You are invited to attend the Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation Conference.

What is Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation?

Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is a one day conference/meetup for teachers, administrators, students, school board members, parents and anyone who is interested in education. It will be held on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, USA.

Education is conversation. Conversation creates change.

The future of education does not exist in the isolated world of theory and abstract conference sessions. Instead, it exists in conversations. It exists in creating a robust learning network that is ever-expanding and just-in-time. Learning 2.0 is not the beginning of this conversation. It is merely a stopping point, a time to talk about the visible difference that we all seek. We read. We reflect. We write. We share. We learn. Come join us for a day of conversation about learning and technology.

You can learn much more about the conference on the wiki, including information about registering. Here are some highlights:

Tentative Schedule
We’re still working on the details so this will be updated before the conference. Also, this may expand if we have more folks register than we are anticipating. (To quote Bud Hunt, “This conference stuff is hard!”)

Registration
You must register so that we know how many folks to expect and so that we can have enough lunches available. (Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?)

Cost

Free, baby. And lunch is included, thanks to the generous support of Littleton Public Schools, St. Vrain Valley Public Schools, and Arapahoe High School.

Wireless

BYOL (that would be Bring Your Own Laptop) – we’ll have wireless access to the Internet (filtered) – we may test our capacity to handle density of machines, but hopefully things will go swimmingly. If not, we have wired machines in various places you can access.

Questions for Students
We’re having a student panel discussion during lunch. Here’s your chance to submit some questions for them to consider.

Invite Others

We strongly encourage you to invite other folks from your school, district, neighborhood, or learning network to attend as well. It would be great if everyone could bring at least one person with them that is perhaps new to this conversation. Put up THIS POSTER everywhere you can (within reason).

Questions?

Feel free to email Karl Fisch, Bud Hunt, Ben Wilkoff or Mike Porter .

Some students blog because they have to. Some students blog because they enjoy using the technology. Some students blog because they like their choice of topics, but very few of my students blog because it is the life-blood of their communication. They don’t see it as their primary or even secondary way of putting ideas out into the greater world and getting validation for those ideas. This saddens me as much as it sobers me. I have been putting off thinking about it for a while because I believed that this kind of community would exist out of my classroom eventually if left alone. Unfortunately, I don’t think that a laissez-faire approach is going to do it.

That is why I now believe that every student blogger need to find a niche, a type and style of writing that best fits them and draws in a larger audience. This niche should not just be an understanding within the blogger him or herself; it should be a well articulated part of their writing.

So I say to my student bloggers:

You cannot create an audience from thin air, you must go in search of an one. You must write about things that make sense for you, that you are passionate about. You must go and find your niche. Subscribe to other’s blogs about sports. Find those interesting voices that you would like to become a part of. Link to them in your blogroll and in your posts. Start commenting on things that are outside of our small writing community. Break out of the repetitive storytelling that can lead to feedback loops within small groups of friends. Use Google Blog Search or Technorati. Use Netvibes or Google Reader. Work to find what you are looking for in your own writing. It may take longer to write your next post, but once you find your niche, you will be able to work within that framework that you have set up and never again be at a loss for words.

I can’t take any credit for this idea, though. I was inspired to try to make my blogging community a part of the greater conversation by two presentations at the K12 Online Conference.  If you haven’t checked out Sustained Blogging in the Classroom  or Initiating and Sustaining Conversations: Assessment and Evaluation in the Age of Networked Learning, you really should. The latter may be the best presentation on blogging in the classroom that I have ever witnessed.

Although I believe that my classroom blogging community is working, it has a lot more potential energy than kinetic at this point. I think only now am I really able to admit that to myself. I have found one of my own niche again: reflecting upon what goes on in my classroom.

For the Ripe Environment to exist, we have to have better (and more simple) reasons for doing what we do with technology. So, I was struck with the simplest of all reasons for using blogs in your classroom: It’s the content, stupid. (I believe this is the one and only time that my mind has blatantly stolen from Bill Clinton and his 1992 presidential campaign.)

The following is what I shared with my students after I shared my rather abrasive reasoning for blogging in the classroom.

