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)

On the main page of our school sites I have posted a focus image in the middle of the page. On our elementary site the image is currently of a student getting off the bus for the first day of school. What if you were to build a writing prompt derived from this picture…

Example: We are excited to have students back in school! As you walked into school for the first day, what were you thinking about? Have you considered what you want to achieve this year? Write a list of three things you would like to accomplish this school year. Also, write down one way that you could help make our school a place that people want to walk into.

Maybe you are a math teacher…

Example: How many seats are on the bus you ride to school? If each seat holds 2 people how many people could be getting off the bus? The distance from the curb to the entrance to the school is 75′. How many days would it take, coming and going, for this student to walk a mile?

Maybe you are a history teacher…

Example: Think about the school you walk into each day. Visit the following web site to investigate how public schools in the United States have changed over time. www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool . Make a list of things that haven’t changed much and a list of things that very different. Finally, what is one thing you would change about our school to improve learning for everyone.

I could go on but, I think you get the idea. I hope others will think about the spaces and resources that could come to life through our web sites, seeking to make them a rich addition to our efforts as a school community. The “motto” that you will on many of the pages is “Share in our growth”. I hope that our school community will begin to see that our web sites hold the potential to do so.

Check back on the T3 page on Monday…. I will be putting together an example that shows how students could use a web2.0 tool (VoiceThread) to build a story to go along with pictures (Digital Storytelling) to enhance literacy.

It has been nice to see educators back at work this week. If you get a chance… check out the Writing Prompt builder or Quiz builder in UnitedStreaming over the weekend. If you haven’t yet created your accounts for UnitedStreaming or netTrekker, I encourage you to do so. If you have any problems setting up your accounts… let me know next week or check out the UnitedStreaming and netTrekker Integration Centers that are linked to the main page of the school web sites. They are full of support resources.

I keep thinking back…. but do not recall being informed in my Ed. School classes that I was being prepped to go out and become a leader in the effort to reinvent schools for the 21st Century. Even while getting my Master’s degree in Educational Technology and Instructional Design, I don’t remember a notice going around that schools were in need of radical transformations. Now I wonder how I could have been so blind. Sometimes I know that it is the structure of an old school system, from top-to-bottom, which prevents us from overcoming the challenges of transforming our schools into effective educational environments. At other times, I tend think that we have not stepped up to the challenge as professionals. I’m sure the truth exists somewhere between those margins.

System change is not often accomplished as a whole-system. It often begins to bend from the contributions of a few passionate people, cutting pathways for others to follow. That is the realistic hope I hold – that a few will become trailblazers in our school community and begin to seek the opportunity to share in our growth… clearing the path for others to follow. This blog is an opportunity for Deer Isle – Stonington students, parents, and educators to think about and talk about “What’s next…” for our schools in terms of applying technology to promote 21st Century skills and literacy.

Please feel free to comment on blog postings with ideas or feedback. All comments will be moderated before they posted as part of this blog. What’s next…. come back to see!