T3 web2.0 What’s next…

Early on in I want to draw attention to Maine educators that are seeking to share thinking, ideas, and resources with their colleagues by blogging. Most of these people have tried every conceivable means of sharing with and supporting other educators (blogs, wikis, web sites, portals, CMS, … ) At some level, all Technology Integrators do this – searching out high-quality tools and resources, which are changing and evolving all the time, to share with teachers. The group I want to point to here is a step beyond the local-school Technology Integration Specialist or Teacher Leaders. They seek to share with a larger audience and spend a great deal of time, as individuals, promoting the use of resources and tools. They have harvested and organized… with the hope that this will be a significant contribution to the quality of their State’s educational system. All too often the return on investment (ROI) for their efforts goes largely unclaimed by the educators they are hoping to reach… unnoticed except by other leaders that are often doing the same kind of thing. A friend of mine in Vermont used the term “creating silos” to refer this type of un-collective effort; where leaders work independently and overlap efforts, creating a wide variety of repositories that hold similar resources and far too often exist almost unnoticed by the audience they are intended to serve.

When I started to become more involved with using technology I saw it as an opportunity for educators to work together and avoid the isolated effort that leads to creating silos. As a Technology Integration Specialist I would go to a conference or workshop and find that I was in a room full of people that were each passionately trying to “reinvent the wheel” – building page after page of links to educational resources and tools. I often found they would have unique resources or tools that they had created themselves, but these generally never got the attention they deserved because they were just part of another silo… embedded into too common a sight to draw the attention of most passers-by.

My experiences as a coach and as an athlete has led me to believe strongly that the capacity of a group of people, working together to achieve common goals, always holds more potential for achieving great things. As part of my Master’s program I worked to build regional teams of teachers. The theory behind this work; if lack of time is the #1 reason why teachers often fail to successfully integrate technology or transform their teaching practices – then having a group of teachers work collaboratively, sharing the load, would provide a way deal with scarce time. We built three regional teams of 10 HS teachers… each team teaching the same subject (Geometry, American Literature, Physics). As in most traditional school environments, each had been reinventing the wheel in isolation. They met at the start and came up with a common set of instructional objectives and teaching topics, which was made easier by selecting people for the teams that were already using the same textbook. Over the course of the following school year each teacher on the team was tasked with developing one of the topics – seeking the best resources, crafting quality lessons, and making instructional assets available to others on the team by building them into a section of a collective course web site. (I wish NoteShare had been around back then.) At the end of the first year all of the instructional objectives and topics had been aligned with high-quality, innovative, and engaging teaching and learning resource – a significant return on investment for all members of team. By contributing instead of working in isolation the overall quality of all topics increased. Each teacher was able to spend significantly less time crafting content and aligning resource and had more time to focus on other aspects of teaching. The following year each was tasked with updating a different topic area, but the overall time was significantly reduced because the assets had already been organized into the team’s course web site. *A significant note: Most of these teachers sought expanded support and enhancement of this initiative and many worked hard to promote the start of other regional teams to do the same thing in the other subjects they taught or for their colleagues to participate in. They believed in the project enough to eagerly try new things and we tried a bunch of Groupware tools that were emerging at that time (ex. Blackboard, ActiveWorlds, TappedIn, Groove). As I mentioned before… NoteShare would have been great to have. It provides all of the capacities that these groups were struggling to find in other tools at the time.

My hope in writing this post is to encourage this group of passionate and active educators in Maine to move to the next level – working with the support of Maine’s educational leadership to establish a central repository and CMS that would allow this group to more effectively reach and reach out to educators all around Maine. Maybe MEA should step forward and see this as an opportunity to re-empower educators in Maine… We need to move beyond creating silos and having our most active and passionate educators waste time duplicating each other’s efforts. I encourage the Department of Education to bring these educators together and ask how they they can be supported to work as a team, in the hope of pouring the foundations for the growth of communities of educators (PLCs) across Maine that work together to contribute their resources and talents to build and maintain high-quality teaching and learning repositories and establishing a base from which continuous improvement can evolve.

Unfortunately, the type of PLCs that has emerged in schools is little more than a renewed emphasis of building stronger localized school communities – where teachers and their local school community work together to support common goals and purpose. While this is surely a important factor in the quality of any organization or team, it is not a new idea and at this level will not result in adequate transformations in the quality of our schools. It still leaves most teachers in isolation when it comes to their day-to-day classroom instructional practice – struggling to keep up with rapidly changing educational resources and learning tools that are needed to engage students and transform classrooms into environments where 21st Century skills and literacy are nurtured. Teachers that teach the same subjects, building collectively to meet similar instructional objectives needs to become part of the context of what it means for Maine’s teachers to work as part of a PLC. Just as students must move beyond the walls that have defined traditional schools, teachers must be encouraged to move beyond their classrooms to regularly engage with other teachers that teach the same subjects/grade level. At the very least we need to find a way to avoid building Silos… and begin to work together to transform our learning environments.

Here are some of he blogs and educators around Maine that have working to contribute…

(list coming soon)