I’m trying to consolidate some of my web life so that I don’t have to spend so much time posting, modifying, editing, publishing, etc. in several different  places.  I have added this blog to my new web site.

Please consider re-subscribing at the new location:  2020Nexus Blog

Don't Try This At Home

I will blog later about Part Two.

WEB DESIGN FOR TEACHERS

Part One – Planning

THESE ARE SOME QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF AS YOU PLAN YOUR SITE — Jot some notes on this planning sheet before we begin.

1. What is My Purpose in Making A Site . . . With Each Level of Complexity I Get More Benefits Yet More Time/Money/Learning Curves Are Involved.

a. Who Am I Trying to Reach or, Who Is My Audience?

i. Kids, Parents, Colleagues, Content Area Team, Grade Level Team, Cluster Members?
ii. Is it Just For Classroom News, Homework, etc.
iii. A Professional Site To Represent Me, Share Professional Resources, etc.

b. Classroom/Teaching/Learning Site for Kids to Pick Up Resources, Announcements, Files, Assignments, etc.?

c. A Blog (online journal/diary with entries posted most-recent-first)? With Comments Allowed or Disallowed?

d. Something Else? All of The Above?

2. How Much Time Do I Want To Spend Per Day or Week On Updating and Maintenance?

3. How Tech Savvy Am I About This or How Tech Savvy Do I Want to Become?

4. Do I Want It Hosted on D-11 / Mann’s Server or Somewhere Else?

5. Do I Have a Specific Color, Design, or Theme in Mind?

a. Do I Want a Simple, Clean Look or Something Fancier?

b. What Flavor/Mood/Impression Am I Aiming For in the Aesthetics of My Site?

6. Do I Want to Invite Participation by Students or Anyone Else? For example, others would also be writing, editing and commenting with you.

7. Will I Be Having Students Doing Any of the Updating / Maintenance?

8. Do I Want Security Features Like Logins and Passwords For Anyone Besides Myself?

9. Have I Made A Rough Site Map / Flow Chart / Outline of my Site’s Pages? Have I Decided Which Pages Should Be Linked? See below.*

10. Do I Want To Spend Any Money on My Site Name or Site Storage (Hosting)? Either way, Heather will be making a link on the Mann site that leads to your site.

11. Do I Want My Own Specific Address / My Own Domain Name? (www.Mr.Smith.com) or is a Sub-Domain Fine (www.Mr.Smith.teachersfirst.com)? What is that name? **

12. How Important Is It To Me That The Web Address Be Easy to Remember?

Notes

* SAMPLE FLOWCHARTS/PLANNING SHEETS/OUTLINES

** DOMAIN NAMES: You Have 3 Choices:

1. You Can Register and Purchase A New Domain Name – pick your own (i.e. www.yourname.com or www.mannlancers.org, etc. You have to find out if the name is available, then pay a small fee to reserve it. I pay around $10 for mine.

2. You Can Use A Free Sub-Domain – get a custom sub-domain on someone else’s server via the service you pick (i.e. www.teachnology.yourname.com or www.mannlancers.schoolnotes.com ). This will happen automatically if you use one of the many free services on the web.

3. You Can Re-Direct A Domain Name You Already Have – Point the custom domain name you already own to a host server (i.e. I have pointed a couple of my domain names to a sub-domain on www.squarespace.com but you only have to type in www.2020nexus.org instead of www.2020nexus.squarespace.com ).

Site Maps Credits:

1. http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/RTKdb/rtkdb_SiteMap.php
2. http://www.uvsc.edu/disted/decourses/dgm/2740/IN/steinja/lessons/02/images/site_map_sketch.jpg
3. http://www.soe.vt.edu/oero/images/oero_site_map.gif

To Meet the Demands of a New Age from Steven H on Vimeo.

The U.S. Department of Education has released an analysis of former studies comparing online and face-to-face instruction, technology use in the classroom, using technology to monitor student data, and the like.

To summarize, the analysis re-affirmed the effectiveness of online learning and “blended learning,” which is teaching face-to-face which incorporates some elements of online learning. The best results seem to come from blended learning, but it’s interesting to note that if researchers compared purely face-to-face teaching with purely online teaching, the online students showed higher achievement.

