My Administrative Accomplishments

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Instructional Technologist to Innovation Strategist

Don declared earlier this year that he hates the term "instructional technology." He's long hated the term, "technology integration."

Three Innovation Strategists. Picture credit: Melissa Lim

"Today, using technology is just part of good instruction," he says. Conversations, Tweets, and title changes ensued this spring. Sean and I are now calling ourselves innovation strategists. Don will join the ranks when he follows his heart and gets back to the training side where he belongs. In the meantime, our agency will continue to evolve and our titles will evolve along with it.

Then this Google+ post from Melissa Lim. The term innovation strategist isn't included anywhere in the article, but it is all about innovation and strategy...and the changing role of information technology.

We're all about user experience. Each day we make baby steps toward the change we want to see in education and for today's kids. Technology is just a tiny piece of the puzzle. We're looking for real change to inquiry-based lessons and student-centered learning. It's painfully slow.

Google Voice: Not Your Mother's Voice Service

This is a repost from one first composed in April 2012 at EdReach.

In everyday life, the Google Voice service is a way to combine all your numbers into one and to conveniently receive voice messages. ListenIn™ even helps you decide which calls to answer after the caller has started to leave a message.

Teachers can use a GVoice number for parents without giving away their primary phone number. Easily created custom voicemail greetings for parents and a different greeting for students make messages personalized and relevant. Educators can put a call widget for a GVoice number on their website making home-school connections even easier. Visit http://support.google.com/voice for more information and to request an invitation.

My students have always enjoyed using GVoice for recording everything from interviews with veterans or local legislators to reports for podcasts. Downloaded mp3 files from the interface make it easy to use and post the audio in a different place. Teachers can easily edit and add pictures for an enhanced podcast.

Educators have been known to get darn creative when it comes to free tools. Most recently, we’ve enjoyed Google Voice for dictation purposes. Many of our students with special needs have great ideas but not the dexterity to get them on paper. They’ve seen success with the speech-to-text capabilities in Google Voice. Prior to the use of GVoice, adults were taking dictation so students could complete homework assignments on time. Google provided a dual solution: empowering students to complete this work independently and improving their fluency at the same time. Students quickly figured out they would have fewer corrections to make if they spoke clearly. Going into high school, our students now have one more tool in their problem-solving kit, as well as the bonus of a virtual portfolio showing growth and progress. Finally, using Google Voice in this way has freed up adult time to work with students in more meaningful ways.

Using GVoice for students with special needs has led to other creative uses. Vocabulary words with definitions and applications have helped auditory learners retain and recall information more readily. Creation of these sound glossaries have helped kinesthetic learners with their retention as well.

The excitement around Google Voice has been contagious. Foreign language teachers have encouraged students to use it for both practice and assessment. In other classes students are documenting their field trips and other events with audio files.

When minds open, so do policies. As a result of Google Voice use, we’re seeing more open policies about the application of student devices during the school day. As teachers see simple relevance for mobile learning, more creativity seems to be the next step. It won’t be long before the excitement spreads even further.

Next, Speech/Pathology services using Google Hangouts! Click here for a complete listing of Google Voice uses for districts, school, and classrooms.

My Love Affair with Social Media

I hate email. I mean, I really hate it. When I'm managing a team, I think I'll set a three-times-a-day rule around email. I'll check it morning, noon, and night for a short period of time, but folks will need to use social media to look for a response. My reasons are as follows.

Transparency

This is the reason I'd prefer my staff to be on social media as well. I will only need to answer a question once. One post and your team knows what's up. The majority of interactions will be transparent. The expectation is both community building and efficiency. Because I can tag posts in social media, finding interactions is much easier there than in email. Yes, there are ways to use tagging in email, but the conversations aren't inherently transparent.

Accessibility

Many social media sites provide multiple opportunities for posting and multiple opportunities for receiving. You can set up some pretty intricate ways to get updates. Include getting an email message in that list.

SPAM

Yes, social media is known to have SPAM. Compare it to the number of junk email messages you get and they won't even compare. Have you ever signed up for a conference, a credit card, airline miles, shopping excursions, hotels, or anything else with your email address? Ugh.

Curb Appeal

The visual, verbal nature of social media will trump anything that email could ever deliver. Tumblr is my best example. All I need to do is scroll and click once in awhile to get the full visual effects of posts there. Sharing is easy too.

Tips and Tricks for users groups

Welcome to the new age of training. We did it all wrong in the 90s in regards to technology training as explained in my last post.

Tips and Tricks for users groups

• Everyone must hold the time sacred. Pretend you’re paying for the session and you can’t miss it. NOTHING should get in the way of this time. Be adults and plan accordingly.

