Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 7 (the last)

The LAST prompt EVER (can you tell I'm excited to be done?): Are you getting burnt out yet? What is making you feel that way? How can you sustain momentum? After you finish this course will you continue? Why or why not? Have you made any connections to other school districts or universities? What are you learning from them?

I write this as I wait for the opening keynote at ISTE 2016.  So, am I burnt out on connecting with other educators? Um...no.  Am I burnt out on my Master's program?  Um...yes.

Don't get me wrong.  It's been very enriching to go through this program (there were a few exceptions).  But, I'm ready to be DONE.  It was very hard to balance my education with creating time to enrich my students' education.

I've already talked in previous reflections about the connections, or lack thereof, that I've made.  I won't stop participating in PLNs and getting involved on Twitter and Google+.  Despite Bill Selak's suggestion during today's Ignite session, I'm wary of Snapchat.  I think I'll be a holdout.   I carefully straddle the line between giving to much access to my students of myself and trying to be an innovator. I tend to err on the side of not giving too much access.

I'm sure I'll learn a lot from them in the next few days at ISTE.

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 6

Here was this week's reflective prompt for my class: Do you have any global connections? How did you acquire them? If you don’t how will you try to make global connections? What do you hope that your global connections will do for you? What can you do for them?

Virtually, that is

I know that I have "global" connections, but they are indirect connections through PLNs and such.  I have one person from Germany that recently added me to one of their lists and followed me on Twitter and one from the Dominican Republic.  Is that global enough?

This did make me think about the fact that I don't think you can force connections.  This is a world of lurking more than dialoguing between each other.  At least that how I feel right now, as I tried to engage people last week in various discussions with questions posed to various hashtags.  I got no response other than people adding me to lists or favoriting my tweet.  I'm not trying to scold anyone with that, but it is a bit hard to make connections, at least meaningful ones when people don't respond.

Like I said last week, I think Google+ might be better for making connections.  At least if you are a part of the EdTechTeam's Google+ community.  I really enjoy EdTechTeam.  I went to one of their FutureReady Summits last summer, probably a year ago today actually, and right around Thanksgiving, I went to one of their GAFE Summits.  I'm going again in August as it's in my neck of the woods.  

It was during the last summit in Temecula, that I started making some of my connections.  I was able to do that through the GEG SoCal Google+ Community.  At both the summit and at CUE, they did a meetup, which is both intimidating and fun.  If you wanted to get started with finding a GEG (Google Educators Group) for your area, start here.  I highly suggest it.

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 5

This week's journal prompt asked me about what tools I'm finding most beneficial to my learning community.  By tool, I'm assuming they mean what platform.

I would have to say that right now, I'm finding Google+ the most beneficial.  At the very least, it's being the most communicative.  I feel a bit like I have to be a little spammy to get a response, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that.  Google+ won't allow for sending one post to multiple communities, so I have to make a public post and then share it with the communities I think the post would apply to.  I may be irritating those in multiple shared communities.

Depending on what communities respond, I may just start sharing with those communities in particular.  Right now, it looks like the winner is +EdTechTeam's community.

I've purposely asked specific questions on Twitter with PLN hashtags and gotten no direct response.  I've had a lot of people add me to their lists, but no actual responses to the questions I posed.

This is in anthesis to what I've read and been told about Twitter.  I wonder if it has something to do with the end of the school year.  Maybe Google+ is taking over as the educator's preferred way to interact with groups of like-minded educators?

The prompt also asked me about Open Education Resources (OERs) that I have found.  As part of my requirements for the NEA Foundation grant I received, I had to sign up for their OER site, Curriki, and contribute.  In using the search term "open education resources", I found the OER Commons site.

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 4

This past week was...sad and scary. I didn't really do much in trying to connect and got myself out there on my PLNs. Maybe after sharing this blog post, I'll go out and ask a question about trust and see if I get any responses, which I can then discuss next week.

So why did I fall short in participating in my PLNs this week? Why was it both sad and scary?

On Monday, Memorial Day, I got an email from my principal that a senior (whom I had as a sophomore) had passed away from an apparent suicide. I've since had this weird vague sadness about it. There is some disconnect because I don't have an empty seat to remind me of his absence every day, but I do have my memories of two years ago of a smart (if not slightly apathetic about school) kid rapping and beatboxing under his breath. I have my memories of the student who spoke so eloquently and philosophically about life and music; though I didn't always understand what he was saying, I got the meaning behind the words.  

I also have my anger. I will admit. I have my moments where I'm angry at him for doing it. Also my anger at the school for only telling his current teachers about the services and not the entire school. He had teachers all four years he was at our school. He had other teachers who cared about him.

His family started a GoFundMe to help with expense, they are almost at their goal. Please consider donating.

That was the sad (or part of it) so on to the scary. On Thursday, after school, I had just done a walk around the school and sat down to gather my things to head to class when a shelter-in-place call went out over the loud speaker. I went to lock my door and pulled a teacher and about 20 kids from the hallway into my room, turned off the lights and pulled down the shades. I called the office to let them know I had 20 kids in my classroom and to ask what was going on. I was told an armed intruder.

It took about 20 or 30 minutes before we were given the all clear to resume what we had been doing. Luckily, there hadn't been an armed intruder, but the possibility of one. The suspect turned himself in to police before he entered the campus.

