PLN Powers Activate! - A Tech Teacher Taps Into Virtual Department To Create Curriculum Map

Guest post by Gregory Richardson, Teacher and Technology Coordinator, Salk School of Science, New York.

Every year teachers at my school submit their requisite curriculum maps describing how and what we are going to teach. One of the best things about being a technology teacher is that for the most part I have the authority to decide what to teach my students. On the flip side of this decision-making power is the responsibility of determining what is most relevant for my students to learn. I have to think deeply and decide what is most vital to include in my classroom.

When it came time for me to map out my year I did not have much trouble determining what my units would be about. My difficulty was in forming the essential questions to build the units around. Unlike other core subject areas that have multiple teachers working together, I was on my own. They bounce ideas off of one another and collaborate throughout the year. I am often on my own. Sometimes, I’m admittedly envious, as I witness how teamwork can lead to the essential questions they want answered by their students. In my case I am the only teacher in my content area - technology. So I did what many of us do when we initially want to seek out information – I turned to Google to search for examples of technology curriculum maps. Google failed me. My search was fruitless.

So I turned to The Innovative Educator, Lisa Nielsen. When I mentioned my need for assistance to the author of this blog, Lisa Nielsen, at best I hoped she could point me towards some technology curriculum maps that I could use for ideas and inspiration. Being an innovative educator she had something else in mind. Instead she replied to my Facebook message asking:

“Why don’t share what you have on Google docs and others can help you with it. I’ve had a lot of luck with docs like this”.

I was a little hesitant. I wasn’t completely confident about what I had written but I needed the help, so I put my trust in what she suggested. Lisa generously posted the link on Twitter and Facebook and invited people to contribute with this Tweet:

Help this tech teacher come up w/essential questions for his curriculum map http://tinyurl.com/techcurriculummap. PLN powers, activate!

I was not sure what to expect.

No sooner did she Tweet then I notice something amazing. Over the next two hours I had a virtual community of more than a dozen people viewing and editing my doc. Although one was not available to me at my school, I had found a virtual “department” to engage with about critical issues in the teaching of technology. Many people offered to help me. In the end my fellow tech-savvy educators helped me to formulate an effective, cutting edge and comprehensive map for my year.

At the top of my curriculum map I posted directions for the type of input that would be helpful and a note to join me in the Google chat on the right-hand side of the page. Not only did my virtual colleagues fill in gaps, we had lively chats about how to best meet the needs of my students.

I can’t overstate the learning I experienced through this process. There were so many educators out there ready to collaborate with me. All I had to do is invite them to help me. My story is exactly the reason to PLNs are so powerful. They provide on-demand PD and support allowing us to make global connections to others in our field when we need it most. PLN’s help harness our collective wisdom. They allow us to experience community in a new way. They create communities and through these communities we are able to be stronger, more diverse and ultimately more effective at what we do.

The end result, a terrific grade 6 tech curriculum map complete with essential questions, understanding, knowledge, content, transferable skills, and assessments. In the true PLN spirit, I’ve left the doc up as a reference for others and invite continued input. Click here to take a look.

You have read this article Personal Learning Network / PLN with the title PLN. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2010/10/pln-powers-activate-tech-teacher-taps.html. Thanks!

Can the National Council of Teachers of English Keep Up with A Changing World for Literacy Teachers? Not Really.

I just came across the National Council of Teachers of English Policy Research Brief on 21st Century Literacies on my Twitterfeed, and though they take literacy past what it looked like in the 20th Century, it still seems quite rather distant from my vision of What a 21st Century Literacy Class Might Look Like Today.

Along with the Council’s outdated name (there’s so much more to it than teaching “English” in our globally connected world), their report, published in The Council Chronicle in 2009, gives little attention to what makes literacy in the 21st century so powerful, authentic publishing, Personal Learning Networks (PLNs), connecting via social media, establishing a professional digital footprint. There’s mention of MySpace (that’s like so five years ago), and social media software (uh, it’s not technically software), but nothing about the biggies like Facebook, Twitter, Ning. And, nothing about ditching the paper and hopping on the eReading and writing bandwagon.

