Final Project

I've been reading everyone's final blog posts with some envy, as I had some difficulty wrapping up my project. I have also been gone on vacation, so the time I've been able to work on it has been pretty sporadic. The project itself as been complete for about a week or so. At least it is as complete as it can be before heading into any significant action. The final parts I needed to do where the nuts and bolts of refining and adding to the rubric to judge its success, and some of the parts about where it goes from here.

I have added this all finally, as well as a view of the website into my portfolio site here:
http://sites.google.com/a/wolfmail.stritch.edu/jason-symes-ced555-sp2010/

At this point, I'm very proud of my project, and I'm excited to share it with others, but my greatest hope is that it will really accomplish the goal that I've set out for it. I really want to work with other U.S. History teachers to share resources, lessons, strategies, students, and success with.

I think this is the core lesson that I've picked up from this program. I always knew that technology was powerful, but I was overestimating its impact. I now understand when people say that technology is the tool, but the importance comes from what you do with the tool. I'm hopeful that this site will be a tool that I can use in a true web 2.0 way. That is connecting/learning/interacting with others who I can truly collaborate with in a mutually beneficial manner. That is really powerful.

I've really enjoyed this program and feel that I have become a better teacher, learner, leader as a result. Thanks to everyone who has helped along the way.

If you build it...

I have turned one corner in my work on the final project, and it turned out to be so obvious, but it took the view from another to see it. From my last blog you can see that I was focused on recruiting. I still am, but it has become secondary. My problem is that I was recruiting without any place for people to go. I've been working hard the last week to get a hub up and running. I opted to go with Google Sites and despite some issues with embedding some videos and widgets it has gone well. Right now I feel pretty good about where I am, and now I have something to show prospective collaborators.

I also am figuring that at this point I have myself and the other history teacher in my school, in addition to two history teachers from a middle school in Verona. Even if it turns out to be just the four of us this year, it is still four times as many people as I've collaborated with in the past, which is an exciting idea to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still looking for prospects and if you see them please send them my way, but I'm living by the, "If you build it, they will come" mantra and I feel pretty good about it.

If you are interested in checking out or sharing my work it can be found at:

http://sites.google.com/a/oregonsd.net/middle-history/home

Thanks for any help you can give.

599 Week 1

Over the last week I have been trying to cross the first bridge towards completing my final project. This consists of contacting individuals who may be interested in joining a group of middle school U.S. history teachers to share resources/planning/ideas/students. I've been able to make a few face to face contacts over the last month, but since then I have been relegated to looking for groups on Diigo or history groups online or on twitter and contact people this way. This has feels a lot like cold calling people which I don't really like and makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I've been able to reconcile this is my mind by saying they have put their names out there on these lists and in their groups, so they must be interested in expanding their connections. It still feels like I'm telemarketing though. I'm hopeful that I'll get a response to some of my initial feelers in the next couple of days.

In the meantime if any of you through your school districts or other connections know of a progressive minded U.S. History teacher who might be interested please send their info my way. I would very much appreciate it. Thanks.

Time to go, I've got more "calls" to make.

Week 6 - Final Leadership Evaluation

One of the things that most impressed me about this class is that my definition of leadership has changed. I did not come into 565 expecting to change my view all that much, but what I see now is that leadership can come in different shapes and sizes. I see now that I can lead my building through my work in the classroom, through committee projects I'm involved with directing, as well as the way I can manage relations between staff members. I think I now view a teacher leader as someone who can effect change in a school through their work with students, other teachers, administration or community. This definition has broadened considerably from the definition I started with, and I now feel I can view myself as a leader in my building.

I think my view of my leadership potential has not changed, I've always felt that I had potential to lead within my building community. I now view myself as someone who is already one of the leaders at my school.

Finally, I do and always have agreed with our books assertion of change from within. This is why I have always worked hard to make meaningful use of time working on a variety of committees. The committees I have joined all have meaning and interest to me and we have worked hard to implement parts of our vision into the larger school community. Finally, taking part in this program has helped me to change our community from within as I relate the new experiences of this program into my teaching career.

Week 5 - 565

I was struck by one of the videos this week. I watch the one featuring the found of Ebay and Participant Pictures. His name has completely escaped me as I write and I suppose it isn't terribly important. But what struck me about the video was that he was a highly successful individual as a businessman, but it wasn't until now that he was invited to speak at TED.

They weren't so concerned about EBay and all the changes it brought. By virtue of their invitation to speak they were interested in his film company and their mission. To make films that inform the public and encourage action. I found that I had seen a lot of his films and some of them did move me to take action, whether it be action in learning more, voting a particular way, discussions with my friends, or passing on the experience to students. At the time I didn't think too much about that, but that is really cool. This guy (insert name) makes movies that make me take action. How cool would it be to have that ability? He changes people's opinions, points of view, and actions. Wait that is what I do.