US Secretary of Arne Duncan has some things to say about the results:

“This new report reinforces that effective teachers need to incorporate digital content into everyday classes and consider open-source learning management systems, which have proven cost effective in school districts and colleges nationwide,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We must take advantage of this historic opportunity to use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to bring broadband access and online learning to more communities.

“To avoid being caught short when stimulus money runs out, school officials should use the short-term federal funding to make immediate upgrades to technology to enhance classroom instruction and to improve the tracking of student data,” Duncan added. “Technology presents a huge opportunity that can be leveraged in rural communities and inner-city urban settings, particularly in subjects where there is a shortage of highly qualified teachers. At the same time, good teachers can utilize new technology to accelerate learning and provide extended learning opportunities for students.”

The press release stresses that most of the studies were performed at the college level and that there are few studies comparing online learning to classroom learning in the K-12 arena, so we should not be too quick to take the results of this meta-analysis as gospel.

Original Source: http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/06/06262009.html

The full report can be found at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/ppss/reports.html#edtech.

Google Voice

The purpose of Google Voice is to have one phone number to give others — I don’t have to decide whether to give out my private land line (I don’t have one), one of my cells, or my classroom number–or all of them, if I really, really needed to be reachable. (No, thank you.) However, the privacy of my Google Voice options is what appeals to me most. I don’t have to give anyone my direct numbers if I don’t feel it’s wise.

When I call from my Google number I can do it from any phone or from my computer.  I can hold a conference call, switch calls, and/or record the calls (this is only legal if I notify the other party).

When someone dials my Google Voice number they can speak with me, leave a voicemail, or send me a text message.  I can, in turn, program my Google number to ring anywhere I want it to.  I can even use custom ringing. For instance, when a contact calls my Google Voice:

1. I can have it ring on all my phones at once.
2. I can have certain contact’s numbers ring on only one of my phones.
3. I can have certain numbers always go to voice mail.
4. I can make it screen my calls.
5. I can listen in on messages as they are being left.
6. I can block calls, place calls, forward calls, and more.

One of the best parts is the way I can get my messages.

1. I can listen to voice mails from any phone I want.
2. I can use my mobile phone’s browser to check my In Box.
3. I can get email or text notifications of my voice mails.
4. I can listen to them online.
5. I can send them onward to someone else or another of my own numbers.
6. I can even get them in written words; Google Voice uses speech-to-text.

Now if I move schools, mobile providers, etc. I don’t have to change my phone number.  (This is the same reason I use a post office box instead of giving my street address to strangers or very important senders.)

And did I mention that this is all free?  If you live in the US (sorry, my international friends!) you can get a Google Voice number by invitation only, as the service is still technically in Beta.  Here’s how. Go to this site and fill in the form. In a week or two you’ll get a message from Google inviting you to pick a number.  You can search for personalized numbers or take a random number.  You can search by location or zip code to see which numbers are available.  I didn’t want to have a random number; I had several pre-chosen that I was hoping to get because I wanted something that reflected my personality and was very easy to remember, like my name or nickname.  Unfortunately, my first ten choices or so were already taken. So I settled on 7122NoFear.

Google Voice looks to be pretty amazing. Right now I doubt I’ll even need or use its full capabilities but I’m very excited about the potential.  I am already giving that number to my students, their parents, and visitors to my web sites, wikis, and blogs. I haven’t felt the need to give it to family and friends yet but it would be a good idea to do that soon or before I am faced with changing phone companies.

It will take some more reflection before I decide how else I can use this amazing service to its best advantage. I can see many advantages for business people yet I want to think through how educators can extract the most benefits.

What would you do if you had a Google Voice number?

This a Wordle made from this blog.

Using Wordle in the Classroom

I haven’t had a chance to use Wordle with my students yet.  However, the following are some resources I have found which might be useful to anyone considering using it:

Five Reasons to Use Wordle in the Classroom by Terry Freedman

Free Technology for Teachers: More Wordle Ideas

Twenty-Five Interesting Ways* to use Wordle in the Classroom – Google Docs

Wordle Blog: A Wordle Lesson Plan

Wordle Tutorial by Bob Sprankle Bit by Bit

I hope this information will serve as either a primer (or a review) about what PLC’s are and how they function. Only the fourth section is specifically geared toward technology integration.  I have extracted [what I saw to be] the important points from some resources I found – which still makes for a long post!  See if you can begin to catch the recurring themes of the different articles. [My own comments and questions appear in brackets.]

