore social networks and blogs and then dive into microblogging and social bookmarking. We could go to town by looking at YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., but we will keep things simple and practical for the scope of the workshop. 

All of these tools are almost rendered useless, however, unless one takes time to develop a personal learning network. This means you connect to others who share your professional interests and this increases your chances of learning about best practices, identifying great resources, and building opportunities for collaboration. During this workshop, we'll give advice on how to do this as well as how to develop one's online professional persona. 

Anyone is welcome to peruse our workshop materials (see below) and contribute to our networking survey. We'd love to have school leaders show how they are leveraging social media and connect with workshop participants. Please also follow our conversations on Twitter by searching for the hashtags #CoSN14 and #CoSNLML.  

 

Mobile Learning Resources

As it's the beginning of a new school year, I just wanted to re-share with you resources from the Leadership for Mobile Learning at CoSN. I'm the project director for this initiative and am constantly curating information related to this topic.

Please check out:

Our LinkedIn CoSN subgroup on Mobile Learning: http://goo.gl/s62TD
Don't forget to also join CoSN's main LinkedIn group: http://goo.gl/d7r73

Our daily digital newsaper on Paper.li with mobile learning news: http://paper.li/elemenous/1339386897
Our social bookmarking group in Diigo: https://groups.diigo.com/group/leadership-for-mobile-learning-initiative (TIP: search our group by state abbreviation to see ML news in your area or search by device name to see news and resources)
And finally, our Guide to Mobile Learning which will help schools think ahead:
https://sites.google.com/site/lmlguide/ .

Let me know if you have any questions or can suggest other resources. I'm particularly looking for stuff related to non-iOS mobile learning so that I can present a wide range of resources to CoSN membership and beyond! 

Steps to Mobile Learning Success: Share Your Thoughts

After visiting many schools and listening to many education leaders over the past two years, I've determined that there are specific areas that need to be covered when planning effectively for mobile learning.  Is there anything else that you would add to this list?

• Vision and Leadership
• School Culture
• Planning Process
• Workflow
• School Policies
• Professional Development
• Infrastructure (networks, device management, etc.)
• Community Support
• Action Research

Additionally, I think that schools also need to be aware of cross-platform tools if they are in BYOD situations,  to plan ahead for changes in assessments and textbook adoption, and to think about how they can creatively fund mobile technologies that they want to adopt.

As part of my work for CoSN, I am contributing to a new leadership initiative focused on helping schools adopt a digital transition cycle. Epic Ed is an online community of practice where school leaders can come to research and discuss complex issues related to modernizing education. Each month, I plan to create resources related to one of the aforementioned areas, and in September 2012, we'll start with discussing vision and leadership. 

I also strongly believe that leaders need experiment with mobile devices and apps in order to truly understand mobile learning. We must model appropriate uses for our colleagues and encourage others to explore new avenues for reaching students. That said, I've started a VoiceThread slideshow where anyone can comment and add their thoughts about this month's topic, vision and leadership. For every subsequent month, I'll add another theme and participants can share their tips, thoughts, and questions on that topic. Participants are also encouraged to send me photos of mobile learning in action or images of charts, diagrams, infographics etc ([email protected]), and I'll post these as well. 

Please take a moment to leave a comment at the very least and pass this on! Thanks!

 

 

Directory of Mobile Learning Initiatives

Inspired by the ISE Wiki (http://goo.gl/kWks) which I've always admired as a great resource, I'm developing a guide to mobile learning for administrators as part of my work as the project director for the Consortium for School Networking's Leadership for Mobile Learning initiative. My plan is to use this Google Form (http://goo.gl/jydO4) to document any initiatives that I've come across, culled mostly from various news items that I have bookmarked here:  http://groups.diigo.com/group/leadership-for-mobile-learning-initiative. This informal directory will help school leaders identify pioneering schools and learning from their efforts. I'm also hoping at some point to turn this into a Google Map. 

 

Please feel free to add your school and a link to your initiative's web site: http://goo.gl/jydO4 and check out the 45 or so schools and districts that I have listed so far. I also encourage you to join our Diigo bookmarking group to share resources on mobile learning: http://groups.diigo.com/group/leadership-for-mobile-learning-initiative.

We'll be informally rolling out the admin guide at CoSN's annual conference during a pre-conference BYOT workshop and two panels on mobile learning. If you'll be in attendance, please join us for some inspiring conversations with members of the Leadership for Mobile Learning advisory panel. Also, ISED members may be interested the International Symposium produced by CoSN and UNESCO which is focusing on mobile learning: http://goo.gl/1wjSh.