We are so impressed by the level of participation and professionalism from our JD and WG teachers. The thoughtful discussions they have with each other about the resources and tools we share are incredible. Their use of the tools, lesson planning and post-instruction reflections are thorough and forward-thinking. Kudos to all of you! We are so glad you participated in NGN! Beyond Cool: Meaningful Technology Integration One and Two!

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The Sun Sets on a Successful Season of In-Services

We were able to offer three virtual in-service courses this summer:

• Next Gen Now! Course One
• Next Gen Now! Course Two
• Virtual Modules One

Source

We were very impressed with the level of participation and the quality of the work produced by those who joined us.  Summer seems like a time when teachers actually have the brain and schedule capacity to fully engage with new content as they prepare for the upcoming year. Discussions were rich with thoughtful collegiate conversation and feedback was extremely positive.  It has been a full two years since we began creating our online professional development offerings, and we continue to learn and grow in the process. We have finally created a system that allows us to keep up with the work course participants complete and offer feedback and support in a fair and consistent manner.  Of course, summer makes this easier for us as well.  Overall, these three courses are a success.  We will continue to tweak them to help participants get the most useful experience possible.

No Polish Needed!

Teacher Leadership Conference
Drumlins ~ May 2012

We were honored to present at the 2012 Teacher Leadership Conference last week.  We set the following goals for ourselves:

1. 100% Engagement of audience

2. 100% Understanding of the difference b/t a website and an ePortfolio

3. 100% Access to resources that will help you get started

4. 75% Implementation of at least one component of an ePortfolio

We once again learned that you should always bring your own technology when you present. Luckily we did!  We needed it.  Phew!

We received the most interesting feedback just after the presentation.  One participant shared with us how unpolished our presentation appeared.  Though not quite how to interpret such comment, we recalled this audience member being focused through the entire session.  We decided to take this commentary as a compliment!  We pride ourselves on our lack of "polish".  We are real people, real teachers, and we never want to appear stiff or bored with our content.  We enjoy working together, love what we do, and have a passion for sharing it with anyone who will listen.  So, to the gentleman in the audience, thank you!  And to the woman in the back row, yes!  We do have a ton of fun working together! We are indeed unpolished on purpose!

While it was pretty easy to look around and see that we met our first three goals, our fourth goal is a bit more difficult to assess.  With that said, we hope that you will reply to this post by clicking on the "comments" link below to let us know what you thought of our workshop, and what you have implemented since participating.  Better yet, share your ePortfolio link with us. You can also email us at:  nextgennow@nextgennowpd.com

NYLA SSL Conference Spring 2012

Thanks to NYLA/SSL for inviting us to present at the spring 2012 conference in Binghamton, NY last week.  We had a nice sized group for our Friday afternoon session - Professional ePortfolios: What, Why & How? 

Thank goodness we arrived a bit early.  We learned that changing the resolution on some computers is not as easy as on others.  It was a bit tricky getting our own computer on the Internet after the Thursday storms, but after a bit of perseverance, all worked out well.  We eagerly await feedback from the attendees so that we can continue to refine our practice and improve our offerings.  The group asked plenty of great questions, and truly seemed to engage with the idea of ePortfolios for themselves, their teachers and their students.  Don't forget you can link to the presentation via our website:  http://www.nextgennowpd.com/ and please feel free to add your comments to this post to offer any feedback or ask any questions that have surfaced since Friday.  You can also reach us by email:  nextgennow@nextgennowpd.com!  We look forward to hearing from you.

Eastern Upstate Teacher Center Consortium Spring 2012

A View from The Woods in Inlet

Thank you to the Eastern Upstate Teacher Center Directors for inviting us to join you at your Spring Consortium.  We enjoyed shifting to the Common Core with all of you and hope you were able to take away some ideas, strategies and tools for implementation in support of your teachers. The evening at The Woods was lovely. To the right is a picture we took from the shoreline just before dinner.  Absolutely breathtaking! 

As we all make the shifts to the Common Core, we begin to realize that we already have many things in place, and the "shifts" are not quite as daunting as we may have thought.  There is still plenty to learn, but if we can set aside some of the things that we already have in place, we realize we are not "reinventing the wheel," but rather adding a bit of air in hopes of creating more effective and efficient journey for our students and ourselves. 

APPR, Common Core, SLO.... It is all a bit overwhelming. Teachers will certainly need the safety and support zone that Teacher Centers can provide as they take on these new challenges to their already hectic professional lives.

A tool is just a tool until...

 We have titled our first two NGN courses Beyond Cool: Meaningful Technology Integration for a reason!  Our focus is not on the tools we share, but beyond them.  Our goal is to provide resources and initiate professional discussions that help educators learn the most effective ways to incorporate any technology in their instruction in a meaningful way.  Any Web 2.0 tool can be used as a gimmick. It is the pedagogy and planning that allows students to have fun and activate their critical thinking skills at the same time. Therefore, each of our sessions requires teachers to create and share a lesson they will teach in their classrooms based on the ideas we present and the discussion that follows.  Then, we ask our teacher-students to provide each other with meaningful feedback.  We have been so impressed with the level of discussion in which our class participants engage.  It is so great to see teachers collaborating to make their instruction the best that it can be for students.  Students and learning! That's what it is all about, right?

