This is a brand new school year. My schedules and those of the students in the resource room are nearly finished. You would not believe the hours of thought and coordination that go into these first days of school so that the nine months to follow go smoothly. Or, perhaps you would if you live with 25 or so people who must live the same schedule as you with five or more unique exceptions per person per week. Each night this week after closing my eyes, I have seen these little boxes floating by on the backs of my eyelids like stereo Youtoob. Inside the box, there is a cursor blinking away, demanding data. Fortunately, I am not one to perseverate and I sleep.

Today, I left school early. That means I left at 3:30 and did not stay, pondering little boxes until 6:00, the time when my eyes generally cross and the network slows to a crawl. I left because I have a house guest, my husband’s only brother. I prepared steamers and haddock chowder. For the first time in 30 years they neglected to regale me with stories of their traumatic first days of school. One brother is deaf and the other one can’t hear. Both are gifted, left-handed, and colorblind. Both had September birthdays and thus, were always amongst the youngest in each respective grade. Their last name had ten letters, consigning them to permanent “lastness” in getting ready to work. They moved four times during their school years.

For myself, I had the September birthday, but only five letters in each of my names. I was already reading, but I had a terrible time getting my baby sized hands around those big fat pencils. To this day, it amazes me that children actually will choose to use chubby crayons and writing materials. I am right handed and have a fine sense of color. My parents stayed married and lived together at one address. They read to me nightly. I have the attention span of a gnat.

I cannot tell you how relieved I will be to finish those schedules. I look forward to using them, to having levels determined and groups of children coming to class to think, read, write and learn math skills.

Last year, our school was new. We didn’t know names of colleagues, or who did what, or the names of children, or how to find the laminator. There is a trick to successfully flushing the toilets, and the thermostats are electronic noses that communicate with a place in Missouri(we are in Maine). In this, our second year, we were able to have a successful field day on the second day of school. My, we have come a long way. Happy New Year to all and to all a good night! Here I come, little boxes. Blink away!

First, here are the rules:

• Post the rules before you give your facts
• List 8 random facts about yourself
• At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
• Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

Here are my 8 facts:

1. I love dogs, especially, I love my two doxies Brandy and Rosie.

2. I have two grown children.

3. My deck chair is on a float.

4. I am a voracious reader of just about anything.

5. My grandmother’s brothers fought in the Civil War

6. My uncle John was a catcher for the Hindenburg

7. I am a letterboxer.

8. My favorite games are Tetris, Cribbage and letter tile games

I’m going to tag

Steve,

Mike,

Terry,

Nancy,

Jane,

Kathy,

Eliza

Chris

I have been away from home and my computer for three weeks. My husband, Jerry, and I have a place in northern Maine. While I can’t say that we are in the woods, we are nestled up to a substantial wooded area just two minutes from the middle of town. Around the corner is a spectacular view of Mount Katahdin.

Jerry enjoyed a view of a young moose bumbling across the property one morning last week. Unlike my husband, I am not an early riser. I often miss seeing the creatures he sees wandering out of early morning mists to drink at the pond or browse dropped apples. The dogs and I begin to stir within the first hour of the Today Show. While I drink my coffee Jerry regales me with all the visitors to feeders and grounds, I have missed while I snooze. It is my great cross to bear that I am a night person married to a morning person. Such is life.

Thursday moring, the wind was up, Jerry had a project to do, the dogs begged to go, and off they went. I got out my kite. Now, anybody can fly a kite at East End in Portland, Maine, or at Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth–ocean breezes you know. Anyone can go to the top of one of the many hills or ridges of Aroostook County, and fly a kite there, most any day. It takes a certain amount of skill and ambition to fly a kite on flat land, surrounded by trees and a kite eating pond, but I have that kind of determination (read stuborn). Jerry says if there’s a tree, I’ll snag it. He says if there’s a string, I’ll knot it. Jerry says if there is a wind, I will stop it. And he’s pretty much right. But when I am trying to fly a kite, I am not experiencing the frustration that he experiences when he watches me fly a kite. When I am flying (or not flying) a kite, the feeling I get is more like playing the lottery. When the kite finally climbs up above the tree line and the string pays out, that is the jackpot.

So, Jerry and the dogs leave, and I go out to the shed where I keep my kites, and I decide I will start easy. I have this ratty, much mended cheapo plastic delta kite with a picture of an eagle on it. The keel is a piece of a Hannaford shopping bag, and every weak point of the kite where plastic attaches to braces, there is a strip of silver duct tape. This kite will fly when nothing else will, and the poor thing is so decrepit that if I crash it into the woods or the garden or the pond, it will either live to fly again or it won’t. Truth is, if it didn’t have the image of an eagle on it, I might have flown it into the trash can, some time ago.

