Last week Ewan McIntosh wrote an excellent post about community-building. It inspired me to look at my own practices as an educational technology advocate. What are the best practices for building a community of teachers willing to learn and improve on their current teaching methods? Ewan is certainly right that finding grass-roots initiatives and supporting those will foster change and improvement. The bottom-up resulting in a top-down approach seems to be a good system. Also, identifying faculty willing to change and evaluate projects/curriculum is one of the biggest challenges as a technology integrator.

I also think planting the seeds for a grassroots bottom-up approach is important. So when thinking about changing to Google Apps, I know that I need an “ambassador” of change in each academic department. This worked very well for our change to Moodle. We first had a trial period, in which the early adopters took to it quickly and loved it. I also did a little bit of “selling” to Faculty that I thought would be interested. This gave a strong base of people comfortable with Moodle before implementing it school wide. The Faculty room was then full of “ambassadors” for Moodle and were very helpful to others. I’m hoping that the same can happen with Google Apps. Of course it helps when the technology is great to begin with, much like Moodle and Google Apps!

Integrating blogging into the curriculum can be a serious challenge. What is the appropriate use of blogs in the classroom? Should student papers be blogged instead of turned in? Maybe English essays should be blogged and commented on by students for the “first draft” in which they receive feedback from other students and teachers. Some teachers would argue that students need teacher feedback rather than student feedback due to the quality of feedback (or lack thereof) that students would supply. I tend to think that the more eyes that look at something, the better.

Is it ethical for students to be asked to publicly post work? Provided you allow them to use a pseudonym, it seems like an ethical practice. I would like to see more examples of actual classwork completed online in a K-12 setting. Please comment if you have great examples.

One site that I see a lot of potential is http://voicethread.com/. Voicethread allows people to upload pictures, video, and documents and then have a community easily comment on each of the items. If I had all the time in the world I would go back to developing Tracker to include more web 2.0 elements like voicethread uses.

My thoughts on an ideal website for current events? A mashup of voicethread, digg, newsvine, twitter and tracker. The overall idea is that people login and can either create or participate in a tracker based on a current issue. Anyone can submit a news article, picture, video or document to a tracker, and based on votes the article gets moved up the queue of the tracker. For each item in the tracker, a voicethread like discussion takes place. An option to only follow comments within your own network would allow people to narrow their audience in a popular tracker.

This is just an abstract of what I would like to see created someday. I programmed and tested http://trackcurrentevents.org in grad school when I worked for a grant project that paid me to produce my masters project. It was some of my favorite work I’ve ever done. I would love an opportunity to go back to development, testing and presenting the project. My ideal “day job” would have me working only 2 or 3 days a week. Jeff, you have a great thing going at World Bridges! Keep it up!

The creative commons search feature allows students to find material that is not copyright protected. We should be teaching students about creative commons to help students understand copyright.

Fair use is being stretched beyond what it’s original intent. The United States Copyright Office clearly states, “There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.” So, unless you have students find and contact the source for every singe image (which is a nightmare), creative commons is your solution.

Arvind Grover recently began campaigning against it’s current use in education. Is it possible to get rid of email entirely? To me it’s like trying to get rid of the post office. It would require an entire shift in practices of a whole lot of people.

What can we do to improve communication? The question actually might be better phrased as, “what can we do to prevent miscommunication?” I think a basic re-education of communication tools is needed. Below is a basic outline for communication priority:

1. Asynchronous communication (email, discussion boards, facebook wallposts, etc) are considered low priority. Response time is considerably less than other forms of communication.
2. Synchronous distance communication (phone, video conference, skype, etc.) Slightly higher priority, needed immediate feedback, but immediate action not always required.
3. Synchronous face-to-face (a meeting). Hight priority. Action is needed ASAP, or according to timeline.

I am curious to find out other peoples vision of life without email, or a reformed email world. Has email actually improved our production? Is it a better communication tool?

http://neit.wikispaces.com/digital_citizenship

So how do we find the appropriate technology for each teacher? A needs analysis is the first step. The simplest solution is always the best. Find the technology that will help fulfill the teachers need. The next step is pushing the teacher slightly past their comfort zone without making them give up. That is the greatest challenge of an educational technologist.

This blog will explore technologies that might push your teachers, or will make them love you for finding the simplest solution.