Virtual PD Challenges

One of the challenges we have noticed in our work with West Genny and JD is that it is sometimes difficult to know whether issues that crop up with Web tools are hardware, network, or tool related (or a combination of all 3).  Different districts have different settings/images on their equipment and web-based tools change all the time.

Blabberize, for example, has been an issue with some hardware.  If the microphone on the computer is not allowed, then recording becomes difficult, if not impossible (depending on the user rights).  Blabberize may prove to be a tool we no longer recommend as it seems to be extremely glitchy lately. 

Some of our class participants were unable to upload a picture of themselves to Moodle, and I am not sure which category in which to place this issue. 

Another struggle we face is the constant changes the tool sites implement.  Some go from free to costly, others change where they locate the features and links we need to point out, and many do a complete overhaul (often without updating their tutorials in the same time frame).

It is difficult when sites are blocked by districts, and we run into this quite a bit.  I know that the federal filtering requirements are actually pretty basic so these are choice the districts are making for one reason or another, and that is a subject for a post entirely of its own. 

We are learning in our first courses outside SCSD what tools seem to work and which ones we need to scrap.  As usual, we have just as much to learn from the teachers who take our courses as they may learn from us!  They keep us on our toes as we learn the ways their districts work.

West Genny!

WG - 1/31/12

We asked the folks in West Genesee to reflect on their current technology integration practices based on an an excerpt from a book entitled "It's Elementary! Integrating Technology in the Primary Grades" by Boni Hamilton.  We thought it only fair that we try to answer the same questions in regards to our preparation for our time with them on Tuesday.

What do you need to stop doing?
We need to stop waiting until the last minute to finalize our plans.  We always feel prepared until we sit down and talk through the actual lesson sequence together, when suddenly we realize there a a few last minute modifications to make or tasks to finish.  We end up feeling rushed to fine tune our work.  If we put our talk-through on our schedule a bit more in advance, we would be more prepared with less pressure.

What do you need to keep doing, but do more purposefully?
We work hard to plan effective lessons, both face-to-face and virtual. We spend a large amount of time discussing our own experiences and researching strong pedagogy. We believe the blended professional development we design and facilitate is an efficient and effective way to provide educators with individualized professional development to meet their needs.  We need to continue to develop our own skills as online instructors.  We need to make sure that we know enough about the folks who take our courses so that we can best meet their needs and help them reach their professional goals.

What do you need to start doing?
All of the above, and practice what we preach!  If we expect our course participants to engage thoughtful reflection, then we need to make it a regular practice of our own. No time like the present!

SMART Board Basic Training

Today we offered a 4 hour SMART Board session at the SCSD Saturday Academy. It was basic level training. When we applied to offer the course, we requested a limit of 15 participants for a couple reasons:
1. There are only 18 computers in the Teacher Center Computer Lab (and we prefer to use one to present so that participants see on the SB pretty much the same thing as they have on their own computer screens). 2. SMART Board training is pretty intense. More than about 12 participants makes it difficult to effectively work through the content and meet the varying needs of the trainees - even with two trainers!

Our first challenge was that that our SMART Board was not orienting properly. Manami spent over an hour on the phone with the folks at SMART Tech on Thursday to no avail. They were not sure why our SB was about an inch off, so we were left to deal with it. Then, with 19 participants, there were not enough computers in the lab for all those who joined us. On top of that, not all of the computers we had were working properly in SMART Notebook. The toolbar was disappearing on them and we couldn't figure out why!!??!! Frustrating for teachers and students to say the least!

We had asked (via email) that our participants create a gmail account and email us so that we could avoid taking up the first half hour of class sharing the Google Doc. A little over half the class received the email and/or followed the directions, so while we helped some create and send a gmail, the others waited patiently for us to begin the training. This is definitely something we need to rethink. Is it worth the time we use to make the Google Doc happen? Or would it be more effective to just print it out for those who didn't sign up and keep moving?

Having not offered one of these Saturday training sessions before, we weren't quite sure how to approach the training - in all honesty, we didn't put too much time into thinking about it. We planned to use the first day of our usual three day training. This was not such a great idea. There is too much content and very little actual application in the first 3 hours. We both agreed at the end of the session that we need to work on chunking it a bit more so that participants learn for about 2 hours, and then have an hour to work on something that they can use when they get back to their classrooms. The way we have it set up, we all left on information overload without getting to the point of creating something that could be used next week to gel what was learned. The feedback we received was all positive - much more positive than our own feelings our planning and performance.