How can I do it better? I need to apply his formula to my class. I want to spark my students to take action. I do this, sometimes, but I want to do it more frequently.

It took me awhile to see how this video fit into the topic of the class, which is enacting, encouraging, leading change, but now I see it. He changes people, conversations, actions with his films and I can do the same thing in my class.

Click Here to go to their social action page. I'm amazed by how many actions he is providing avenues for people to take as a result of the films his company is making. Try one.

Week 4 - 565

What a great title! I feel the real highlight of the week was the activity in class. I really felt like my group struggled. We never really got a grasp on what we were actually doing. Once we figured out how the game worked, we skipped past the part where we analyzed the problem that the game was presenting and we went to throwing darts at the wall, hoping to hit a bulls-eye, or even the board. The dynamic in the group was a bit off, and I think the time crunch and all the different jobs affected us all in different ways.

I think the real lesson is clear though, that change is hard. There is a lot to do, and you can totally fail if you don't get your act together right from the start. This is something I always struggle with, that people don't just hop on board. I feel something is so clearly right and the way to go, but I need to do a better job of slowing down, considering other points of view, and making sure their is actual evidence that this is the best road, not just my point of view.

This is a week that I can definitely take back to the real world and learn something from. That makes it a good week.

Continuous Change

In going through this weeks resources I was constantly reminded of a quote I had come across in the not so distant past. The quote said something to the effect that education is a field that is historically slow to change.

When I first read this quote I agreed and went along my merry way, but after this week that sense has been constantly on my mind. I'm wondering how a profession that deals with so many different individual kids during a year, then gets a new batch every year can at the same time be slow to change. That to me signals a big problem. It has made me nervous as my school building faces a million changes in the next month, summer, year. Can we handle it?

The question is how do you best implement change in an institution like ours? There has to be leadership. This is why I'm so nervous about my school moving through the next stage in our life, we have lacked effective leadership in our building for as long as I've been there. I like my school, but it is somewhat a mess. We are going to get our 4th principal in the last 8 years in July, and next year we will have a minimum of seven new faces on staff out of a staff of 42. He has a big job, and I'm hopeful that he understands how to work the system, leading change, and how to rebuild a fractured community. I am also hopeful that I can fulfill an earlier blog post and put myself out there as a leader in the building for change. I know I can do it, I think a lot of lessons for our future can come out of this week's materials.

Data and WINNS and Driving

This is my first trip to the WINNS site, and outside of the painfully long waiting periods, I really enjoyed looking at much of the information. For my first glimpse I focused on the WKCE data and found that we performed about where I expected to. What I was surprised to see is a decrease in our proficient/advanced numbers over the last 5-6 years. It has not been a constant decrease, but it looks to my untrained eyes like a decrease. You can see it HERE.

The next step was to identify the why and my first instinct was to look at the sub groups of race or economic status. The first race/ethnicity probably has not had an impact, while our numbers of students in the Hispanic and Black categories have increased our overall number is still very small and therefore has had a negligible impact on our data.

The second group, economically disadvantaged has grown, and what I noticed was that their scoring has dramatically decreased over that time. It would seem to me that with a group a little over 10% of the overall population decreasing significantly would have the effect of bringing down the overall score slowly, but surely.

Now, there could easily be other, more significant reasons to our decrease, but the fact remains, our economically disadvantaged students are being left further and further behind. Now I suppose we identify the problem, solving it should be easy right?

Last point: We don't really do this in our district. My feeling is that we go on and on about being a data driven district, but I don't recall ever being shown meaningful, straight forward data that made any sense to me. I liked this. I found value in this exercise. I couldn't say the same thing when we have had PD's using data in the past. I wouldn't say we are data driven, but I think I would like to be, as long as we become good drivers.

Leader?

This week's blog deals with leaders in a building, specifically me. Am I a Leader? How do I Lead? Why do some people Lead while others Follow?

The simple answer is that yes I am a leader in my school.

The long answer says not yet.

Am I involved in decisions? Yes.
Do I take active roles in professional development? Yes.
Do I participate fully in committee activities? Yes.
Do I share my views on issues that face my school? Yes.
Do some people value and consider my advice on issues? Yes.
Do I lead our building towards positive and real change? Not yet.

It is this final not yet that results in my long answer being the way it is. I don't view myself as a leader because I have not yet led anyone or any group down a road to positive change. I have been a partner in bringing change, but I would not say I was the catalyst, or the leader. There is hope for me yet, it is early in my career. I'm confident that if I can carry out the visions and plans of my mind I can become a leader in my building, but that is still future tense.

