So on a Saturday morning my wife and I sit on the couch and start at opposite ends of the Internet and narrowing down the options.

In a world of endless resources how do you find the perfect resource? How do you find the perfect faucet?

You rely on others to help you out.

I’m not sure how many faucet reviews I read, how many rating systems I learned on different websites, but I do know without all those reviews, without people taking the time to write about their purchases our job of picking the perfect faucet would have easily doubled.

Are we teaching students to make choices in a world where choices are endless?

There’s a skill to all of this, and part of it is making a decision based on the best data you can find and have at your disposal. Are we teaching students to find and evaluate data? Are we teaching them to read reviews ranging from 5 stars to 1 stars and make a judgement call a product, or a piece of information?

I’ve watched people struggle with this world of endless choice and in the end I’ve watched people get so overwhelmed by all the information that they just pick one and hope for the best.

We need to be teaching our students how to evaluate not only information, but information about products and services as well and how to use that information to make an informed decision.

The purpose of this PDF is to help schools looking at adopting Web Based Portfolios (WBP) as a form of assessment with students over a period of time. By adopting a web-based platform as a container in which to house portfolio content, schools give students a web-based vehicle with endless possibilities to create, collaborate and communicate their learning to the world.

Web Based Portfolios have been gaining ground in recent years as the skills needed to create digital content have become less complex. Remember the days when a digital portfolio meant courses in Dreamweaver or some other programing language? Those days are behind us as the tools of the web have taken over and simplified things to a point where a true Web Based Portfolio is possible.

In the past, schools, teachers and even students had to decide what their portfolio was going to reflect. Was it going to be a portfolio that showed assessment for learning or assessment of learning? The decision had to be made because in a paper-based world you just did not have enough space to physically hold all of the content to show both. In fact, in a paper-based world many teachers and schools started out envisioning their portfolios as a way to reflect on assessment for learning. In many cases, due to physical requirements in holding the amount of paper it took to show the learning process, many teachers and students ended up creating portfolios that showed assessment of learning. When a choice has to be made because of limited space to keep a rough draft or a final copy students will keep the final copy, and so will teachers.

WBPs if nothing else, solve this age old portfolio issue. With the cost of servers and web storage continuing to drop, creating endless storage space for students to show the learning process and allowing teachers to assess for learning is cheap and getting less expensive every day.

When students have endless space, a WBP not only shows assessment for learning, but also assessment of learning. We now have a vehicle that has the space to allow students and teachers to have the best of both worlds all in one place and the ability to track learning over great lengths of time.

Learning Over Time

The biggest issue a WBP solves is an issue that, up until now, we could not even talk about because we did not have a vehicle that allowed us to even have the discussion.

When we talk about assessing learning over time, or tracking learning over time, historically schools have done a good job of tracking assessment for learning year by year. Students come into 3rd grade, keep a portfolio of their work, and at the end of that year take their work home with them. The next year they come back as 4th graders and repeat the process all over again.

Education never had a system that allowed educators to look at learning year after year other than maybe a few teacher picked samples to go into a student cumulative folder. Of course these cumulative folders are better at giving us a snapshot and focus on assessment of learning not for learning in the long run.

With a WBP that belongs to the student, controlled by the student, created by the student, education now has a vehicle that can extend beyond space and time of a school year. Once a student creates a WBP and owns that space, the assessment for learning over a long period of time becomes natural. Students have one spot, with unlimited space to create, gather, and reflect on their own learning.

Think of the possibilities as a 7th grade teacher if you had students who were in your school system for four years and were able to look back at how they progressed as a reader. Students would have the ability to reflect on their growth as a mathematician from 3rd grade to 7th grade. The power of reflecting on one’s own learning across grade levels not just within them is something that until WBP, was a difficult if not an impossible task. I can imagine a day when a senior in high school has a body of knowledge all in one place that is his or her learning journey. Think of the wealth of information that would be contained within that portfolio. Think of the wealth of knowledge for the school to be able to track learners over time looking at a particular student as a learner.