Technology is never EASY that is for sure. There are always parts that don't quite work the way they are supposed to work. Things can stop working in the middle of something. Flexibilty is KEY! What now? 1. We need to get the SMART Board fixed. The alignment issue must be addressed. 2. We need to solve the toolbar problem. Or at least figure out how to make it reappear when it disappears. 3. We need to rework our training and address the issues we discovered (and mentioned above). We can and will do better. Whether or not we will offer another Saturday session is yet to be seen. But it is more and more evident that our staff needs this training, and we will do our best to make the trainings we do offer both effective and useful!

SLS 2011

www.goldzone.org

The SLS Fall Conference was on November 9th at the Double Tree Hotel in Syracuse, NY.  We were invited to present for the second year - thank you Patty!  Once again, we enjoyed sharing our passion for instruction and technology with the LMS crew from the area.

First, as promised, we want to make mention of...

• Justin and Laurie - thanks for the last minute equipment fixes. We appreciate your help. Even techies run into issues at times!
• Thanks for providing so many great segues Tina!  One might think you were a plant...
• Marcie - good luck with your ePort.  We are thrilled you walked away with ideas you can use (hope all of you did)!
• Thanks for opening the discussion about public reflection Sue.  It is a topic that inevitably comes up.  Many of our folks seem uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their reflections in a public forum.  We have added the image and quote above as a continuation of our  response to this conversation. 

Now onto our reflections...
First let us say we learned something too today!  We did not realize that the resolution setting on your computer could change the way a website displays when connected to a projector. Thank goodness Justin was there to give us the heads up - now we know.  Though we probably could have figured it out on our own when not in front of a group of professional techies, it was a great relief to have a quick and easy fix.

What about those goals we had for today?
We completed the presentation with no major glitches.  It seemed to go well.  The polls suggest that you were engaged, and you do understand the difference between a website and an ePortfolio.  Only time will tell if you apply what you learned!  We hope you will share a link with us if you do!  We look forward to feedback to this post and conference feedback. The conference has come to a close, but we hope you won't be strangers:  nextgennow@nextgennowpd.com

What ideas and/or feedback do you have for us?  Do tell!  Add a comment to this post or email us directly.  Hopefully we will see you all again next year- if not before!!

Developing Our Philosophy and Setting Goals!

We are so glad we finally had to sit down and write our philosophy and goals! We believe in practicing what we preach so we want to keep our ePortfolio alive. We often talk about our philosophy and vaguely of our goals but we have never written them down. It was a powerful experience finally getting our philosophy on paper. It took a lot of talking and reflecting to dig down to the truth of what we believe. Once we got them down on paper, then video taped (with the help of the fabulous Karen!) ourselves saying them, we knew we could own our philosophy. We truly believe each of our statements is true and we hold ourselves to them.
     Goal setting was much more difficult than we anticipated but we knew we needed to do it. We found an article discussing a Harvard Business School Study in which MBA students were asked if they set goals. Only 3% had written goals and 18% had goals but not in writing. The remaining 84% had no specific goals. When the students were interviewed again 10 years later the 18% who had goals was making twice as much as the 84% who didn't and the 3% who had written goals was earning 10 times as much as the rest of the class combined! We want to be in the 3%! If having clear, written goals will get us there we are all for it.
     We started writing our goals and got confused again. We knew we wanted to write SMART goals because that is what we have been using in our virtual classes but we had the hardest time with the "R" of SMART. "R" stands for realistic. Does realistic mean we have to be sure we can do it? We try a lot of things without being sure of the outcome but that's part of what keeps us engaged in our work too. Does realistic mean we can't aim over our heads? We're frequently over our heads and figure out how to get to the surface. We like the challenge. We decided realistic means we think we can do it. Believing in our ability and our participants ability to step up to the plate every time we approach an unknown is realistic. It has worked for us so far and we plan to move forward with the same momentum that has kept us going and growing.

Why reflect?

So what about reflection? Why is it that it is touted as one of the most important elements of learning, yet few of us ever take the time to do it formally? We had a conversation about this today. We compared it to exercise for our bodies. We all know it is good for us. It is an important element to staying healthy, building and maintaining strength and endurance and finding mental balance. Nonetheless, it is often easy to put it at the bottom of our "to do" list, and therefore, rarely get to it.

Quotes from two famous philosophers helped us wrap our heads around the "why" of reflection:
"Know thyself." - Plato...or was it Socrates?
“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” - John Dewey

Much of what we found on reflection suggests that students cannot make emotional connections without reflection, and without connections, it is extremely difficulty to make meaning (aka learn). Experience alone is not enough to engage our whole brain. We need to process the experience (critical thinking) and take the next steps to apply what we have learned before moving onto the next skill or topic.

And, since we know that most of us will not reflect (or exercise) "just because," it becomes one of our jobs as educators (trainers of students or teachers) to provide both the structure and opportunity for reflection. With that said, we are curious. What are your thoughts? Do you see reflection as key to learning? How have you effectively incorporated reflection in your teaching and learning?

Photo: "Grey Crowned Crane watching its reflection" by Jean Spector from Fotopedia.com