Blogtoberfest is coming!

October is Connected Educators Month, celebrating the power of teachers in groups. You can follow the events by going to www.connectededucators.org or by reading #ce13 on Twitter.

Here in SDUHSD, we're going to celebrate with Blogtoberfest: 31 days, 31 stories from your colleagues about how connections with others have improved their practice and made things better for their students. A new entry will be posted every day; collect them all!

Watch for the festivities to begin tomorrow morning!

Blackboard Summer Academy 2013

One of my projects last year was upgrading our Blackboard Learn LMS. Because of the hardware limitations of our server, we were about 4 updates behind. Additionally, I wanted us to add features that would make it easier for teachers to blend their classes and for students to access Blackboard. We upgraded the system to include content collections, moved to managed hosting (so we don't maintain the server) and purchased mobile access for smartphones and tablets. Because we wanted teachers to take advantage of these new features, and to support teachers using blended learning, I developed the Blackboard Summer Academy (BBSA).

I designed a four-day course to be delivered to teachers over the summer. Each day would include 2 hours face-to-face, and 1 hour online. The course was delivered through the our upgraded Blackboard; teachers were enrolled as students in a BBSA course with all the content I developed. They also had a "practice" class where they were the teacher, as well as their own classes for the upcoming school year.  When I opened signups, we were overwhelmed with the response; unfortunately, we were limited in the amount of money we could spend to pay teachers. We ended up running two workshops, each with 12 teachers.

The goals of our workshop were to familiarize teachers with existing and upgraded features of Blackboard; to encourage the use of Blackboard for more than just posting documents for students to download; to expose teachers to concepts of 21st-century skills (the 4 C's) and to the requirements of Common Core; and to create a cadre of teachers who are able to support their colleagues with Blackboard.  The content I developed was a mix of hands-on, directly applicable Blackboard skills ("What button do I push?") with higher-level considerations of blended instruction. The class was delivered through a flipped model of blended learning; teachers were given all the content ahead of time to read or watch. Each class day started with a short 5-10 minute introduction, and then teachers had the rest of the time to work on their own, as I offered individual help and support. The culminating project was for teachers to develop a blended unit that they could deliver in one of their classes this year.

Teachers who enrolled came in with a wide variety of Blackboard expertise, from novice to expert. I felt like the flipped instruction allowed me to differentiate for each teacher, meeting them where they were in their experience. Teacher feedback at the end of the workshops bore that out, with 90% of participants agreeing that it "helped me to learn at my own pace." In the evaluation of the workshop, I asked teachers to (anonymously) write what was the best part, and what could have been improved. The responses indicated that teachers appreciated the opportunity to learn the software and prepare for their own classes at the same time, as well as the flexibility inherent in the flipped learning. (Interestingly, many teachers expressed to me their uncertainty and confusion about the flipped model at the very beginning of the workshop; by the end, they all seemed to appreciate it.) When I asked what could be improved about the workshop, most of the answers were some version of "more of the same": more people involved, more time, etc.

I'm going to be presenting about our BBSA at a Blackboard one-day conference next month. In reflecting on my take-away lessons, two stand out to me. (1) Teachers appreciated the differentiation provided by flipped learning, and (2) teachers found it valuable to work on an authentic task: developing their own class rather than some arbitrary made-up exercise. Not surprisingly, we know that those two factors are also characteristic of truly effective classes for students, as well.

I'm quite proud of how the Blackboard Summer Academy turned out. I think we achieved our goals in a way that modeled effective instruction for teachers. I'm hoping that we'll be able to run the workshop again next summer, hopefully for an even greater number of teachers.

EdCamp Palm Springs

I spent Saturday in Palm Springs at EdCampPS. I've written about the EdCamp movement before, including plans by several of us to bring an EdCamp to San Diego. Those plans have continued apace, to where we find ourselves currently three weeks away from EdCamp San Diego, on October 5, in Escondido. We opened registration in June, and all the spots were filled in about 2 1/2 days. We now have a long waiting list, which I hope means that we will have good turnout.