The report suggests that global economies, new technologies, and exponential growth in information are transforming our society. Today’s employees engage with a technology-driven, diverse, and quickly changing “flat world.” English/language arts teachers need to prepare students for this world with problem solving, collaboration, and analysis—as well as skills with word processing, hypertext, LCDs, Web cams, digital streaming podcasts, smartboards, and social networking software—central to individual and community success.

Ugh. the report clearly was not written by those involved in the world of 21st century literacies. The language is outdated, key pieces are missing, and my personal bias, no...kids and teachers don’t need to use smartboards. The myth that they’re used as anything more than a projection tool in the real world of business is one the IWB companies are thrilled educators have bought into.

Wanting to give the NCTE the benefit of the doubt, I thought perhaps their 2009 policy brief Writing Outside of School may have touched on some of this. Nope. Okay, there’s some dabbling in the authentic use of online tools but the digital immigrant accent shines through loud and clear with examples that don’t make a lot of sense for instance: Two middle schoolers keep and share online journals in which they write reviews of music and films. Really? They keep online journals to write reviews of music and film. This is not how middle schoolers review music and film, and for the record, they don’t say “film.” Just not seeing that as the medium for this activity. Post comments and rate music and videos on YouTube is more in alignment with what students are doing. Another suggests: A teenager joins a group of his peers at 826 Valencia and reads his poem aloud. How about he posts his poem online to an authentic audience who rates, comments, and provides feedback becoming part of the student’s personal learning network where he connects with others with similar passions.

Looking at what I consider the big five, PLNs, social media, authentic publishing, eReading, and establishing a digital footprint, the NCTE gives little focus or attention to what is arguably some of the most important types of communicating our students need to learn to do. Here’s my suggested reading for the NCTE.

Crucial reading to develop the big five of 21st century literacy
PLNs, social media, authentic publishing, eReading, digital footprint development.

To help educators support students in authentic publishing read:

• Just Say Yes to Publishing! Exposing The Man Behind the Curtain If He’s Still Saying No.
• 21st Century Educators Don’t Say, “Hand It In.” They say, “Publish It!
• The Secret To Getting Every Student Excited About Writing
• Innovative Educators Can Help Students and Themselves Become Published Authors

To help the paper-trained become digital readers read:

• A few strong cases for ditching the paper and letting books grow digital wings
• Shed the Paper and Allow Books to Grow their Digital Wings
• Social Books Unlock Reader’s Voice and Provide Opportunity for Conversation
• iPads? Eh! Social Reading from Your Phone? Now That's Innovation!
• Ditch Paper and Get to the Thinking Faster.
• How I Lost 20 Pounds in One Month On a Paperless Diet
• Read and Personalize Books for Free with MeeGenius
• Innovative Ideas for Using Cell Phones to Summarize and Take Notes
• Reading 2.0: Where is the Love?
• The End of Books? (For Me, At Least?)

To help educators harness the power of social media read:

• Why social media curriculum is critical in schools
• 8 Real Ways Facebook Enriched Ms. Schoening’s First Grade Class
• Using Facebook with Students Becomes A Global Conversation via CNN
• Video Rebuttal to Educational Leaders and Parents On The Social Media Ban Wagon
• Why Every Parent and Teacher Should Learn MySpace and Facebook and A 30-Day Guide To Losing Your Digital as a Second Language (DSL) Accent
• Keep Your Students Connected This Summer with A Social Network
• How I Use Social Networking to Keep My Students Engaged All Summer Long

To help educators learn to harness the power of a personal learning network read:

• The PLN Matures. The Progression of the 21st Century Personal Learning Network
• Innovative Ideas for Getting Teachers Excited About Building Their Personal Learning Networks Real Time from Hunterdon Central Regional High School
• 5 Ways to Build Your 1.0 and 2.0 Personal Learning Network
• Why I *STILL* Love the Phrase Personal Learning Network
• 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network.
• 5 Readings and 2 Videos to Help Others Get Going with Personal Learning Networks
• How Blogging Has Helped Me Build My Personal Learning Network
  

To help educators support students in developing their digital footprint and 21st century voice read:

• Controlling your digital identity is as easy as 1-2-3
• Don’t Silence Students. A Resource to Support Students In Developing Their 2.0 Voice
• The 6 Step Plan to Using Your 21st Century Voice to Make a Difference
• Teaching Kids how to manage their Digital Footprint
• Ideas for parents interested in helping students manage their digital footprint and effectively participate in social media.