That is why we use blogs to communicate, not because they are easy, not because they are more collaborative, it is simply because they let the content speak for itself. Without content you are nothing. Without great ideas there is no hope for the future. It is the content that matters, not the format. That is why we do blogs, to pull content up through the rss straw, roll it around in our mouth-like readers, tasting each smooth milkshake post and swallow it down, totally satisfying our desire to fill our bellies with content.

Now, content can be anything from stories to videos to embedded PowerPoint. The only crucial element of content is that you are proud enough of it to consider it yours. That means that content does not exist in an answer that was just done to get it over with. Content does not exist in the unrealized half-wonderings of a before school speed post. Content exists in thought-provoking ideas. It exists in well-worded prose or original poetry. Content is the torrent of inspiration that is created when authenticity is the goal, and you actually have the time to do something.

I actually wrote the preceding piece on my Palm Treo while I was eating cereal. I didn’t start writing it as a way of addressing The Ripe Environment, but this piece really gets at prerequisite number 6: Students and Educators should know that their products and ideas as valuable. If we are concerned with content, students will know that we genuinely care about what they express and teachers will know that their ideas will have some impact. If we focus too much on adding more features or tools to our toolkit, we will never get to the act of content creation. And that would be a very sad thing.

I am tired of talking about the tools. Many of us have been talking about the tools for a long time now. We have said that using technology for technology’s sake is counterproductive. We want to use technology as a tool, right? But the tools for collaborating and creating are the largest sticking points for others. Teachers get caught up on jargon, on the basic skills of one program or process. They are still so focused on “podcasting” or “dreamweaver” that there is no room for creating the environment in which people will actually want to go beyond the tools, into true learning (you know, what we want our kids to be doing). What, then, is beyond the tools? What should we really be reaching for? The Ripe Environment. The simultaneous personal and public experience of using all of the tools at the teacher’s disposal to tear down walls, collaborate with each another, and question the traditional role of technology in the classroom.

So, how do we get to The Ripe Environment? Well, I have started to reflect on how I became a constant-learner and contributor to this thing I am more and more reluctant to call School 2.0. I want to replicate this process for others, and showing people my flickr account, my del.icio.us account, my blog, my podcast, my pedagogy, my wiki projects, and my twitter account just doesn’t seem to work very well. What does actually work is making sure that they have the right environment so that they can explore these resources on their own, through their own creation.

I am now proposing the 10 prerequisites for collaboration as a way of creating The Ripe Environment in the classroom, in a school, and in a district. There will be quite a few follow-up posts about this topic, but I wanted to get some feedback on what I have already written before I go too far off the deep end. Please leave a comment or e-mail me at benwilkoff@gmail.com.

Here they are:

In order for the environment to be ripe for collaboration, educators and learners must:

1. Have a genuine need to be heard by others and, in one way or another, receive feedback for contributions.
2. See living examples of collaboration (not case studies or projects from a few years ago) that they can become a part of.
3. Have the time to connect more than two dots together. (Rather than connecting: “My students need to know this” with “here is the information” they need to have time to connect “My student needs to know this” with “my students need to evaluate this for validity” with “my students need to know how to use this resource to find the information” with “my students need to create new information for others to use.”)
4. See collaboration as an extension of their natural instincts as a teacher (opening possibilities for learning).
5. Find the backchannels relevant to them (these backchannels must be encouraged and honored as vital sources of learning).
6. Know that their products and ideas are valuable.
7. Understand the marks of successful collaboration. (They have to know what it looks like.)
8. Accept that questions are both for interdependent and independent learning. (All questions are serious points of inquiry in The Ripe Environment.)
9. Believe that personal and professional change can never be institutionalized. (Individuals create change, not schools or districts.)
10. Know that meetings, conferences, and workshops are not the places where the most powerful learning and change takes place.

I will be writing more about each one of these 10 prerequisites, but please let me know what you think about them as stand-alone ideas.