On this morning last week, as I get to the open place where I fly my kites, the wind starts to drop, but am I discouraged? Not in the least. I wait for a gust. I’m in position. The kite is in position. I feel a gust at my back. I snap the kite up and it goes. Into the cattails. I retrieve the kite. Gust. Snap. Pay out the string. Steer away from the cherry tree. Take up the slack. And there it is soaring overhead, so high up it looks like a real eagle. Jackpot! Where is Jerry when this kite flying business goes right? He is missing it. And I know how he feels, sitting alone in the morning with a moose to share, and no one awake to show it to.

The kite is practically flying itself when I see movement above the treeline. Some kind of bird is rising above the treeline at the bottom of the field. I speculate about what it might be. Great Blue Heron? Red Tailed Hawk? Turkey Buzzard? Is it wandering by, or is it comming my way with intention? Oh my, who would believe this? Where is that man when I have these amazing things to show him?

The immature eagle comes straight at my kite. Is he going to attack it? With my heart in my throat I struggle with myself to wait, to see what would happen, to haul that kite right out of the sky, to let the kite go. I would never want to cause harm. The eagle hovered over my kite, made a couple of passes by the kite, and seemingly satisfied his curiosity, flew back the way he came.

I flew the kite a few more minutes just savoring the moment, and then hauled my eagle kite in. How fortunate I am to have had this amazing experience. I thought I would share it with you all in this space, and invite you to tell your own stories of encountering wildlife or interacting in some wonderful way with another species.

Hi, Alice and everyone. I’m responding here to item #4 on the todo list. This is not just the end of class for me, this is the beginning of vacation–so of course, here I sit at the kitchen table wrapping up the loose ends. This is the end of a series of 5 graduate level courses since Spring Semester. I’m done for a while. Four of these courses were tech courses. I thought there would be some overlap, but no, each of them focused on different tools and most of what I encountered was new and fertile ground. I learned to evaluate the quality of information on the web, how to use the Mozilla composing tools, PowerPoint presentation, Digital Story Telling, and last but not least, Web2.0 and errr… a glimmer of Web 3.0 things to come. I have learned to research and navigate more efficiently. I have new tricks to add to my frequent use list. The Delicious tag and the RSS feed have joined Google (everything) and Wikipedia on that list. I will have a working Avatar before I leave for the land of no (gasp) internet in Aroostook county. (It is there; we don’t have it.) When school starts up in the fall, I will meet the students on my caseload and begin to teach. As I get to know them, get with the curriculum, and read those individual education plans, I will begin to integrate the skills I’ve learned and I will be in touch with you with all my questions.

My teaching will change because I will look for opportunities to integrate tech to motivate and excite students about learning (and me about teaching), to communicate with staff and parents in a collaborative way, and I will have a whole slew of blog friends and instructors to help me do it. I’ll be gmailing you!

Hi, I’m working at my kitchen table now. I really wanted to see the presentations, but honestly, this is ok too. I enjoyed being able to talk about my project and was encouraged that some people in the class thought it was something they wanted to do. Since my NING was a closed project, I decided to create a second NING network that you could look at and comment on. This one, Expedition 225 is open for the rest of the summer for viewing, then when the school year starts, I will shut it down and put up an invitation only ning network just like it  for Portland’s Expeditionary Learning school teachers. I’ll link to my blog and Alice so I hope people will respond to it in the way they will to others in the class who did not get to present this morning. I’m getting the hang of it. Struggling a bit with the page vs post…

Well, Steph Cheney joined me after lunch for a NING conference. It is exactly what I wanted to do. Now I don’t feel so panicked about the presentation tomorrow. I have chosen the layout and the appearance. (I chose the color green because Steph reminded me that East End Community School is the first certified “Green” school in the state.) Now I need to finish dragging structures into the form, word smithing the the explanations for the various parts, and sending out invitations for colleagues from EECS to respond. I’m going to hold off on inviting people from each of the three wings to moderate until I have some experience of the blogging “energy” people bring to the site. I’m going to limit participation to EECS at first, but if it works as a social experiment, we could always invite others to blog along with us. I’m thinking that maybe there should be a Second Life professional development community and that the blogging community may soon shift over because it seems so compelling to be three D. and the communities look rich with opportunity. Now NING is looking a little flat and static… That’s the trouble with the net–like Maine weather it is all over the place–blink and it changes in some profound way.

