Collaboration

Collaboration is an essential element for successful teaching and a significant part of my repertoire. I regularly share with and learn from colleagues to ensure the best possible instruction for all students. My students also benefit from working alongside each other in meaningful ways. Besides day-to-day collaboration, I have embarked on occasional projects that go beyond the classroom to incorporate school and community.

"Befriending the Cloud" is a presentation I recently gave at the Google for Education Summit here in Bangkok. The purpose was to share with other educators the process and benefits of my students' recent exchange with University of Akron pre-service teachers, as described in earlier posts.

Here are some samples of other collaborations I have undertaken to benefit my students and include the wider community in our classroom learning: 

• Global Issues Discussion Series - Evening lectures presented by my 9th grade Humanities students and local experts 
• RIS Teacher Recruitment Brochure - includes "Best of Thailand" articles written by my 8th grade Language Arts students
• School visit from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - invited by students in my 7th grade Civics class

I'm always interested in collaboration opportunities, and learning about ways in which other educators go beyond the classroom, so please share your experiences and ideas.

See One, Do One, Teach One

One short year after participating in and meeting well-connected educators at Learning 2.011, and six months after EARCOS12, I was offered an opportunity to present at in my school's professional development in-service today.

Compared to many illustrious and inspiring individuals in my Personal Learning Network (PLN), my dabbling in the wide, wide world of connected educators does not add up to much. However, the combination of my LinkedIn profile, few dozen Tweets, a limited Edmodo presence, my yet-to-be-published Facebook page, and this well-intended, if skeletal, blog represents an honest attempt.

Much of my connectedness is self-directed; my husband has also been active in cultivating global contacts and resources, so I have also had a partner with whom I could exchange thoughts along the way. The development of my growing PLN is also thanks to (mostly) indirect motivation from the people with whom I have connected; a PLN's value-added.

So, my husband Kevin and I joined forces today and shared ideas and resources about creating PLN's with our colleagues. Though neither of us are experts, we focused on the vast resources and benefits of a PLN (special note: all presentation resources came to us by way of PLNs), tools we use or know about, as well as some of the trials and errors that we have made along the way (plenty!). We tried to keep the presentation pretty basic and encouraging, knowing that very few of our colleagues regularly used tools such as Twitter or LinkedIn. In fact, Twitter shut us down after numerous coworkers signed up for new accounts. Think we alerted the spam blockers?

Ideally, a few more people may now broaden their networking beyond the school walls to contribute to the global education community, learn from it, and pass the benefits along to their well-deserving students. See one, do one, teach one; it's not just for surgery anymore.

Conundrum

Whether you are 14 or 40, your identity is at once obvious and obscure - for most people, at least. When deciding on this year's curricular themes with colleagues, there was no inkling how close to home the "identity" theme would end up being for me. As I ask my students to examine and reflect on their own identity through stories, poems, political theories, discussions, human nature, societal influences, music, and many other lenses; little do they realize how much related introspection I do right alongside them, and because of them.

Blame it on the new 1:1 laptop program. I eat, sleep, teach, and talk technology, or so it feels some days. Armed with a dusted-off website, a brand new blog, lots of tenacity, and a healthy dose of naivety, I attempt to stay slightly ahead of my 8th graders, if on a completely different path - the slow lane, if you will. To this end, I recently shared my blog posts with students in a lesson about responsible blogging and commenting. With new rubrics in hand, they read and honestly evaluated my posts, scored each entry, and explained why I earned the score. They complimented some of my word choices and use of metaphors, though resoundingly concluded that the blog audience was not them.

Oh. Right. Audience. The same basic focus I try to instill in their writing day in and day out. Who is my audience? Why am I writing at all? The questions are pretty obvious, though frighteningly not as instinctual as they should be coming from a Language Arts and Social Studies teacher. So, my conundrum is directly related to the monumental shift in thinking about the ways we communicate, collaborate, and connect in the digital world. The options are truly as limitless and as inspiring as any cultural renaissance that has gone before.

The terrific Learning 2.011 technology and education conference held in Shanghai last weekend proved this point exactly, and added plenty of fire to my simmering consternation: Is there a way to be simultaneously protective and authentic online? Do I want my digital identity to be personal, professional, or some gratifying weave of all my life's elements? Wanting to reap the benefits of the educational potential only available by embracing digital connections force me to welcome the riddle and get out there on the digital map to make my humble mark, whatever it may be.

What are your thoughts about digital identity?

Identity TTT by Torie Leinbach @ Personal Collection (CC-BY-NC 2.0)

Pushing the Envelope

The start of the school year is way more thrilling than the start of a calendar year, even if the confetti and crystal balls are replaced with clean uniforms and bulging pencil cases.  Come August, there are always dozens of students to eagerly greet and meet, a multitude of strategies to perfect, lessons to tweak, colleagues to catch up with, and initiatives to implement.  The 2011-12 school year has been more exciting than usual because of the notable number of new projects taken on for the sake of changing times, and our amazing students.

The 1:1 laptop program is one of the noticeable changes in my classroom. My students are like the astronauts, happily exploring previously undiscovered resources and skills that are accessible in the wonderland wonder known as the internet. I am the commander they rely on for some direction. Truthfully, all I really provide is a nudge. The young teenagers are fearless in the vast space of the 2.0 world.

In the 20 or so days since walking in the door of our educational vessel, the students have taken off full blast with any task asked of them so far: blogging, commenting, making and uploading music videos, e-mail, citing, collaborating, completing forms, and note taking.  There have been some technical glitches and false starts, but none have outweighed our collective determination and curiosity.  In a moment of looking back with awe, I find myself especially eager to see what technological and academic adventures the next nine months will bring.


Laptop by Dan Barbus @ flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)