Reflections and Revisions

We've all had to live with the ISM for a while now, and it is not an unqualified success. I'm now scuttling back to the drawing board and trying to decide what will improve this child of mine.

MindMeister has an incredible online tool for thinking things through, and it has helped me realize that the ISM is trying to accomplish too much in too little time.

Just like our students, we all are learning at different paces and using different manners. The ISM needs to reflect this. I've been playing around and wonder if I've found the right sequence. Let me know if you find this helpful, and email me if you'd like to become a collaborator. This is a group project, after all!

If you build it...

they might come. Then again, they might *not* come. I'm not certain if it's the way I put the whole ISM together, if it's the way it relies on people being comfortable experimenting, or if I just need to tear the whole thing down and start again (AGAIN). Whatever the reason, the ISM is not what I would call an unqualified success. In fact, it's not what I would call a success at all. A disaster? Maybe.

I really need feedback from all levels of users. So far I've had a meager handful complete the thing, and only a couple of them "got" the Reflections thing. How can I restructure this vital part of the ISM?

Just like our students, if we don't reflect on what we've learned, it becomes something dead in the back of our minds. We *are* learners! Now I just need to discover the right mode for helping myself and others learn to use these new tools.

Back to the drawing board? You tell me. I'm going to get another cup of coffee and then head for school. Perhaps this afternoon I'll have people take me up on my invitation to start the ISM from school. That should give me a chance to discover first hand what is so off-putting about the whole thing.

Talley Ho!

First Pothole on the ISM Road

(Note to self: Go to another computer to test features, when you have your usual computer set to automatically log in to sites.)

Checking my school email at 10:30 p.m. last night yielded feedback from the first teacher trying to work through the ISM:

I am having trouble on the module. There are several places that ask me to give my "Reflections" on a page but where I am supposed to click "Edit the Page" it is saying "Protected." This module is really hard to understand most of the time. I am getting really frustrated. I feel like I am wasting my time.

Oh No, that certainly isn't what I intended! But it is invaluable information, and showed me some major bugs...

• the instructions about joining wikispaces.com and the TTR wikispace at the beginning of the Getting Started section must not be clear enough, or s/he would have been able to edit the page
• I've deleted those instructions, and changed the wiki settings (see below)
  
• requiring membership in wikispaces is a pain - I'm not constantly at my computer (no matter what my colleagues think!), so can't be certain of getting the membership requests moderated in a timely fashion.
• I've changed the settings to Public, so membership isn't required to edit pages
• The My Maps feature in Google Maps is really cool, but it turns out that "sharing" doesn't mean people can add to the map, it just means they can view a map set to Private
• I've deleted the Exploration recommendation that the user "add to the map"

True to life and Murphy's Law, Wikispaces.com was down when I tried to work on it last night. After tossing and turning and failing to find sleep, at 2:30 a.m. I was finally able to get into the site and make the changes. I've emailed updates to the teacher, in hopes s/he will be willing to give it another shot and provide me with more feedback. Does the phrase "Not Ready For Prime Time" ring a bell?

Now I'm worrying about the usefulness of the physical handout. I created it by copy/pasting directly from the wiki, but that means the handout is out of date almost as soon as it is made available. Let's hope I find a solution before bedtime; I'm not worth much on 2 hours of sleep!

Will It Work?

The Internet Study Module (ISM) that has consumed so much of my life the last few weeks has finally been posted to the school website. I sent advance copies (doesn't that sound grand?) to the district admin, hoping it will be what they are looking for, but I'll confess to being very nervous.

Not nervous about the admin. If they don't care for what they find, we'll pull it and start over (or replace the new with the previous learning module). What I'm nervous about is the reactions of my fellow teachers. Have I pushed too hard? Am I asking them to take too big a leap? Is this just going to frustrate people who are working as hard as they can to prepare the young minds that are entrusted to us?

Then I read David Warlick's post, "Caught Whining..." and breathed a sigh of (almost) relief.

I do not believe that most teachers are too far behind to start learning new tools. They’re smart, resourceful, dedicated, and they are professional learners.That's the community in which I work...a family of professional learners.

Am I pushing too hard, too fast? Perhaps. But I'll find out shortly, once word spreads that the module is out there, ready to be worked on.

Highs and Lows of Tech

Having recovered from my elation about being able to blog from my cell phone, I asked DH to work through the ISM again.

We are all so accustomed to learning being packaged, either in a text book or in a handout, that shifting to reading/writing directly on a web page can be a little confusing. A "little"??? More like a LOT.

I use the Internet much like nlowell. It is something that I use constantly, in a myriad of ways. Getting ready for a family trip to Mexico, my son was startled to discover that I had gotten a much better exchange rate on dollars to pesos than he had, simply by going through my bank's online service. He had made many phone calls, driven quite a distance, I had spent fifteen minutes online and beaten his results. My response? "If I can't do it online, I probably won't do it.

On my way to finding nlowell's statement, I ran across this timely posting by Teacher K. Is screen-casting the answer?

