geek.teacher

It’s kind of funny, since this place has never looked more like a ghost town, but I’ve actually done more blogging in the past few months than ever before. It just turned out to be not here. I am, of course, referring to Edcamp Philly, where for almost all intents and purposes, I kind of wound up being in charge of almost all communications, which meant tending to the blog and Twitter feed. Those letters to the Edcampers? I wrote them. Those Meet the Edcampers posts? Did almost all of the copy-pasting. That being said, I performed as only one tiny piece in the larger machine of the Edcamp organization team, and it would have all fallen apart if I had tried to do it on my own. I’m extremely fortunate to have met the right people that, as a team, we were able to pull together a great day.

And it was a great day, probably the absolute best day of my eight years as a teacher. To think that I helped pull together something which brought so much knowledge and joy to the educators in attendance is, to me, nothing short of miraculous. Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined doing something like this. One year ago, I could have imagined it, but would have dismissed it out of hand as unrealistic. Seven months ago, I met a wonderful group of teachers who all really wanted to do it, so we did.

But all of that is really besides the point, and not what I came here to blog about today. I really want to talk about one very unexpected moment I had during my day.

I ran a session right after lunch entitled Things That Suck. I’ll be honest I completely stole the format from UX Crank, who ran a session with the same name at BarCamp Philly back in November. The basic idea: throw out a topic, and have the people in the room move around the room to different areas to signify whether they think the topic you’re discussing a) sucks b) rocks c) is not worth caring about. here’s what we talked about:

• Merit Pay
• Interactive Whiteboards
• Full Inclusion
• Students with cell phones
• District Professional Development
• Grades

There was some great discussion as I started calling on people from the different sides to justify their positions and respond to what others were saying. a few times somebody would say something and half of the room would go “ooh!” and raise their hands to respond, which was awesome. On most of these issues, there’s no really right or wrong position, but you can learn a lot about the states of people’s schools by finding out their viewpoints. The cell phone debate was so good that we let it go a few minutes long.

The powerful moment, however came on the fifth topic. To set the scene a little while after we started, our roaming cameraman came in and miked me up to record the conversation. No problem, everybody’s having a good time. Until I say the magic words “Next topic: Your district’s professional development plan for you.” If you’ve never seen a roomful of teachers looking at you like deer caught in headlights, I don’t recommend it. They looked at me, shifted their gaze to the camera, looked back at me, and then I told the camera guy to cut the feed. As soon as he did, I’d estimate that fully three-quarters of the room made a beeline for the sucks side of the room.

People, we have a problem.

The people on the rocks side did an excellent job of presenting why we should all hope that our districts can be forward-thinking to give us meaningful professional development. In particular there seemed to be a strong element of collaboration, particularly in the use of Professional Learning Communities. On the sucks side, people seemed upset about being forced to sit through mandatory professional development programs that frequently follow a “do as I say, not as I do” model. They’re wondering why they’re told they must differentiate their instruction, but never have their professional development differentiated for them.

The main thing I got out of the discussion is that, it doesn’t matter who you are, what age you are, people are hungry for a choice. The people who blessed us with their presence on Saturday gave up their own free time so that they could connect with other teachers and hopefully learn something useful. They didn’t get any continuing education hours out of it, they genuinely wanted to learn. i think a big reason why we got such positive comments from the attendees is specifically because they had complete control over their own days. We actively encouraged people to vote with their feet and walk out of a session if it didn’t fit their needs or interests and find something that would.

At the afterparty, I got to talking with a few different people about the mindbending moment of people being afraid to speak their minds in public with a camera rolling, and we came to an important question: If teachers feel that strongly about how much they would love to have some choice and control in their own learning, what implication does that have for our own instruction? Something tells me that if we feel as if our kids wouldn’t love choice in the same way that we did on Saturday, we’re simply deluding ourselves.

Presented without commentary, a wordcloud from Tagxedo that I made from the options I have for comments when I do report card grades through Portal.

I was really rather bit of a terrible tease in my last post with promises of a “big, big announcement,” and then I left all three of my readers hanging terribly by never making the announcement here. I aim to fix that now by informing you that if you live anywhere within easy driving distance* of Philadelphia, you must come to edcamp philly on May 22!

edcamp philly is an unconference, which means it’s not like any other conference you’ve ever been to! Instead of the incredibly intelligent and good-looking organizers picking and choosing the schedule of the day’s events, we place that in the hands of the attendees. At the beginning of the day we’ll have an ominously empty schedule board that we expect the attendees to fill up. Fill up with awesomeness, that is! People do that for the first couple hours or so, do the meet and greet, and plan out the day.

