Honestly, nowhere and everywhere all at once.  I have worked with folks in my district and folks in New Zealand.  I have worked in my kitchen and I have worked in my office.  I am continually amazed at the amount of work I can get done sitting in my own recliner.  So much is happening.  Parker, my son, is five months old and just at the right station in life to look absolutely adorable doing just about anything.  My new job had taken my to building and classroom all over the DuBois area providing me with fantastic opportunities to see some awesome educators in action. The end of graduate school is within reach and…oh yeah…my wife is as beautiful and supportive as ever.   Thanks hun.

I am not sure how often I will be able to expound on all of the good things that are happening here at DuBois, but I will tell you that I keep up pretty well over at my tips blog.  If you are interested I try to provide quick info at least once a day.  I hate to be white noise and if I have nothing to say I am not going to keep up appearances with lengthy posts about my daily life. 

I will, however, come back and pick up a professional development thread after a few of my plans get off the ground.  I am using a ning with the staff, two departments are using wikispaces and I inch forward everyday with the ideas like “Community Nights” and “Saturday Sessions.” 

But that is all for another time.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for stoppin’ by.  

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14094452

I’m taking Bob Greene’s advice.  I’m closing the lid and will see you all on Tuesday morning. 

Have a great weekend! 

According to everything the class taught us, data analysis and the subsequent action plan take up the majority of the time in the project.  We, the students, had three weeks to collect data and one week to analyze and conclude.  I am not complaining, I get it.  I get that this was an introduction to the process and now we can implement this practice with our districts, but I really go into it.  I am disappointed that I could not possibly put all of that data into a coherent form in just a few days.  I can’t believe it, but I am disappointed that I didn’t have time to write a bigger, better paper.  Looking at my schedule, odds are I will not get back to it for quite sometime. 

 That said, here is a small piece and please save your comments about my awful APA citation for an argument with a college professor :     (FYI: InfoSource is an internet based content delivery system that we are using to update MS Office skills)

            Question two will unfortunately remain unanswered until further research is conducted.  It is my opinion that offering online, on demand personal development is a more effective delivery method; however, the data collected from InfoSource (Pearce, 2007) proves the contrary.  A yearly assessment report showed over 300 failures, 54 incomplete tests, and only 45 passing scores in 2006-2007.  A quick look at the time spent showed that the average participant is spending less than 30 minutes on each quiz and often logging off after less than 10 minutes because of a failure of the pretest.

This is the only online assessment tool that we have, but it is my belief that it is not an accurate reflection of the medium.  In my personal experience InfoSource is tedious and difficult, offering material as drill and skill rather than exploration and reflection.  I point to the short amounts of time spent and the staggering amount of failures as proof of this.  As a side note, I am also taking issue with InfoSource’s overall data reporting.   To my knowledge, the system provides only one report listing access times and success or failures.  There is no way to filter, import, or export data making assessment beyond pass/fail difficult.  Chalmers and Keown (2006) suggested that the success of any program is equal to the amount of support provided.  Infosource is a stand alone quiz machine and, in my opinion, is proving to be an expensive experiment with very little reward.  

Although not addressing professional development on a mass scale, another popular method of teacher development is the conference.  With the assistance of the district office, I was able to access and manually record conference request data for the years of 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 (D.A.S.D., Appendix A).  For the last two school years there were 1086 individual requests filed.  Not having other data from other schools makes conclusions difficult, but cross checking the requests with the given rationale yielded some interesting trends.   Less than half of the requests appeared to be related to pedagogy.  Only 79 of the requests involved educational technology, while 364 requests were related to the administration and guidance departments.  The question that needs explored now is why teachers do not seek out more opportunities within their content area?     

Eliciting participation is the key to a having a reliable network.  Without participation you have a stagnate web space full of old pictures and fragmented comments.  My question is how do you gain prolonged interest and participation without constantly going to hot button issues?  I believe anyone can gain a spark of interest by publishing an angry rant about teacher salaries, or internet nerds killingAmerica, but what keeps an individual engaged and willing to spend time deep in conversation with others?

Over the past few weeks I have been actively engaged in action research.  My subject is professional development.  I see a huge contradiction in the way we are asked to teach (MI) and they way we are taught (in-service).  I envision a future of on-demand PD that is available to the teacher when they need it, at the time of their choosing, but I digress.  It is summer and in order to gather necessary data I needed a different approach.  I called upon my network.  I have access to 1000’s of teachers across the country.  Granted the majority of them are tech savvy, progressive, educators, but I thought that I could gain a relatively large and diverse sample for the simple needs of my paper.  I was wrong.

