Making the Most of DE

Have you noticed how different your dashboard looks when you log in to DE this year? Well there are a number of new features on your dashboard that will help you maximize your use of DE content as well as help you keep up to date with upcoming events within the DEN. I will highlight to of the biggest changes to the dashboard that will help you to immediately get more out of DE today.

1. Making the Most of DE

When you log in to DE, you look for the section with this header. It is actually a series of three tabs with helpful hints and trick for utilizing DE content. Notice that they are labeled Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. This allows you to find support at your own comfort and skill level. These tips start at searching for content within DE all the way to utilizing the Builder Tools.

2. DE Webinars

Another great and now easily accessible feature is a listing of all of the upcoming webinars DE is offering to all DE users. This listing can be viewed either by date or by program (as in DE products or STEM webinars.) If you look this week you'll notice that the 2010 Fall Virtual Conference is coming up. This is always a great learning experience! Click here to register for the Virtual Conference.

DEN Summer Institute

This week I was privileged to attend the Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. It was an incredible learning experience! I it just such an uplifting experience being among so many amazing educators who share a similar vision for education as I do. To be able to converse and share ideas, gain resources, learn new skills AND have fun all at the same time makes the learning so much more meaningful and impactful for me. We started with some networking (the picture is from the networking trip into Boston), spent a few days in learning sessions and completed a professional development project for something in Discovery Education. We even got to view each others' projects before we left and I was again blown away by the talent of my fellow STAR educators. The best part about the projects is that Discovery Education is going to upload ALL of them into their Professional Development section so that all Discovery educators can utilize the resources. Thank you DE for such an wonderful and educational experience - it will most definitely have a positive impact on my teaching!

Meltdown in the Twitterverse

Monday, the folks over at Twitter were working to fix an auto-follow-type bug and many people in the Twitterverse went into panic mode right away because their Following/Followers lists had apparently been wiped out to zero. Now for those of you that weren't on Twitter at the time - your Twitter stream was still visible to you as a user so it was pretty obvious that you were still following everyone you'd chosen to follow. But there were still a large number of people that went into a panic that they had lost their followers.

I was simply amazed at the number of people that were upset AND how few mentions there were of no longer following those they had chosen to follow - meaning most people were simply concerned that people were no longer following them. Now granted I have just a little less than 300 followers and follow a little less than 200, but I just don't see what the big deal was. If I'm saying things that others find to be truly meaningful and worthwhile won't they find me and start following me again? And vice versa: I know who I would start following again because I know whose tweets I find compelling and interesting. 


So personal reflection time: What does it say about us if we are freaking out when something like losing our Twitter followers happens? 


Image courtesy of Twitter.

Going Back to Move Forward

About a week and a half ago I was told that due to budget cuts, my position was "being recommended for elimination to the BOE" and the following Monday the BOE approved that recommendation. If you have ever met me or read any posts on this blog you know that I LOVE my job. I love the opportunity to help other educators grow and improve the educational environment in their classrooms. When I lost my job I was at least able to apply for any open teaching positions within the district and have taken a position at a middle school teaching sixth grade science.

So in August I'm "going back" to the classroom.

It's still hard for me to fully grasp that idea, that I've lost the job that I love and it has nothing to do with my job performance or capabilities. In a time where there are entire schools being restructured by having all employees re-interview for their jobs, the only part that factored into selecting my position was that I was the last person hired. Some days I feel like I'm progressing through the stages of grieving, and other days I feel like I'm just going to wake up tomorrow and it will all have been a very long nightmare. And yes, it is a grieving process. I have lost something which I love and had no choice or say in the matter.

This weekend I was starting to see a light and begin to be excited about some of the possibilities with this new job. When I left the classroom blogs had only been approved for use in our district for a couple of months, the only wiki anyone had ever heard of was Wikipedia and the tools like Glogster and Voicethread hadn't even started yet. When I think about all that I have learned in the last three years as an instructional technology specialist, and pair that with all of the technology I will have available to me in the classroom, I really do start to get excited. I know that my experience as an ITS has made me a better teacher and that I will be able to more strongly impact students when I have that daily, face-to-face interaction with them, but I'm still struggling with the whole idea. 

Leaving the classroom to take this position was the hardest thing I had ever done in my professional life at the time as I love teaching, and now I'll be "going back" with a new perspective and new skills.  

Image courtesy of ManojVasanth and Flickr.

My Advice?

