Because my school does not have a virtual school platform like Moodle or Blackboard, we have opted to simply asked the teachers to post pages, links, .pdfs and .doc to our school’s CSM run website. While this presentation of worksheets and online activities is limited in scope, it is still better than nothing.

The American School, where my wife works, is fairing a bit better and has even received some press for their use of Blackboard. For years they have been encouraging teachers to use Blackboard for such an emergency, and while teachers have begrudgingly posted a few assignments here and there the tool has largely been unused till now. Now that the emergency is upon them, however, teachers are scrambling to quickly learn how to become “virtual” teachers, and in doing so are finding the limitations, not only of Blackboard as a tool, but they are also realizing that teaching using online tools is more than simply posting assignments on a web storage space.

Teaching online, or being a virtual teacher, is more than a skill set; it is a mindset and a philosophy. Teachers who are well versed in a variety of tools, not just Blackboard will fair much better in times of crisis and will be better prepared for finding ways to reach their students than say teachers who rarely use technology at all. Teachers who themselves are connect and use many tools for their own learning will barely miss a step. While I understand the unease these teachers are experiencing, I think their apprehension speaks more to the limitations offered not only by blackboard, but of school philosophies when it comes to technology use and pedagogy.

This crisis has clearly illustrated that creating a valuable web-friendly ethos/community of teachers well versed with technology, is the first step in creating a sustainable system to deal with not only emergencies, but in helping to maintain strong ties between teachers and students beyond the classroom. Communicating with students outside the classroom whether through Blackboard or other free online tools must be an ongoing activity for the entire school. If students are used to checking a blog for assignments or working on a Google Doc with a peer, then not being in school will not impact their schooling as much as say a student who has no way to contact their teacher beyond email.

I am not writing this post to make teachers feel bad about their or to discredit any schools. We are all doing the best we can. I just want to point out that using technology is not something that schools can force their teachers to do only in times of emergency. Teachers who are not familiar with a variety of tools that will help them connect with their students will stumble and become anxious when forced to change the way they teach. Schools must imagine different possibilities:

We need to imagine a school where everyone blogs- teachers, students, parents, and administration. Imagine a school that has its own youtube channel and podcast space. Imagine a school that uses chatzy as a back channel even when school is in session. Imagine a school where students are constantly working together using Google Docs and wikis. Imagine a school where almost every knows how to use several tools to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Imagine a school where the school day never ends, and the work can be done anywhere any time. Imagine a school where the teacher uses class time to coach and guide and not lecture or “teach.”

This is the type of school I am trying to build. You can use Blackboard, but the beauty of the Web is that it is all free and available to us all. We simply must be able to take some risks and trust our students to learn from their mistakes.

Here are some examples of what is possible:

I had planned to use this week to get my students started on our online 2.0 journey. I already have two classrooms, one in Canada and one in Thailand, waiting to meet us. We have sketched out some rough ideas of how our three classes will interact, but I needed to start showing my students the tools and skills they will need to make the kinds of connections I want them to make throughout the year. I was going to walk them through each step in class, but due to Swine Flu we were forced to “just do it.”

I was actually a bit excited when I heard we would not be in school. Rather than fumble around with how I would deliver my traditional material, I began instead to think about how I would help my students quickly learn about and use a variety of tools that would help them connect and stay tuned with our class community. I was not interested in posting worksheets for them to complete. I wanted to recreate our classroom online, so we could have conversations. It is this sense of community that I feel is missing from Blackboard.

The first thing I did was launch our class blog. I had planned to start blogging soon anyway, so it was perfect timing. I used the blog as the central place to communicate with the kids. Unlike Blackboard where individual classes are closed and hard to access, a simple blog allows me to share information, media, and much more in an environment that inspires commenting, conversations, and community. The hope was to quickly create an area where we could meet and move onto completing a variety of tasks.

Once the blog was published, I had to find a way to direct the kids to it. Out of 50 students I had the emails of about 29; I started there. I posted a link on our school website under the page for English work, and on the first day I had 81 visits to the blog. Because my students are not yet familiar with RSS, I had to find a way to let them know when there was going to be new posts.

I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page, (I have asked that adults not become a fan of the page yet. I want my students to feel safe and really understand what we are doing, before I introduce our network to the bigger global network.) In three days already has 23 fans. I embedded a Facebook feed in the sidebar to allow students who do not have Facebook a chance to stay tuned with announcements. I can now also send the group updates straight from Facebook. I now have an easy way to share class announcements with the kids in the place where they spend their time online. Instead of hoping that they would check Blackboard, I know that they can simply get an status update telling them to take a survey on the blog as they chat with their friends.