When I first learned how to harness the power of the read/write web, it was by aggregating all of the blogs that meant something to me. Whether it was answering the daily challenges of Weblogg-ed, finding meaning in Edublog Insights, or trying to parse through the Borderland, I was enraptured by all of the great work already happening in the edublogosphere.

Now, I find myself with less and less time to read what others are because I am so consumed with trying to make my own vision of School 2.0 work. In some ways I think that this is an improvement. I am now participating in the conversation rather than just observing it. But, in many other ways, this is not an improvement. Will Richardson is always talking about how reading blogs prepares you for writing them, but finding the time to consume information that is not directly related to the projects that you are working on is harder than I would have ever imagined. The pile of blog posts just keeps adding up. And according to this, I will never catch up unless I do something drastic.

Well, I think I may have found a solution, both for myself and for all of the people who seem to be having the same trouble (I know that there are at least a few of you out there). I have been playing around with my new Palm T|X, which was purchased with funds from my school district’s Digital Educator Program. At first, I was rather disappointed with the limited web functionality of the built in browser. That is until I realized just how effective of a feed reader a palm pilot can be. Google Reader Mobile allows me to read one post at a time and then progress to the next. I don’t have to worry about seeing the 2000 blog posts that are unread. I can focus on just one. I can also pull it out whenever I have a free moment. I don’t have to pull out my laptop and fire up bloglines and search for something good to read. It becomes a book of blogs for me. It becomes the way for me to catch up again and listen in on the conversations going on in the edublogosphere.

The real reason, though, that I am so excited about finding this new feed reader is that I can imagine having a set of these in the classroom (5-10) and setting them up next to the bookshelf. Anytime a student wants to read something written by a fellow classmate, they take a palm pilot off of the shelf and read a few blog posts. This would not be the ideal venue for responding to blogs, but it would further the community of writing. These devices are also pretty inexpensive, so getting a few into the classroom would not require a huge investment.

What do you think? Are there other uses of a web-enabled palm device that I am missing for the classroom (other than for reference)? Is this another way of creating School 2.0 in small increments.

1. This is way too technical for me. It is fine if you want to try it out (and fall flat on your face when parent/administration/other teachers find out what you are up to), but I am just fine to live in oblivion. Wikis (did I say that right?) are too complicated for my kids. There is no way that they would be able to handle that kind of organization on their own. Your kids are different. You have more access to the technology. You were born into this stuff. I am too far into my career to start learning something new.

2. We tried something like this back in the 70’s/80’s/90’s/a few years ago. It didn’t really work then, but feel free to give it a try now. I was pretty excited about it before, but I think my interest petered out around when I realized that I was doing more of the work than the kids were. I think there are a few teachers in the school down the road who are doing this kind of stuff, so I’m not really sure that it is new or different. I will just sit back and watch you put effort into collaborative tools, but I will not put my own support behind it.

Now, #1 I have made my peace with. If a teacher has decided that they are not ready to try something new yet, I will reframe it as many different ways as I can think of in order to get them on board. At least they accept that working with students around the world, getting instant feedback on authentic writing, and infinite choice in assignments are things that are truly different than the traditional goings on of education.

#2, on the other hand, does not even acknowledge that working with web 2.0 tools is something that is a transformational step. They are so used to educational jargon and methods being repackaged and renamed that they have come to believe that School 2.0 is just a big facade that houses the likes of Project Based Learning or Cooperative Learning Groups. I can’t blame them for thinking this in the light of all that public education has taught them, but for them not to be able to see the drastic difference between writing an essay to one teacher and writing an essay to an entire school (and beyond) to be critiqued and linked to and built upon is something that I just will never understand.

Case in Point: After presenting The Academy of Discovery to a high-level technology coordinator in DCSD, he said that there were pockets of people who were trying this out elsewhere in the district. I was shocked. It was news to me that we just might have the most progressive district in the US and I just don’t know about it. Or, perhaps the problem is that he is having trouble distinguishing between an authentic collaborative student-directed wiki (receiving 50,000 hits in 6 weeks) and doing iSearches with google in order to make posters to put up in the room. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but I really think that this is an important roadblock to advancing our vision of education. Many educators, administrators, and parents believe that all technology integration is created equal. This is just simply not the case.

