My life has been a whirlwind of activity since NECC and I have found it hard to keep up with blogging. I don't know why, but I feel guilty blogging when I have other deadlines looming. Do any of you experience that? Is it illogical? Should I blog anyway, much like we still get the day to day things done at work of home when we have extra tasks on our "to do" lists or should I take any free moment and put it toward the deadlines and follow Grandmas' rule of "work before play"?

I'd love to hear your take.

Disclaimer: Blogging is like play for me- sheer enjoyment. Not necessarily the writing, as for me the writing doesn't come easy, but the thrill of the hits and conversation that follows.

Community Driven System
The purpose of stealing moments away from my already full agenda this morning though is to share the wonderment of the last week. This week I came to realized more than ever that I am a community driven woman. I believe in the power of the community, the wisdom of the crowd, that the network is more powerful than the node and that none of us are as good as all of us. I believe that School 2.0 means moving from a classroom system to a community system. And now more than ever I also believe that about PD and I mean all PD- conferences(e.g. K12Online08), workshops (e.g. most recently CABOCES Summer Instititue), ongoing, job embedded sync and asysn (e.g. PLP) and as a result I am going to start changing my keynotes even more to flow from a community model as well. As I reflected over the last week I realized even my family operates as a community rather than a traditional family model. I am no loan wolf.

CABOCES Summer Institute
One week ago I landed in Buffalo and was greeted by Rick Weinberg who took me to Selemanca where I would be spending the next week working with educators from the surrounding area. When the day drew closer to the conference Rick shared that unexpectedly numbers were down. I gave him the opportunity to cancel rather than bring me out for just a few people, (I am knee deep in buying my first home in Va and could have used the time) but Rick was firm that they wanted to move forward. I am so glad he made that decision because this week was an incredible week of learning for me personally.

Here are my take aways...

1. When you are focused on educational reform from a community perspective- more is not always better.

 Monday- I had 10 administrators who were with me for one day. The small number enabled me to spend time personally getting to know each attendee. I invited Karen Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and Jon Becker to attend a panel discussion answering their concerns and questions. You can listen to the panel discussion here. The strength of intimacy because of such a small number of participants in the room made me realize that relationship is a more powerful tool when trying to leverage change than having large numbers of people in a room who are passively listening to you talk.

John Norton's wine glass metaphor rings true here- (He was drinking a glass of wine when it occurred to him- hence the name) that it is better to have small numbers of highly engaged people when influencing school reform than hundreds of folks who show up but walk away unchanged by the experience.

Also, on Friday when we knew our numbers would be minimal and we had such brilliant panel members coming from the community (Darren Kuropatwa, Kevn Honeycutt, Allanah King, and Mark Clemente) we made it a teachable moment. We spontaneously opened the Elluminate session up to the world (and they showed up) and we used Ustream and a chat channel as well to show if you offer quality the community will come to you- no matter how rural or small you are.

2. My belief was reinforced that for most newbies, teaching tools in isolation is too overwhelming and a waste of time.

Tuesday I tried to lay the foundation and set the context. I also wanted to help attendees understand the today's digital learner. Wes Fryer (Oklahoma), Laura Deisley (Atlanta), Meg Ormiston (Illinois), and
Sue Waters (Australia) talked about personal learning networks and the tools that support them (listen in here) on Wednesday. On Thursday my plan was to look more closely at tools and their pedagogy and how they best relate to various instructional activities and then on Friday to plan inquiry based instruction with an interactive model of building a PBL mini-unit. For the most part things went according to plan, but Thursday's tools, tools, and more tools left me feeling overwhelmed and tense. I know if I had been a newbie in that audience not having been given the opportunity to use the tools in a meaningful application would have been frustrating. The idea was to create an awareness, not mastery, so that on Friday when we created lessons using the TPCK model we would have a web 2.0 list of applications from which to choose. The result though was painful, at least for me.

I brainstormed with Rick Weinberg and Tim Clarke afterward and what we felt would have worked better was to have four tables- with one of us at each table presenting a tool. Our presentations would include the tool, an activity using the tool, and a chance to reflect on best uses of the tool. Then after 45 minutes we would break for 15 and then could present another tool. We would do that three times (12 tools) and participants could choose which tools they wanted to learn.

I really believe that the best examples of tool instruction are within the context of what you are learning. Like our heating and cooling system they should be invisible. The only time we focus on our heating and cooling is when they aren't working properly. Then we have to rethink the tool. Even Bill Fitzgerald (Funny Monkey) after his discussion on Open Source tools left the attendees with the idea of forgetting the tool- focus instead on what you want kids to know and be able to do- then figure out the right task and tool for the job to help them learn or do it.

3. What is most important to 21st Century educational reform is to listen to kids.

On Tuesday I decided to create a panel of kids from 11th grade to college juniors and talk to them about their reflections on technology. It was the most inspiring part of my week long work. I am still learning from all they taught me during that hour.
Meet Gracie, Maegan, Ryan, Jay, Danny, Christian, Thomas, Caroline and Jesse. You won't be sorry you did.

4. Teachers need time to reflect, explore, and build in the safety net of your workshop.

Teachers, like kids, need you to model and then let them explore authentic use with you there to help. They need to understand how to create lesson plans that use the tools in meaningful ways, but then they need to actually collaborate together to build activities that they can use in school. Activities that leverage the potential of these new mediums for connecting and collaborating.

Typically, in my workshops I only have time to present the shift and the tools- never to actually jump to the most important step of helping teachers contextualize what they are learning. I walked away from this week realizing that this step is what is missing in school reform and why, in my opinion, that change is happening so slowly.

