This past week I was honored to do a guest blog post on Richard Byrne's blog Free Technology For Teachers.  You can read my post about creating and managing student Diigo accounts through a Teacher Account here.

If you don't already subscribe to Richard's blog, you should. He provides a plethora of useful links and resources for educators of all kinds.

Last month I had the amazing luck to receive a tweet from a fellow educator, Gerardo Lazaro, who teaches at St. George's College in Lima, Peru.  He asked me if I was interested in doing an online collaboration project with his students.  I immediately jumped at the opportunity.  We weren't really sure exactly what kind of project we wanted to do, though we knew we would do it with 6th graders since he teaches middle school and the oldest students I teach are in 6th grade.


The Planning
Finally, after a few weeks of playing "Twitter tag," we found time to Skype and discuss an online video conference with our classes.  During our 2 hour Skype session, we pulled together the whole plan.  We were able to share our vision for the conference, share links and use his classroom wiki to do our planning. While Skyping, I pulled up his wiki on my computer by clicking on the link he provided in the Skype chat.  I immediately clicked on the 'join' button and he approved me to begin editing the wiki.

We had decided to have our students research a little about each others' city based around these four areas: History, Culture, Geography, Political and City.  We split up the topics, each choosing one to edit.  When we were done, I used an iframe code to embed the wiki page and project description we had created on his wiki into a page I created for the project on my wiki.

When the whole thing was done and we signed off for the evening, I was blown away. In 2 hours we had planned a whole project and were ready to go for Monday.

That is the power of social media.

On Monday, we tested the last hurdle of the project: the actual video part of the conference.  My district blocks Skype (apparently it 'does something' to our network), we couldn't get iChat to work because he doesn't have a Mac, we couldn't get AIM to work when we tried earlier in the week at work, or Oovoo either.  Finally, my brain clicked: Google chat with video!  We had used Google chat before to connect during the school day, so I knew it wasn't blocked. At 8am Monday morning, 4 hours before our meeting, we tested it out. It worked like a charm.


The Meeting
At noon, my 6th grade class came down to the lab.  I had arranged the room so that the iSight camera on my Macbook was trained on them, and I had the desktop microphone I had purchased earlier in the week ready to go.  I called Gerardo up and there they were--a classroom of 6th graders smiling back at us.  We started with the typical nervous laughter, smiles and waving, and we started asking each other questions based on some of the research that we had done on each others' cities.  At one point our students danced for each other and we were able to show each other our favorite drinks (a purple drink for them and Coke for us).  The students in Peru also got to describe some of their local cuisine, such as ceviche to our students, who named cheese steaks as their favorite. 

There were times when we couldn't hear each other well, and sometimes my students and I had trouble understanding his students' accents, but overall, it was a lot of fun!  And surprisingly easy.  Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, my students didn't have a lot of time to do research, but Gerardo's students were able to create presentations based on the research they did.  Sadly, my students were never able to see them because the site Gerardo put the presentations up on is blocked by my district.  As a side note, we had discussed the possibility of using VoiceThread to allow students to share their work and ideas, but that, too is blocked by my district.

They were, however, able to leave comments on my project wiki page for the students in Lima to read.

Unfortunately, it was the end of their school year (Peru is below the equator, so the seasons are opposite to ours), so we won't be able to plan another meeting for a while.  Hopefully, by then, I will have better equipment and we will have more time to plan.

(and I will make sure my designated photo-taker takes photos of the other students, too!)

Twitter
We had also set up Twitter accounts for both of our schools (@Bluford_Elem and @SGC_Senior) in case we wanted to students to Tweet answers to each other.  While that did not pan out due to planning limitations and my students' unfamiliarity with the Twitter format, it is has opened up that possibility in the future.  I am also glad that I have a Twitter account for my school.  I hope to be able to incorporate it into our parent communication and perhaps further communications with other teachers and schools.

The Sad Reality

Sadly, within the network firewalls of the School District, many of the powerful social media tools available for connecting classrooms are not available to us due to poor understanding of their potential and unsubstantiated or illogical fears.  There is a whole site dedicated to connecting classrooms to authors using Skype.  The hundreds of thousands of students in classrooms in Philadelphia will miss out on this opportunity due to it being blocked. (Although I'm hoping to find an author willing to use iChat or Google Chat.)

What's in the Future?
Now that I know how easy it is to plan such an event and even how fairly painless it is to pull it off, I look forward to similar experiences in the future with my students.  I am talking with a Kindergarten teacher in my building about getting an author or another class connected with his. 