So, I guess what I am saying is this: We need something that will distinguish us from mundane “technology in the classroom.” We need to be seen as going beyond what has been done before, not something that is untested or fad-like, but rather something that is essential. How do we make sure that people get that we are not doing something old in a new way? We are doing something new, something that you would never be able to do without the tools of online collaboration and rss.

This is a challenge that I am willing to take up because if we can’t even explain what is going on in our classroom to other educators so that they realize the potential of a school 2.0 environment, we will never be able to explain it to the rest of the world.

I have been hearing from so many educators (Wesley Fryer, Steve Dembo, Paul Allison, David Warlick, and others) that all of the learning comes from the conversations, not the sessions. They are absolutely right. In the hallways we were talking about pedagogy and authentic learning with people who have a vision for education, but in the presentation rooms, we only discussed a well formatted agenda for specific (always proprietary) tools.

After going through all of the motions of this day, I have decided that gadget wonks are of no value to me. Although I see that they are disconnected from the classroom, that isn’t what bothers me. Many people who aren’t in the classroom have great ideas for the future of education. What bothers me is that they have can’t see the entire vision. They can’t see the affect of reflective practice, of piecing together the scattered collaborators into a movement.

The entire vision for School 2.0 is of desperate importance. It is the only way that the learning environment will change. Gadgets do not create change, people create change.

If I really believe that, I need to stop asking myself how I can get more gadgets into the classroom. What I really need to start asking is how I can get more people into the classroom, through collaboration.

I want to cram as many people into my classroom as possible. I want parents, students (both mine and others’), teachers, community members, and anyone else who has something of value to feel as though they are a part of my learning environment. They should not feel like a foreigner in my learning environment. But, how do we do this? How do we start to bring in all of the rich voices from the outside world without the dependence upon gadgets and proprietary methods? How do we stop teaching for tools themselves and start teaching for learning?

It may sound like I am making a semantic distinction, but I feel, especially after spending an entire day at an extended sales pitch, that our students will never transfer learning if they believe that they can only do it on one tool, or in one classroom. We need them to know that learning happens everywhere with every person they know in a key role. The only way that they will learn is if the people they are connected to learn with them.

Last night, though, every student from Wallingford was removed from the spaces that they formerly had called home. The following were the reasons given for this total reversal of technology integration and collaboration:

A parent has complained about wiki and even contacted the State General Attoney to see if it violates anything. Her grievances about the wiki were the following1-there were three personal pictures — all on the map of the home page 2-some kids used their real names on pages or as a username 3-in my post on icon I identified that where I live and that I teach at a “blue collar school” 4-I had pictures of the school and the rooms which could provide a blueprint for a killer 5-some kids put personal descriptors “I am five feet tall with brown hair named Sam” 6-on my “lesson plan blog’ One thing i wrote down last Thursday was something like “Myspace words of Wisdom” which she interpreted as me telling the kids about how they should join. I actually had a heart to heart talk with the kids about what they were including and the problem with the public sites. We just had two students in CT have full scholarships revoked after the University saw their MySpaces. The other part of this is that the school system looks down upon “outside” websites run by teachers. So because the attorney general is now possibly involved, that implies risk to a minor, and that’s frankly not something I am going to play around with.

The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is, “Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public nature of the internet?

Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?

I often think about this digital trail that I am leaving behind. It is amazing to me to know that many of the ideas I am having right now will affect others years from now. I still receive e-mail about a band webpage I put up when I was 16. It is scary how much the internet has a memory. It is cataloging every keystroke I publish. And this is beautiful. The internet knows that my name is associated with my ideas. This makes me truly happy.

