I don't usually do this kind of thing, but I received an email from a community outreach spokesperson from Meeting Tomorrow, a company that sells audio/visual equipment, telling me about a contest they are doing.

Meeting Tomorrow will be giving away 10 LCD projectors to 10 schools based on votes. You can nominate and vote for your school here:

Today, one of my 2nd graders clicked on an ad at the bottom of my PortaPortal page and discovered a PBS Frontline video called "How Google Saved a School." He watched the whole thing through, commenting at the end, "That was decent!"  I immediately found the video (using my PortaPortal page ad), Diigo bookmarked it and sent it out on Twitter.

Now, I could write a whole post about the unbelievable things going on in that school, but my mind turned to how Google might save MY school.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that my school is, well, how should I put it. Failing.  Our school culture leaves much to be desired, with students running through the halls, fights in the cafeteria and, unfortunately, much of the administration's attention being focused on the 'do-badders' rather than the 'do-gooders.'

We have been, since September, talking about starting an incentive program with 'Bluford Bucks' that students could earn for exhibiting positive behaviors at school.  They could then 'buy' prizes with the Bluford Bucks they had earned.  We talked, and speculated and talked.  Finally, in November, we received a sheet of 3 Bluford Bucks to photocopy with a short explanation of the concept in our boxes.  At the bottom of the explanation was a description of 2 ideas that our Climate Manager had in mind with a request for more ideas.  All I could think was "This is never going to work like this."  Not because it wasn't a good idea or wasn't trying to be successful. It was just impossible that, by putting a sheet of Bluford Bucks in teachers' boxes and saying, "Here's this program, we're not really sure how it's going to work, but let's do it!" that any program would work.

But I really want it to work.

We NEED an incentive program.  We need one with teacher buy-in. We need one that is well-thought out, well-planned and well-orchestrated.  That is something that one person cannot do alone.

In steps Google.

I decided, "Hey it's my school, and if I want this to work, I've got to do something about it."  I spread the word that I was starting a Bluford Bucks Committee and I set up our first meeting to be on a day when we had report conferences at night so I knew people would be in the building.

15 teachers showed up.  I was giddy.

The night before I had put together a Google Group for the committee, hoping that the committee would buy into it.  Anyone who works in a large school knows how hard it is to find time for people to meet, especially across disciplines and grade levels.  I figured a Google Group would solve that problem by allowing people to be part of the planning without having to find a common meeting time.

I collected email addresses at the meeting and made everyone a member.

At first, it was just me posting up discussions and sharing information.  A few people responded, and I knew that people were reading the posts because they would talk to me about them in school.  Then we went on Winter Break.

The group was quiet for a week over break.  This week, it has blossomed and bloomed.  People are responding to posts, responding to each other, taking on responsibilities and sharing them.

Tomorrow, thanks to the power of Google, we have a mobile school store on a cart decorated by one of our committee members, a pile of donated school supplies for the store, newly designed Bluford Bucks (in Photoshop by one of our committee members), volunteers ready to bring the cart around to show the students and explain the program, a script for the pitch and criteria for getting "Bluford Bucks," administration support, and a team of teachers dedicated to making this program work.

Google might save my school.

I sent a message out to our committee members, quoting Angela Maiers: "Together we are smarter." Were it not for the way that Google Groups allows members to share resources and communicate asynchronously (with a very user-friendly interface), none of this would have been accomplished.

It has been an amazing experience watching my colleagues step up and take the reigns.  It's as if they've been itching for the opportunity.  What's even more amazing is that all of this has been accomplished without the intervention (aside from offers of monetary support) from any administrators (they were made members of the group, so they've been able to follow what's been going on).

Even if everything doesn't pan out exactly how we planned it at first, the way we pulled together as a staff will have lasting effects in how we work together as a staff.

You can view our group here:

I am in the process of pulling together my applications materials for ISTE's Outstanding Young Educator Award.

This is the video I put together to address this question: "What role do you believe technology plays in making a positive difference in teaching and learning?"



Thanks for your feedback everyone, I changed the video based on some of your suggestions. I think it's done!

I'm not usually one to follow the crowd, but as I saw people tweeting out their 'end-of-year' blog posts, I figured that it might be a good idea, even if just for selfish reasons. 2009 has been a transformative year for me.  It has marked a complete shift in my professional life and as a result, my career has become more fulfilling and exciting.

I did not accomplish all of this on my own.  It was a slow progression, starting with the ISTE conference in June, when my world was expanded beyond my classroom, school and even district walls.

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!