Round Three OpenPD March 26, 2008

Tonight begins round three of OpenPD, we have made a few changes this round. The class will be held from 5:00 – 6:00 PM EDT, check your time zone here. We will have another face to face session joining us from the Magnolia School District in Texas. Jamie Gustin, who attended our last session of OpenPD, is now inviting teachers in his district to participate. All of the connection information is available on the wiki, we will be using Skype and Ustream as we have in the past, sign up for accounts if you have not already and plan on joining us. The agenda is posted, we will be starting with creating you own wiki and hope to move ahead to more advanced options in both wikispaces and also blogging.

We are looking forward to teaching the course again and also to having more people join us. It has been a wonderful experience and we anticipate the same for the following 5 weeks, see you tonight!

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Teacher as student, again

OpenPD is in its second offering, the course has been going very well, wonderful participation, all those attending engaged, tools working extremely well. We had an activity planned for this week as a review of what we had covered last week. The assignment was to create a Google presentation in groups; members of the groups would be mixed, face to face and virtual. All sounds good, right? Well it did turn out great; all groups were successful in creating their presentations and sharing them, working through editing. The downfall was the communication during the creation of the presentation. We decided to use Skype chat, all had Skype accounts, but not all were as familiar with group chats in Skype, myself included and I screwed up. I had difficulty adding people to the group chat, I didn’t have everyone’s contact information, and not all were logged on to Skype so when I tried adding them to the chat it didn’t work. I felt as I did the first night of class in the fall, clumsy with the tools, and rather than assist those in the class with what the assignment was I felt I had the reverse effect and proved to be a hindrance instead. I should have been better prepared, and I apologize for that, at the same time it was a true picture of what it is like for a teacher to be a student in their own class.

It has been suggested it may be in the best interest of my co teachers for me to step aside and let someone else take my place, someone savvier, and someone more literate with the tools. I know I don’t have a string of accomplishments associated with my name, not a blogger that is read or subscribed to, and not someone who falls into the category of any kind of name recognition in the world of education. I do believe strongly not all of us are made of that mold, but we all do contribute in our own way to challenge those we come in contact with to open their eyes to the possibilities we believe are relevant in the shifting landscape of education. I have felt being part of OpenPD has been a contribution I have been able to make, a time of collaborative learning for anyone interested. I have a lot to think about.

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Social Software 07 Great Success

Wednesday evening was the final night of the Social Software for the Classroom which Darren Draper and I facilitated together. I want to thank all who participated, it was a wonderful experience for me and I learned a great deal from everyone, especially Darren. We used tools new to all of us, tried a new concept in professional development as well testing the notion of providing a place for anyone who wanted to learn about web 2.0 tools to come together from around the world to learn, share and collaborate.

I also want to express my gratitude to Darren for being willing to take that leap in asking anyone reading his blog to share in the teaching and participate with him in an open professional development session. I learned a great deal from him and with him; he is a wonderful example of one who truly does believe in collaboration. He has written a great post on his blog about our last session, please follow the link and take a look. We have plans to hold another class during the winter; we will let you know when we have the dates set.

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