A. I think this first article from the ASCD’s Educational Leadership publication is great because it comes from Richard DuFour, and it shows how PLC’s fit nicely with Response To Intervention [a big push in many districts,  including mine], although he doesn’t address RtI directly.

What Is a “Professional Learning Community”?

Big Idea #1: Ensuring That Students Learn

The professional learning community model flows from the assumption that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. This simple shift—from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning—has profound implications for schools.  Three crucial questions that drive the work of those within a professional learning community:   [Response to Intervention?]

• What do we want each student to learn?
• How will we know when each student has learned it?
• How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

Big Idea #2: A Culture of Collaboration

Educators who are building a professional learning community recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.

Collaborating for School Improvement

Collaborative conversations call on team members to make public what has traditionally been private—goals, strategies, materials, pacing, questions, concerns, and results. These discussions give every teacher someone to turn to and talk to, and they are explicitly structured to improve the classroom practice of teachers—individually and collectively. For teachers to participate in such a powerful process, the school must ensure that everyone belongs to a team that focuses on student learning. [How can we convey that the interaction among a PLC’s members is never to be supervisory or evaluative? How can we ensure that it never becomes so?

• Each team must have time to meet during the workday and throughout the school year. [During the day, all year, common plan-how can we make this possible?]
• Teams must focus their efforts on crucial questions related to learning and generate products that reflect that focus, such as lists of essential outcomes, different kinds of assessment, analyses of student achievement, and strategies for improving results.
• Teams must develop norms or protocols to clarify expectations regarding roles, responsibilities, and relationships among team members. Teams must adopt student achievement goals linked with school and district goals.

Removing Barriers to Success

For meaningful collaboration to occur, a number of things must also stop happening.

• Schools must stop pretending that merely presenting teachers with state standards or district curriculum guides will guarantee that all students have access to a common curriculum.
• Schools must also give teachers time to analyze and discuss state and district curriculum documents.
• More important, teacher conversations must quickly move beyond “What are we expected to teach?” to “How will we know when each student has learned?”
• In addition, faculties must stop making excuses for failing to collaborate. [Does our present system value and support this kind of collaboration?]

Big Idea #3: A Focus on Results

• Professional learning communities judge their effectiveness on the basis of results.
• Working together to improve student achievement becomes the routine work of everyone in the school.
• Every teacher team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress.

Hard Work and Commitment

• Initiating and sustaining the concept requires hard work. It requires the school staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively on matters related to learning, and hold itself accountable for the kind of results that fuel continual improvement.
• When educators do the hard work necessary to implement these principles, their collective ability to help all students learn will rise.
• If they fail to demonstrate the discipline to initiate and sustain this work, then their school is unlikely to become more effective, even if those within it claim to be a professional learning community.
• The rise or fall of the professional learning community concept depends not on the merits of the concept itself, but on the most important element in the improvement of any school—the commitment and persistence of the educators within it.

B. Here are some excerpts from Arapahoe High School’s web page about their PLC adventures and their plan for going forward. AHS has been using PLC’s for two years.

A Professional Learning Community is a collegial group of administrators and school staff who are united in their commitment to student learning. They share a vision, work and learn collaboratively, visit and review other classrooms, and participate in decision making. The benefits to the staff and students include academic gains for students and better informed and more collaborative teachers.

WHY PLC’s?

The purpose of Professional Learning Communities is to improve student achievement through collaboration with colleagues.

* Engaging in Data Driven Dialogue

~ a 4 step process to look at common assessment data (steps are tied to the 4 questions listed above)

* Exploring the latest Research regarding best teaching practices

Where We Started

A Leadership Team, comprised of teachers, administrators and instructional coaches was created 2 years ago to:

· Help make decisions on behalf of the teachers in regard to PLC work

· Establish credibility for the PLC process

· Brainstorm ideas for future PLC work

· Communication link to the entire staff

· Simulate protocols to be used with entire staff

· Cultivate grassroots decision making

· Be a “sounding board” to assess the  progress of the PLC process

What We’ve Accomplished

· Summer of 2007, entire staff read Rick Dufour’s book Professional Learning Communities At Work, chapters 1-5