Four of us who have been organizing EdCampSD rode up to Palm Springs to participate, observe, learn from, and support our colleagues. Along with me were former SDUHSD teacher Holly Clark, Ryan Archer from San Marcos, and JoAnn Fox from Escondido. I spent much of my time examining their organization, layout, and logistics for their event. I talked with several of the organizers about what they had done, why they had done it that way, and how they would do things differently in the future. EdCampPS was a bit smaller than EdCampSD is expected to be; they had 140 signups, of whom about 85 showed up. We currently have 225 signups for EdCampSD and another 60 on the wait list. If we get the same attendance rate, we should be in good shape.

The sessions at EdCampPS were typical of what I have seen at other EdCamps: great discussions among educators with all levels of experience and expertise. Very few had been planned ahead of time; most were spur-of-the-moment, truly collaborative discussions. I attended a session on using Twitter for professional learning or with students, one on managing Google Apps with Chromebooks, and one on having students contribute to and comment on blogs. In each of the sessions, I feel like I learned something from colleagues as well as contributed what I have learned from my experience.

The next three weeks are going to be hectic, as we finalize arrangements for EdCampSD. In the end, however, it will work out to be a great day. The value in an EdCamp is in the conversations among colleagues, not in the session board or logistics!

The End of the Computer Lab

The days of the Computer Lab in schools are over. For years, our schools have supported rooms full of desktop computers that teachers can reserve for small periods of time for their classes. Typical use of these computers labs is

• short-term, due to the shared nature of the room and school bell schedules;
• outside of the standard classroom setting, disrupting any continuation of learning;
• individual, usually with computers in rows on tables;
• often disconnected to other coursework in the class, due to the need to schedule computer time weeks in advance.

Every single one of these characteristics is exactly opposite of what we know about effective use of instructional technology. There is good research that shows that for educational technology to really be valuable in improving students' learning, it should be

• used regularly over a long period of time;
• embedded into students' regular class settings;
• part of students collaborating and working with each other;
• and integrated into the immediate context of the lesson or project.

For these reasons, among others, computer labs are going the way of the ditto machine and the chalk board. A much better model for integrating technology into instruction is a 1:1 or 2:1 adoption, with devices in student hands during most of the class day. Some districts are accomplishing this by purchasing devices for all students; others, including our district, have chosen the BYOD path, supplemented by Chromebooks. In either case, use of information technology should be embedded into every class period, instead of relegated to "special" days when we "go to the computer lab."

Copyright and Fair Use

I had several conversations with teachers this summer about copyright protection and what constitutes fair use of someone's material.  The big misconception I've seen among teachers in our district is that putting materials behind a password (like in Blackboard) means that we don't have to worry about copyright restrictions.  This is patently not true: it's like stealing a car and hiding it in your garage instead of parking it in your driveway.  It makes it less likely that you'll get caught, but it's still not the right way to get around town.

A large part of the problem is that "Fair Use" is an inherently fuzzy concept.  The fair-use provision of copyright law does not provide specific definitions for what is or is not fair use.  Instead, it lays out guidelines for what kinds of factors a court might consider when deciding when a particular use is covered under "Fair Use".  Ultimately, "Fair Use" is what a court decides it is.

Here are three resources that explore copyright and fair use in more depth:

• Short and to the point, emphasis on fair use: www.cwu.edu/~pierckat/copyright.html
• A little bit longer, but more comprehensive: www.gcflearnfree.org/useinformationcorrectly/module/12
• A six-minute sorta-cheesy cartoon, but worth watching: www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/05/copyright-on-campus-six-minute.html#.UfcuUI0m0dV

As we implement Common Core, with resources developed in states all over the country, it is important for teachers to remember applicable copyright laws, so we can model appropriate behavior for our students.