I hope to do more collaborative work within my school and hopefully with other schools. It is so important for my students to interact with people outside of their communities, as many of them rarely get a chance to do so (see my previous post on this). A friend of mine who is a lab teacher in Germantown (a section of Philadelphia) and are planning a video chat with our students.  There are more social media tools I am hoping to use soon.  I will begin using my Diigo teacher account with my 5th and 6th graders for the research project they have coming up in the spring. I have already tested it with one of my 6th graders who is working on a separate project, and she loved it.  Hopefully tools like GlogsterEDU and VoiceThread will soon be unblocked so I can start using them!

Feel free to share your experiences with connection across continents or ways you have used social media in your classroom!

I'm not going to lie.  

Today was tough.  Really tough.  My kids were, for the most part, great.  Honestly, most of the time it's not the kids that drive me nuts.  Kids will do what they can get away with, after all.

My school has been relocated for this year while a new school is being built.  As such, our kids are being bussed to our new location (about 10 minutes away by car), with 6 buses making 2 trips to move 600 children from our old neighborhood to our new one.  Let's just say, admission took 1 hour (all the kids have to be fed because nearly 100% of them qualify for free/reduced lunch) and dismissal also took 1 hour (imagine Ellis Island after a boat came in without the organization and with everyone speaking English).  It didn't have to be like this, but, alas, I was not surprised.

I often feel powerless at my job.  I feel as if everything is happening to me, not with me or because of me. I crave collaboration and intelligent conversation about education, but I don't get a lot of it at my job. Whenever I feel alone, in steps my PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network).

Side note: if you don't know what a PLN is, then check out the links at the bottom of this post.
  
After a long, frustrating day at work, I sent out a tweet:






Within minutes, I received encouraging words, many from people I have never even met in person, but with whom I have exchanged wonderful resources and conversations.


















I felt--no joke--all warm and fuzzy inside.  

These are big-thinkers, lifelong learners and people like me, who seek out knowledge for themselves and have a passion for sharing that knowledge with the world.  Sadly, my face-to-face PLN is lacking such energy and passion.  Or, perhaps, this energy just hasn't been released, or maybe it hasn't been given the opportunity to flourish.  Twitter provides that opportunity for me.

So, my questions are:

• Have you ever wanted to discuss that new issue of Educational Leadership, only to find you're the only one with a subscription, or you're the only one who read it?
  
  
• Have you ever heard a story on TV or the radio or read a great book and been just dying to talk to someone about it, only to find that people want to talk about Desperate Housewives or The View and have never heard or read the story and/or have no opinion about the topic? (No harm meant to those who enjoy those shows!)
  
  
• Have you ever had a question that no one seems to know the answer to?
  
  
• Have you ever wondered how someone else does something?

  Sounds like you need the support of a good PLN!  

If you have a network of friends/fellow educators already, then you should feel like the luckiest person in the world.  If not, then you need to get one!

A supportive and innovative PLN will help you grow in your career, help you grow as a person and give you a place to bounce new ideas around, ask simple questions or get help when you need it.  It can also be a place of comfort and belonging when you feel isolated or alone.


How can you just up and 'get' a PLN?  

• Give in to the fad and join Twitter.  (See links to posts below on how to do this.) 
  
  
• Join a Ning (social network) that is related to your area of expertise. 
  
  
• Join Diigo and start sharing links with people or join a Diigo group.
  
  
• Listen to conversations in your workplace and seek out those people who share your interests or whose company you enjoy.  A good PLN does not have to be virtual--it can be right under your nose!

Best wishes to everyone with the new school year and thank you to all of the valuable members of my PLN that keep me going every day!
 
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Helpful links for building a PLN:

'Creating a PLN' Wikispace

What is a PLN, Anyway? from Teaching Village (Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto)

The Innovative Educator: 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Building a Personal Learning Network

How to Build a Personal Learning Network from Free Technology for Teachers (Richard Byrne)

Oh, the Adventures You'll Have if Only... from Teacher Reboot Camp (Shelly Terrell)

How to Become a Twitter Teacher in 23 Steps or less by Kapil Bhatia

Why You Should Start Tweeting by Jason Renshaw


Examples of Online Communities (these are all technology & education related)

Classroom 2.0

Philly Teacher Techs (OK, a plug for my own Ning, but it's the closest I've gotten to starting a local PLN)


ISTE Community Ning




school bus photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com

frustrated face photo courtesy of tuppaware_001 on Flickr