Opening Up Your Options

"I believe knowledge construction comes from experiencing or building something yourself or collectively as a team using tools". I ask you all: do you agree?

Chapter five of the connected educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach & Lani Ritter Hall focuses on different tools that can be used to support connected learning in a classroom. As a society we need to strive towards "keeping up with the Joneses". As the world becomes more digital we must respond accordingly or we will be left behind. Learning in schools is molded by the materials we use and this can generally be witnessed in an average classroom. In the late 1700s and 1800s a "text book" called the New England Primer became popular in schools. The themes that were portrayed in this book series were religious in nature and focused on a great deal of repetition and memorization to learn about reading and writing. This reading and writing was very plain and typically focused on religion and religious values. This was a widely used reader therefore many students only got to learn through this point of view.

Moving into the days of Web 2.0 tools and classroom 2.0 technology, these limiting (and frequently religious) barriers have been shattered. Using the internet, students and learners of all ages can connect with people across the globe. Students now have access to a much wider variety of cultural information. Students in America can learn through the eyes of a student in Bangladesh or listen to religious ceremonies that are completely foreign from their own. Students can watch what they want, read what they want, and they most certainly are not constrained to one view of the world.

What kind of tools are suggested in The Connected Educator?

• Social Bookmarking!
• There has always been an option to save a link to a site that you have visited in the past. However, archiving websites has become much more complex and useful! 
• Instead of just saving the sites and hoping that they are still active later, users can now archive their favorite articles and easily search hundreds of saved items and then they even have the ability to share these sites with other users. 
• One example of this is the website that is titled Delicious . This creates a community of website savers that extend across the globe. 
• You can also use applications such as digo to save and annotate information directly from a web page. A digo tool can be added to your regular web browser fro convenience. 
• Blogging!
• Blogging has been mentioned in many of my past posts so please feel free to navigate my blog for further information! 
• This is one of the ways that people can connect based upon shared interests and they ride the waves of internet freedom!
• Sites such as edublog.org help teachers or administrators create an online community for their learners on any level. 
• School wide or only in the classroom - edublog.org makes this easy!
• For people that are just starting out with blogging, Googlereader will help you find and organize your new sources for information.
• Microblogs!
• Just about everyone knows what twitter is these days. Its up to us to make sure that it is correctly utilized for professional or academic development! 
• Staying consistent and remaining dilligent about the information you seek and provide promotes success in the world of microblogging. 
• Wikis 
• Ever have problems working on a group project? Is it too hard to email the same document back and forth while communicating all changes between group members? Use Wikis! 
• This is a shared space where people can update and work on documents with one another in real time. No more confusing emails between a bunch of people!

These are not the only options educators have when they want to stay connected on the internet.. I encourage you to look for more and share as many as possible with me so my classroom can become more connected too!

Connect to What Makes You Tick

As I have previously reviewed the concept of blogging and all of its potential roles in our daily lives, I have also highlighted its connection to the world of education. It is just as important for people using online platforms to be connected as it is for people using face-to-face means of communication. From the day we are born we use our interactions with other people to learn about ourselves and our surroundings. We learn to speak from our parents and we learn to read from our teachers. Interpersonal skills are learned from our friends and hobbies are learned from different resources throughout our lives. Continuous learning is the cornerstone of being an effective member of society and, in school, where children learn to actively participate in their development, is the best time to expand their means of exploration in every way we can.

Online learning is in an opportunity to expand on teacher instruction and student learning. Chapter two of "The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age", focuses on the idea of developing a connected learning model. In this chapter, the author focuses on the transition from a small local community of learning that generally isolates the learners, to a larger interconnected global network of learning that opens up doors to worlds that would otherwise remain unknown. (On page 27 is an illustration of the change that has occurred). But how does online learning excite the process?

Originally, learners only had access to a small amount of resources. Whatever literature was made available to them only collaborated with the information they may have gathered from lectures or personal conversation; the internet smashed these boundaries. Educated people began sharing their information, increasing the amount of literature available. Then, others began to respond to this information increasing the amount of thought surrounding the individual ideas. Soon after that other people stumbled upon these interactions and they begin to find interest in things they had never heard of.  None of these changes required the learners to hold a book or have a face-to-face conversation.

