One of the SLA teachers joins the conversation with her own blog. She’s got her own reflections on the past week and a half. Go take a look and welcome her to the blogosphere.
A View From the Schoolhouse
One of the SLA teachers joins the conversation with her own blog. She’s got her own reflections on the past week and a half. Go take a look and welcome her to the blogosphere.
Will blogged about his visit to the SLA planning session, and in it, he asked me a question:
Chris said something to the effect that his process had been informed by people all over the world, and that by being transparent about it on his blog, it had been a richer, more effective experience. (Chris, if you read this, maybe you could embellish that thought with a comment but not from the beach!)
So I’ll answer as a break from packing…
For me, the edu-blogsphere has been my "critical friends" group. When I’ve had questions, when I wanted feedback, I wrote (or podcasted, when writer’s block hit), and I got amazing feedback from people all over the country. The fun thing is that I actually can’t imagine trying to do with without blogging about it. It just seems so much harder to think about it that way.
I’m a collaborator by nature, and working as the sole "employee" of SLA for the first six or seven months of the project was not a natural state of being for me. There were a lot of folks here in Philly, from SDP folks to TFI folks, who could and did help. You met one of those folks yesterday in Wayne Ransom. But even with that, the idea that I could use my blog, write about ideas, questions, plans and get feedback from all of the world, really did inform my practice. When we had our curriculum summits, questions and ideas that folks posed on the blog made their way into the planning docs. When we created our interview questions, several of the questions folks came up with on the blog made it into the final draft. And when I needed help getting my head around 1:1 computing, folks like Wes Fryer and Miguel Guhlin were incredibly helpful.
And then, of course, folks like you and David Warlick and Christian Long and Arvind Grover took the time to take it off-line and come and spend time at summits and planning workshops and phone calls. The friendships and collaborations that moved off-line but started on the blogosphere have been some of the most valuable pieces of the puzzle as well.
When SLA opens in 53 days (eeeek!), it really will be a better, more democratic, richer school because so many really intelligent, passionate folks have had a hand in the planning of it.
Again, the crazy thought for me isn’t that I did it this way… it’s — why would anyone try to start a school without doing it this way? It was a whole lot easier — and better — to plan a school by culling the best ideas from anyone who takes the time to express them than trying to come up with every ideas myself. And I think — I hope — that by opening up the process of planning to the web, by inviting so many folks in and allowing their thoughts to change mine, it made me more willing to give up my own ideaas and be a more democratic, consensus-driven principal when the faculty came on board.
One of the amazing things about being a edu-blogger is, of course, getting to know the other folks out there who are thinking about and writing about and doing this stuff. Having Will close our planning session with a presentation that was both practical and inspirational was the perfect way to end a really amazing, exhausting and transformative two weeks. I think we all ended up with a sense of how much work we have in front of us, how much work we’ve already done, and how much we could achieve if we don’t allow ourselves to be limited by anything other than our (students, teachers, parents, even principal) own passion, energy, intelligence, creativity and curiousity. In the words of Tom Sobol, "When you have the chance to change the world, don’t screw up." No pressure.
So back to today… we closed our session with Will with the chance to really reflect on our own ideas for technology / new literacy infusion in the classroom.
Here were our prompts for the reflective journal (filled out on Moodle, of course…)
What the faculty wrote was amazing, and I may ask some of them for permission to post their entries on here, but for now, here’s my journal entry.
I want my kids to use computers… as a tool for information creation, retrevial and critique. I want them to understand what a communication tools is… how it changes and evolves and how we are in an age of faster change than ever before in human history. I want our kids to understand that they don’t have to be passive receptors of information, but active participants in the information age. I want my kids to read, write, produce, direct, podcast, v-cast, blog… I want them to do all those things critically — understanding that the choices they make when they craft a sentence or put together a series of cuts in a movie affect the way their message is understood. I want kids to have a message, and I want them to use these tools to better craft and publish those messages. I want our students to be able to see themselves as 21st century citizens with the right and responsibility to join in the global conversation in an informed and impassioned way.
I need to learn more about what 1:1 really can mean to facilitate our faculty’s ability to maximize the use of these tools. I need to more about how other schools and teachers are using the tools to keep demonstrating models of what is possible. I need to learn more about the dark side of 1:1 so that we can plan for it, expect it and mitigate it.
I worry most about sustainability. I worry about how much it costs to keep getting these laptops — and I hope that, should the money for the $1500 laptop run dry, we’ll be ready to use the $100 laptop.
I am most excited about watching the amazing and thoughtful group of teachers that comprise the SLA faculty use these tools in powerful and new ways. I am most excited about seeing them share their ideas with students… and seeing students share their ideas with us. I am most excited about seeing all of us blog about what we learn and, with luck, become a model that other schools can follow.
I will want more training on… new ways to continue to look at these tools to make our school more efficient… more democratic… more transparent… I will want to keep finding new ways to quickly and easily get information into the hands of the stakeholders (parents, students, teachers, administrators) who need it the most. I will want to keep working to make our school a 24/7/365 school where we all understand that the walls of the school are merely the physical representation of the collective mindscape that is SLA.
(Thanks, Will.)