Celebrating Success 1: 21st Century at Confed.

The other day I felt quite down about our rate of progress towards becoming a 21st century school. Change in schools can be slow, perhaps more than other industries. We had a quick staff meeting where our technology group was given a short period of time to show staff how to set up an RSS feed or google reader. We wanted time to get every staff person to create their own. I really felt that if we just talked to them, no one would carry through and program their own feed. Not enough time and nobody interested. I wanted everybody to use the feed to assist them in their professional learning, just as I use mine.

The next day, one of our wonderfully gifted resource room teachers came into my room and wanted help setting up a google reader. My intern helped her to do that in a few minutes. I told her that she could now subscribe to this very blog as a start. She explained that she had susbscribed to my class blog instead! At first I was disappointed.

I then realized the beauty of her idea. Three times a week she comes into our room to help children with the writing process. Much of the writing we do is blogging. (learn, communicate, build a learning network) By setting up an RSS feed to our blog, every time a student writes something it is sent to her reader and she can comment, encourage and collaborate with students almost instantaneously! The beauty of the idea is that I didn't even think of it before.

An ingenious idea which was not possible until the age of technology. The students win as they increase their readership, the teachers win because the technology makes their job easier.

I'm looking forward to celebrating more successful steps to becoming a 21st century school!

Blogging is Good for the Soul, 10 reasons blogging works for me

Who knew I would love to blog? I used to think that blogging was like much of twitter, quasi- communication, spelling challenged with little or no meaning. For sure I have had to come to terms with why I would do this, especially when you consider that most bloggers have only a handful of followers. Wendy James talks about the number of lurkers (people who read blogs but don't ever contribute on their own blog nor do they leave comments). I couldn't see participating at that level as I have this innate need to share what I learn.

In the book "Here Comes Everybody" (Howe), the author edited a wikipedia article that was written in complex and awkward language. The edit improved the article even though his knowledge of the topic was limited. His edit stood the test of time as well. Howe talked about how good it felt to be part of something important. It was fun for him. It is fun for me; it gives me a sense of belonging.

Here are my top ten reasons to blog:

1. it feels good to be part of something larger than yourself (community)
2. gives me a reason to read and learn
3. the way I learn has always been to read and then tell people about it, even if they don't want to hear
4. adding to the body of knowledge in my particular area of interest
5. cements my thoughts around an issue
6. creates a longitudinal record of my personal growth, ideas and learning
7. there is power in knowing that your opinion/work may make a difference, as others blog writing makes a difference to you
8. establish an on-line professional presence
9. fun to take a stand on issues
10. modelling 21st century learning for my students and colleagues

I would love to expand my personal learning network, to increase the number of blogs I follow and to increase the number of people who follow me. In the meantime, it has been very fun for me. Not for you? You'll never know if you don't give it a try.