Those of you who are working your way through the ISM module need to help me on this one. Is it pushing you too far out of your Zone of Proximal Development to have the entire module as only online? Would you, the consumers of the product, prefer to have a physical handout to work with? I'm so accustomed to doing everything on the computer, including taking notes and adding comments to documents, that I may be pushing too much of my own learning style on you.

Leave me a comment and let me know!

New test

Test

Goodness Gracious! What won't they think of next?

Trying to think my way through the section on Social Networking (specifically the entry for blogging), I wandered around the Help sections at blogger.com, where this blog is posted. Lo and behold I can now blog from my cell phone! The picture is not the best in the world - I guess I didn't really expect it to work - but I'm not going to redo it. Instead, I'm going to revel in the silliness of my first experiment with moblogging. What an incredible tool this could be in the classroom!

Revision is a good thing, right?

I'm now on my fourth fifth sixth version of the Internet Study Module I'm trying to create for our district.

The "Beast" (as I've come to refer to it) started life as a graphic organizer created with Cmap, then morphed into a word processing document, ready to be posted to our website. That way participants could download the handout and follow the steps at their own computers, at their own paces.

You can't do an Internet study without using the Internet, so I added some online components: sign in using a Google spreadsheet, take a pre-test at Quizstar (a tool from 4teachers.org), go to a wiki for explanations, add your own thoughts on a Google doc. All for an introductory study session. Great ideas, but a tad intricate. By the time I finished writing instructions for accessing the Quizstar pretest, the word processing document looked like a map of the Houston freeway system. Not the best example of how to use the Internet!

Back to the beginning. Trash the document, look at the graphic organizer again, and start fresh. Write, search, write, link...ask Dear Husband to try it out. He's a Mac person, so we have to amble through various browsers to find one that will work with all the links. He's also very literal, and stumbles at the second set of instructions. Obviously, I hadn't built a firm enough scaffold.

Third iteration looks better, but is still depending too much on a handout. As a friend observed, "There's something just...WRONG about having a paper version of an Internet study module."

The fourth and fifth versions got closer to what I had originally envisioned, but were still too laborious and paper-bound.

Now that I'm on the sixth version, I think I'm finally getting it. The wiki is carrying the weight, but now I'm concerned for those who feel uncomfortable reading/writing/thinking solely online. Can they be comfortable with nothing but links?

Surveying My Options

SurveyMonkey has a great free service. I was able to set up an assessment survey without any trouble, until.... Would you believe I got stumped by the final step? I couldn't figure out how to find the correct URL to post for participants to take the survey. Fortunately, it seems I'm not the only one who had problems; they have the answer in the first page of the Support FAQs. Great tool, with only one small unintuitive step.

As teachers we frequently pretest our students before we start a new unit. This online tool allowed me to create a ten question survey in about 15 minutes. I'll be able to retrieve the anonymous responses online, view the responses in aggregate, and then look at the individual responses. Why not try it for one of your next pretests?

Teachers as ARE Learners

I'll admit it...I'm a teacher. And a learner. I can't stop myself. Something catches my attention, and I have to explore, investigate, tear it apart. It's a wonder my parents survived my youth! As an adult, no matter what job I've been paid for, I've always ended up teaching. And learning. Now, as a middle school Tech teacher, I'm moving to a different level: offering to teach my fellow teachers. Guess what...I'm learning as well.

My current exercise is trying to create a meaningful learning opportunity focused on using the Internet. Does my target audience already use the 'Net? Certainly, if only for school email and entering grades and attendance. What do I have to offer them? What I see as the incredible universe titled Web 2.0. The problem is this: I'm a geek (freely admitted) and the people I'm writing for probably aren't comfortable wearing this label.

How do I open the virtual windows without scaring them to death? Some of them probably have My*pace accounts, most of them have never heard of Ning, and a few (who have suffered through other sessions I've offered) have del.icio.us accounts. Can you hear the reactions I'm imagining?

Blogs? Something that is blocked from school, and who has time for that anyway. Podcasts? Something that requires an iPod that can't be afforded on a teacher's salary. DSN? We're a rural community that doesn't have access to high-speed Internet. Wiki? What tha?.

But it's worth the effort! I want to share all the neat stuff that is out there. I want other people to get excited by David Warlick, Miguel Guhlin, Wes Fryer. I want to meet people at Tapped In who I know in the "meat world." Why can't we use the opportunities afforded by Wikispaces to help our students grow and learn while we do the same?

And of course I'm off on a tangent as soon as I start creating the links in this post. Wouldn't you know it, when I went to Miguel's blog to pick up the correct URL, his March 20 entry hit me full in the face. Before I could come back here and create the link, I had to go to Randy Rodger's edublog Teaching Better with Web 2.0 and find this

...a teacher first needs to view their blogging, reading of other blogs, bookmarking, etc. as an essential part of the classroom preparation time. Think of the time already spent gathering materials, perusing teacher’s guides, creating handouts/worksheets, etc. If but a small portion of this time is redirected towards learning/doing something new, a teacher can quickly develop a proficiency level and begin to identify ways to effectively utilize the tools of web 2.o in their instruction. One planning period a week is a great place to start!

Well. Hmm. Okay. Let's let this entry be the beginning of my journey preparing the new Internet exercise. Fellow learners, start your engines!