Technology Fail!

I guess these things are bound to happen.  Our PDPP Posse Blog got together again this morning for our third meeting and we were really excited to be joined by some enthusiastic middle school readers who belong to the library club at Gordon Head Middle School.  We arranged for them to join us by videoconferencing in using BlueJeans from their iPads.  It was a great plan and everyone was excited to be connecting.

But . . .

There were no batteries in the remote for the conferencing screen on our end
There was feedback because we had to use a laptop instead of the usual system
The Middle Schoolers were in a noisy place (a middle school!)

So . . .

Despite the best efforts of Rich McCue on our end and Mr. D on the other, we just couldn't hear each other well enough to make the experience worthwhile.  Disappointing.  But just maybe some of our best learning occurs through failures and missteps.  Right?

And . . .

We are not quitters!  So next week we will try again with the following changes:

1. We will check the equipment the day before or morning of to make sure everything is in ship shape.
2. We will arrange for the students to be 2 to a device and hiding out in quiet spots around the school.
3. We will turn off the mics when the person on the device is not speaking.
4. We will have a set agenda of the order of presenting circulated ahead of time.

Our anticipation has only grown and we are now REALLY looking forward to hearing from those enthusiastic young people.  Thanks to Mr. D, Ms. Margetts and Ms. Ross from GHMS and to Rich McCue from UVic for their help and patience with this process.  

Book Club and a guest

We had our first "real" book club meeting last week and something exciting happened!  We had a guest, Heidi, join us from a local middle school to lend her expertise to our gathering and to introduce us to some of her favourite middle years fiction books.  She mentioned that there are two over-riding themes that she has noticed middle schoolers being fascinated with:  not fitting in and death.  She suggested several books on those themes that she has found popular among her students.

But the interesting part about having Heidi join us was how she joined us.  It was using BlueJeans videoconferencing.  So, Heidi became part of our round table and it worked really well.  So well, in fact, that I have a new plan for the book club:  I am going to invite other middle school language arts teachers to join us this way so that we can access the experience of people already working in the field.

Progress!

The above was written several days ago and there has been a new and exciting development to share.  A friend of mine, who also happens to be a masterful middle school teacher, Alex, suggested that he might be able to bring some real live students into our discussion.  Alex is a man of action and so tomorrow, a small group of grade 6 - 8 students will be joining us via BlueJeans to share some of their favourite books, genres and literary themes with us.

This has inspired me and I am in the process of setting up another group of students to join us next week.  Maybe some of the others would like to come back again too.  This is getting cool.  To see the books that we are reading, reviewing and blogging about, see http://pdppposserc.blogspot.ca.

Curation? And a plan!

I want to do something meaningful for my tech ed class, which has a wide open, student driven project (or two) so I decided to see if there was interest among my cohort to start an online middle years book club.  There was.  Significant interest.  We held a quick introductory meeting and almost everyone who aspires to teach that age group attended along with several people that are interested in the younger grades.  Wow.  Our cohort is very keen to gather great resources and to share the work of doing so.  Exciting stuff.

Next step is to figure out how to turn this into a tech ed endeavour.  I spoke to my prof and she introduced the idea of "curation".  I knew that a curator is someone responsible for collections in a museum or library but I was woefully ignorant about digital curation though I now think that Facebook and Wikipedia are both forms of curation because they store data that is constantly growing and changing.

I did some "research" into digital curation (okay, I looked it up on Wikipedia) and found the following to be helpful.  A good approach to digital curation is to: 

1) conceptualize - what kind of digital material will we be creating?

2) create - produce the data that we will be storing. 

3) access and use.

For our purposes, this will consist of our cohort (and beyond?) reviewing middle years resources and sharing teaching ideas with one another.  For now, we have decided to manage our book club as a blog (PDPPPosse Resource Club on blogspot) but this may have to change to manage more data.  

Now I put it to you, both of my readers:  any ideas for a curation platform?  

Reluctant baby steps

Seldom have I experienced such academic frustration and total incomprehension of a subject.  Today I sat in my EdTech class feeling like it was being taught in another language.  Feeling, in fact, like it might be rocket science.  No fault of my professor.   It's just that I am a 1970's and 80's educated person who learned the Queen's English (the 80 something year old Queen's English) which doesn't include words like "diigo" or "twitter" or "livebinders.com".  I am wading through a thick fog of this strange new language feeling overwhelmed and disoriented.

But here's what I have gleaned so far:  in order to become connected with the best and biggest possible resource there is, it would behoove me to become versed in twitter.  I hate that I am starting to see the value in it but . . . I am starting to see the value in it.  I am only just beginning to figure out how to use truly excellent online resources and connect with some innovative educators that are sharing with each other, freely and generously using this medium.   

Today I made some tentative wobbly baby steps.  I connected f2f (which for people of my generation means face to face) with a teacher friend of mine, picked his brain and pilfered from his twitter community to find a few people to follow.  I spent a quick half hour looking through some of their tweets in a fairly aimless way and became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of good stuff out there.  The next small step will be to try to bring focus to my "twitter time" and to determine how to meaningfully expend energy finding resources (including technology) that will be helpful to me as a teacher.