So why am I, along with all of the other organizers, doing this? We have seen it in action ourselves! Back in November a whole bunch of teachers went to Barcamp Philly, which is a general sort of unconference. Most of us had never met in person before that morning. We kind of loosely talked online about ideas for a presentation that we could do, and a couple of days before we decided on a topic for the presentation. On the morning of Barcamp, we met up, chose a time and room for our presentation, and got to work on actually making the presentation. Five hours later, we presented the Social Media Survival Guide for Schools. While presenting, we met a couple of other awesome teachers presenting right after us, and, even though we didn’t quite know it yet, the core of our organizing uncommittee was born. We added a few more here and there as we went along, leading to a great group of people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with the past few months.

It was a really great day for us at Barcamp, and we want to bring the same fun and excitement we had to the K-12 education crowd. So head on over to http://www.edcampphilly.org and register for the event on May 22, 2010. I guarantee a great day, or you’ll get your money** back!

*My new friend Irene Tortolini has ruined the curve for all of you, because she’s coming down from the Boston area. So today’s definition of easy driving distance is 350 miles.

**Oh yeah, edcamp is a totally free event! So no need to worry about taking a chunk out of your fat-cat union salaries, my public school teaching friends.

Today I finished up my final session of Professional Development to explain to some of the teachers in my school basic concepts behind building a Personal Learning Network and the tools they need to do it. I previously wrote about my first sessions here, under the lofty opinion that I, and I quote, “don’t suck.”

I think that I chose appropriate terminology there, because my performance was admittedly rocky in following weeks. The last two weeks in particular, I found myself not so happy with my performance on the first day of the session, and more pleased with the repeat the following day. Would more practice have been more beneficial? Quite possibly. But having never really on my own developed a scope and sequence like this for adults, I think I also kind of needed to see the places where people got confused the first time so that I’d have a better handle on it the second time.

I ended up choosing a sequence of Docs > Diigo > Reader > Twitter, figuring that I’d move them increasingly from a position where they can just interact with people in the building to further interaction with a larger community.

General observations, in no particular order due to impending brain implosion from too many things running through it*:

• I scheduled an hour for each session, but I should have probably made them each at least 1.5 hours. The first day stretched naturally to 90 minutes without complaint, but the later sessions people had places to go and I had to let them go at 60 minutes. Especially the last two sessions, I have absolutely found myself kicking myself with the stuff I didn’t have a chance to get to, especially in regards to the important parts about really interacting with your larger PLN
• Seeing the teachers “get it” is just as awesome as seeing the lightbulb turn on in a child. I knew I had hit something today when one of the teachers in my group independently started to send @ messages to the other people in the group, which got all of them then sending messages to each other. Serendipitous.
• There is an awful lot of vocabulary to explain to a bunch of technological neophytes.
• My Twitter network is awesome. I asked for some shoutouts yesterday, and over 90 people responded. Brilliant. More than anything else, the international tweets truly wowed some of my group.
• When you’re showing off Twitter to your audience, it’s pretty comical to open it up just in time for them to see Ira Socol calling Diane Ravitch a “war criminal.” and then have to explain that, no, he’s not joking.
• I loved it when they realized that someone took really good notes in Google Docs, and they could ask her to share it with everybody at once.
• Some people had to miss the session today but asked if I could still show it to them anyway next week. So they want to know!
• I’m honestly not sure how many will go on to use these tools on a regular basis. If I get one or two regular Twitter users out of the 15 or so people I started with, is that a success or failure? Sure, it’s two more than we had before, but that’s a pretty horrible ratio.
• Piggybacking on the last point: could I have done more to get them using the tools, or is exposing them to the tools enough?

I have a lot to reflect on, and I’m sure I’ll have more in another week or so when I get the Evaluation Form together on Google and ask them to fill it out. Right now I’m a bit worried that they’ll be too soft on me and not point out stuff that I need pointed out to me. Conversely, I’m also worried that they’ll confirm my worst fears about doing a terrible job. For the record, I don’t think I did a terrible job, which is why it would be terrifying to find out that I actually did so. When I get some results back, maybe I’ll post a followup assuming that I haven’t died from mortification.

*Big big announcement coming real soon. I might explode from not telling the world yet.