With my current projects in progress for PLP and my MEIT proposal, I see no reason for them not to be ideas that could lead to significant change in our building for both students and teachers. If they are successful and spread, then I would feel more comfortable with the label leader.

My PLP project involves creating online presentation portfolios (sample) for students to reflect and share their work and learning with teachers, parents and other students. Our school previously had these in binder form, and we are actively working to improve the process and bring it and our students into the web 2.0 era.

My MEIT proposal has been discussed in other blog posts, but I feel like it will do for me, as a teacher, what the SLC does for students. It puts my work out there for others, it allows me to collaborate with peers, and it allows my students to expand their understanding of curriculum and their world simultaneously.

As I mentioned before I am excited about both of these ideas. I know it will be a lot of work and there will be setbacks, but I'm excited nonetheless. The last statements go for being a building leader as well.

Free the Ning. Or discount if for educators.

Yesterday I was excited to hear the new Ning report on what their new pay structure would look like. Now that I write this, it seemed like a lot of people were excited to find out, I bet they got a lot of traffic yesterday. Anyway, I was pleased to read that some version of Ning would be provided for free to educators. My initial reaction was positive.

Ning Planning to Remain Free for Teachers - http://nyti.ms/cPiI7Yless than a minute ago via TimesPeople

Jason Symes
jmsymes

You can see from this tweet, that I was initially excited. Just look at my face for proof. After the fact though, I was a little more skeptical.

The Ning that seems like it will be offered for free is the bare bones minimal option, which is not the same as what many of us have become accustomed to since whenever you started using Ning. Problems for me with the free version are the 150 members, no grouping, no interaction with social media. That is the direction I wanted to go with Ning, and why I and my students liked it so much. You can see the side by side comparison here. As I looked at the different levels I can see that the version I would be interested in and would best meed my needs is going to cost me $20/month, or $200/year. That's not cheap. I would really need to have my act together to go in that direction. It also seems like for education the cost is going to be significant enough to discourage many from trying it out. That's too bad.

My only hope is that when we see the effect on educators the $200 dollar option can be brought down to something that is closer to my budget ability. I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath.

Culminating Proposal Assignment

My focus has temporarily shifted in the last few days away from my portfolio, to the culminating project proposal that we have recently been assigned to write. My sense initially is that I'm pushing myself, but at this point I don't really really know. For the project I'm planning on trying to start the roots of a network of teachers for my subject area. I know there are already these networks out there, but for the most part what I've seen are big discussion boards for lesson plans and resources. I want to create a network of collaboration. I'm looking for a small group of teachers to occasionally plan with, have students partner with students, and function as an audience for our independent work. My goal is to get five teachers and their students to join and participate in this network.

This is the part where I feel I've bit off more than I can chew. First, I don't have any contacts. For me right now I'm a bit unsure of how to make them. The second part I see as a challenge is that some place is going to need to serve as our networks hub, and I'm guessing a big part of that is going to fall on my shoulders.

I have a couple of leads:

1. Langwitches Around the World in 80 Schools
I'm going to need to scour this list for potential contacts and perhaps send out some emails.

2. I take students to D.C. at the end of the year, and the company I travel with also employs a lot of teachers of middle school students, so I'm hoping they can help me out, but we'll see.

3. I know a few people in schools in the area, who can hopefully point me in the direction of teachers of like mind and curriculum.

By a few people in schools in the area, I'm mostly talking about my wife and you, reader. If you know a teacher of social studies in your school with maybe 7th or 8th grade students, I would appreciate your help. Or even if you have a cousin who knows a guy, who gets his hair cut by a lady, who has a son, who goes to a school with a social studies teacher who would be interested I would still appreciate the lead.

You could email me any information to jmsymes@wolfmail.stritch.edu

Thanks for your help, or at least reading.

555 Portfolio

My biggest question that I've had with this project is what am I going to do with it, when I leave the friendly confines of Cardinal Stritch? I'm assuming that I'll be able to transfer it to my regular home version of Google Sites, but that's an assumption, and we all know what happens when you assume. Can I save it, move it, use it, because if I can't then that's going to put a serious damper on my enthusiasm. I say that honestly, because I am pretty excited about this idea. Especially after seeing that all my artifacts don't have to come from my Stritch work, they can come from my work work. I'm excited to share and put out some of the work that my kids have done. I'm proud of the products they have created with me. This year I've enjoyed, perhaps more than ever some of the new ideas we've worked on. I'll show you one here,

www.7oreligion6.pbworks.com

www.7oreligion4.pbworks.com


It is a wiki that each section of my class worked on after our religion unit. WARNING: It is not perfect, it is clearly the work of 7th graders, who were new to religions, wikis, and deadlines, but it is still pretty cool how they came together to create something. While there are things I'm not particularly pleased with how each wiki turned out. I am happy with their effort, and I'm convinced that this was a good first step for them to take in this area of content and delivery.