So, in an effort to make concrete something that is so disparate, here are the key elements of my web presence (these will have active links in the near future):

Podcasting:

1. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts
2. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts Digg Page
3. Weekly Authentic Gcast
4. Yongesonne Gcast
5. 2005-2006 Discovery Podcasts

Blogs:

1. Discourse about Discourse
2. Daily Lesson Plans
3. Isabelle’s Dandelife

Wikis:

1. Academy of Discovery
2. Discovery -Isms
3. Discovery Utopias
4. DC Edusphere
5. Yongesonne’s Educational Technology Resources
6. LA Cresthill Collaboration
7. Lesson Planning Wiki

Social Bookmarking:

1. WeeklyAuthentic del.icio.us
2. bhwilkoff del.icio.us

Social Networking:

1. Myspace
2. Standpoint
3. Stop CyberBullying
4. Facebook

E-mail:

1. Gmail
2. Firstclass

Public Accounts at services I regularly use:

1. Teacher Bloglines
2. Student Bloglines
3. Discourse about Discourse Feedburner
4. Flickr Account
5. Google Calendar
6. Google Documents
7. Google Reader
8. Conversate
9. Jotform
10. Wufoo
11. Technorati

Number of Google hits for “Ben Wilkoff” – 891.

I hope that none of this comes off sounding narcissistic. This exercise merely meant to show the beginnings of my digital legacy. It is also meant as a challenge for you to estimate your web presence and to start to think about how your digital trail of breadcrumbs will help others down the road.

This year I chose to think about next year that seems to be approaching so rapidly as to be nearing terminal velocity. All last week, I said what I have always said about next years, “I am determined to get it right next year.” But this year the “it” is different. This year I am not referring to classroom management. This year the “it” is not referring to teaching a book or unit the right way. The “it” this year is that I am going to get the next generation of my classroom right. I am going to make sure that I have all of the research and ideas in place so that I know and everyone else knows what the Discovery Team will look like when it comes through this fundamental change.

So what will change next year? Well, it is my hope that teaching will become a more collaborative process and learning will become more student-directed. This may sound far-fetched and somewhat hollow, but I have outlined everything, down to the assessments (much better than CSAP if you ask me) in a wiki. The fact that it is a wiki means that it can change. This vision is malleable by anyone who is interested in taking a stab at making thing better for teachers and students.

The Academy of Discovery is more than just a vision, though. It is a gauntlet that is being thrown down. It is a statement that says education will not be effective without collaboration, context, conversation, change, connection, and continuous support. This ultimatum, however, is more for students than teachers. It means that once we provide you with all of the infinite resources, creativity, potential of a connected classroom, it is your responsibility to be amazing. It is your responsibility to direct your engagement. It is your responsibility to learn.

Digital Writing is:

•    Dynamic.
•    Multi-dimensional.
•    Infinite.
•    Pluralistic.

With these things in mind, all writing should be:
•    Infinitely editable
•    Inherently clickable
•    Continually discussed
•    Focused on revisions and the history of revisions.

Dave Cormier turned me on to the idea that we are still writing for the technology of paper, even if we have moved beyond it in terms of its capabilities. I found intriguing and more than a little frustrating to think that we are still formatting our ideas to be read in a linear and static text form. We have put so much investment as a society in the technology of paper that very few people are ready or able to move past it. Yet, in order to fulfill the potential of a fully connected society, we must start to think in new ways, read in new ways, and especially write in new ways.

First, the idea of ownership must be changed. All writing should have the ability to be edited at any time. Just by clicking on the letters, you should be able to add your own piece of understanding. Anyone should be able to see the original iteration, but they should also be able to see any additions, subtractions, contextualizations, or expansions. This is the only way to have true collaboration. If we stop setting up boundaries for ideas—yours vs. mine—we will all become better writers and visionaries.

All words should blue and underlined; they must be clickable. There is no reason for a story, a poem, an essay, a blog entry, a novel, a biography or even a letter to lack context. Each word should take us to someplace new. Each word should let us explore the web of thought that caused it. Now, if one person were trying to accomplish this, it would never happen for want of a real life. Yet, if each user can add his or her own contextual links, the writing context would grow, the webs of knowledge would spin themselves, and reading and writing would change forever.