So what’s this mean for innovative educators? It means look at your council. Do they look like your students? Are they interacting in their worlds? Are they bringing students into the conversation? Do they exist in online worlds? If the answer is no, they probably aren’t preparing you or your students for the world outside the classroom. But don’t worry, if you want it, you and your students can develop a PLN that will be there for you.

You have read this article digital footprint / NCTE / Personal Learning Network / PLN with the title PLN. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2010/09/can-national-council-of-teachers-of.html. Thanks!

5 Readings and 2 Videos to Help Others Get Going with Personal Learning Networks

I refer to my wonderful personal learning network a lot in this blog. Here are some of my posts on the topic.

• The PLN Matures. The Progression of the 21st Century Personal Learning Network
• Innovative Ideas for Getting Teachers Excited About Building Their Personal Learning Networks Real Time from Hunterdon Central Regional High School
• 5 Ways to Build Your 1.0 and 2.0 Personal Learning Network
• Why I *STILL* Love the Phrase Personal Learning Network
• 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network.

Personal learning networks, or PLNs for short, are a relatively new concept. In fact when I first wrote about PLNs in 2008 I searched the term on wikipedia and came up short. So, I decided to start my own wikipedia entry which was rejected saying something to the effect of me not having the right or authority to just make up terms. In writing this post I notice the term finally did get accepted just this year and though rather scant you can read about PLNs here.

I first heard about PLNs from Will Richardson and shared his video about the concept in my post 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network. Here is Will’s video.


Today, I discovered a creative new video about PLNs from a talented artist through this Tweet.

mbteach RT @nashworld: And yet another look at PLN by @johntspencer => http://is.gd/enpkm simple and grounded. Like this. Will share.



The video provides a short engaging overview of what a PLN is. Aside from the exquisite artistic ability of it’s creator, something I really like about this video is that @johntspencer includes face-to-face interaction in his definition of PLNs. To me this is significant as I think many mistakenly think of a PLN as just your followers on Twitter or Friends on Facebook living in virtual worlds. While this is extremely powerful and leads to tremendous global connections, to me PLNs can be made up of people you connect with in a variety of ways. Some may never even know they’re a part of your PLN but you follow their blog or books religiously. Sometimes (and hopefully) your colleagues make up your PLN. Many of us innovative educators are finding more and more often that in many cases we meet someones mind before their face. This makes both the face-to-face and virtual connections even more powerful. You skip past the “getting to know you” and right into deep conversation ready to pick up just where you left off whether the past or future conversation happened as a DM on Twitter, a comment to a status update on Facebook, a backchannel chat during a webinar, IMs during a con call, or over cocktails.

You have read this article Personal Learning Network / PLN with the title PLN. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2010/08/5-readings-and-2-videos-to-help-others.html. Thanks!

The PLN Matures. The Progression of the 21st Century Personal Learning Network

I’ve noticed an exciting new trend lately with personal learning networks (PLNs).
To date the progression of the PLN has gone something like this.

1) Joining
People organically develop their PLNs when chosing to participate in social media like Twitter, Facebook , blogs, and through learning networks like Classroom 2.0.
2) Lurking
Once a member of an online community, people generally watch to get a feel for how things work and consume information.
3) Conversing
Next people move to joining conversation by retweeting, replying to discussion, commenting on blogs, connecting face-to-face building on ongoing conversations, etc.
4) Initiating/Creating
Sometimes people move to initiating the conversation by tweeting, starting discussions, launching blogs or learning networks, starting conferences (i.e. Educon, EdCamp) etc.