For the first task, I asked students to create Gmail accounts. Later in the year I want to use Google Docs and Google Reader, so I felt that this was a crucial first step. With little help from me, I now have 23 students created Gmail accounts. A few students had problems so I set up a chatzy chat room to answer questions. I experimented with various video conferencing sites and dodged a major bullet and didn’t use Tiny Chat due to some inappropriate material on their site, but found TokBox to be very useful and I hope to use it in the future.

I’ve used Youtube as a way to create videos for my students who are not native English speakers and may not be able to read all of the text on the site. As the students perform each task, I give them a little more to do. They have in three days: created Gmail accounts, commented on a blog, signed up to be a Facebook Fan, responded to some quotes and images, and finally answered a survey I posted from a Google Form.

Not only have I not fallen behind this week, I have actually helped my kids learn real life skills by doing and not just talking about it. By quickly building our online community, I think the kids will better understand the power of these tools and how they can use them to help their learning.

I hope you will stay tuned to what we are doing throughout the year. I have big plans for the year and this is a great group of kids. We will create individual blogs next week, as well as set up RSS on Google Reader, begin to think about tagging bookmarks with Delicious, and we will set up a class wiki and Flickr page. Why have I chosen these tools? I see them as the most vital for my own learning. I use them often, feel comfortable using them, and I really understand their value in creating a network.

Empowering teachers to use these tools is a huge first step in creating a school that can function on or offline without missing a step. Swine Flu or no Swine Flu, I know my class will be connected and ready to learn, share, and teach others. The question now is how do we get other teachers on board and feeling comfortable using these tools?

If you are interested and want ideas on how to be a more effective virtual teacher join us on our journey. We are learning as we go, but would love the company. What do you think? How has Swine Flu affected your teaching? What has worked for you? What has been hard? Do you find Blackboard useful? Do you use any other tools to connect with your students? Let the conversation begin!

Like many stories of connections made across time zones, cultures, and age groups this one involved some risk taking, some curiosity, some opened minds, and I hope some learning. Let me lay out what happened:

A few days ago I started reading The Last Child in the Woods. It sparked in me a sense of panic and guilt about the amount of time my daughter spends outdoors connecting to nature, getting fresh air, and exploring. I decided I wanted us to begin exploring our surroundings together. Even if our immediate surroundings was an empty dry desert field covered in garbage and construction refuse.

We went outside with our cameras in hand to see what we could discover. I wish I had a field recorder, so I could have recorded her excitement and enthusiasm. We spoke of the wind, the setting sun, and how plants can grow with little water. We spoke about the power of art to make the ugly appear beautiful. We asked questions of each other. We guessed at answers. The two of us were a mobile outdoor classroom. Father and daughter in an empty field in the desert.

When we came home I asked her if she wanted to see her pictures on the big screen of the computer and talk about what she had seen. The result was a very simple photo essay. Being the proud dad that I am, I decided to share the experience with my Twitter network. I thought that was the end of it, until last night when I noticed several comments come pouring in. After a quick request as to who was responsible I found out that @wmchamberlain had shared Kaia’s blog post with his class. I suggest you go and read some of the 43 comments.

I immediately got in touch with him through Twitter, and he told me that a few of his students were curious if we had electricity in Doha. I told him, if he was interested, I could Skype into his classroom and answer some quick questions. So there we were, a small classroom in rural Missouri and me in my kitchen talking about our surroundings. We were following our curiosity. We were discovering new things. We were learning, beyond classroom walls, because we had all decided to take risks and be open with our lives. I told wmchamberlain’s students that since Kaia is only three she may have a hard time reading their comments and really grasp what is going on. I suggested they create some video comments. Which they did:

The next day Kaia and I sat in our kitchen and watched their video. She is still too young to really grasp the connections that she is making, but in a few years these connections and this type of interaction will be ubiquitous in her life. I hope that her teachers are ready to help her continue on this journey.

Later I found another comment from a teacher in New Zealand and a Tweet from another teacher in Alaska who was impressed by the work she had observed unfold on Twitter. This story would be pretty cool if it ended here, but I hope that other teachers and other classroom will share this story with their classrooms and parents communities. I hope that this story could not only be a springboard for starting discussion about open pedagogy, taking risks, and connected classrooms, but I also hope that it will open people’s eyes to the themes presented in The Last Child in the Woods. I would love to see people share their stories about how they are taking their kids outdoors. I hope that classrooms will begin to share how they are reconnecting with nature. The irony being that they are using technology to weave their stories together.