If there is anything that blogs have taught us it is that writing should not exist in a vacuum. Ideas that are not read and discussed are of no value. So, logically, we should share all of our writing, discussing each aspect of our discourse and getting instant feedback on our vital work. Comments focus us upon revision, but they shouldn’t be at the bottom of the page. They should be attached to the words, never separated from the context of the ideas. Paper doesn’t allow us to hyperlink our comments, connecting them to the words that made us think of the comments in the first place, but digital writing can allow this if we can move beyond our vision of the internet as Digital Paper.

Digital Paper does not allow us to push writing to what it can become. It limits us to think of writing as a singular and static process. Things like Google Documents are great resources, but they lack the pervasive nature that digital writing needs to have. The entire Internet should be editable, discussable, and clickable. Only then will we be able to shrug off our dependence upon paper as a substance and a metaphor.

Teacher 2.0:

Impassioned secondary teacher wanted to create high-level small-class learning environment in a diverse school dedicated to reflective pedagogy, thoughtful technology integration, and teacher leadership.

General Job Responsibilities for all teachers at our school:

• Collaborate with team, department, and greater teaching community via both synchronous (essential question directed in-person discussion, Google Documents-style collaborative lesson planning, real-time chatting) and asynchronous methods (wikis, non-mass e-mails, Personal Learning Network reading and linking).
• Maintain a reflective teaching blog, podcast, and/or wiki which is focused upon finding solutions for classroom problems, creating more student engagement or acheivement as shown through authentic assessements and teacher anecdotal evidence rather than state-wide assessement scores, or generating new ways to connect to students, teachers, or other members of the education community.
• Read and interact with a Personal Learning Network made up of a few administratively selected educators and a vast majority of personally selected teachers, authors, and students who challenge you to become a better teacher.
• Create your own professional development objectives for the year based upon your passions and your readership of your PLN. The majority of the professional development time throughout the year will be based upon your own objectives.
• Create curriculum that can be shared, edited, and reproduced through creative commons licenses.
• Use non-graded e-portfolios as the exclusive means of assessment and personal student reflection.

Specific Job Responsibilities for the English Language Arts position:

• Create and maintain a digital authentic writing community, in which students are responsible for reflecting upon their own work, linking and commenting on others’ work, and understanding and controlling the direction of their own writing progress/process.
• Conduct project-based learning that asks students to address real-life issues through authentic writing and media creation.
• Use inquiry-based lessons to teach the conceps of textual analysis, considering all types of text (visual, auditory, and performance.)
• Model the creation of touchstone-texts and resources that produce well-balanced viewpoints of our world, and help students to do the same.
• Ensure that each student can question the validity of statements made in writing or in speech by verifying sources constantly.
• Cultivate each student’s unique writer’s voice so that the intentions of their writing meet the impressions of the reader. This process must include constant feedback, grammatical and conventions mini-lessons, and constant question asking as to the purpose of the choices that the student author has made.
• Conduct in-depth digital and conventional discussions on the nature of read and writing, user-selected texts, and thematic issues related to other curriculum.
• Model higher-level thinking skills in writing and verbal remarks to the class and expect the same high-level thinking from students.

I know that I will be adding to both of these lists quite a bit as my thoughts keep coming, but I thought that I would start off with these. Please let me know what you think of they way things truly should be in schools. Oh, and if anyone knows of a job like this out there, please let me know. I would love to be a part of a school that is this perfect. (I know that this doesn’t exist yet, but I suppose I can dream.)

1. Choose one of the following to respond to in your writing (to be discussed as a whole class after 5-10 minutes of writing):
   • Why do you think that people act differently online then they do in real life?
   • How can we create a safe environment for everyone on our blogs besides setting up rules or guidelines?
   • What are the inherent risks of posting to a blog at least once a week?
2. In groups of 2-3, explore the Discovery Blogging Rules websites and brainstorm your own rules ideas that fit into the following categories (to be used for creating our official Discovery Blogging Rules for 2006-2007):
   • Creating a blogging environment without fear (of insult, of reprisal, of dishonesty).
   • Creating a scholastic blogging environment.
   • Creating a blogging environment based upon protection (of personal information, of identity, of unique thoughts).
   • Creating a creative, non-restrictive, tolerant, and sensitive blogging environment.
3. In groups of 2-3, write down approximately 5 Blogging rules that you think should be a part of the Discovery Blogging Rules.

