Our middle school has been doing Student Led Conferencing (SLCs) for four years now and we’ve been making it better each year. As a middle school, we’ve come up with a plan of action and have something that we are going to move forward with next year. It has worked so well, our elementary school dipped into SLCs this year as an entire division. In year’s past, the middle school has used several methods to have students showcase their learning using technology:

• Blogs

Each student has a working portfolio with their school blog. Over the past couple of years, students would using the tag of SLC to showcase specific pieces of work to demonstrate their learning. Each subject was represented and the students would reflect on their SMART goals in password protected posts. While it worked, it still felt messy.

• MS Office Notebook Layout Portfolio

Students and teachers took a shining to the Notebook Layout view in MS Word. The students could create a tab for each of their classes, create a tab for goal-setting and could use the record feature to record directly onto MS Word. While this worked fine, it had it’s bumps because it was completely tied to their computer so their audience and feedback was limited. Additionally, students liked using VoiceCandy in their classes as a quick way to record instead of Garageband, but VoiceCandy and MS World do not get along on a consistent basis.

• iWeb Growth Portfolios

This is the first year we have pushed iWeb with our teachers and students. We now have dedicated server space on site so that students have the option of publishing to the FTP Server, making their iWeb public OR publishing to their Local Folder on their computer. Two of our grade levels chose to use iWeb this year for SLCs and the students included work demonstrating their learning in classes as well as their own reflections for our newly adopted Middle School Student Learning Profile. Next year, iWeb will be used at all grade levels.

Using iWeb as a platform to be the umbrella for their learning has proven to be a platform that we are going to continue to support at our school. We are very proud of the growth and reflections that students have demonstrated throughout the portfolio creation process. I want to stress, the most important component of the SLCs is the communication that occurs between the student, the parents and the teacher during the SLC time. iWeb was the perfect platform for our students to organize the conversation about learning.

View Jonathan’s Portfolio for an example:

The feedback from the parents was extremely positive. The students were more engaged using the iWeb platform and the teachers spoke favorably of the iWeb platform for its ease of use with minor technical difficulties. It was a win-win-win for everybody!

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Before the Spring Break, we held the fourth installment of our Parent Technology Workshops here at SAS – Pudong. We hold the workshops once a month for parents so that they can feel up to speed in their child’s education. As technology is a tool for their learning, the Parent Technology Workshops give parents time to have discussions around the use of technology and to give them the skills they need to stay informed about their child’s technological journey.

The last Parent Technology Workshop was the first in a two part series called Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt format introduced parents who are new to the Mac environment to important and useful features on the Mac so that they are better able to guide their children and gain a better understanding for themselves. We are finding that many parents have gone and purchased their own Mac and we want to support them!

The Scavenger Hunt has nearly 30 items and we talked in depth about 6 of them in depth in the 80 minutes we spent together. Below are the notes from our session. We’ll repeat and expand on the Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt during our next Parent Technology Workshop Sessions over Parent/Teacher Conferences on April 7th and 8th.

We’re looking forward to future Parent Technology Workshops as there is definitely a need in our community. Each time I do one, we have at least 50 parents that want to come and learn with technology.

What kinds of workshops have you done with your parents in your communities? What do they want to learn?

Mac OSX Scavenger Hunt Items Discussed:

How to take a screenshot on your Mac
Hold down the keys Command, Shift, 4. The curser will turn into crosshairs. Click and drag the cursor over the area you would like to capture on your screen. The image will save on your desktop. Drag it to your iPhoto icon to save it into iPhoto.

How to use Time Machine
We recommend purchasing a separate hard drive that you can dedicate to Time Machine in order to back up your Mac. The hard drive does not need to be an Apple hard drive but should be between 500GB and 1TB. Once you purchase the hard drive, plug it into the computer and open Disk Utility. Select the hard drive on the left menu and then select Erase. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will erase and format the hard drive for Time Machine.

Next, go to the Spotlight to search for and open Time Machine. Turn the slider to the ON position and select your new hard drive as the Time Machine Backup hard drive. Your first back up will take a lot of time so I recommend letting it work overnight. After your first back up, plug in your hard drive at least once a week to update the backup. This will take less time.

How to right click on a Mac
There are two ways to right click on a Mac. The two handed method is to hold down the Control button and click on the trackpad. The one handed method is to put two fingers on the trackpad and then click on the trackpad.

How to create a PDF
You can turn a document into a PDF easily on a Mac but using the print function. I use the shortcut of Command P to print or you can go to File and select Print. When the print window opens, look to the bottom left corner for the PDF button. Click on it and select Save as PDF. PDFs are useful because they are smaller files that can be read on almost anybody’s computer (Mac or PC).