· With input from staff, students and parents, the AHS Mission Statement was created and approved in fall of 2007 and Vision Statement was created and approved in fall of 2008

· Every PLC team has identified at least one Essential Learning to focus on during PLC’s

· Every PLC team has administered a Common Formative Assessment around their Essential Learning

· Instructional Coaches trained a majority of the staff on Data Driven Dialogue process in the spring of 2008

· All PLC Facilitators are receiving professional development training, led by the Instructional Coaches

· Leadership Team continues to meet to provide valuable feedback and direction for the future

Where We’re Going

· Begin goal setting in individual PLC’s

· Continue to collaborate with colleagues

· Continue to have conversations about sustaining the PLC process and embedding the culture of change in AHS

· Continue to use the DuFour book Professional Learning Communities At Work to guide our work

· Continue to provide research for the staff and community on PLC’s

· Continue to provide training and support for PLC Facilitators

· Continue to train staff on the Data Driven Dialogue process

http://arapahoe.littletonpublicschools.net/forParents/PLCInformation/tabid/7822/Default.aspx

C. The following excerpts are from a very long article from SEDL (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory). Some of its language that makes me think of the true purpose of Continuous Quality Improvement. For your convenience, because the piece is so long, I’ll start with the summary.

Professional Learning Communities: What Are They And Why Are They Important?

Summary

Reports in the literature are quite clear about what successful professional learning communities look like and act like. The requirements necessary for such organizational arrangements include:

• The collegial and facilitative participation of the principal, who shares leadership – and thus, power and authority – through inviting staff input in decision making. [Does our new Superintendent have a policy or strategy regarding PLC’s?]
• A shared vision that is developed from staff’s unswerving commitment to students’ learning and that is consistently articulated and referenced for the staff’s work. [CQI and RtI?]
• Collective learning among staff and application of that learning to solutions that address students’ needs. [How do we get resistors on the bus or find another bus a la Good to Great.] [How do we foster increased trust among staff or individual PLC members?]
• The visitation and review of each teacher’s classroom behavior by peers as a feedback and assistance activity to support individual and community improvement [How will we involve parents and community members in a meaningful way?] [How can we coordinate our PLC’s with our present model and schedule for professional development?]
• Physical conditions and human capacities that support such an operation. [How will we arrange for common plan times during the school day in order for these PLC’s to be successful? How will the PLC's include electives, especially since they are on a different schedule?]

This paper focuses on what is labeled the professional community of learners, in which the teachers in a school and its administrators continuously seek and share learning and then act on what they learn.

The goal of their actions is to enhance their effectiveness as professionals so that students benefit. This arrangement has also been termed communities of continuous inquiry and improvement.

As an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement.

Outcomes of PLC’s

For students:

• decreased dropout rate and fewer classes “skipped”
• lower rates of absenteeism
• increased learning that is distributed more equitably in the smaller high schools
• greater academic gains in math, science, history, and reading than in traditional schools and
• smaller achievement gaps between students from different backgrounds (p. 28).

For staff:

• reduction of isolation of teachers
• increased commitment to the mission and goals of the school and increased vigor in working to strengthen the mission
• shared responsibility for the total development of students and collective responsibility for students’ success
• powerful learning that defines good teaching and classroom practice and that creates new knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learners
• increased meaning and understanding of the content that teachers teach and the roles they play in helping all students achieve expectations
• higher likelihood that teachers will be well informed, professionally renewed, and inspired to inspire students
• more satisfaction, higher morale, and lower rates of absenteeism
• significant advances in adapting teaching to the students, accomplished more quickly than in traditional schools
• commitment to making significant and lasting changes and
• higher likelihood of undertaking fundamental systemic change (p. 27).

Professional Learning Communities: What Are They And Why Are They Important? Issues… about Change, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1997) http://www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61.html

D. This final article about how emerging technologies are transforming PLC’s into PLN’s comes from the May, 2009 entry in Rob Jacobs’ blog. He is an administrator in California. The blog is: Education Innovation.

The New Professional Learning Community- The PNLC

Professional Learning Communities are going to change.  The change will come in response to technology and the need to adopt it as a part of how a PLC functions.