We discussed and debated the student generated rules, especially those that further explored the concepts originally outlined in the four resources mentioned above or those that were noticeably absent from those four resources. Here are our results:

Discovery Blogging Rules

2006-2007

1. I will not give out any information more personal than my first name or post pictures of myself.
2. I will not plagiarize, instead I will expand on others’ ideas and give credit where it is due.
3. I will use language appropriate for school.
4. I will not insult my fellow students or their writing.
5. I will only post pieces that I am comfortable with everyone seeing; other pieces I will keep as drafts.
6. I will not be afraid to express my ideas, while not overgeneralizing or making derogatory/inflammatory remarks; any posts on controversial issues must be submitted to Mr. Wilkoff for consideration before they can be posted to my blog.
7. I will use constructive/productive/purposeful criticism, supporting any idea, comment, or critique I have with evidence.
8. I will take blogging seriously, posting only things that are meaningful and taking my time when I write.
9. I will try to spell everything correctly.
10. I will not use my blog posts or comments as a chat room. (No IM language.)
11. I will not bully others in my blog posts or in my comments.
12. I will never access another student’s account.
13. I will be proactive in monitoring the comments that others leave on my blog, utilizing the comment blacklist if necessary.
14. I will personalize my blog and keep my writing authentic, while taking responsibility for anything blogged in my name.
15. I will not provoke other students in my blog posts or comments.
16. I will use my blog as an extension of the classroom, and in doing so, I will leave anything that unsaid in the classroom unsaid on my blog.
17. I will only post photos which are school appropriate and either uncopywrited or correctly cited.
18. I will not spam.
19. I will only post comments on posts that I have fully read, rather than just skimmed.
20. I will not reveal anyone else’s identity in my comments or posts.

Infractions of these rules will lead to the following consequences in order of severity and number of offense:

1. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), warning by teacher, and editing or deletion of offending post/comment.
2. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), temporary loss of blogging privileges (duration of quarter), editing or deletion of offending post/comment.
3. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), permanent loss of blogging privileges (duration of school year), editing or deletion of offending post/comment.

The process by which blog posts violating rules 3, 10, or posts of a controversial nature may be used:

1. Students present the idea/draft for Mr. Wilkoff’s consideration.
2. Mr. Wilkoff will either accept or reject the writing based upon its merit on a case by case basis.
3. The student will post the piece of writing with this warning: “This piece of writing is authentic in its use of controversial language/topics.”
4. Mr. Wilkoff will post a heading: “This blog post was accepted by Mr. Wilkoff for use as a Weekly Authentic despite its controversial nature.”

These rules have already started to work their magic. This past week, one student violated rule #18 (spamming). The letter of apology for this infraction, which has shown me that these rules are workable, is as follows:

I hope that my classes and I have added something to the discussion of blogging in the classroom. Please let me know if you have a better way of doing this, or if you think we have missed anything.

Just as an addition to my ever-growing Wish-List:

• I would like to be able to do live collaborative screencasting so that I can conference individually with my students and we can point to and talk about certain aspects of their writing.

Can someone please work on this application. I would really like to use it in my class this year.

I think that this could be done by holding meetings at local schools in order to address the myspace/internet safety issues. There should be a place where parents can ask as many questions as they want and learn about the educational benefits of moving beyond pencil and paper based classrooms. I would like to set something like this up at my school. These are the resources that I have so far. Let me know if I need to include anything else.

Safe Blogging and Social Networking Resources 

Karl Fisch’s Internet Safety Links 

A resource for CyberBullying 

A wiki introducing Internet Safety to Parents 

A sad little article about the lack of understanding among teachers about internet safety. 

I am still working out what this meeting(s) should look like. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

I can’t think of a better way to ask for a community than to create one and hope that other people join up. I have already run this idea by a few, more experienced, Edubloggers, Bud Hunt and Karl Fisch. They have both responded pretty well to the idea and are willing to help me get it off of the ground.