This would never be possible in a paper-based world. The amount of information, knowledge, and understanding that would be in that one portfolio would not be able to be stored in a paper-based world…now think of all the students in your school or district. The paper-based world can not compete.

WBPs not only solve some of our biggest frustrations as educators but they create new opportunities that we haven’t even thought of tapping into yet.

Student Ownership and Conferences

A critical shift in moving to a WBP system is the notion that students own the portfolio. This, I believe, is a huge shift in the way we view portfolios. For many educators this will be a scary step. When students own their own learning, when they are able to reflect on their own learning, have some choice on what their portfolio looks like, acts like, and when they are able to update it anytime and anywhere, the control of the content shifts from the teacher to the student.

Otherwise known as student-centered learning, students become the true drivers of the content that is put within their WBP. The WBP reflects who they are as a learner. With the guidance of the teacher, students make choices on what learning artifacts deserve more attention than others and find ways to make those artifacts stand out (assessment of learning). In this way you have assessment of learning embedded within, surrounded by assessment for learning, which creates a learning assessment ecosystem that is rich with data, content, and reflections.

Many portfolio initiatives in schools stem from Student-Led Conferences. The Student-Led Conference, or conference format in which the student and student learning is the center of the conference, have gained momentum in the last decade and usually include a portfolio of learning.

As an elementary teacher I know the drill: Conferences are fast approaching and you realize you haven’t had the students working on their p
ortfolios for the upcoming conferences. You drop everything, and for two weeks focus strictly on creating portfolios. 3 reading examples with reflections, 2 writing pieces with reflections, 2 math papers, a spelling test, a piece of art, and the list goes on.

Portfolios are created for conferences, not necessarily to truly reflect student learning. WBPs allow content to easily be collected throughout the school year. Students might take a picture of their work, or something that represents their work, and put it in their portfolio. They might reflect on ten assignments, create and embed two videos, record themselves reading twice and write a reflection about it and upload all of it to their WBP.

Come conference time, the student creates a new category or tag called “conference 2010″. They then categorize or tag the content they want to show at the conference and are able to choose from a wealth of information-anything they want to show. They might in fact, show a sample of writing from 5th grade and one from 7th grade, demonstrating to their parents how they have grown as a writer over time. Or they may choose an audio recording of themselves reading as a 3rd grader not pronoucing their Rs correctly and then in 7th grade reading with emotion and having a great laugh about how far they have come and what they have worked on as a reader over time.

When we separate the WBP from the conference, it becomes a true vehicle of assessment for learning. With a WBP, educators can think about learning over time, in ways never before possible. We can find ways for students to deeply reflect on their own learning and allow students to truly own their learning. WBPs not only solve many of the issues that paper-based portfolios had, they create whole new assessment and reflection opportunities educators have only dreamed of.

“I’d love to do so much more, but we have to cover all this content and I just don’t have time.”

Why is that? Why is content…which is now available anywhere and everywhere still what we feel like we have to do as teachers. I hate to say it but I think I got out of the classroom just in the nick of time. I would be considered a horrible teacher today. We use to go off on tangents in my classroom that could last for weeks. Somebody would bring something up and we’d run with it asking questions, answering questions and find ourselves in a whole other place be the time we were done. Off topic? Yes. Fun? Absolutely! Did we learn anything? More than I could have imagined!

But it seems today at all grade levels we’re so focused on covering content for this test, or by that date, that learning…..real true deep learning gets skipped over. Personally I find that very depressing.

Yes….I’m afraid I’d be a bad teacher today. I’d be the person who’d close their door so that nobody else could see that I wasn’t “on task” and yet my students would be among the most connected in the school. Our learning would revolve around what my school is calling it’s Definition of Learning:

Our learners develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes by connecting prior learning to new experiences.  The most significant learning generates increased understanding and can be seen in our expanded capacities to analyze, synthesize, reflect, apply and communicate our new learnings in a variety of situations.  At ISB, we recognize learning as a life-long adventure.

