Leader

__**Media Specialist as Leader**__ Aug. 27-30 I've been engaging in some good dialogue with our Academic Coach about some of our professional development this year and how I can help facilitate that using Web 2.0 tools. As a faculty we are reading "The Parallel Curriculum: A Design to Develop Learner Potential and Challenge Advanced Learners." The authors that have contributed to the book are the leaders in the field of Gifted Education including Tomlinson, Kaplan, and Renzulli. I proposed that we set up a blog or wiki to facilitate discussion or a bubblus page for brainstorming. The Academic Coach liked the idea of a blog. I was going to us pbworks or wikispaces, but decided to go with blogger since it looked like it would meet our needs for this purpose. The url is http://lmsocd.blogspot.com/. I set her up as coauthor of the page so that she can modify it and/or blog as an author since she is the Academic Coach. Setting up the blog itself and the on going discussion probably would add up to 45 minutes to an hour. I'm sure that managing the blog throughout the semester and rest of the year will probably require more time and trouble shooting. I don't foresee any problems at this point. (1 hour)



Aug. 31 Today I spent an hour with our Academic Coach getting her onto the blog (http://lmsocd.blogspot.com/) which will focus on the book that we will reading "Parallel Curriculum." I think this will create some really good discussion. I spent a lot of the time navigating through the blog with her to familiarize ourselves with the design options and how it might work to manage the blog. We set her up with administrative privileges so that she can make the posts to facilitate discussion and delete anything if necessary. This will also create some positive PR attention that will spotlight how talented our faculty is. (1 hour)

Sept. 1 The settings on the blog had to be adjusted to get everyone access to make comments to respond to the postings. We changed the settings from members only have access to those with google accounts. I think it worked, but we'll see. It was funny to see people's responses. I think some were seeing it as more work, and some were seeing it as less or just something that will help facilitate discussion. We'll see how it goes. (30 min)

Sept. 2 Turns out that some people were having trouble getting access to the blog. I worked with one of the teachers having problems and for some reason they were being bounced back to the blogger home page instead of the blogspot page for our blog. After changing some settings in the preferences to not allow pop-up windows, everything was fine. I created a book mark for her on her bookmarks toolbar and everything seemed to work fine after that. (45 min.)

This link may work better: http://lmsocd.blogspot.com/?zx=4b360ca639ca3655



March 27 I am now a member of the International Society for Technology in Education. This will give me access to ISTE online journals and publications, ISTE ning and other social networks online, ISTE discounts for conferences, and custom list serves depending on what you're interested in. The member ning has links to all kinds of blogs and even an ISTE iPhone app which I just down loaded. VERY COOL STUFF!

I just participated in an Elluminate Live! Webinar through Learn Central with Sir Ken Robinson, PhD on his book "The Element." The future of education was the theme. The format of the webinar was very interesting. There were over 500 people in the webinar and at first I was thinking that with that many people that it would be impersonal, but it wasn't. Anyone can join the discussion at any time and a map of the world showed how participants were present from pretty much every continent. There were some bandwidth issues at first, but they were resolved by everyone turning the video quality down and by Dr. Ken, turning his audio quality down. The chat feature that was going constantly was a little distracting, but still relevant to the points being made. The main theme of the webinar was shifting education to focus more on creativity and innovation through relationships in community, both in person and through technology. People are chatting and putting in links to blogs and websites, referencing things that support what is being said. Such an interesting format for any 21st century learner, especially for the one that can multi-task, which is probably most of us. In the end, they opened it up for questions. It was especially interesting to see how participants could engage a leader in the field in a very personal way, even though they are geographically so far apart! The moderator opened a separate website to continue the discussion after the webinar was finished. (2 hours)