First Day Musings

I've had a very long day today and though its late I'm not ready to call it a night. You see tomorrow (actually today), I face a staff of over 100 people for the first time as their principal. I have been given the enormous responsibility of leading a group of educators in the task of educating over 900 students. What do I tell them? I mean I love the people in my community and I want what is best for them; I want the decisions I make to only have a positive impact on the students and our community. What I say, what I do, how I act could have an enormous consequence on them and the community. Just reflecting on that thought makes me wonder if I will sleep tonight.

I also know the realities of life and work will at times interfere with my goals and will affect others on staff in ways that will not always be in the best interests of students. Things will happen that take me and other staff members away from the school and the things that need to be done. And I wonder, .... I am seeking the right words to say to this incredible group of people that will ignite a spark that will inspire positive change in a community that has been struck by too much tragedy. In some ways, I feel inadequate or maybe a little scared that I now have the ultimate responsibility for what goes on in the school. Can I be the leader that makes the difference needed for this community? Can I be the leader that can pursuade others to follow and work to their fullest potential acting in the best interests of their students?

Man oh man what have I agreed to do? Tomorrow's 30 minutes with the staff will be a defining moment for this year and maybe for me. I'm not sure exactly what I will say, but I've decided that I can't say it better than Dalton Sherman. So tomorrow I'll play it safe; I'll share some things with staff and then , thanks to the advances in technology, I'll invite Dalton into the meeting and let him tell his story to another 100 people and just maybe a spark will ignite our teaching community to believe in our students - all of them. What more could a principal hope for from a staff?

Creating a User Name - the origin of kicode

I just finished reading How to Create Cool User Names by Srikanth and I'd like to share the way I created my user name. But first the background; for those who know me, you already know I share a name with one of the most read authors in the world, Stephen King. Obviously, there are problems with trying to use my real name online as my digital identity would disappear beneath the thousands (millions?) of references to the author. So I decided I wanted to create something easy to remember as Srikanth suggests you do. My solution was to take the first two letters from my last name- "ki" from King, the first two from my son's name - "co" from Colin, and finally the first two from my daughter's name- "de" from Demetria. The result was kicode; I pronounce it "key code".

I discussed this over a skype call with @robwall back in June after he expressed curiousity about where the name came from. I am finding that the user name works with almost all sites that require a user name although someone beat me to it with g-mail! The nice thing with this solution is you can play around with the order of the names; in my case I used my last name, my first born, and then my second child. I could have had something different using the same plan in a different order; for example, it could have been dekico or decoki or codeki or cokied. Try it for yourself; you might find something that sounds cool,is easy for you to remember, and has not yet been taken.

An Adult Alternative 12

On Thursday, the 28 students in our class of 2009 will be celebrating their graduation from High School. One of them will be an adult alternative 12 graduate who I have to confess I had my doubts about ever being around long enough to graduate. He was a young man few of us could figure out; he was loud and very often acted in inappropriate ways. His teachers quickly lost patience with him and he was a social misfit with his peers. He basically did not attend school from the time he was 16 until he was 19. When he returned to school, I wondered what the heck we were going to do with him because nothing we had tried worked. Fortunately though, the right teacher came along who saw a student who needed our help, who needed education, and who needed support.

She challenged staff to change the way we looked at him. His nickname, Spinner, which he had happily responded to, was quickly dropped and we began to use his proper name. We still saw some inappropriate things from him, but we also saw something else; his humanity fell into focus. We learned about a person with feelings and questions though it was sometimes difficult to understand what he was trying to say. We began to accept some of his quirks and we got down to the business of trying to work with him. And guess what? He proved to us that he could learn, that he could stay in a classroom, that he could do some algebra! He also proved to us that he could push some buttons still and his teacher was not afraid of telling him that he had crossed a line and it was time to go home.

Some will view the alternate status as a negative no doubt, but he has grown more over the last three years than most I've known. I also saw him commit one of the greatest acts of kindness I've ever seen from a student. We had a literacy carnival in late May and he attended. He happily went around playing the various games we had set up winning tickets to buy books. When he got to my station, Yahtzee, he quickly won 12 tickets. Well he immediately turned to a little girl who was watching and who had run out of money and tickets and gave them to her saying, "Go get yourself a good book!" With that he left my station and left me convinced that he was graduate material.

Now that his time with us is coming to an end, I feel some sadness and a lot of concern. What will happen to a young man going into an adult world that does not always tolerate differences in people? What kind of future is in store for him? Ours is a small town where unemployment hovers over 60% and it is a town with huge addiction issues. He is going out into that reality and we are holding our breath. I hope he finds his way; he's earned it.

RockYou.com

I visited The KinderKids' Classroom Blog by Maria Knee and was thoroughly impressed with the way she used web 2.0 tools to document the activities of her Kindergarten class. The visit introduced me to RockYou.com as well which kind of reminded me of Animoto. However, it is also somewhat different as it gives you more control of the way the pictures are displayed during the presentation. In any case, it is another "cool tool" for presenting images to the public. I selected some images from an Elder's Evening that our school hosted back in February for my first attempt at preparing a RockYou presentation. I'm quite happy with the result!

Curse you Twitter!