I could almost garuntee we wouldn’t cover the “curriculum” but we’d learn a lot about a lot of things and have a heck of a lot of fun figuring it all out together.

I had the pleasure of sitting last night and reflecting on my time here as I watched my first American Football game in over 8 years. I’m proud to say that ISB beat SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) and the hamburgers grilled up by the head of school (Link to his new blog) were fantastic. For a moment I felt like I could have been in any small town in the heart of American enjoying Friday night football. As I sat there in the crisp fall air the memories of my own high school days of Friday night football games came back. Sports were the reason I went to school, they were the only reason why I tried to pass classes. You had to have a 2.0 GPA in order to play and, well, lets just say I did pull at least that…..most the time. Motivation to do well comes from many different sources for kids. For some it’s sports, for others it might be band or theater, and yet for others it’s school itself that motivates them to do well. But understanding that each student is unique in what they are passionate about and what motivates them to do well is what every school, teacher, educator should strive to become.

ISB is a unique school internationally. While most large international schools have rigorous entrance exams ISB-Brussels has taken a different approach…..one of inclusion.

As their Impressions brochure states:

1500 students, ages 2 1/2 to 19, from 70 countries. Each with his or her own learning style, skills, interests, passions, personality,hopes and dreams, 1500 students, 1500 ways of being intelligent.

My favorite conversations of the week revolved around this idea that every student is unique and with that we need to find unique ways to reach each one of them. ISB is a 1:1 school from 3rd-12th grade. Two years ago they took the plunge, with little to no known research backing 1:1 laptops programs in the elementary school. But it doesn’t take long to get a feeling that at this school it’s students that matter. That if there is a way that putting a laptop in the hands of every child might help….then they were going to do what was best for kids. Research or no research they had a gut feeling that computers at all levels could help students learn.

Many conversations revolved around the whole child and the whole class. Not every student is a reader, not every student is engaged by technology, and that’s OK. How can we put the tools in the hands of teachers and give them the opportunity to use them where and when appropriate.

It’s what many of us have been saying for years. That the technology is just a tool that can lead to learning, when you have as many computers as pencils in your classroom it makes it easy to choose the right tool for the lesson. My message to the people that attended my sessions was start with the learning outcomes and see where it all fits. Where do you write with a pencil, where do you watch a video, where do you interact with digital media, where do you create content for the world, and how do you meet the needs of each of your students?

You could feel a culture within the school (mostly around the heated passionate discussions in some of my sessions) that ISB is not a school that is going to find research and then react…..instead they are out there creating the research themselves. They’ve been 1:1 in the elementary school for two years now and are starting to collect some data around learning. What I love is that their first round of student tablets are about ready to be replaced and the school is asking itself what’s next? Are tables the best tool? Is there something better? Where do we go from here?

When you are a school, as the slideshow says above, believes in innovation, innovation, innovation, it means celebrating your successes and learning from your failures. The school is not perfect, they know that, and in this day in age we all feel like we have a lot to learn and that we will never be able to learn it all. That’s a mindset I believe many people feel with the pace of change today. As some point we need to stop trying to learn it all and learn how to learn what we need when we need it. In my session on Digital Literacy we only made it through 3 of the 10 slides I had. The conversation was intense and passionate, as we tried to answer the questions:

What does it mean to be literate and how do we teach that in all subjects to students?

It was a great session (I thought anyway) that allowed people to share what they felt it meant to be a teacher, something I think we do not get enough time to discuss within our schools.

At the end of the day if you are a school that believes in innovation, innovation, innovation and that through being innovative you can reach each child and give them “multiple opportunities to success” then you are a school on your way to truly changing the world.

This is a great solution for teachers in primary grades who have a digital camera in their room with them to document learning throughout the school year.