I have some other projects that I'm excited to share on my portfolio, but I haven't gotten permission yet from some students.

Final Note: I have some pretty good luck generally, things typically work out for me in the long run. This year I've been pretty down on myself because I started a Ning with my class, we were enjoying it, the kids were excited, but I've failed as a Ning master. I guess I wasn't quite ready or prepared to implement it, then today this link came across my Twitter page. Ning is no longer going to offer free sites. While I still consider this a failure on my part, I don't feel so bad about it, because I wasn't willing to pay for it. It feels like I'm even Steven.

The Portfolio Continues

I'm on spring break this week, but in my own self interest I've been trying to move ahead with the portfolio project for my most recent class. This week I've created vision and mission statements, as well as identified standards that I will be holding myself to. The mission and vision were difficult in that I'm pretty comfortable with the values that I aspire to in my class, but finding a concise, less than cheesy way to communicate them can be hard. I spent the better part of an afternoon writing, watching a movie (Ali), then going back to do some editing, more Ali, and finally finishing up the assignment. If you want to take a look at what I finally came up with, they are here. I would appreciate any feedback. If you could care less about my portfolio you can watch a great movie intro to a period in history. Even after this exhaustive editing/movie watching experience, I'm still not 100% comfortable with the writing.


The second part of the project has been to identify standards that you work with, then supply artifacts that demonstrate your competency in them. I went with the NETS standards for both students and teachers and I'm beginning to have my doubts. The problem I'm having is I view these standards as a goal for my classroom, so as a result I don't yet have artifacts to demonstrate some portions. Or the artifacts I do have are from my class, and not so much the Stritch program. I need to get in touch with the professor to check on the status of moving forward in this manner. I'm hopeful, because as I mentioned before I really like the NETS standards and feel they offer me more guidance and support than my curricular state standards.

Finally, I'm looking forward to Easter and the end of Lent. This year for Lent I gave up sweets, with mixed success if I'm to be honest, which I think I should be on the topic. I have however done very well in giving up Cadbury Creme Eggs, which are by far, without a doubt the greatest little treat out. Needless to say on Sunday morning and throughout the day I plan on downing quite a few of those delicious little eggs.

Professional Portfolio

Looking at the professional portfolios this last week was an interesting exercise.  It is amazing how like kitchens many of them don't age well unless they are regularly updated.  I'm hopeful that during this process of portfolio creation I'm able to find pieces or components that I can take a regular interest in updating down the road.  I feel like the classes during this cohort that I've done the best in are projects that I find meaning with, so I'm happy to have the portfolio to work on. 

I'm excited to work on Google Sites.  We have it in our district connected with Google Apps so this will be a great experience that I'll be able to translate into working with and assisting students on their sites. It also suits my need of enjoying fiddling around with new tools and troubleshooting.  I did take some time to set up my portfolio skeleton last week and the Google Sites do seem like they will be very easy to work with and allow for a high level of customization.

Back to the portfolios from last week.  I noticed that the best ones do seem to follow the skeleton that has been created for us from this class.  I found some portfolios that had organizational systems, but none of them worked from my point of view.  The key I see to the portfolio is that when faced with the front page you ought to know what you are looking for, and exactly where you are going to find it.  That wasn't always the case in some portfolios that I came across.  That would seem to be a pretty obvious lesson, but one that some have apparently missed.

I'm feeling pretty good after week one of the portfolio progress, we'll see how it goes down the road, but I'm optimistic, which is good.

30 days, 1 year, and Learning More

In the next 30 days, I am going to make a real effort to jump start some of my classes asynchronous discussions and when I do I want to be a better facilitator.  I know I can't respond to every post, but I can give some recognition and work to summarize the key points of discussions.  I think that by just doing these two things the quality could be improved. 

Over the next year I would like to have more online materials, work, discussions, and submissions.  Reduce the paper that gets pushed around my room.  I would like to have my class go from 85-15 f2f-online to closer to 70-30.  I think that is a better balance, and would allow some students to take the balance further, if they were comfortable in that arena. 

What I would like to learn is, would my students be interested in a synchronous discussion that would take place outside of the school day and online.  It would be a unique opportunity to discuss items that were tangents to in class discussions.  I might also be a way to involve new groupings and some students who aren't comfortable in the in class environment.  I think it would definitely have to be casual and enjoyable to be anything a 7th or 8th grader would be interested in, but it would be an interesting experiment.