After my initial e-mails to my administration and these two great teachers/resources, I thought that there would be no way of stopping such a mammoth idea. My principal loved it, and the feeder area coordinator thought it would work well with some of our other goals. But last night, I received an e-mail from the Web Services manager of my district. In it he said that I should consider using two semi-crippled technologies (Firstclass and SchoolCenter) that teachers in my district are already fairly comfortable with (and the district has already paid for). I say that these are crippled technologies because they have real holes in their capabilities. They just can’t do everything that I want to do with this community.

Even with this minor setback, I have decided that I will not compromise (at least initially) my vision of the “Perfect Online Professional Development Community.” I would like to see just how collaborative, easy to use, scalable, social, and reflective I can make this experience for other teachers. So, without any further explanation, I would like to unveil what I think are the essential pieces of a new generation professional learning community.

A central portal will give you access to the following (I am thinking about using protopage):

1. A master blog that would guide discussion.
2. Blogroll
3. Recent Blog Articles (a la SuprGlu)
4. Archived Blog Articles (in a newsletter type format)
5. A Google Earth Mash-Up of all of the school represented in the community
6. Bios of the teacher bloggers (if they wish to include them) done in a social way so that collaboration is easier (an Elgg.org-type personal page)
7. A calendar for event planning (Skypecasts, Classroom Demonstration Webcasts, Classroom Picture Flickr Stream)

The other aspects of the community that will not be directly shown on the portal’s front page except for simply linking to them:

1. A Q+A section for both teaching questions and technical help questions (Ning.com has a great set-up for something like this).
2. A Digg-Style Article/Website recommender.
3. A Wiki for success stories of technology integration or improved practice (a little like David Warlick’s Telling the New Story Wiki)
4. Walk-Throughs (screencasts) for how to create blogs, collaborate, etc.
5. A way of dealing with comments both attached to and unattached to their original posts. (co.mments.com has a pretty great strategy)
6. A professional development bookshelf (akin to either this one or this one)
7. A way of signing up for an e-mail RSS system for new posts (most teachers check their e-mail religiously)
8. A belief statements wiki about technology or teaching in general for certain collaborating members or individuals (this could be a running list of belief statements and/or a running list of questions that these belief statements beg to be answered. I also like the idea of using standpoint.com somehow).
9. A system for sharing lesson plans and ideas (both formatted and unformatted) including a collaborative document center.
10. A cross-school project starter (partnering up similar teaching styles)

Questions I still have about how to get this done:

1. How do we get as many different positions represented in this community (principals, core teachers, librarians, elective teachers, etc.)
2. Should we try to protect anonymity on the blogs?
3. Just how much do most people know about these technologies? Will it be like starting from scratch for most people? And if so, should I send out a formal (or informal) survey about these ideas (What have you done in your classrooms with technology? Do you like to create you own lessons? How much do you enjoy reflection? Do you want feedback on your classroom ideas from other teachers? How worried are you that this is going to take too much of your free time? How many of you already blog?)?

Well, that is pretty much it. I would like to make this project as appealing and voluntary as possible, so that everyone who is in the community has a lot of buy-in. Let me know what you think of this grand scheme. What is possible and what is not possible?

Here is my idea:

I will develop a quiz on new technologies that will help my students throughout the year (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasts, thinkfree, glypho, etc.). They can either follow the links and find each of the answers individually. Or they can search and follow their own path to a file (or website) with all of the answers to the quiz in one place. I need to work out the logistics, but I can imagine finding a way of hiding the file (or website) so that my students will still have to use all of the skills that they are being quizzed on.

Do you think that this is possible or a good idea?

1. Wikis and wikibooks
2. One to one learning
3. Digital Storytelling
4. Web 2.0 and social networking
5. Podcasting

Looking at this list, it seems that these topics are a little hokey. They are basically the buzzwords for the last few years. I feel, however, that I have gotten beyond the buzz. I hope to prove this with the following posts. If you get anxious, please go to my furl site. Search for these categories.