In closing and on a different note, this experience was also eye opening for me as a parent, because having Kaia exposed like this made me hyper aware of how vulnerable I am making her. I am sure many of you read Alec Curosa’s post a few month back about his Flickr stalker. I started to think about how much trust we ask that parents put in us as teachers. Kaia’s blog started as a way to share photos with family, it has quickly become a way that we are documenting her life. And now, it is becoming a way that she is connecting with people throughout the world. This is scary. Part of me wants to pull back and keep her our little secret. But if we want our students to feel comfortable and be cautious online, we must be able to do the same with our own children.

As teachers and technology evangelist it is easy to ask parents to allow us to expose their children to a variety of experiences online, but as a parent it can all seem so scary. I agree with many people that if we choose to live open lives online, we must trust that the positive experience will outweigh they dangerous ones, but there is nothing like seeing pictures of your daughter on a youtube video created by someone else to spark up the paranoia. Where can this go? Will I always be able to control it? Should I be able to? These are all important questions to ask as we push the boundaries of our lives and our learning online.

What do you think? What is the value in this experience? Is the risk of exposing ourselves and our children online worth the connections that will be made and the lessons that will be learned?

Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say about these meetings at this time, but please check out the wiki for more information on what we have discussed and a list of the guest speakers, which have included Gary Stager, Kim Cofino, and recently David Warlick. Not a bad list, thanks Julie!

It has been a pleasure to attend these meetings and learn from, not only the “experts,” but the members of the group who attend the meetings as well.

I am writing this post to firstly thank Julie and secondly to share this video:

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have much to say about it as this time, you can read Julie’s post for a more comprehensive overview, but I have had one thought that lingers in my head since we spoke:

Curiosity + discovery= Learning

I live in Doha, Qatar, and I recently planted a few trees on my roof top garden. My daughter and I were on the roof tending to our young tress when she noticed several caterpillars. She was fascinated with our hairy little friends.

I remember being enthralled with the whole process of metamorphosis as a child and wanted to introduce this transformation to my daughter.  Sure she is only two-and-a-half, but such a magical event can be appreciated at any age. Right? We took one of the caterpillars, some leaves, a branch and put it all in a jar, hoping that we could watch the entire metamorphosis over a span of a few weeks.

The little guy is doing okay. He is eating the leaves, growing, and dropping a massive amount of poops, which are coming in handy for our other project- potty training. “See the caterpillar goes poo-poo too.”

Well that was away back in December and at the time we felt that we had identified our little friend as a Gastropacha (Stenophylloides) populifolia.

But after seeing the moth, it looks more like a Lasiocampa (Pachygastria) trifolii.

It had been nearly three months, and I had begun to give up on the moth. I was sure it was dead. Just yesterday, my wife said I think the moth is out, and my daughter was so excited to see the moth too. I am sure the concept of metamorphosis is way above her comprehension at the age of two-and-a-half, but you should have seen her face as she spoke to the moth, go on fly now. Can you fly moth?

I am not sharing this story because I think it is cute. There are many lessons here on what learning looks like. The lessons that could be learned if this process were given to older students are immeasurable.

We are always deriding young people of needing instant gratification and having short attention spans, but how often do we give them the chance to slow down to the speed of nature when they are studying it? Forced to cram our time with curricula expectations, we are shortchanging our students by rushing throiugh worksheets to be ready for exams.

If we want them to take the time to really connect with a topic and learn, we have to give the time. After all it takes three months for a caterpillar to transform into a moth.

What are your ideas? Can you see the benefit of expecting students to maintain focus and patience on an idea like this?

Readers of this blog may have noted that I am at times overly critical of the very technologies I promote, but I want to reassure you that I am a strong proponent of inquiry based learning, and I believe that network learning is the right direction for anyone who is obsessed with investigation, and at the end of the day isn’t the search for truth the very fabric of education. Let me share a few intersecting stories about a little girl, her dad, and a moth caterpillar that may shed some light in this topic.

