CLAS, Ning, and my next installment

Yeesh... where has the time actually gone? CSAP time already (but I'll reserve comment on that topic; heh). For those who read my first two installments of Education in the 21st Century on Elephant Journal, the third part is up and posted.

Last weekend I did a presentation at the spring conference of the Colorado Language Arts Society (CLAS) on technology in the classroom. I have to admit that before I started, I was a bundle of nerves and was pretty much looking for any excuse to not do it. It's funny: I can stand up in front of 25-30 students all day long, but when it comes to standing up in front of a dozen adults, I'll take a pass whenever I can. Fortunately, it ended up going really well. I hit on Google docs, Google sites, Blogger, podcasting, live blogging, videos, etc. As it turned out, a lot of it was really new to many of the people in the room, even though I thought it would be "old hat" to them. I ended up running out of time, and I really enjoyed myself once it was all said and done.

My newest "toy" in the classroom is Ning. Doug A. and I are collaborating on a project involving Plan B 3.0; yesterday I hit up Jeff L. to see if he wanted to join us (you're next, Liz!). Actually, as far as that goes, if anyone is interested, I know I'd be up for it... could prove to be very interesting. At any rate, I want my students to not only collaborate within the class, but between the classes as well. To that end, I set up a class Ning page for the kids. Will it work? Well, we'll see I guess, but I do think there's some very interesting potential to become something pretty amazing.

*UPDATE*

I've been doing some digging around on Ning and after a few trial and errors, I have a few tips/suggestions:

First, I found that even though I told the students it was in essence an online classroom and needed to make sure their profiles reflected that, I still had a few students post pictures and choose names that weren't school appropriate. I am still working with those more recalcitrant students around that issue. Ning does give a privacy option when it comes to who can see and join the page. So far I haven't worried about who's joining it, especially since there is an option to ban members, though I can change that to approving members that try to join if I need to.

Ning does give the option to approve just about anything that could be posted to the page: videos, photos, blog posts, etc. I engaged it after a few students were adding pictures of themselves to the main page.

The students have really bought into it so far, but all we've done is set up profiles. They haven't quite realized how I plan to use this for networking, posting assignments, etc. I have a feeling that they may become slightly horrified when they realize that their "MySpace for my class" is going to be used against them... ha ha!

Real World Collaboration

Advocates of 21t Century Teaching and Learning frequently refer to project-based learning, authentic assessment, and real world collaboration. With a quick google or technorati search you can find oodles of classroom examples and definitions of these concepts. However, given that education (to many) does not actual reside in the real world, I wonder if teachers and administrators can clearly point to an example of real world collaboration. I hope we can all point to examples from our work...do we use these with our students and are they compelling? I would love to hear examples of real world collaboration in response to this post.

Here is mine:

Last year prior to the release of CSAP scores (our state assessment), I proposed that we announce the results in a different (or even innovative way). I wanted to make sure that district staff were the first to hear from the Superintendent (they often complain they are the last to hear anything) and I wanted to demonstrate the power of new technologies. After a conversation with my brother-in-law Daniel Sallick of Homefront Communications, I proposed that we do a video news release on the web rather than a standard news release. I needed the assistance of the district video producer and the district application developer. The Assessment Department, Public Information, and Technology Services all had to collaborate and our timeline was short with about 5 days to plan, develop, and launch the news release. I wrote the text, one of the Assessment Department staff created data profiles for all schools, the video producer planned the shoot, edited the script, and created the final video. The district application developer altered the website to allow videos to be played within a page and ran countless tests to guarantee the video would play on the majority of computers. In the end the project ran smoothly and was satisfying as the launch garnered a lot of positive feedback.

Final product