But what about true E-Portfolios that students create and reflect upon themselves? Last year as Shanghai American School we started with a vision of every middle school student having a blog as a e-folio to reflect and share their learning with teachers, parents, and in the end…the world.

Of course I left and taking my place to carry on the vision is the one and only Amanda DeCardy. As a math teacher Amanda was one of the first middle school teachers to play with the idea and later on go 100% e-folio via the blogs last year. This year as one of the Educational Technology Integrationalist for SAS she has made that vision a reality with every 6th – 8th grader having a blog as their portfolio.

It’s an easy concept once you understand how blogs work. Create a category for each subject…students collect digital documents via, mp3, images, uploads, etc. throughout the year reflecting on there learning. When it comes time for the Student-Led Conferences (SLC) students can go back through their year’s reflections pick the ones they want to share with their parents and simple add it to the Student-Led Conference Category.

Without Daniel knowing it (I randomly clicked on a student blog) I’ve used his blog as an example. I’ve shown here how the categories look on his site. As a parent you can follow your child’s learning through the school year and know what you are going to be talking about at the SLC. Feel free to browse Daniel’s site (I’m sure he’d appreciate it) to get a feel for how this works. Use the categories as your navigation and take a tour of Daniel’s learning.

Thinking long turn this blog continues to grow each year. Daniel continues to add his thinking, his reflections, his documentation of learning. As his content grows he’s able to not only reflect on what he’s learning now, but go back in history on his own blog and link to that prior knowledge and thinking from years past.

Why a blog? It’s simple and in chronological order….right or wrong that’s how are schools are set up and over the years you would be able to see the growth of the student.

Why Public? I’ve had teachers talk to me about having students reflect in a public space. One which I think is even more powerful than a private space, but others feel students reflecting openly can be dangerous. I find it to be a very rewarding learning experience personally, that’s what blogging is and students seem to take to it (not all but most). It’s teaching how to reflect, how to be honest and understanding that part of the learning process is reflection. Is there risk? Sure…there always is when you publish something, but I feel the risk is minimal to the benefits students, and educators for that matter get in return. Anyone that blogs knows what I’m talking about.

Long term advantages:

By using a blog or a common open system and adopting it school wide really allows the power of this type of portfolio publishing to show. When Daniel is in 11th grade and he’s appling to univeristies think about the depth of knowledge he has to pull from. The link he can share with universities, and what universities can find out about Daniel. It will be 5 years before Daniel graduates and we do not know what universities will be looking for or what applications will look at at that time, but I can’t help but think that this kind of website of learning, or reflection won’t help Daniel in some way.

There’s a lot that must go into this and I know that Amanda has worked hard this year getting all teachers and students to a place that this just what happens at Shanghai American School. The amount of PD for teachers and the amount of training for students in understanding what this means I’m sure has taken much of her time this year. But in the end these students will be better for it and that’s what we’re all about!

We started off the year talking about how we could organize the photos and movies that would be taken over the year so that when it came to this stage of the process it would be as quick and easy as possible. With 30 days of school left the last thing teachers want is to spend their time learning a new skill.

So here’s what we’re doing:

1. In August we set up an Album in iPhoto for each student
2. As teachers and assistants took pictures and videos they put them into each students album
3. In iPhoto we then created a slide show
4. File – Export – Slideshow – Medium size

That’s it……cute little e-portfolio for 1st grade students of pictures and videos throughout their year of learning.

It took longer for the videos to render (about 15 minutes) then it did to do the whole rest of the process.

The key to the whole thing is starting in August with a plan of how to keep track and organize the photos and movies.

iPhoto makes this easy. As soon as a teacher connects their camera to the laptop iPhoto pops up and teachers could quickly drag the right photo into each students album.

Just another way of using pictures and media to record learning.

Kim and I have just finished up the first of five course we’re running here at our school for a Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy. Kim has a great post on the course we just finished as Chad Bates and I currently work on putting the next one together.

