Stepping up to the plate

Today I shared a lot with my faculty after school. It was a typical All Staff meeting except for one thing: I was the only thing on the agenda. Turns out, it’s a good thing I was well prepared to go 45 minutes with material because the principal said to share some visions for technology and training opportunities so I spent many days going over what I could share. I worked on my speech in my head and had lots of ideas floating around but wasn’t sure of what direction to go.

Then I found a couple of great Innovative Education videos on You Tube that I could share to get the ideas flowing. I was a little nervous about it because I haven’t been used to pushing new ideas at the staff. I have bee the Technology Coordinator for 8 years and have built up our infrastructure and maintained the status quo but I don’t feel like I have been much of a visionary or even doing that great of a tech trainer because I thought most teachers were too busy to have someone pushing new tech ideas at them.

But something snapped a couple months ago when I started reading lots of posts of other great web 2.0 thinkers and educators on Twitter and I put together a presentation of many of the great tools I had been using lately. I showed them Google Earth with the new 3D buildings. I demonstrated Skype just a little bit. Didn’t even have someone lined up to call but they got the idea. I shared all the tons of resources we have on our network now and challenged them: What are you really doing with all the great resources we have?

Afterward, I had a pretty good feeling that it went well. The principal called and thanked me for doing a great job presenting. I sent out an email asking the teachers one question: What is one thing that stands out in your mind from my presentation? I got several replies right away. They had gone back to their rooms and started looking up some of the things I talked about. Several had already downloaded Google Earth 4.3! I was pleased that I had pushed myself to share what was really on my mind and that they were receptive to it.

I had shared some of my apprehensions in my last blog and got ONE comment. Thank you Paul! You can go back and read it but he basically said to show them how I have been drinking from the fountain of knowledge and they may catch on as well.

And thanks also to half dozen Twitter people for shouting out to the group during the preso. At least one teacher went back right away and signed up for Twitter as well.

My May Posting

OK, so everyone starts blogs with good intentions of writing to them often. I shared a lot of where I was at with open source and beginning to explore social networks and web 2.0 tools back in April. It was a good milestone for me and I can look back to that time and see how far I’ve come.

I have been on Twitter a lot since then and am up to about 55 followers. I am following 75 so there’s always a lag of people I choose to follow and how many actually decide, for whatever reasons, to follow me and perhaps see what I’m all about. I don’t contribute too much yet in the way of web 2.0 stuff because I’m still very much a learner and not a leader in this next phase of technology in education.

I keep a “diary” of usernames and passwords for all the sites (most) that I join up to. I am up to 30 pages now in a little blue book I got from Microsoft back when they were introducing Server 2003 and Visual STudio .net. It only measures 5X7 and has a wire spiral bound and hard translucent cover pages. Very handy to keep around. Adding all the info was pretty much in chrono order so it made no sense. If I wanted to find where my new pay pal pw was, I would start at page one and start flipping and maybe stumble upon it. I finally make a 3 page index in alpha order after I got to page 26. it really helps. My point in mentioning all that, besides wondering if any other geeks out there are doing something like that as well, is to show that after page 26 where I recorded Twitter, I can see how many other online tools I have  tried out and am beginning to use.

Here is a sample list of what I’ve been on for new web sites: Ning, Stumble Upon, Play Cafe, Gizmoz, Skype, Utterz, wikispaces, MyBlogLog, Quotably, Pandora, Moodle, RemembertheMilk, slideshare.net, Elluminate, Godaddy (go own some more Internet real estate for my school) Google Docs, LoTiconnection, Second Life, UStream.tv, WordPress, Jott, wetpaint, and Secondbrain.

I may have, I know I have, been to many other sites but those are just the ones I recorded where I had to write down a username and password. To be honest, half of those I haven’t gone back to often yet. And others like Twitter and all the Google related stuff I’m on everyday.

I have beginning to describe for my faculty next Monday, in what the principal calls a 20 minute presentation, my personal learning network. I want to make them aware of some of these new tools, of the importance of the read/write web, so I am going to make it all come together somehow, if that is possible. 20 minutes to explain any or all of this to the unenlightened? I don’t see how. A taste, maybe. To whet the appetite for more hopefully. And just to clarify for myself by saying it out loud, where I really am at in all this so far. It’s probably taken me more than 20 mintes to just tell you all this and I haven’t even used visual aids!