How to do Software Updates
There are two items we ask our students to do one a week and one of them is Software Updates. We ask them to put a recurring evening on their iCal with an alarm to remind them even though the the computer automatically checks for software updates. The fact is that many people click on the Not Now or Later button and find themselves behind in updates. Software Updates are important to extend the life of a computer’s Operating System (OS. It updates a computer’s applications, Security Updates, device drivers and firmware.

To do Software Updates, go to the apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and select Software Updates. The computer will check for new software. If you have not done this in awhile, you’ll have several updates available. It’s then sometimes best to click on the Show Details button and do a few updates at a time. Especially in China, the internet speed impacts how quickly and successfully software updates download.

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At today’s ADE Session in Singapore we spent the day talking about the importance of personal branding.  We are fortunate to have Max Judd here who facilitated the personal branding session.  Max is the senior manager of Education Advocacy Programs at Apple and is responsible for the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) program.  He talked about how Steve Jobs really helped Apple redefine itself with the Think Different campaign and how redefining Apple would have changed if the brand would have said Think Differently.  Famous logos crossed the screen that most of us recognized from companies and PEOPLE that we all recognized.  Companies like McDonald’s are recognized by all and Obama’s logo broke serious ground as it was the first time a candidate for President actually created a logo.

Rebecca Stockley gave us time to form our ideas through an exercise that built in the cherished time for both reflection and time to give/receive feedback about our reflections from our colleagues.  We started with identifying the key roles that defined us as a professional and then photographer Joseph Linaschke demonstrated HOW to capture our roles in a single image.  His photograph was creative, inspiring and really sent the message about what my colleague Declan does in his job as an ICT Coordinator.

What surprised me throughout the day was that mental blocks kept coming up throughout the day.  People almost tortured about what image would describe what they do as their professional self.  I know few educators who have a recognizable personal brand our personal logo right now and frankly, I can only think of Jeff Utecht right now.  He actually has TWO!  Comparing them one of them was designed by David Gran, a fellow ADE and talented artist, and one of them Jeff designed.  One of them used catchy technological words in a globe and one of them was a simple image with the phrase ‘The Thinking Stick’.  So what is the difference between the two logos?  Both are technically part of his personal brand but what Jeff is extremely talented at is getting people to THINK.

I spent the day having deep conversation with my colleagues about branding themselves and it came down to this:  Educators want to be known for their ideas and their beliefs rather than simply their roles of educator, mentor or colleague. AND I will also argue that as educators we really SHOULD blur the line a bit around our professional self and our personal self.  We are educators and my nature what seems to matter the most is the personal connection we have with our audience.  Jeff was either lucky or brilliant to come up with The Thinking Stick years ago because is shows his professional ideas and beliefs around reflection and shows a bit of his personal self showing his passion for baseball. 

In this day and age, I think it is important to sit down and create your personal brand, but know that it’s a process that will take time, self-reflection and most importantly reflection from your colleagues.  Ask your audience, “So how do you see me a teacher?  an administrator?  a consultant?  a mentor?  And then, throw a little bit of your personal self in the mix!

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This will be the first of what I hope is a few posts just so that I can reflect on the process of rolling out a 1:1 Program at my school next year.  I am so excitied about this and really wnt it to go well. We’ve had many, many meetings with many, many stakeholders.  Last month our school board “officially” gave us the go ahead.  Parents will find otu “officially” this Friday when an article goes out in our school magazine.  I thought it only fair that the teachers find out before the parents!  At today’s staff meeting I walked them through the following Keynote – everyone seems excited!

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Every school should have a YouTube channel, yes?  Why?

• Kids love to see themselves on YouTube
• Parents love to share the videos of their kids with family
• Potential students can view the videos to see what life is like at the school
• Potential teachers can view the videos to see what life is like at the school

In a school my size, I think just a few people should have access to update the site, but in a smaller school I think it’s absolutely possible to give each teacher the login information so that they can share the videos from their classrooms.  How many schools have YouTube sites up and running?  Hmmm.. the key is to keep them going!  Thanks so much to my colleague Jonathan Chambers for helping to create it!

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The Shanghai k12 LAN Party kicked off today with a group of 12+ educators who met at my house this evening for the first of a four part series centered around the free k12 Online Conference.  This is the third year that we’re hosting this professional development event and I am still inspired by the mere fact that it’s even happening at all in Shanghai.  There are many reasons to avoid participating in this event:

• The main conference site is blocked in China most of the time.
• The internet in China can be unreliable and slow.
• One of the founding organizers, Jeff Utecht is no longer working in Shanghai.
• Teachers could be giving up to nearly 12 hours of their personal time on evenings and weekends to attend the four sessions of our LAN party

We’re pushing past all of the obstacles – they mean nothing to us!