What I’ve noticed lately, is that this has moved a step further from, wait for it...

Conversation to Collaborative Creation
The natural progression of PLNs where people move from consumption to creation seems to be moving to the next level: Collaborative Creation.

I first noticed this when Mary Beth Hertz and Kevin Jarret shared with me during preparation for our #140Conference panel how they used the power of their PLNs to collaborate to create what is now called EdCamp. EdCamp is a day-long, completely free, user-driven “unconference” several educators spent several months planning, mostly virtually resulting in a terrific learning experience for all those who participated and leading to future EdCamps. Drawing from a PLN to collectively share and put together an unconference is extremely powerful and likely couldn’t easily be done without many Web 2.0 technologies available today.

Hey PLN, Can Ya Help Me with This?
Then I noticed something else happening in the Twitosphere. People were tweeting out requests for others from their PLNs to help collaborate on projects. The requests were not just asking for feedback, comments, or responses, but to actually jump into collaborative documents and join in the creation of materials connected to areas of expertise. The result in many cases would be something that benefited and informed all collaborators. What’s more places like Twitter and Facebook make it easy to reach out to/tag specific people if you want to virtually tap an expert on the shoulder for input.

I was so intrigued by this that I asked a few people doing this to share guest posts on my blog to share what they were doing. The work they were doing was nothing short of transformational.
These educators were collaborating to come up with smart ways to update their curriculum by infusing innovative, collaborative ideas. Teachers all contributed to a document what unit of study they were focusing on, ideas for innovating instruction, challenges, and questions. There was an additional column for suggestions. The document was tweeted out by some class members and next thing you know there was a global conversation with people providing feedback to teachers as they were learning directly in the document in which they were working.

Here are the two posts explaining exactly what took place.

• Innovative Ideas for Getting Teachers Excited About Building Their Personal Learning Networks Real Time from Hunterdon Central Regional High School
• Hiring the World to Be Your Professional Development Provider (free of charge)

Perhaps the most amazing example of this was when Alec Couros Tweeted:



Wow! What resulted was a document that you could see had dozens of contributors sharing, creating, developing a document that is currently 24 pages and counting and the source for numerous articles about Ning Alternatives. Sylvia Curry made a screencast of the “Ning Alternatives” document being edited in the first few minutes. The process was incredible and you can see pieces of it below with exactly who is editing where. What you can’t see is the top right part of the screen where Google docs shows you who is collaborating and also allows for a chat that can take place about the document.



Next I noticed a revered educator, Lucy Gray doing something similar. She Tweeted:
elemenous Share any thoughts/resources for meeting the needs of adult learners here. http://tinyurl.com/23bytyb #appsct 1:51 PM Aug 12th via TweetDeck Retweeted by you

So, I took a look at her Adult Learners document. What I saw was people (including me) collaborating from around the world on a Google doc with Lucy conducting a conversation in the instant message feature of Google docs prompting folks to think deeper and provide additional insights and information. This is a document that is useful to all those reading and contributing.

Being the innovative educator I am I had to jump on the bandwagon, so I followed the lead of Lucy, Alec, and the rest and I tweeted this:
Contribute to hosted v self hosted Ning alternatives http://tinyurl.com/selfhostedvhosted Focus - Right language rather than critique.

I also sent direct replies to some people I knew were successfully learning network hosts such as these:
@stevehargadon Wld luv ur contribution @ hosted v self hosted Ning alternatives http://tinyurl.com/selfhostedvhosted
@jenwagner - Not sure I understand the question. It's really "any" hosted v self hosted solution.

I also had extended conversations with @funnymonkey and @don_watkins who contributed generously. The result was this document that compares hosted vs self-hosted alternatives to ning (stay-tuned for upcoming post).

As creator of my own learning network I had expertise in the hosted solution, but I did not have expertise in the self-hosted solution. What better way to learn, make meaning, and create then with contributions from my PLN.

I know the phrase “game changer” is overused these days, but...I think this qualifies. Do you?