• Set up away from your regular desks. Reserve a conference room. Participants should be completely engaged. Avoid leaving your email open and if you must check it only during scheduled breaks. Everyone likes feeling important, but if someone else needs you RIGHT NOW and one of your children is not dying, you need to set different expectations and enable people less.

• Pull your own learning cart: come with questions and be ready to help answer the questions of your colleagues.

• Bring wine to the picnic: arrive with your best strategies and ideas for effective use, time management and effective problem solving. Be ready to share.

• Use some of that money you were going to spend on a class for refreshments to keep people comfortable. Brain research says people need to be operating in the larger parts of the brain to truly be learning. This means you need to be hydrated, warm and your stomach needs to be full. Otherwise your brain is just thinking about how uncomfortable you are. Working in survival mode will not allow your brain to absorb information you need.

• Work collaboratively through the modules in small groups according to level. Stop to practice, ask questions, take notes and cement information so you can retrieve it later.

• Have the technology ready so you can try things. Make your less technology-savvy people drive at times and be patient with them.

• Get up and move around frequently and take deep, cleansing breaths. Switch tasks, pulling relevant information from resources outside of the written curriculum. For example, if you study pivot tables in the module and they still don’t make sense, find a YouTube video for a little more information or clarity. If you have specific questions about, for example, pivot tables use Microsoft’s website or user forums to look up the information. Use good search terms to get your answers, if you don’t find it, try something new. Your tenacity will pay off. You’ll be able to find your answer more quickly next time and the hard work will help you remember the information for which you’ve looked. It’s easy to have someone tell you the answer but you’ll forget it more readily than if you need to work to get it.

• Avoid side conversations about unrelated topics (work or otherwise) or make them short (your brain needs them). Appoint a task master if this is difficult for your group. Make sure this person is efficient and outspoken. They’ll need to watch the clock and firmly guide the group.

Learning to Learn: Welcome to the Future!

This from a colleague: “Hi Corin, a few of us were ok’ed to take an excel class, we were going to do it from Fred Pryor, but Anna said she took the course and she had to help the instructor. I did a google search and found very bad reviews. Can you recommend something for us. We are interested in some help with 2010 and both basic and up.”

AAAAARGH! Using Excel as my example, you’ll see my response below. 

Picture credit to: miffdesigner on Flickr

You’re not going to like this. All your canned Excel courses are going to be like Anna’s experience – it’s why she feels she needs another one instead of absorbing the information from the classes she’s taken in the past. No one can know everything about Excel, it’s too vast. You all use it enough so that you’ll come with specific questions and they are probably going to be somewhat deep and very specific based on your jobs. If the instructor doesn’t have that particular piece of knowledge, it will look like they need help. The reality is they actually just need the time, not in front of a group, to figure out how to solve the problem and get back to you. Your teachers will have good searching strategies as well as time and experience using Excel but they still won’t know it all…ever.

Welcome to training today. Software changes too much and is too large to have it and all its uses effectively taught even over a college semester.

The problem with the courses you're looking for has been that the content doesn’t really have staying power. When you need that one skill someone taught you in a class six months earlier, you still need to look it up – which is what you should be able to do now…without spending hundreds of dollars on a class. Here are some free ideas that should work better if you’re willing to do a bit of planning. Based on how research says content and skills get cemented in the brain (conversation, practice, and collaboration) the following experiences will help you remember what you learn.

Form a users’ group around business office use of Excel. Use the training we get free because we pay Microsoft’s astronomical campus fees. You can break groups up into smaller pairs or triads depending on self-assessed levels (basic, novice, intermediate, advanced, etc). Hold these groups for a couple hours once a month.

Hone your searching skills. You’ve got resources ALL OVER THE INTERNET. They are YouTube videos, user forums, recorded webinars, and websites full of resources. Microsoft has done a great job with videos at http://office.microsoft.com A class in effective searching is probably the best way to spend agency money. However, you can get training on this for FREE if you look for it on the internet. I take webinars on this constantly and there is a lot of useful documentation at your favorite search engine.

Because you can stop, start, practice and discuss the content in each module it’s going to stick with you far longer than what you’ll get in a couple of face-to-face sessions with someone standing and delivering in the front of the room. The human brain is not meant to sit and get information for long periods of time with only a lunch break but the format is so engrained in our hearts and minds it’s all we know. Time to break the pattern because the paradigm isn’t working.

Phew! It’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but your best instructors are not going to know Excel to its core and your best users of Excel won’t be great teachers. I’d be more than happy to facilitate these sessions or just get you started by directing the group and being your initial task master but I think you ladies are more than capable of effectively doing this on your own.

Next month, look here for tips and tricks on running your own user group.

Part Two: Give me a Picture Sharing Site

This post is a continuation of Part One.