The story begins in Shanghai at a technology conference of all places. I was sitting in a session led by Alan Levine on photography and the power of Flickr. Alan was talking about the different things he does with Flickr in regards to tags, when he mentioned that you can post a photo of almost anything: a plant, animal, or insect and tag it is as unidentified or unknown and people will identify it for you. At the time the idea seemed quaint, and it immediately fell into the “pretty cool” category, but I didn’t give it much more thought.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I live in Doha, Qatar, and I recently planted a few trees on my roof top garden. My daughter and I were on the roof tending to our young tress when she noticed several caterpillars. She was fascinated with our hairy little friends.

I remember being enthralled with the whole process of metamorphosis as a child and wanted to introduce this transformation to my daughter.  Sure she is only two-and-a-half, but such a magical event can be appreciated at any age. Right? We took one of the caterpillars, some leaves, a branch and put it all in a jar, hoping that we could watch the entire metamorphosis over a span of a few weeks.

The little guy is doing okay. He is eating the leaves, growing, and dropping a massive amount of poops, which are coming in handy for our other project- potty training. “See the caterpillar goes poo-poo too.”

What does any of this have to do with inquiry based learning and Alan Levine? Never a fan of jargon, I am a bit embarrassed to use the term life-long learner, but I did entere education because I have an insatiable curiosity. I wanted to know what kind of caterpillar I was dealing with, so maybe I could take care of it better and make sure it made it to butterflyhood. Let the search begin!

Let me walk you through how networked learning is helping me on my quest. My first step, and I am sure the first step of most K-12 students is that I Googled Qatari caterpillars, only to find a series of websites about the famous tractor company. I can just see the blank expressions on the faces of most 5th graders at this stage of their research, “but that is not what I want.”

What happens next? I had no clue as to where to start. How does one begin an investigation without a starting point? I wished I could just post a picture of it on the Internet and have someone tell me what it was.  I remembered Alan’s session from Learning 2.008, which in and of itself is the first step of network learning. I didn’t remember exactly what to do, so I sent Alan a Tweet and within minutes he had sent me a response giving me instructions:

I ran upstairs took a photo of the caterpillar and added it to Flickr. I did some other research on my own, as any good academic should, and found there are also groups on Flickr that help you identify insects. I sent out a few Tweets hoping that with the combined power of my network and Flickr I would have some answers.

This is really a remarkable thing. We are now able to just post a picture of almost anythinf on the Internet and have someone tell us what it is! Think of the power that gives your students. Think of the way they must learn to interact with others in order to use this power most effectively. I think it is truly amazing.

Within twelve hours I had my first comment on Flickr. At this point in the story I would love to say that someone had correctly identified my caterpillar end of story, but that is not the case. I think often times our students are just looking for the “right” answers as well. Whether they find it on Google, Wikipedia, or someone tells them the “right” answer, the end, and an easy one at that is their objective. While I admit I was a little disappointed when I cut and pasted the answer the guy from Flickr gave me into google and the caterpillar that came up for: Prominents (Notodontidae) looked nothing like the bug in my jar, I realized that learning and research are like many things in life- processes not products.

Posting to Flickr and waiting for a response from a network of people was not the end result, but one step in the process of my learning. When I started I had no idea where to look to even find a starting point for identifying this caterpillar. I was looking at tractors for goodness sake! But with the tips from one person, I had a lead. I was on the hunt.

I cut and pasted words like Prominents, Notodontidae, and Clostera. I got closer and closer. At this point, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Alan was still supporting me with this Tweet:

Now his vast network of experts was on the hunt too. I posted my findings on the Flickr Page in hopes that they will help narrow down the search:

Realistically there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of species of caterpillars. I may never find the exact match I am looking for, but that is not the point.  The point is that I am not satisfied merely punching random terms into google expecting answers and giving up when I don’t find them.

I am interacting with people and hoping they will help me on my journey toward the answer. This process is powerful. This collective, communal learning is what learning looks like. My daughter is only two-and-a-half, and most of what I have said is way over her head, but already she is asking me to watch caterpillars on daddy’s computer. She knows that Youtube is a powerful tool to help visualize and make real so many concepts that are new to her. We watched a Monarch butterfly hatch from its cocoon, hopefully soon we will be able to post our caterpillar hatching on youtube as well in hopes of helping others on their journey. I hope to be able to add the name of the species.

If you have any information regarding this caterpillar please leave it here.

About two hours after writing this post, I received a Flickr Mail from Bob Barker, the guy who had made the first comment,leading me to this page. We will wait and see what the moth looks like, but it looks like we have a Gastropacha (Stenophylloides) populifolia in our jar.

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