You have read this article Personal Learning Network / PLN with the title PLN. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2010/08/the-pln-matures-progression-of-21st.html. Thanks!

Hiring the World to Be Your Professional Development Provider (free of charge)

Editor’s Note: I asked the author to write this post after being impressed that a professional development facilitator not only reached out via Twitter for feedback and inspiration for teachers. That is relatively unique, but many of us on Twitter have done this. But rather because they also invited other educators in to provide feedback and suggestions on ideas these teachers were developing for updating instruction via a Google doc which you can view here. Instantly these teachers in this session were having educators from around the Globe provide feedback, thoughts, and suggestions real-time into their work. How cool is that?!? The article below provides the background on the experience. Enjoy the read and please consider sharing some of your insights with the teachers at their collaborative google doc.



Form of an authentic PLN experience! Shape of a PLN mentor!
Cross posted at Flying off the Shelf

Guest post by Heather Hersey

Just as students need authentic experiences, models, and mentors, teachers need the same experiences in order to forge into Personal Learning Networks (PLN). Showing a video about its power or sharing an example of how a PLN worked for you isn’t enough for some teacher-learners.

When I began exploring social media as a way of learning from and sharing with others, I was not alone. English teacher Cathy Stutzman (@stutz01) and I jumped in together, proofreading blog posts and even tweets! We figured out twitter lingo and really coached each other through it. I also relied heavily on my hubby, Brien Gorham (@virgilsdiner), who had already been blogging about pop culture, for advice and proofreading. These two kept me going in addition to other folks I met through Twitter, most notably, Buffy Hamilton (@buffyjhamilton). Even when I have fallen off the digital earth a few times, these folks grabbed my hand and helped me leap back on.

However, it was the experience of others that made me see PLNs as a new language that needs mentoring and immersion as necessary gateways for some teachers. For example, Marci Zane (@marcizane), signed up for Twitter but did not use it. She admitted that she didn’t see it as a value to her at first because I would send her things I found there. It was seeing me use it during the 2009 AASL conference that changed her mind. She explained to me that she saw all of the things she was missing and found herself wanting to be included in the conversation.
Another example is our 1:1 pilot group. [See Cathy Stutzman's guest post on here for more info about this session!] This past Wednesday, Hunterdon Central Regional High School had its 4th 1-1 pilot meeting. This is the 2nd group of teachers, who are now joining us from last year, exploring strategies for making learning more student-centered. One of the ideas we have been focusing on is the building of a PLN. We shared wallwishers, videos, and personal experiences, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I felt like we made a breakthrough.

Will Richardson (@willrich45) visited as folks shared out their lesson plan ideas. A few of us tweeted about the experience using #hctweet and created a google doc to share our ideas and hopefully get some feedback. Finally, folks were able to see the potential of these tools for themselves and their students. Many people joined twitter, those that already had accounts got into the tweeting, and we even had a new blogger emerge (Keith Dennison). Setting up an authentic experience to use twitter and Google docs did far more than our prior attempts. Lessons learned and powers activated!

Update: OK…maybe powers weren’t completely activated. The meeting above took place on August 4th, and we met again today, one week later. I began what I thought would be a quick 10-15 minute recap of how #hctweet and the Google doc took off, as well as the blog posts and connections that resulted from our work last week. What came next surprised me: we began a full-fledged twitter discussion with people asking how to do things that they weren’t able to do over the week. Folks also asked for clarification and practiced with each other so they could see how Twitter really worked. We have several veteran tweeters in the room so we were able to answer questions, tutor, and mentor folks in growing their PLNs and then used Twitter in our Skype session with Sarah Brown Wessling (@SarahWessling).
This was the third time we worked with Twitter during these sessions, and the experience shows that one-time presentations are not enough nor is a single follow-up. We need to not only create authentic experiences but also allow for continual practice with experienced users as we navigate this new territory as teacher-learners. Alright…powers re-activated…tweet on!

You have read this article Personal Learning Network / PLN / twitter / Twitter in Education with the title PLN. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2010/08/hiring-world-to-be-your-professional.html. Thanks!