I was excited and flattered when an instructor emailed me to ask if she could interview me for a class she is teaching about being a technology integration specialist. Since it is a class early on in the program it mostly covers what it means to be an integration specialist - what skills are involved and such. So the questions were pretty much what I expected: What would you say are your major responsibilities? What is a typical day like as an integration specialist? (This was the hardest question to answer as no two days are alike.) What advice do you have for those looking to become technology integration specialists? It is this last question that was both the easiest and I feel most important question she could have asked. And these are the main points of my answer:

• Expand your Professional Learning Network (PLN) - I learn SO MUCH when I take time to read my RSS feeds and just "listen" to the education talk that occurs on sites like Twitter. 
• Be approachable, but not a door mat. - It is important that the educators and students you support know that you will help them when they need it, but don't do the work for them. If needs support keep your hands off of their computer if at all possible. This may possibly be one of the hardest things I had to learn because "I can do it faster." But, if you fix the problems for them, they will come back again expecting you to fix another problem and won't ever learn the skills themselves.
• Don't let your work take over your life. - It is so easy to sit down "for just a few minutes" with your computer in the evening and then realize that two hours have passed. One of my favorite aspects of my job is that I get to explore the internet for new tools and exciting ways to use them in the classroom. But this can be very time consuming and can cause you to feel overwhelmed if you are not careful.

There were of course a number of other things I could have said, but I felt these were some of the biggest ideas that I wanted to convey.  And of course as soon as I publish this post there will be even more that I wished I had added.


Image courtesy of Flickr and laughlin

Kansas Roads More Important than Education?

I just saw on local news channel KWCH that Reader's Digest ranked the roads in Kansas number one in the nation, which was of course followed by an interview with an official from the Kansas Department of Transportation telling folks why we shouldn't have to cut any money out of the KDOT budget next year. That we would certainly drop from the prestigious rank of #1 if we were to cut the KDOT budget.

At the same time, the district where I work is looking at having to cut somewhere around $25 MILLION from our budget for next year - and that's just one district. Top that with the fact that the state has already been delinquent making payments to school districts a number of times this year and it leads to some potentially terrifying implications for our education system in Kansas.

Now it may be that I am biased because I am an educator, but it seems to me a really easy way to get more money into the education budget would be to move some of the money from the KDOT budget over to the education budget. I know as a Americans we are taught that it we must be number one (think how many times the medal count was displayed on NBC during the Olympics) but as a Kansan I am really okay with letting our road conditions slide down the list a bit if that means our students can continue to get the educations they deserve.

Image courtesy of Flickr and TheDphotography.

Power Trips in Education

Have you ever noticed the number of people that are apparently on serious power trips in the world of education? From the physics instructor who destroys a laptop in class to emphasize that laptops are not allowed in his class. (What is this guys scared of anyway? That students might learn additional information than he isn't giving in his lecture??) Or administrators that create rules for students simply so they can play "Gotcha!" when a student breaks the rules. To districts blocking Youtube, photosharing sites and a vast number of other internet tools all in the name of internet safety. Or the classroom teacher that simply feels that if they were capable of learning without all these "new, fancy tools" their students should be able to do so as well. All of these are intended to make sure everyone around knows "who's in charge" and that deviants will be punished. 

But why? Why must there be keepers of the knowledge or controllers of the access? If our goal as educators is to make sure our students are prepared for life after school, why then are we actually preparing them for life thirty to forty years ago? Billie McNamara in an article title "The Skill Gap" states "Today, basic soft skills dominate workplace needs: interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge; skills and abilities such as ethics, personal organization and work habits; time management; teamwork and interpersonal communication; anger management; reasoning and problem solving; and managing one’s learning." How are we preparing students for a work environment that requires them to manage their own time, work with others, manage their own learning and solve problems if we are controlling every move they make? It seems to me that we are moving students in the exact opposite direction of where we want them to be by NOT allowing them to think for themselves or have any say in the direction of their learning. 


Personally it is so rewarding to give students the power select which tools they will use in the learning process and to give them a say in how to reach the learning objectives. This not only allows students to learn those "soft skills" that so many employers are looking for in new employees, but it actually reduces stress on the teacher - it's really quite liberating. So what do you say? Can you give it a try? Just let go...

Image courtesy of Flickr and Jackaraia

Facing Defeat

Recently I applied to be a Discovery Educator Guru and unfortunately I was not accepted. The list of those that were accepted is amazing and I'm certain they will represent the DEN well, but I am still disappointed that I was not accepted. And of course my wonderful husband gave me the pep talk that I shouldn't be too disappointed because I've gotten so many other things in my professional career - which is true. I got a teaching job pretty much right after graduating college, I was accepted into master teacher programs, I was offered my current position despite the fact that I didn't have the "preferred" master's degree, I've presented at several conferences, and I've been able to represent the DEN in a number of other ways. 
Still, this one hit me hard and I had to work to push myself through it. I had to tell myself that only five were accepted and those that were accepted were clearly more experienced and qualified than I am. That I need to keep doing what I am doing as it does make a difference to a number of people. In the end what really helped me to push past that disappointment is my children, especially my fourteen year old. I had told her how excited I was about the possibility of becoming a DEN guru and she knew that I had not been accepted. I knew that I had to accept this defeat gracefully not only for myself, but also as an example to my girls. I feel it is important that they see me being a strong person working to improve the system of education in any way that I can. In that process there will be defeats, and I feel that those need to be seen as learning opportunities and that if I can show that to my children I am actually benefiting from that defeat.


Image courtesy of Picasa and scwphoto