This is in no way intended to be mean or angry and I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart those of you that have helped me.    It simply raises a point that I am sure others have toyed with before.  How is it possible that one person posts a picture of an airport and receives 30 comments while another asks a serious academic question and receives 4?  I blame it on blog ADD.  Very few stick to one topic (including me) and explore it in the depth that it deserves.  Or could it be that the 3% (on a good day) of people that are willing to participate force us to change topics on a weekly basis just to gain interest?  I don’t know.   

I have to think seriously about these matters because I am introducing a professional network to my teachers in August.  And while the initial excitement will prove fruitful how will we manage to prolong serious discussion over a period of time?  Projects?  Action research?  Do I have to constantly have something prepared to make sure everyone is participating? 

I am sorry if this has offended anyone, but I get a real sense of a hierarchical structure to edublogging and it is off putting.  I do want to take time to thank my personal network that I now believe only consists of a few handfuls of people but those people are amazing.  You folks truly inspire me and always make me feel welcome.  I suppose it’s my fault for drastically over estimating the size of the network, but optimism got the best of me.  I urge you all to take the time and go answer a question.  After all there are no stupid ones, right?

Okay, back to the paper.  I will fill you in on the data when it is complete.  I believe you will find it interesting.

I would love to hear any thoughts and feelings you all have reguarding professional development and they way it is provided in your district.

Please provide me with name, experience (yrs), and location. 

Here is my problem statement:

Educators in the DuBois area school district need to provide a relevant education to their students.  Currently, few teachers are demonstrating 21^st century applications or skills in their classroom.  We believe that this is a result of inconsistent professional development and a lack of technical support.

Therefore, we will make a concerted effort to provide quality in-service training that is relevant to the educator’s aptitude and follow up with consistent skill reinforcement.  Furthermore we will make a concerted effort to provide adequate resources to educators whenever and where ever they choose to use the new knowledge or skill they have acquired.  

Research Questions:

1.  What are the 21^st century skills we want our teachers to model?

2.  How can we provide consistent and relevant training to 200 teachers?

3.  Will adequate resources encourage teachers to integrate technology into their curriculum?

I believe that feelings are relevant to atmosphere or environment so I encourage you to let it out.  If you would like to keep anything private, please note it so that I do not publish the comment or include you name on the paper. 

Thank you network.

Take Care.

Using information from folks like Ian Jukes, George Siemens, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, I pieced together a presentation that I hope will get the point across.  My point, the kids are alright, we are the ones that need change.  It is my goal to introduce 20 teachers to professional networking and begin the process of changing educational practices here in DuBois, PA.

This was done with the web application Spresent and it seems to work best in full screen mode (lower right).

This
work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.ode>

With the wide spread use of collaborative web application the question should be why isn’t everyone involved in school curriculum?  Using a wiki or Google Document a district has the power to offer business, industry, universities, and the community at large a chance to make their voice heard.  The real selling point, all of these groups can participate at their leisure. 

I am in the initial stages of trying to use this technology to accomplish similar tasks.  I have authored several Google Documents inviting the key players to collaborate.  Currently I am only dealing with administration and educators with a stake in this particular project, but I am excited about the possibilities.  Wouldn’t it be beneficial to have a virtual mentor that is an expert in the field you are writing for?  How about a representitive from the state agency to explore grant possibilities while making sure that you have the updated standards?  

Will education ever open up enough to let this happen or is this just another idea that would take too much effort?      

I say this because I am teacher and I only ever hear the teacher side.  I should say I hear the negatives more often than the positive because those folks always seem to speak the loudest.  Yesterday I had a meeting with our district superintendent and our curriculum director.  Honestly, I prepared for war.  Occupying a new position, I wanted to know what my role was going to be and what, if anything, they planned to do to support my efforts. To my surprise, my questions were answered completely and politely. 

I went in to fight for the teachers and found out that was precisely what the administration was going to do.  In fact, the three of us spent over an hour and half brainstorming and hashing out specific, measurable goals for the express purpose of helping teachers change instructional practices.