The feedback has been positive on our first course. When we first introduced the 40+ staff members to wikis, blogs, RSS, Google Docs, and Skype all in 2 weeks (not recommended) there was system overload. To much to fast….but some things just need to be done. By the end of the course most of the participants are feeling more confident and those that just a few weeks ago were ready to throw their laptops out the window are writing me e-mails looking forward to the next course.

What excites me is our next course will not focus on the tools…we’ve already covered that, but we will now focus on why and how these tools change the teaching and learning landscape.

One question that came up in the final day of our last session was one of balance and how do you keep from getting sucked into always being online and connected.

The problem is that Kim, Julie Lindsay (who Skyped in), and myself are not the best examples to talk about balance. It is something I think we all struggle with in life. Technology or not, balancing work and life has been a battle through the ages.

I was talking with Chrissy about this the other day and I think one thing that helps is arriving at a point were the technology works for you instead of you feeling like you are working for the technology.

I feel like I can make technology do what I want, but I have a skill set that allows me to do that. I can pick the right tool, set up a site, send this here, that there, and be more productive with the tools. The tools work for me…I don’t work for them.

How do you get to this point? I think it’s just using the tools. It’s much like anything…practice, practice, practice.

I think about playing the guitar which I’m slowly learning (part of my disconnect time). I practice, and practice, and then one day….it actually sounds like a song. Not sure when it happened, or what I did, but my fingers all of sudden land on the right strings, and the struam finds the right pattern. It just clicks.

I think the same happens for many of us…we use tools, we practice with them, we explore them and then one day….they are working for you instead of you working for them.

Digital Immigrant vs Digital Native

As part of our course we had the teachers read about Digital Immigrant, Digital Native (Marc Prensky) for class. Love it or hate it, it always makes for great discussion.

Today I was running a session with 4th graders on using Excel to create reading logs as they track their reading at home and at school.

I started thinking about these 10 year olds who were born in 1999 or 2000. What does the world look like to them? They will never know a time without the Internet, cell phones, Skype, Google, and TVs that get 100s of stations. They’ll never know what it feels like to sit in a car for hours without a GameBoy, a DVD player, an iPod, or searching constantly for a radio station as you drive cross country.

They had already accumulated 1000s of hours of screen time before I stepped into there class today (Not saying this is right or wrong…just fact).

Only half the class said they had used Excel in the pass. As we worked through the lesson covering math terms such as column, row, cell, average, sum, and graph, we created a nice little Reading Log that will auto sum their reading time for the rest of the year. As well as continue to average out the time they read at home, school and total minutes read. A fun little activity.

At the end of the lesson the teacher asked them how many in the class felt as though they could do the whole lesson again on their own. All but three students raised their hands.

And that is where I think these kids are different. I do think that they’re brains are wired differently to learn and understand screens and manipulate this learning space because they have been learning and using these tools for years. They have a skill set through their experiences that allow them to learn and adapt quickly to this learning landscape.

Now I know they are fourth graders and not all of them would be able to reproduce the lesson again….but I also know if I was to do this same lesson with adult learners, those that Prensky would say are digital immigrants, that a week from now I would be back in their rooms walking them through the same steps….again my own experience.

This would be an interesting study. But it’s my hunch that kids just retain this type of lesson, this type of learning in this landscape better. I could be wrong…..

It’s been fun watching the teachers at our school get excited about these tools and this learning landscape. You can view some of their final thoughts on the course on their blogs here. I’m looking forward to the next course which focuses on 21st Century Literacy Ideas, Questions, and Issues. We’ll be talking about copyright, mass collaboration, privacy, digital profiles, and a host of other issues that are raised once we move into this new landscape for learning. It’s a five course certificate so we have a ways to go and more to learn and think about, but by the time this program is over at the end of next year, I think we’ll have a ground swell of people at ISB ready to take teaching and learning to a whole new level.

I predicted this year would be about building value with these tools and that I personally was going to focus on bringing the conversation to people who are open to hearing it and are ready to hear it.