Student Centered

My student centered lesson is one that I'm currently working on, which deals with the topic of religion.  It has been an interesting experience this year in that it is a bit of a change from the way I worked this topic in the past.  I like that the students are able to get to know all the religions at a basic level and have opportunities to follow their interests.  My issue with my current unit is that many of my students have "filled" their organizers with basics and see that as an opportunity to be finished.  I have had difficulty with some students trying to find specific niches that they can delve deeper into.  For each religion I've picked out and demonstrated my own interest for the religion, but I have had only limited success in translating that to the students.  For the last few days we've been discussing the assessment that will be used and tomorrow I'll show them the rubric for it.  I'm hoping that they'll see to be successful in the assessment according to the rubric they will need a well rounded understanding, but will also benefit from areas of greater depth of knowledge. 

On another note, next week I'll be presenting my synchronous discussion topic to the class.  My topic will be professional development for virtual teachers.  Our primary discussion will try and connect the data found in the study and the responses in the asynchronous discussion.  In addition we will discuss ways in which the lessons of this research can also be applied to our current brick and mortar institutions.  I thought the two leaders I worked with last week did a great job and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to take the lead. 

Asynchronous/Synchronous Presentations

This week, I'm responsible for one of the asynchronous sessions and over the course of my reading background knowledge I couldn't help but connect the issue of professional development to my life as a teacher here in Oregon.  The articles I was reading were discussing what kind of training people felt they needed, and there were differences based on experience and type of virtual school.  They then went into the different models that are used to present training.  My thoughts turned back to my home district and I was wondering what the percentages would look like in our brick and mortar building.  I was interested to see if what teacher's perception of their needs, and what we receive from our district would agree at all.  I have a guess, but I don't want to speak for all the teachers in our district.  I also couldn't help but notice that most of the survey respondents preferred their training in a mix of face-to-face and virtual training.  Wouldn't it stand to reason that would be a pretty similar response to teachers in my building, but that is definitely not how I see training happening. 

As far as running the asynchronous session, I think that I'm pretty clear.  I hope that my initial post will illicit some response, then I have a few directions that I'm predicting the conversation will move in, but that will be based on the groups interactions.

I'm more unsure about my synchronous run next week.  The issue I have is that while I'm pretty comfortable with the material, its isn't something I'm confident enough with to work a whole lot of angles.  I'm also still  looking for a meaningful method for the session, as opposed to 15 min. of listening to our own voices.  I'm hoping that tonight's session will provide some inspiration about the options that are out there.

Virtual Learning - Week 2

 

This week, we got an opportunity to practice what it would be like to work as a virtual instructor.  Out first experience was in running a portion of the elluminate session.  We facilitated a small group discussion on a predetermined topic.  My first impressions were that time flies, sharing the mic requires patience, and watching both the chat and listening to the mic may cause you to learn nothing.  I really struggled with following both the chat and the audio, and found that I needed to focus on listening to others, then during the lag time between participants I could scan the chat to see if there was anything I needed to address.  Another observation was that the synchronous discussion requires a lot of patience in wait time and transition time from one participant to the next.  Finally, when discussing it was really useful and added a degree of authenticity when people recognized one another by name.  In the classroom the name of another participant is often implied, but in the elluminate session it was too confusing when people didn't use names in discussions.

Our second teaching virtual experience was setting up an initial contact letter.  This is the classroom equivalent of the first day of school and serves to make the first impression between students and teachers.  I had to think about what I would want my first impression to be prior to writing the letter, as well as predict what some of the initial needs of a student may be prior to starting an online class.  It was an interesting experience, that will serve me in my classroom as well.

Virtual Learning - Week 1

New Class starting 1/26/10 and we are learning all about teaching in a completely virtual environment.  My first impression is that a good virtual teacher, would most likely make a good classroom teacher, but it doesn't seem to necessarily work going the other way.  It seems as though there are some skills that are critical for teaching online that classroom teachers may not emphasize.  The increased access to help with problem solving was first and foremost in my mind.  In the virtual school it feels as though a teacher needs to be available when students are working.  That can be anytime.  I would think that a virtual teacher would need to make clear boundaries for all to see, about when they are available to help, and when you are going to need to be patient.  The second skill applies to this, which is managing asynchronous participation.  It would be a lot of work to keep conversations going within a class, because rather than discussing face to face over a 45 min. period, this discussion is spread out over a week or more.  On the positive side, this may create a stronger discussion that is well thought out and can be rely more on outside sources and research.