The most exciting time of the conference for me personally was to watch the groups choose a topic- create a concept web, a curriculum web, choose appropriate standards, an essential pedagogy, an appropriate tool and develop several lessons that all integrated not only core disciplines but fell together under a theme, project or problem. The creative juices really began to flow as we constructed together a killer initiating activity that would usher in our year long project and the lessons we would use to teach state mandated content from a passion-based perspective. The tools made sense because they were merely a means to an end- helping students learn about things that interested them from the perspective of a scientist, historian or author.

I am thankful to CABOCES for being willing to invest the time that allowed their educators to not only gain an awareness but to deeply reflect, discuss, and wrestle with the concepts while facilitators and the community stood close to help them make informed choices about change.

What does music, film, live performances, laughter, passion, reculturation and blogging for charity have in common?-- Western NY's Powerful Learning Practice's culminating celebration!

Holland's team performing a remake of "This Land is my Land" into a Web 2.0 Song

May 22, 2008- 20 school teams in the Western New York region came together to celebrate their learning journey that took place over the last 6 months through a job-embedded professional development opportunity called Powerful Learning Practice. Schools met as teams to master the following outcomes over the course of the year:

Knowledge: An understanding of the transformative potential of Web 2.0 tools in a global perspective and context and how those potentials can be realized in schools

Pedagogy: An understanding of the shifting learning literacies that the 21st Century demands and how those literacies inform teacher practice.

Connections: The development of sustained professional learning networks for team members to begin experimenting and sharing with other team members and online colleagues from around the world.

Sustainability: The creation of long term plans to move the vision forward in participating districts at the end of the program.

Capacity: An increase in the abilities and resources of individuals, teams and the community to manage change.

The culminating celebration is one of the two face-to-face meetings that take place in PLP. It is a time when the schools teams come together and share what they have learned with each other through learning displays, presentations, informal sharing in groups, and a facilitated process that results in bulleted action plans.

PRESENTATIONS

While all the schools teams had an opportunity to share their team projects and what they had learned from being involved in PLP this year, three projects were asked to share more fully from the stage. It was very difficult to decide who should present because most of the projects were just incredible. Those that presented were:

Webster Teams,
Holland Team, and Niagara Academy. But the presentation that stole the show was given by Laura, the 5th grader who authors the blog: Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference.

Will writes about her presentation,

She talked about how she started her quest to get donations for
charities by finding sponsors for her daily good works, how surprised
she is that over 30,000 people have visited her blog since last
December, and how she’s been able to donate over $1,600, 50 pairs of
pajamas, and over 400 books to charities in her area. It’s a great
story and example, one that I’ve shared with Tess on a number of
occasions."

Another PLP participant Mike Maloy adds,

I’ve written on the group’s Ning and in comments on various
blogs about how my learning has been completely transformed. I’ve
written on my own blog about how inspiring and “human” the web can be.
I’ve been awed by Jill Bolte’s “My Stroke of Insight” and Randy
Pausch’s “Last Lecture”.

I can honestly say that Laura’s presentation was one of the
coolest, most enlightening experiences of all my years in education.
Since her presentation I’ve been wondering…If Laura can do what she is
doing as a fifth grader, what will she be able to do in the future? If
Laura can do what she is doing as a fifth grader, why the heck can’t I
be doing more? Will my daughter be inspired do something so special.

I was also incredibly impressed with the creativity in Western NY. For example, Holland's team opened with a Web 2.0 remake of This Land is My Land and closed with Eric Lawton singing an original song he wrote entitled, You've Got to Learn Web 2 Point Oh. You can listen to 2 minutes of that here--> Download youve_got_to_learn_web_2_point_oh.mp3

What a hoot! Not to be outdone Holland's superintendent followed in "American Idol" style with a song he sang A cappella to Will and I. All in all it was as touching as it was entertaining.

Reflecting on how PLP has impacted participants

When asked how has PLP impacted or changed your professional or personal practice those who attended the WNY celebration give many reasons. Here are a few of their responses.

• The resources shared and the connections with the community...I have started to build my network outside of my building.
• Broadened exposure to web 2.0 tools beyond personal use.
• Facilitated collaboration with colleagues within my district (but outside my building) that was little-to-none prior to this.
• It gathered all of the teachers using tech
  together to work on one common goal. Otherwise, we would have just kept working
  independently on our own path. It really pushed our district to start a plan to
  implement and educate others in our district.
• It gave importance to technology and gave those
  of us with a passion and knowledge around technology a voice with our schools.
• Working with other members from my district that
  I usually don't get to see. Their ideas and perspectives during this learning
  process were greatly valued.
• I am no longer embarrassed about what I don't
  know and I am excited about learning and moving forward.
• I am using tools I didn't even know existed
  before this year. I modeled in a regular meeting and taught other staff through
  the process enough for them to say they will go back and use it in their
  classrooms. I want to learn more and use it to help teachers in the district
  support one another to excellence.
• The level of support that is available in this
  network is comforting. There is a lot of knowledge among the PLP community.
• Thanks for the opportunity. It has been an
  excellent, life changing learning experience. I hope we can sustain and spread
  our learning. If I can inspire one other person like I have been I would
  consider it a great accomplishment
• You've opend my eyes to the potential of 2.0 and
  have created a more technologically literate individual! I felt both Sheryl and
  Will's support was awesome very encouraging and empathetic.

  Kickoff Meeting

Culminating Meeting