So, how do you deal and cope as an educator when life gets real?

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 3

The suggested prompt for this week was:  What have you seen that you think may violate creative commons, fair use, or copyright law? Did you do anything about it? Why or why not?

Personal Screenshot

Nothing but the work my students complete comes to mind.  I've been trying to instill the need for students to respect people's work by doing image searches that filter for those allowed for reuse.  I go as far as to do an image search on their blog posts about their Passion Project for the images they use to make sure they show up under such a label and mark them down when they don't.  

Since I've started to make such an effort not to use anything that isn't labeled for reuse, I know how hard it is to ignore some excellent images because they haven't been labeled as such.  It's a process that is going to take time.  Especially since when you do an image search for "labeled for reused" and then filter for such, you get a group of photos like these.

I do notice that a lot of the people I admire in the EdTech world, particularly those that blog, do their best to follow copyright laws and adhere to creative commons practices.  I always do my best to give credit, where credit is due.  This applies in particular in the education world where we want to share and build off of other's great ideas.

Then this made me think of those who don't want to share for whatever reason they may have: insecurity over their ideas or competitive need to be the best.  In class, we've been talking a lot about PLCs and PLNs (Professional Learning Communities and Professional/Personal Learning Networks for the acronym-impaired).  We talked, in particular, this week about trust in both and what both PLCs and PLNs need to work well.  

I think some PLCs don't work very well because sometimes schools, districts, the teachers within it themselves create an atmosphere of competition.  The point of participating in a PLC is for the benefit of all the students, not just one set of students.  So, trust is broken when educators hold back things that worked for them because they want their students to do better than the other teachers.

What I personally need from both and PLC and PLN is reciprocity.  I can't continually give and not get anything in return (and this itself could lead some teachers to stop sharing).  I think, from experience, that when educators are just starting to build and explore PLNs, they are going to, more naturally, take than give.  Now that I'm getting more comfortable communicating and sharing in the social media world of education, I've been making the effort to share more instead of just take.  

It's okay to capture up great ideas for awhile; but at some point, you should start to give back.  Sometimes, being reciprocal isn't always about sharing your work and ideas, but giving feedback to those that do.  It doesn't need to be tit-for-tat.  

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 2

So, two classes down, six more to go.

This week we were supposed to start contributing to the networks we "joined".  I had already been building networks on these platforms, but I was a lot more passive about it.  So, I've gone out of my comfort zone and started to try and take a more active role with my contributions.

This isn't easy for me because I don't like pushing myself on to other people.  I don't invite myself over to other people's homes or parties, metaphorical or not, even when I know I am probably welcome.  I don't want to force someone to be fake nice to me.

So am going about contributing by sharing articles or information that I think may be of use to people.  I started with trying to start a dialogue on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter about Google Spaces.

So is Spaces a way to try & cross file sharing with social media? https://t.co/Ie3Y9WFmkh #occue #futureready #edchat #edtech #edtechchat

— Mindy B (@Miss_MindyB) May 16, 2016

On the Facebook group and on Google+ I started a very brief dialogue, but it fell flat on Twitter. That's the thing about social media. You can put yourself out there and no one has to return the favor and respond. I put myself out there with this blog, but very rarely do I get responses to my posts. However, thanks to the blogger data, I know that people read them. On the social networks, you don't usually know if people read your posts, so it can be a bit discouraging. That's why I think it's good to start slow.

On that note, that's why, knowing in particular that my classmates might be struggling with getting into Twitter, when I read the blog/podcast mentioned below, I used it as an opportunity to try and contribute meaningfully to Google+ and the cohort's facebook group.

Ultimately, you just need to keep trying. I'm hoping this class will push me to build strong networks of people who will support me and allow me to support them.

Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 1

So on Saturday, a week ago this posting, I walked in my graduation for my MAED.

I am not, however, actually done.  I have one more class:  Nurturing Learning Communities.

For this class, we'll have to journal weekly, so I'm going to take the opportunity to use this blog to do so.  My hope is that maybe it will help me blog more consistently as a whole after the class is over.

For our first assignment, we were instructed to join three new social networks and make connections with 50 people per network.  Our instructor, in our face-to-face meeting, felt that number was a little too high to make it meaningful.  I kind of agree for those that are just dipping their toe in reaching out to the educator community on these networks.  You want to start slow and try and build relationships and not just lists and circles and groups of people you never end up dialoguing with.

I am already plugged into most of the effective networks.  So, I hope I will be forgiven for not joining new ones.  But, this assignment did push me to reach out and add more people to my circles on Google+.  I had to think carefully about the people I wanted to add.  I just didn't want to add people whose names were unrecognizable or that I knew nothing about.  I went through my G+ communities members and added people to my circles whose names I recognized from GAFE Summits and CUE and EdTechTeam interactions.

This assignment also pushed me to find out about Twitter lists.  I had noticed in my TweetDeck feed that people had added me to some of their lists, but never really looked into it.  So, I found some lists that looked promising and subscribed and created a few of my own.

I'm hoping that this class will push me, even more, to reach out and create PLNs on these platforms.  What platforms do you use?  What do you like about one over the other?