Last year I offered to co-teach the Portland unit to third grade students. I had four special needs students in the class and lots of ideas. I was ready to cha-cha. Then reality hit. Get the mobile lab, distribute the laptops, take back the ones that didn’t charge, get 21 students logged on and on the appropriate web site and….oops! time is up. Bus comes in 10 minutes.

Next year I will use delicious to establish the commonly used sites for the Portland Unit. Then, students can access it and be on task even if the whole class isn’t up and running. The Maine Memory Network, for example is a student friendly site. I generated a list of them for another class, so of course, I will have to find that and import it to delicious, and then bookmark the laptops. We have two mobile labs, and there’s no guarantee that we would get the same one for the whole expedition….I am hoping that someone reading this blog will know of a simple way to update 40 or so laptops. What have you done to solve the problem of too much getting ready and not enough moving a project forward?

I’ve been sitting on the Professional Development Committee for Portland Schools for about 6 years. Our most recent contract is, I think, revolutionary. The payscale is no longer hooked to showing up every year, nor is it hooked to high-stakes testing. The contract is now set up to reward teachers who step up to leadership opportunities, who agree to preside over PTA subcommittees, and who engage in professional development. The idea can be a little complicated, but suffice to say, one way to take control of my financial future is to take five courses, and relate them to professional growth, benefit to students, benefit to school and or the wider community. Five of these relevant courses constitutes sufficient points to make a “lane change”. The reason this contract is viewed as win-win by most stakeholders is its basis in research. When teachers are engaged as learners, their students have better teachers.

So, today, when Steph showed us her online community of teachers embracing the idea of self-directed learner, then Alice spoke of the October Conference, and also, when Alice related anecdotes about finding the WOW2 community for her own professional development opportunities, I began to see how a similar community might come together for the purpose of supporting each other as teachers who are in the process of making lane changes. I have been thinking about forming a support group that would meet once or twice each month, but now, having barely survived the experience of teaching for one year at East End Community school, I can’t imagine how we could manage the time to physically meet on a regular basis, take classes, be good family members, good citizens, and….oh yes, teach. Do we have time to blog regularly? Sometimes? Some of us some of the time? Do I have time to moderate? Uh, sometimes yes and sometimes no. But, I do think I can find a co-moderator in each of the three wings of the school. I represent EECS on the committee, so my first responsibility would be to the school and then, if others are interested, they could copy the model, or join by invitation.

So how does this relate to students? It relates to students in the same way the new contract honors learning and leadership. Will we blog about learning? Will we pose essential questions? Will we discuss time management and solutions? Will we discuss various courses and their value to us as teachers, leaders and learners? Yes, I think so. And I might as well claim professional development rep privilege and post my committee meeting notes, discuss PD topics and link to professional development opportunities.

It is my hope and contention that potentially “disruptive technologies” like this can and should challenge us to not simply block, ban, and prohibit the use of digital tools within learning environments, but rather challenge us as educators to reinvent the traditionally passive, teacher-directed model of instruction into a more collaborative, engaging, and truly learner-centered model for learning. –Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I returned to graduate level coursework last winter at year 31 of my teaching career. I shopped around to find just the right fit. I wanted some credit for my life experience, to update my skills, and to set the stage for my life in retirement. I found a great tech course in a MAC lab at the University of Southern Maine. I did everything I could to set myself up for success, and by and large, I accomplished that. My great disappointment was that I ended up doing all my homework, research and reading at home on my PC when I had thought I would be able to try things with my students, turn to my classroom iMac, to reflect, locate a tutorial, or collect some useful sites. I was simply blocked at every turn. Now I admit, that I was trying to look at some really rad stuff. There was, for example, a dynamite multiplication algorithm I wanted to show to a colleague. Blocked because it was on Utoob. And this just kept happening. I would go to my school internet to perform some relatively sinple task, and would be blocked. Meanwhile, I continued to have the occasional “oops!” experience. We’ve all had them. You know, you want to find a discount software site and you end up opening a very different site than the one you expected. So what exactly does all this blocking and banning prevent?

When I walk through the public library I see the students from our school clicking away at computers, so absorbed in what they are doing that they barely notice their teacher looking over their shoulders. So, what are they doing? They are keyboarding, chatting, exploring, listening to music, finding friends, teaching each other how to play simulation games, tracking sporting events and stats and more. My lament is that they have to wait for school to be over to do many of these activities when with a little less blocking and banning, we could connect these things that our students like to do with the curriculum.

Of course students need to be safe, but they also need to self-monitor their own personal safety. Of course students need to be on task, but they also need to be self-monitoring about attention to task. I’m excited to learn that there are end runs that I can use with students, like custom search tools, to get around these “disruptive technologies” so that kids don’t have to wait for school to be over to engage in web 2.o activities.