BobfromMaryland

First of all, I want to express my profound appreciation to Shelley for putting this course together and to Meg Steele, who presented the subject at a Maryland independent schools convention and kindly consented to be my coach.  I feel that 23 Things has been a very valuable part of my professional development this year.   As I said in my Voicethread, it is not an exageration to say that this course opened my eyes to the world of Web 2.0, and, through my participation in RSS feeds and Classroom 2.0 I hope to continue this participation. 

Like anyone whose eyes have been recently opened, I'm still trying to process and make sense of the blizzard of information out there. As my school year (and everyone else's, I'm sure) heads to a close, the pace of my work and the deadlines for completing projects make my time limited.   The challenge for me is going to be to go back to the material in this course and really check it out.   I've started with a class wiki and I'd like to try expanding that and adding something next year.  I'm naturally a person who likes to try something out and know something of what I'm getting into before trying it with my students. 

I found this course very well organized.  The pace, while demanding at least in my case, was not unreasonable. The only suggestion I might make is to let people know in the begining that they are likely to sign up for a number of applications, and that keeping track of many different loginids and passwords might be a challenge.  There are a number of ways to cope with this; use one for all applications, or keep a written list of loginids and passwords, but if people know this at the beginning, they're more likely to pick a strategy that works for them.  By the time I realized the problem, I was already using different loginids and passwords for a number of applications. 

Again, thank you, Shelley, for putting this course together!  I've recommended it to the administration at my school. Hopefully you'll get some other folks from Barrie taking the course in the near future!

I genuinely enjoyed and appreciated my wanderings around Classroom 2.0, so much so that I joined.  I think the most useful things for me at first will be the tagged discussions on wikis and blogs. I briefly scanned and joined a discussion on alternate wiki platforms posed, coincidently, by another member of EastKnox and friends.  There's clearly a lot of information available, more than I can absorb on a Sunday afternoon.   I also like the idea of hosts to the site, to whom you can ask a question about site organization.   I look forward to exploring this more.

I also went through the list of Ning networks related to education.  I found one called I Teach Social Studies which I am considering joining.  At the moment, it has about 80 members, and the discussions on it seem rather short.  One thing I want to explore is the useful of following tags like "Social Studies" vs specific groups within Classroom 2.0 (I'm very intrigued by the one labelled "A Crazy Place Called Middle School") and separate groups such as I Teach Social Studies given above.  

I would say that I found a lot of resources that potentially have a lot of value.  I suspect that, like many other tools, the actual value you get will depend on the time and effort you put in to learn about it. I can see pretty easily that Classroom 2.0 could be of tremendous value in my professional development and personal learning, but it will also take a non-trivial investment of time.   

One of my fellow faculty members at Barrie used Ning to create a private network for seniors in our school for an exploration of the theme "What Does it take to be Human."  It had subdivisions for topics such as "Heroism" and "Fear".   She had groups of students gather information relating to these topics, and then pose questions to be answered by discussion.  I found out about it because she invited some faculty members to take part in doing the readings and activities and then commenting.  My favorite was the comparison of Beowulf, the group of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, and a hero of your choice as to what they had in common.  I also found the model a very intriguing one, in that it was easy to track who had taken part in each discussion.  I'm thinking this might be a cool model to try for a discussion next year. 

I'm not afraid of saying that I grew up in an era where a central concern was the right to privacy, usually from big government.  From the novel 1984, to the governmental abuses that led to the Privacy Act of 1974, to the concerns that lists of your library books or your international phone calls may be lying in some government file, to be used by unknown bureaucrats.  For people like me, Will Richardson's item "Transparency=Leadership" rubs a bit of a raw nerve.

Richardson's point is that, in an age where everyone's lives are more transparent than ever before, it is important for students to be "googled well," or, in more conventional terms, to put their best public face forward. He then takes the next logical step to say that teachers and administrators need to model being transparent online, and goes so far to say that "The fact that they are veritably "un-googleable" in terms of finding anything they have created and shared and perhaps collaborated with others on troubles me on a number of levels. First, I can't see for myself whether or not they are learners. And, almost more importantly, I get no sense as to whether or not they are leaders of learners."

I can certainly appreciate the point that, since the advent of the electronic age, we are all increasingly 'public figures', whether we want to be or not.   Presently we demand a high degree of transparency in our political leaders (do we really want to know what Bo Obama ate for breakfast?), and it would be no bad thing to expect our educational leaders to be more transparent than they are.  But, leaving aside the question of whether the skill of writing articles or blogs or collaborative documents is the best measure of an educational 'leader,' I don't think I'm being backwards or unreasonable if I decide to take some time and scope out the public arena of education before putting my work out there.  What potentials for abuse are there?  And what constitutes putting my work out there? Is having a blog now the new standard of openness?  Should it be a wiki, or a public google doc? Tweets on Twitter? 

This a great article for making me think, and I do take its point seriously.   I may, however, take my time before I do something about it in terms of putting myself out there.  As we have found out about new financial instruments, such as derivatives, in the current recession, what is technologically 'leading edge' isn't always a great idea.

I like google docs!  I found an immediate use for it by starting a file of things I've done to look for new books for a course I'm teaching next year.  I started the document at home, put it on Google docs, and was able to work on it at school.  Yeah!  That alone was worth the price of admission.  Clearly a second use would be as a type of share folder, so that students could upload their work for me to check and/or share with each other. Presently, our school has a system of shared folders for this purpose, but not all schools do.  Also, this would be great for creating with a partner a course syllabus and reading list, not to mention other documents. I wish we knew about this during our school's accreditation process, when we had to create all sorts of joint documents.  

 There were some disappointments.  We use Word 2007, which creates docx files, which google docs doesn't support.  Also, the table function was awful. The 'insert row' buttons inserted columns instead!  I just won't use this for tables.   I did create a presentation, and, while it doesn't have some of the fancy bells and whistles of MS Powerpoint, it works fine.   But, on the whole the fact that basic word-processing and other functions are available free plus the sharing option make this a true winner.  Thanks for showing this to us!