Converged Networking denotes:

• the ability to carry data, voice, and video over a single network
  

• broadband to school sites, district offices, and wireless devic

• will change how, where, and with whom Professional Learning Communities collaborate with

• including different schools, experts at the district office, or  consultants from across the globe

• Teachers at other schools to share instructional strategies
  

• district personnel to discuss data or potential Special Education issues
  

• consultants via various collaborative technology platforms.

Imagine PLC meetings with:

PLCs will be able to leverage talent, expertise, and knowledge independent of geographic restrictions. This location independence or location non-dependence will increase the calls for Professional Learning Communities to operate with even greater collaboration because more people will be able to be potential members.

Just as communication technologies such as email or cell phones have created an expectation of immediacy, that is, and expectation for immediate response, so too collaborative technologies change the culture of Professional Learning Communities to expect real-time interaction.

Professional Learning Communities will move from “communities” to “networks.” [This has already happened among those in the educational technology field. We have been building PLN’s or Personal Learning Networks through blogging, Twitter, Nings, Second Life, etc. across the globe for a few years now.]

Additional Resources via SEDL:

· Leading Professional Learning Communities: Voices from Research and Practice

· Professional Learning Communities – Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement

· Professional Learning Communities – An Ongoing Exploration

· Multiple Mirrors: Reflections on the Creation of Professional Learning Communities

· Schools as Learning Communities – Issues About Change, Volume 4, Number 1

· Professional Learning Communities: What Are They and Why Are They Important? – Issues About Change, Volume 6, Number 1

· Creating a Professional Learning Community: Cottonwood Creek School – Issues About Change, Volume 6, Number 2

· Assessing a School Staff as a Community of Professional Learners – Issues About Change, Volume 7, Number 1

· Principals and Teachers: Continuous Learners – Issues About Change, Volume 7, Number 2

· Launching Professional Learning Communities: Beginning Actions – Issues About Change, Volume 8, Number 1

· Co-Developers: Partners in a Study of Professional Learning Communities – Issues About Change, Volume 8, Number 2

He wonders.

Should we be teaching work-arounds as a digital skill?

Those of us who teach in labs do it all the time: our challenges are things like internet filters, software permissions, hardware burnout, equipment failure, lost passwords, erased files, web outages, etc.  One of my favorite, oft-quoted lines about teaching and technology by Dean Shareski is: “I don’t do boxes and wires. I do teaching and learning with the boxes and wires.”  That is my goal, my mantra, and my philosophy.  However, if you work in a lab or an IT department, it can all too often devolve into merely dealing with boxes and wires.

But Clarence reminds us it’s all about problem solving, critical thinking, analyzing options, keeping a goal in sight, working through, over and around obstacles instead of focusing on them.  I teach 11- to 14-year-olds so they come to me with some skills, but not as many as you might think.  They can still  implode when they get confused, like all learners do.  I must help my students turn the potholes into detours instead of head-on collisions.  I really nudge kids to learn work-arounds when, after a little direct instruction, I set them loose and they begin to encounter the roadblocks.

I wonder aloud.

What can you do to solve your problem?
What have you tried so far?
How can I help you become as independent as possible so you can do this when no one’s around?
Which part of the project/question/software do you already understand?
What would you do if it were your cell phone, Nintendo DS, iPod, or MySpace?
How can you make this happen a different way?
If I promise your answer is there in front of you will you look again more closely?
Can I give you hints or ask you a few questions since I’m not going to be handing you the answer?
I wonder if other computers you’ve seen have a port, wire, button, plug, or click for that?

As I’m sure you know from your own experience that at about this point they get very aggravated.  There is gnashing of teeth.  There is even whining.   The discomfort can last for minutes, days or even over the course of the semester as I continue to sweetly demand that they think for themselves with minimal intrusion from me.   Of course I encounter bugs myself, so I keep modeling work-arounds.

Then one day they realize that they CAN find their own answers and they CAN make things work.  ZING!  Their confidence shoots up. It’s so fun to watch when their face changes. It’s even better when they take their new-found knowledge over to another student and help them make their own discoveries. I always feel a little stress adn guilt about holding out on them, but when they get it — Wow! That’s the magic that keeps us teaching.  It has little to do with which tools we use or the content we teach, don’t you think?

I wonder.