Here is what came of our meeting: 

2007-2008Technology Integration Specialist
Goals

1.  Identify teacher proficiencies
     -Create and implement a tool to measure teacher competencies
2.  Establish a common technical language or vocabulary
     – Use meetings, web tools, and email to build awareness of staff and faculty
3.  Hold one informal discussion about technology education at each building
  -Communicate with building principals finding an opportune time to speak to staff and faculty 
4.  Implement and support teacher/parent/student communication through web presents
     -Increase teacher web pages by 30+ through face to face meetings and workshops
5.  Maintain four differentiated learning experiences throughout the year
  -Groups of below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced.  Offer professional development appropriate for each group (according to data gathered by goal #1)
6.  Establish two networked learning communities for collaboration and reflection
  -One group for elementary and one for the middle school using web tools for social networking.  Connect teachers and myself to continue discussions beyond face to face
7.  Establish community academy
  -Partner with SRO and community organizations to hold community awareness meetings about internet usage and internet safety

It’s amazing what a civil conversation was able to accomplish.  For me it was both a measurable set of goals, but also a measure of respect between professionals.  How do you define quality leadership?  

First, I can’t say that I am a big fan of the online conference.  It’s the blur of a chat room, the bad audio, and sometimes disasterous presentors that keep me watching re-runs rather than participating in real time.  (By the way, thank you to the person that thought of recording and posting presentations.  It’s like TiVo’d education ) However, Dave did it right.  He demonstarted a tool within the context of potential use.

Dave used the aggregator, PageFlakes, as a web portal.  (see it here) He set up each of his ”flakes” to aggregate certain tags (in this case foe2007scm.)  He then encouraged the students to create a blog post or tag a flickr pic.  After a few minutes and a quick page refresh, links started to pour in from the attendees.  I literally sat slack-jawed in my clunky K-Mart recliner.  It was so simple, yet so cool.  

Sure wikis and even expensive web-portals can do similar things but here, right in front of our eyes was a FREE 10 minute answer to keeping everything…and I mean EVERYTHING, in one place.  Just off the top of my head.  This is reseach, assessment, collaboration, community, and even entertainment placed into a nice neat package.

Here are two communities I am working on.  I cannot stress how ease this was.  I hope that I can energize others the way Dave unknowingly energized me.

For teachers at DuBois  http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11176389   

For PA tech Teachers   http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11201963

Obviously, I am only working on local items.  I have no idea where this is going nor am I sure what the impact will be.  I can tell you one thing, the success or failure will be clear.  In fact, it will be availble for millions to see. 

I am not going to get into particulars, but during a nice conversation about using web tools in the classroom an interesting comment was posted.  The source, who ironically declines to post a picture,  questioned if using web tools is a step toward killing FTF communication and if we advocate them are we teaching our children that it is okay to ignore the human element?  Hmmm. 

Short answer, no.  I don’t think anyone who cares enough to be a teacher is advocating dropping out of society.

Long answer, this question always seems to be posed when education is involved.  Be it secondary or university is e-learning as good as FTF learning?  Personally, and I may step in it here, I feel that the e-learning I have experienced is and has been more substantial than the 4 years  I spent at a small university in PA.    How can I rationalize such a statement?  Thought you would never ask.

I agree the e-learning is not for everyone.  I am a self-motivated individual that will dive head on into just about anything that catches my interest (keyword).  I like reading, I love learning, and yes, I like that the majority of the time the outcome depends on me.  In my mind, there is no comparison between 8 weeks of on-line grad work and the first 2 years of on-campus undergrad.  During the “gen ed” years of college I was stuck paying 10,000 a year for part-time faculty that wanted to be there less than I did.  I was automatically enrolled in classes to make sure I was ”well-rounded” and was only able to sniff my interests once a semester.  I went from jazzed about running a real TV studio to a careless frat boy 2.0 seconds.  (oh yeah, and back in my day, we had to live in those 8×8 concrete cells, not these 5 room condos they get today) 

Before I go too far, I think what I am trying to say is that there is room for everything, like I said before, balance.  Technology is not going to replace FTF communication.  As human beings we long for connections.  As soon as electronic communications turns personal you know that someday you will meet that person face to face.  With the web we get to seek out exactly what we are interested in.  When I looked into grad programs it was between a $40,000 PSU diploma in curriculum and a $20,000 diploma in technology integration from Walden.  A PSU branch is within walking distance, but they did not have the program for me.   In the past I would have been stuck, but e-learning provides the platform for experts and interested students to connect and focus like never before.  There is no way a rational, educated human being can say that the 2 credit Health course with 800 people is better than an email conversation with an industry leader.   

Heck, we are all going to meet in ATL in just a few weeks and I am excited for that opportunity.  I have ”met” several people that I consider true friends and even though it may take us a few minutes to recognize each other, I guarantee we’ll be laughing and sharing stories in no time. 

Take Care and hug a friend, or as our European pals say, 

Cheers!

Ken  (flickr photo by Bonedad)