I'm supposed to be writing up my Master's project right now, but just had to take a few minutes to share my morning lurk around Twitter. First of all, I normally do not allow myself the time to get on Twitter in the morning because I find myself struggling to pull myself away; there is just so much good stuff there. Today is a good explanation of why I don't do Twitter in the morning; 30 minutes on Twitter turned into another hour of exploring (and I only scratched the surface of most of it).

Twitter itself is not the problem. I posted one Tweet this morning; a re-Tweet of a colleague's Tweet and sent one direct message to the same colleague. The problem is I can't resist opening links that look interesting to me; here's what I found this morning.

@shelleydeck suggested I check out a site that is a check list for Foundational Digital Literacy skills - http://tommarch.com/files/ict.htm.
@jackiegerstein suggested a site that encourages communities and groups to host their own Ted Talks - http://www.ted.com/tedx.
@AngelaMaiers suggested a site that professes to be a place for professional development for teachers and librarians. She sold it as "a great resource for tech and literay" - http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm.
And I can't remember who Tweeted this one out - http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Tools+at+a+glance.

I also read a blog from @wfryer that gave me an interesting idea as a way to run a public meeting -http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2009/04/23/advice-and-wisdom-on-school-public-relations/.

In just 30 minutes of reading microblogs on Twitter; I have more professional resources collected than I collected from an entire school year last year before I heard of Twitter!

Now Twitter I'm turning you off and turning back to my work; curse you for being so useful!

Reflecting on EC&I 831

Part 5: Reflections on EC&I 831

EC&I 831 (cool video at this link) has surpassed my wildest dreams for a class. With non-traditional assignments and self-directed learning, it has opened a world to me that has allowed me to grow professionally and spawned a desire to learn more. It has made me into a 21st century teacher and learner! I have created a personal learning network that is a true professional learning community and I have opened a world far richer than any library can provide. My learning has been so great that I can’t possibly summarize it all in text. I began by trying to summarize my thoughts about the class using MindMeister. This grew into an idea to make a video to summarize my thoughts using a SmartBoard, a tool I had never used before. The quality of the video I made though was not the greatest as I worked on it alone and still have much to learn about making a quality video. I also had problems uploading it due to its length which I actually now consider a blessing as I decided not to use it and accept the fact that the 3 hours I put into making it and trying to download it taught me about Smart Boads and the importance of setting up properly when producing a video. I elected instead to make a series of Jing videos to summarize my learnings in the class. These can be viewed by visiting Stephen King's E-Portfolio.

I decided to submit an E-portfolio as my major digital project for the EC&I 831 class with Dr. Alec Couros for several reasons. It is a compilation of my learning over the last three months, as well as, a venue to house 2 of the 3 parts of my project. The first part is actually a Moodle Class, Career Ed. 7, that I created to use with a group of Grade 7 students I teach. Part 2 is a Wikispace that I have created for the benefit of the staff of La Loche Community School; it includes scheduling, important dates, and numerous links that teachers will find beneficial. It is not complete; it is a space that will continue to be developed and improved upon. The next phase of the site will be to develop teacher video tutorials using Jing for school programs like MAT (mark and attendance program). Finally, the third part of the project was to learn about WordPress for the purpose of teaching e-portfolios to High School students. I decided that to make the experience meaningful I would make my own portfolio; this WordPress blog pulls together the other parts of my major digital project and it includes aspects of almost all of my learning through the EC&I 831 class.

I hope those who visit my major digital project find at least one thing in it that they can learn from; it was my pleasure sharing my thoughts and learnings with you. And the next time I blog, it will be done entirely on the belief that I am not being evaluated and simply because I had something to share. Thanks to all who have helped me get to this point!

The more I know; the less I know! (ProCon.Org)

Confucius said, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." This is a concept that has rolled around in my brain for years, although I never said it so succinctly. When I was in my third year of University, I remember realizing that the more I know the less I know because there is so much more to learn that I still do not know! Make sense?

I'm not even supposed to be working on this blog because I'm trying to finish off my obligations for the EC&I 831 class that I am taking, but I stumbled across a site as I was browsing through some of my the unread blogs in my Goggle Reader account that really illustrated the point above. I visited the blog, Free Technology For Teachers, and specifically a blog titled, "ProCon -Helping Students Evaluate Controversial Topics." It looks like it would be a good tool for students engaged in researching controversial topics in school. However, it is a site that illustrates just how much there is that I do not know; I'd never heard of it before this morning and now I'm writing about it. I've never used the site and would have to take some time navigating around it to know its full capabilities, but because I do not teach a lot I doubt I will use it. However, I do think there are teachers who could use the site and so I'm sharing my latest discovery yet again!

The sad part is I have over 300 unread blogs in my Reader account; how many more gems have I missed because of time? I guess though in a way this is the power of EC&I 831; it forced my to learn a lot, but in doing so made me realize there is so much more that I do not know! Nevertheless, it has given me the tools to learn more and independently. I am a better educator as a result!

I have attached two images (click on them to make them larger) above for those interested in ProCon.org; might be enough information there to get you to have a look for yourself.




Source of Confucius Quote: Inspirational and Motivational Quotes @ http://quotations.about.com/cs/inspirationquotes/a/Knowledge4.htm