These courses are just that. Some people never before hearing the word ‘podcast’. While others have wanted to dive in but were waiting for the right opportunity.

This also extends to my approach at up coming conferences. I’ll be leaving next Saturday for Portland, Oregon where I’ll be doing a three hour workshop at the NCCE conference on how teachers and schools can communicate with their communities beyond using e-mail. We’ll talk about blogs, podcasts, and everything Google spending a good hour on each.

With trying to keep up with almost 50 new blogs, I have found myself reading much more of late and want, from time to time, to point out some great thinking that is happening as another wave of educators joins the conversation.

Becoming a Fish:

For those that find an end to their learning (which we all must know as never existing) whether it be acquiring that degree or comfort level in their profession, they have fallen short of their potential. When one stops seeking knowledge or even questioning their current knowledge and understanding, they have failed themselves.

Do Bloggers Care About Copyright Laws?:

So, I’m curious…is there a different standard for information found in blogs? I doubt it, but I have a sense that bloggers don’t care really. They’re all about sharing.

How are My Thoughts Changing?:

I’m not sure how my thinking has changed yet.  I am just sure that it is changing and I am so interested to see how these new ideas play out.  I am excited to be in a profession that has the opportunity to engage directly with these ideas with children and youth.  It is an exciting time to be in the field of education.

Connectivism:

So my questions are these:  Knowledge…is it something we construct (constructivism?)…something within us?; something always there, but masked by our own delusions (Buddhism)?; or does learning and knowledge now depend on CONNECTIVISM?  I am still not sure how constructivism and connectivism are entire different. Do we not build knowledge (constructivism) through our interactions with others and our experiences?

A little rain for the 2.0 parade:

Did anyone else read the articles on Connectivism and Messing Around and wonder “What’s the big deal?” I don’t see much novel about those discussions, just technology-specific applications of pre-existing ideas.

Addressing Truth and Bias in the Classroom:

Imagine the individual who cares deeply about a subject is dedicated to finding truth. To avoid bias, it makes sense to work with other passionate individuals with alternative points of view. Compelling arguments may win the day. Reporting the truth involves admitting the biases and reporting the truth from multiple perspectives, pointing out the gray areas and areas where further investigation is needed. Is it possible that truth is relative depending on perspective or truth is “the best information available.”

Connectivism the new constructivism?:

I guess since I entered adulthood in a pre- internet world I would attest that learning can and does take place off line and maybe, I would argue, in a more visceral way. I will never forget the first time that I saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. It had to be at least 20 years ago and I remember waiting on line to see it and being surprised at how small it was and being distracted because the painting was under glass and there was glare on the glass.

These are just a couple of the posts that have me thinking this week. I’m really enjoying teaching teachers, and adults in general for that matter. Wonder if there is a way to make a living at it.

Sure I understand that it’s really about the learning, but it is also about the technology. It’s about all the “How To” videos on YouTube. It’s about the team at CommonCraft making a living out of the “How To” part of technology.

And at the end of the day, 90% of the PD I offer here at my school is how to do different things with technology.

Yes, at some point it is about the tools. You have to make sure your Ying is with your Yang.

Why we use these tools is just as important to support is how we use these tools. Some teachers need/want to know WHY we use them before HOW to use them. Others want to know HOW to use them before figuring out WHY they use them.

Is there a right or wrong way? I don’t think so, we’re all different, we all see things in different ways.

I’m a HOW person personally. I sign up for something, test it out, figure it out, and then answer the question WHY you would use this tool.

That’s just me….I start with the tools and answer the question WHY.

It’s the old Ying and Yang approach. One thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way is consultants who come into schools, talk about WHY you/we should be doing all this stuff, but not take the time to offer a session on HOW.

Take RSS for an example, I’ve been to many a session and believe personally that every educator should learn to use a RSS Reader. I know WHY and hear consultants/presenters all the time talking about WHY we should be using an RSS Reader. But HOW?