Isn’t teaching work-arounds what all teachers should be doing with all students all the time, not just in digital environments?

Clarence alludes to the fact that the very bugs we “work around” daily with the technology are the most frequent reason teachers use to avoid bringing their classes to the lab or trying electronically-enhanced lessons.  (This excuse vies for supremacy with, “The lab is always full,” “I have to prepare my kids for testing,” “It’s easy for you because you have a lab all to yourself,” and “I don’t have room for any computers.”)

I feel conflicted when I hear all the reasons.  I know some are true or at least partially true, especially because Murphy’s Law reigns in computer labs.  I know it’s intimidating. There are bound to be 1 or 2 things go wrong and there are very few support folks around to help when a carefully planned lesson gets derailed by hardware, software, printer, or internet problems. (They fail to realize that even we geeks have our tech learning curve stretched like a rubber band daily.  I am humbled constantly by the flaws that show up in my lab and my practice!)

On the other hand, the Glitch Excuse also rankles me because those same teachers will try new lessons, solutions and methods–except digital ones–in their own classrooms. They already write  backup lessons in case things don’t go well. They already know that old equipment like overheads can malfunction. They even take kids to the lab for computerized assessments when required to.  But they’ve psyched themselves out about using tech for better, non-mandated electronics in their own everyday lessons. They’ve either surreptitiously or unabashadely refused to use the newfangled machinery because it can make a person feel uncomfortable, inadequate, or awkward.

I wonder.

Are they admitting that they are too afraid or too stubborn to change their thinking to fit a changing world?
Where in that mindset is the dedication to lifelong learning?
What are they modeling to their learners?
Must they be perfect or have complete control of a situation before they can proceed? Is it not okay for them to make a mistake in front of others (even though they’ve done their best to prepare for contingencies)?

I wonder.

Can administrators in good conscience accept this kind of reasoning when it comes to embedding digital tools and 21st Century skills?

Can a math teacher get away with saying, “I refuse to use those new manipulatives or calculators because I don’t know how — they might break”?
Can a Social Studies teacher say, “I don’t want to use maps or timelines. I don’t like them.”
Can a reading teacher say, “I’m too old to read any other genres. They’re too confusing!”
Can I say, “Gee, I won’t learn art or music; I’m just a computer teacher!”?

I wonder.

How can we create a shift in thinking for the adults?

My enthusiastic response to Clarence’ question is YES!  We must teach work-arounds; it’s problem solving and critical thinking at its best. We must prove to ourselves that when obstacles crop up they are opportunities and teachable moments, no matter the content or venue.

I wonder.

How will adults learn the work-arounds if they won’t show up for the lesson?

I have some ideas but that’s another post for another day.

Directions

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.  Although this meme is somewhat US-centric because we have our long break in June and July, those overseas could still set some goals to reach before the next milestone, i.e. end of term, prior to next school year, before the next break, etc.

The Rules

• Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
• For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
• Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
• Title your post Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
• Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
• Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
• Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
• Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

My Goals

• Rework my personal and teaching sites into either blog or wiki formats. Having a static site has been a problem for a year or two; I can do better.
• Present and share generously with other educators in my field as often as possible, especially in association with the Oracle Education Foundation. So far I have 1 lined up for Project-Based Learning and another on Digital Storytelling.
• Move forward with a PLN/EdTech Learning cohort I started way back in March, along with participating in a new 21st Century Learning PLC just beginning in my school district.
• Attend as many virtual National Educational Computing Conference and TIE Colorado sessions as possible since I can’t go to either one this year.
• Finish (at the very least) Brain Rules (John Medina), Classroom Habitudes (Angela Meiers), and Transforming Classroom Practice (Borthwick and Pierson).
• Learn some basic HMTL and CSS so I can get better at WordPress and web design.
• Learn from Twitter and my edtech blog reading lists but balance my screen time with life offline. This might be the most important goal of all.

I Tag…

(UNLESS you are already tagged or you are trying to unplug this summer)

1. Anyone setting goals to reach before school starts again next fall.
2. Anyone overseas setting goals to reach before end of term or next break.
3. Kate Olson of Kate Says
4. Marianne Stabile of A Teacher in Abu Dhabi
5. Julia Fallon
6. Scott Elias
7. Chris Clementi at Kidsnetsoft