Starting Learning Communities at my school
Now that I have found so much information from all of us exploring all the magnificent tools that are available in the WWW, the next step is to act upon it and start building learning communities in my school.
How I see that happening is by doing the following:
- Organize a blog or a site that lists all the tools, a short description and samples of its applicability.
- Observe teacher and meet with them to see what their needs are.
- According to their needs, I will expose them to some tools (according to their readiness) and as I see them getting used to the tools, I will start releasing more tools that will be relevant to them.
- I will start creating small solutions for different departments.
- I will try too get teachers on board with blogs per department, so they could start sharing their ideas and concerns.
- I will try to get teachers on board with Google docs for lesson planning and unit planning.
- I will have workshops where teachers will start working with these tools.
- I will have teachers creating a newsletter with a blog, to receive feedback from parents and students.
- Some teachers could use hotchalk.com to post assignments, videos, photos, etc.
- I could show teachers on how to record different lessons that could be use when they are absent or post them for students to review what they covered in class.
Hotchalk or a blog page could be the center of all the tools students or other teachers could start from.
Some practical ways to help teachers starting using these tools:
Hotchalk ~ Could be used as course manager
Blog ~ Could be used as an announcements page.
Jing ~ Could be use to create little tutorials and lessons for a substitute or review lessons.
Delicious ~ To post important links for the course
Skype ~ To call parents (long distance call) . They could record the conversation with the permission of the parents (liability issue).
Wikis ~ Collaborating with other teachers
Flikr ~ Class photos
Google calendar ~ class events
TeacherTube ~ Educational videos
Then, when teachers feel comfortable then they could start using these tools more with students
Google docs ~ Group project
Bloglines vs. Course blogs ~ Students’ journals, etc
Skype ~ Role-play, case scenarios, support, etc
We could use the educational videos to introduce them to different concepts and have them available for them to access them.
Ok…I will continue later (I am brain dead)
October 23, 2007 at 3:27 am
Excellent ideas, all of them. I’m in the same position as you. I need to encourage teachers to grow in this area. I’m going to share my ideas on how to go about that in my Blog but I’m really happy to see others have the responsibility of “teaching teachers.”
October 23, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I’ve seen your entries and I’m intrigued at the idea of creating web communities. As I have seen at our school most of the time you have to lead the best and drag the best. I look forward to reading some more and will be borrowing liberally from you as I hatch my own plans to make teachers more tech savvy.
October 24, 2007 at 12:16 am
Sunnytechgirl, we should talk about our ideas and maybe come up with a good model for both of us to use. What do you think?…I think we should maybe create a blog together and share our ideas and maybe other people could join us to do the same thing. I know Michael is doing something similar too.
October 24, 2007 at 12:36 am
Cheryl and David,
What about the three of us creating a plan or collaborating with each other to help our schools to incorporate more technology into more teaching. I know the three of us could come up with something better rather than working by ourselves.
October 24, 2007 at 1:36 am
You have so many great ideas. It is inspiring to read your blog and see all that you have done. It gives the vision and inspires me to keep trying to do more and more. Also, thanks for all your words of encouragement as I awkwardly make my way through the course. I think it’s a great idea to collaborate with other like minded colleagues on a blog.
October 24, 2007 at 5:50 am
Maureen, thank you for such nice words. Well, it is so much fun when you collaborate with other colleagues. The way we can all help each other and feel great at the end of the day it’s very rewarding.
We help students from our hearts and when we notice that we made a difference and how much we contributed to their success, really help us continue and keep trying our best. Well, I feel the same way when I help colleagues.
October 25, 2007 at 1:05 am
Absolutely, I’d love to collaborate on that. I’m planning to post my ideas tonight since I didn’t get to it last night. However, like you, it will have to be a work in progress. I like the wordpress blogging tools, you get a very nice interface. So we could make it a big project, create Ning socialnetwork with the blog as part of it. With all these tools it would be great and with teachers from different divisions participating we should get lots of collaboration. The advantage is that in rural divisions like ours sometimes there aren’t that many teaching is specialized areas. David is the lead techie in his school and the others have quite a bit of catching up to do. Just one thing. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I wonder if someone else is already doing this. On the other hand think how much we’ll learn setting up a site and posting this type of information and with LwICT such a huge concern right now it’s certainly a timely idea.
October 25, 2007 at 1:15 am
Like the rest of you, I am trying to work at integrating ICT in all of our courses. All of our students see me in Grade 9 for ICT 1&2. The problem, however, is I never see many of them again. For three years, too many students avoid computers as much as possible. So, I am trying to work will many of my colleagues to try to generate ICT into all grade levels.
Some already do great stuff, but we are not consistent nor do we scaffold and increase our expectations of student projects.
For example, students may do PowerPoint presentations in all four senior years, however, they do not incorporate multimedia into their presentations because we, the teachers, have not emphasized the need for more integration of technology.
We need to change this. I see students using technology all of the time (talking and texting, etc.), but they need more than just those skills. It is a work in progress.
October 26, 2007 at 3:47 am
Yes, I know. It’s time consuming and we need to see what is out there that is working. Something is collaborating in a delicious account (centralize that account) where we could just link to different sites. We can categorize by:
- Tools
- Videos
- Tutorials
- Strategies
- Classroom resources
- Resources by subject area
- PD / Professional development
Then we could have the blog to bring an strategy together.
We should have a google calendar for maybe PD opportunities, video-conferencing once in while.
What do you think?
October 26, 2007 at 3:59 am
Mike, I agree with you. That’s why we need to create online learning communities or to have time to collaborate with teachers to be in sink with everything we teach. That’s the biggest challenge in every institution, don’t you think?