And trust me “Just go sign up for one” is not helping/supporting educators. It’s more complicated than “just signing up for one”. For us in the tech bubble we know what “just sign up” means. For those not in the tech bubble it is a lot more complicated than that.

We’re almost half way through the school year and I still have teachers who struggle with HOW to upload pictures to our Flickr account. They understand WHY they should, but the HOW takes a long time to learn. Because it’s not just uploading pictures. It’s uploading pictures, creating a Set, organizing them in a way that is easy to find, and naming them in a way that we know what the picture is.

At some point it’s about the technology and it should be. We live in a technical world, and the HOW is just as important as the WHY.

First I think we need to understand how I view my job and what I think the job of an educational technologist should include.

First and foremost we are educators. Our job is to educate. Our students range in age from 60+ to less than 5 years old. Our mission is to teach them how to use technology to learn, create, be more productive or make a task easier. The only way we can do that is to have a solid understanding of what is out there, that tools exist both as part of the computer’s operating system and on the web that allow us to do our job easier, to learn differently, or connect us to people, thoughts, ideas that we never had access to before.

Our job….is to explore!

Our job….is to understand!

Our job…is to motivate!

Our job…is to change habits!

Our job…is to support!

Our job…(leave your thoughts in the comments)

So when Dan asked the question yesterday:

How do we keep from continually dividing/splitting off conversations?

Answer: You can’t! You can’t control the web, you can’t keep the conversation from splitting into different parts; into niches. That’s what the web is so good ate. Yes….having one big conversation would be great…but at the same time overwhelming. The splitting of conversations on the web allows each individual to choose the conversation they want to follow (aka network). On Twitter for example, you follow the conversations you want. You create your niche (or personal) network on Twitter. You don’t want to hear about the group around dogs….or maybe you do. Only you can decide that. Twitter allows the conversations to be split. We see it in the use of Nings as well. There is a Ning site for almost any niche in education. Sure we could all benefit from one large Ning, but then again…it would be to “noise” for me and I wouldn’t be able to find my place.

I don’t have the answers…but whereas I realize we need to be using
multiple tools as technologists, that is not such an easy sell to get
faculty, teachers, instructors on board with using yet more tools…

And this is the ultimate role of the educational technologiest. Our job is to know all of…or as many as we can…tools that can be used to further learning. Our job is to understand how these tools and technologies can be used so that teachers don’t have to.

We can’t give the tools to people when they don’t need them…there first needs to be a need for the tool.

The first question I ask any teacher is: “What do you want students to learn?” The second question is “What’s your idea to get there?”

As the teacher is talking, I (and maybe this is just me) can start to visualize what tool they are talking about. They might not be talking about a technology at all, but I can usually visualize a digital tool that can reach the outcome they are after through their idea.

Start with the idea and apply the tool.

If you start with the tool first…you have a lesser chance of effecting learning. This happens to me quite often. A teacher will come to me and say “I want to blog.”

OK, that’s great, but why? What are you thinking? Why do you want to blog? What do you know about a blog?

From there I try and understand what the teacher wants to do, what is the outcome they are looking for. Maybe it is a blog that is best, maybe what they really want is a wiki, or just to use Inspiration.

My point….don’t try to control the conversation on the web. Don’t try to control the learning in the classroom. Allow the thoughts and ideas to control where you go. You can’t force conversations to happen in a certain spot or in a certain way. You have to be able to build a place for conversations to happen. As an educational technologiest you have to be able to understand the tools and be able to teach those tools, apply those tools, and support those tools within your school. The more you know, the more powerful you become as a resource for teachers and students.

Don’t just learn blogs, wikis, and twitter…learn all of it! Your a technology person…go out there and learn it all! And by that I mean get yourself a network of like minded folks that know it for you. You can’t know it all…but you can build yourself a network that will know more collectively than you will ever be able to learn as an individual.