With the help of my colleagues Jonathan Chambers and Simon May, we have or are in the process of downloading all sessions before we meet as a group.  Tonight, when the teachers walked in the door we handed them a USB that had Stephen Heppell’s Preconference Keynote on it as well as several of the first sessions posted early last week.  We took the internet out of the equations, giving alternate access to the presentations.

Through Skype, we brought Jeff into our conversation live from Bangkok.  Jeff then streamed our conversation live on his UStream channel U Tech TV.  At one point we had 25 educators from around the world, listening in on our conversation and chatting questions and replies to our real-time conversation.  Brian Lockwood from Japan… Allanah from New Zealand – we were having a global conversation around learning.  Jeff was and will continue to be part of our conversation.

The remaining obstacle is the amount of time educators are giving out of their personal time.  It’s our belief, the k12 Online Conference is a dynamic teaching and learning event complete with engaging presentations that draw life-long learning in for collaborative conversations. Andy Torris recently wrote about this his a recent post:

If you ask me, it is at least 50% the responsibility of the “leader” to have the “follower” want to be engaged.

All of the teachers part of our conversation this evening were engaged because we were all the leaders and we were all the followers – that’s 100% of the responsibility in Andy’s view.  Through building these types of Learning Communities, teachers become even more empowered to increase student learning.

Our next Shanghai K12 Online get-together will be this weekend.  If you just happen to be in Shanghai please visit our Shanghai K12 Online wiki and sign-up to join the continued conversation.  Thanks to Jonathan Chambers and David Gran for our logos over the years.  We’re making quite a collection!

If you are not in Shanghai, it’s not too late to organize your own K12 LAN Party.  One of the greatest attributes of this conference is the fact that you can organize your mini-conference around your schedule.  The presentations are online for anytime-anywhere access.  Keep the conversation going – download a flyer today!

Jeff joins our conversation from Bangkok

Pictures from the Evening

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All this week we have been finishing up getting our middle school students on blogs. I love blogging with kids… they learn so fast and are like sponges when it comes to technology. I’m a technology teacher and what takes me 15 minutes to figure out will take them less that 5. It’s the nature of age and it’s the difference between being a Digital Immigrant vs. a Digital Native. Which one are you? I’ve learned to let the kids teach me what they know and learned to let it be okay that I am not the sole disseminator of information. Kids learn from each other, the learn from their parents, they learn from their teachers – I believe that we all work together, supporting each other. Age is not a factor in this equation – learning comes full circle.

I started blogging over three years ago – it was a personal blog and it got me hooked on technology as a means to celebrate learning and life! I started really blogging with my parent community last year as math teacher with this account and then created my professional blog a few months ago where I communicate with amazing educators around the world. Today I was curious about what I’ve been blogging about the most. As a teacher, I hope that I talk about my students the most and the learning that takes place in and out of school. A wordle is the perfect was to visually display this. The largest words are the most common words within my blog. I’m pleased that students and learning are a bit part of what I blog about! I think I’ll continue to take a look at wordles every once in awhile as a way to give me feedback about what I really think is important. Try it! Put your blog address in or create your own Wordle to showcase who you are and what you value!

Cross posted on From the Outside Looking In and U Tech Tips

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When I was a math teacher, one of my favorite assignments at the beginning of the year was called A Million Words or Less.  I’m pretty sure that I got the idea from this article on Education World and I’m sure that many of you out there do something similar.  I love this assignment so much that I’ve decided to give it to all 380 middle schools students with a twist of technology!  One of our tech options at my school is the use of

Moodle, the open source online learning environment for teachers.  I’ve been using Moodle for five years and I still like it because it gives teachers and students a secure environment to reflect upon their learning.

My technology goals for this assignment are straightforward and simple:

1. I want each student in my school to know how to use Moodle.
2. I want each teacher in my school to know how to use Moodle and see its benefits.
3. I want each parent to know about Moodle.

Now, beyond technology this is a great assignment because it gives an intimate insight into our student’s lives.

We have 24 advisors in the middle school and I’ve set up a Moodle classroom for each of the advisors.  I very simply attached the assignment which is a homework assignment for parents to write about their children in A Million Words are Less.  I then created an Assignment activity so that parents can submit their letters to their child’s advisory teacher. I then wrote a post on my school blog which walks each child through the process of creating a Moodle account.

I’m really excited about this assignment and the technology with it.  I was pleasantly suprised to have most of my teachers thrilled about having a Moodle classroom.  It may be because I did all of the work for them this time in setting up their classes, but I’m betting that many of them will be hooked when all is said and done because of the possible success of this assignment.

Wish me luck!  If this goes the way I think it’s going to go, I will have brought the school community together by using Moodle!

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