Fourth argument: Google will delete any account for students under the age of 14. Um, no. The terms of service at Picasa,Flickr and other picture sharing sites ask that children have a parent’s permission to create an account as per the Children Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA). Admittedly, there is a lot of confusion over the federal COPPA law. However, you’ll find clarity on the FCC’s website through part one of this blog post. Oregon’s contract with Google states that we’ll have permission forms on file for ALL students (even those over 13). This has pushed districts in our state to do local education around the use of online tools in education which is not only great for access, but also a good community builder. Discussions around shifts in educational resources with parents, board members, even local businesses and non-profits has only been good for education here. We still have a long way to go.

Fifth argument: Kids will go home and access inappropriate pictures. We can’t control what kids do at home. And we can’t use COPPA’s cousin, CIPA as an excuse to block websites unless students are connecting at school. The Children’s Internet Protection Act applies ONLY to connections for which school districts receive eRate money. If students access Picasa through their school account at home its the parents’ responsibility to monitor Internet usage. This is a great educational piece for parents and all the more reason to open the conversation. The fact is, on an unfiltered Internet connection with no parental supervision, Picasa is one of the more tame sites to which children will have access. It is both the job of the educational system and the local police department to help parents with this. To block children from the usefulness of Picnik/Picasa would be a sad sacrifice both in discussion and students as contributors on the Web. Use of Picasa can also foster a conversation about how kids can avoid victimization. This verbiage and subsequent curricular planning should be addressed in writing and appropriate for each grade level.

Students Learning and Sharing by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Flickr

Let’s revisit that second argument, as absurd as it is. We should use caution when giving kids access to Picasa just as when we give them access to ANY tool online. Schools have content filtering in place and usually a strict policy about how and why students access the Internet. The rules help students and staff effectively access the great stuff on the web and help educators and human resource departments (and sometimes law enforcement) dole out consequences when there is a breach of policy. I am a teacher and it offends me when law enforcement officials and technology directors feel they can tell me how to educate children and deem which resources are appropriate for teaching the skills and knowledge required for today’s world. It is a technology department’s job to give us safe, secure connections to online tools while maintaining the integrity of the network. My job is classroom management. There is no grey area here. When I ask for access, you find the safest most secure way to give it to me without question. Period.

The opportunity for teaching skills within and way beyond the regular curriculum far outweighs the dangers. In fact, I still take the stance that children will be much safer given access **including education** to and around these tools than if we simply block them. We are doing children a grave disservice if we don’t teach them to effectively navigate these online resources. Effective navigation includes avoiding inappropriate images. If these tools are blocked, we lose this teaching opportunity entirely. Let me remind you there are no accidents. The goal is to have students find exactly what they are looking for. When they do, I know it and there are always consequences for their behavior. Sometimes, said consequences are pleasant and sometimes they are very, very, very unpleasant. Have you every been in a lab full of children? There are no secrets. If a student accesses an inappropriate site, the teacher knows within a second.

There are thousands of sites where people can share media and license it according to their purpose. Some of these sites are useful for teaching certain required concepts because of their capabilities or the way in which they are formatted. In Oregon, it makes the most sense to open (at least) Picasa since we have a statewide agreement to provide districts with Google Apps for Education. Sensibility comes when we turn on this service through our districts and teach students to make full use of it. There is no expectation of privacy as this is made clear through education and permission slips between school and home. When there is a question about usage on the part of a staff member or student, the district maintains the right to access the content within any account. I’m not saying this because districts need to be punitive. The district’s right to access the content within any account can foster conversations about digital citizenship, information literacy and other types of responsibilities stemming from broad Internet use. Education is the key.

Schools around the world have Picasa OPEN. This isn’t innovation. Use of this tool isn’t new, it’s become a basic part of many curricula around the globe. Stop arguing and start acting. For crumb’s sake, let me do my job.

With all of that said, here are a few ideas for using picture sharing sites in your school or classroom:

• Use open-licensed images as building blocks for multimedia presentations and conversations about copyright.
• Have students collaborate with others in different locations on albums about historical events, science concepts, or local civics. Students can build collaborative presentations using Google Docs.
• Upload pictures of your classroom and tag parts of each photo with words for the objects in the photos. This is a great activity for emerging readers and writers and English language learners.
• Use Picnik to overlay a limerick, haiku or other piece of writing over a student-generated photo or artwork; this would be a fun activity with literary devices that can be represented visually
• Share albums for sporting or other school events. Allow others to upload photos to each event album. Use these pictures for newsletters and the yearbook.
• Have students keep a collection of pictures related to a current event or other topic. They can create their own art related to the topic based on the photos they collect.
• Teachers can get ideas for arts and crafts based on the photos they find in Picasa.
• Use pictures to teach good composition and basic design principles.