The process became an ongoing learning cycle and it has never stopped. Online sharing passed ideas along. It questioned and expanded upon those ideas. Most importantly it invited new learners to be a part of this idea expansion. Connected Learning Communities were formed. Learning communities occur in many different settings. Local communities, global networks, and bounded communities.

• Local communities are face to face communities that will work on changing the pace or learning process that is occurring within a certain building or school district. 
• Global networks are primarily online communities that pass information to people that may have never met or may never meet in the future. 
• Bounded communities can either be online or in person, however, they are focused on inquiry and going as deep as possible into the information about a certain topic. 

Utilization of all of these communities to pass along learning is absolutely key and the way the technology opens doors makes it the best way to be involved in all three. 

Please view a Video of a personal view of the Connected Learning Model

Keeping it Balanced and Keeping it Connected

My previous post addressed the idea of what a blog is, what it can do for the people that partake, and what the responsibilities might be of someone that is developing a blog. The research that was used included the three articles that I used to gather a guiding idea of how to start my blog and this post will basically be expanding on those ideas. Essentially, now that I have a basic understanding of the process, I went out in search of information that will help me begin to flourish as a blogger.

One main idea that was consistently addressed in my resource, chapter 6 of The Connected Educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, is the difference between a network and a community and how an understanding of this difference will help someone flourish in the blogging world. "Networks are about the individual" (Nussbaum-Beach) and communities are about all bloggers.

An efficient network refers to a group of blogs that one person has followed that does a good job of streamlining information for that one person's interest. Bloggers literally share information about anything you can think of but a good blogger will keep their relationships limited and mutually beneficial. Many times it is best that someone entering the world of blogging finds themselves a mentor that has "been around the block" once or twice. They won't necessarily need their mentor for every little action they take, but rather to help them set a basic list of rules. For instance, a blogger that has found a variety of posts and posters that meet their needs will do their best to keep it to just this: a relevant group. Someone that is starting a blog about marine life may enjoy sporadic information about travel but it is important that they stay focused and streamlined towards their goals. To avoid having irrelevant information overshadow the bloggers goals they can use RSS aggregators. They can filter out what they don't want to see and relevant information grows at a much faster rate. When bloggers have more information they can share more information and the other people in their network can benefit even greater. Networking is about having a good source of people from which you can learn, but bloggers need to be careful in their decisions if they want people to trust them enough to open up their information to them.

On the other hand, a community is a group of bloggers that follows a similar purpose and uses the information of each other to promote strong relationships. If you think of the term community outside of the online definition it literally means a group of cohabiting people that interact on a variety of different levels. A blogging community has the same idea. A bunch of people meet under an online interest and these people share information back and forth. However, bloggers in a community will also interact with people that want to join. Its more than just people sharing and reading information on one end. For instance, there should be a person that takes the job of welcoming people into their blogging community. Another person could have the job of filtering out irrelevant information. A network really only involves the decisions of one person to make the blog sink or swim while people in a network work together to develop a blog and help each other to grow as both learners and teachers.

A good blogger will build a strong network by being a productive member of a blogging community. How will I apply this to education? Simple.

I envision that a way my class will share information is through blogging. I can give them options of topics to research and they can blog about their findings. My students can develop as bloggers by making smart decisions in who to follow and who to let follow them. The people that want to research dinosaurs can do that while another group of people can research asteroids. By making smart informed decisions behind the guide of their mentor (myself), they can all find research that will mutually benefit each other and the unit can become more than a unit. It can become an online community of smart young networkers. "Technology is an amplifier that can accelerate students and teachers towards wider understanding and deeper learning. Technology is not an elixir. It is not a silver bullet... Learning Transforms us and our students, not the tools" (Nussbaum-Beach).

The students can provide information for themselves and work to understand the information on a much deeper level.

Just remember: As a blogger you are committing to being a perpetual learner.

Enjoy!

For those of you with a linked schoology account --> please address the original article!