Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration

Five Things you can do to make even the worst Professional Development More Meaningful and Less Boring

You are there, sitting in another boring staff development starting to count the tiles on the ceiling because you just finished you morning crossword puzzle and finished reading through your feeds on Flipboard. The presenter is presenting on something that you have already seen, and you have eaten the last chocolate covered donut. What to do, what to do? And that is the first 15 minutes of the day. Only 7 hours and 45 minutes to go. 

Well, you can decide that the day is going to be a total waste of time. You can decide to mentally turn off and spend the day silently complaining and making sarcastic remarks, or you can decide that the you are actually going to do something educational…

There are things you can do DURING meetings that wil keep you engaged, keep you awake, and keep you 

Create a Backchannel: Today’s Meet

A backchannel is a silent discussion that takes place while a presentation or meeting is going on. (Think digital note passing.) For instance, if someone is presenting and a question comes up, instead of interrupting the presenter, you could ask the question in the backchannel. Today’s Meet is an excellent and simple site for creating and using a single event backchannel. It is especially good for single day training and if you want to keep the conversation localized. Let everyone with a computer know the backchannel url that you choose, and, if there are others like yourself, then you can have a silent conversation going on. Beware however, it is very easy to switch a backchannel conversation into a bitchfest. If you see that happening, you need to take control of the conversation and bring it back or if it gets too bad, you can even end the backchannel. With Today’s Meet, users do not have to know any hashtags and the ease of use factor is very high. 

If you want the conversation to go beyond your immediate geographical location, taking it out to the entire internet, then backchannel using Twitter, where more people are hanging out. You will have to come up with common term that all users agree on called a hashtag which identifies the conversation. For instance, a hashtag usually describes the session like #TCEA13 which is for the 2013 TCEA conference. The danger of starting a backchannel in Twitter is that the conversation can grow to enormous proportions and you can lose control very easily. 

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ISTE Unplugged: This year, let’s add a little diversity.

Although I annually have a real issue with this exclusionary event (even though I know it is open to anyone that want to attend but it really is a bunch of white middle class educators getting together and very little diversity)  I keep thinking that “This year will be the year” that the group picture taken at the end of the event will actually look like the population of the United States and not the membership of the Republican National Committee…

But hope springs eternal…Maybe you can crash the party and put a little diversity into the proceedings…—TBH

From the announcement: 

ISTE Unplugged is a series of independent events that take place in, around, and with the support of the annualISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference.

Boy, have we got some fun this year! (Hint: look at the “unplugged keynotes” section below.)

All of these events are free and do not require signing up (except maybe the Saturday night party—keep a watch on my blog or at at http://www.ISTEunplugged.com), so come join us. The Global Education Summit and the Bloggers’ Cafe do require that you are actually attending ISTE—and a HUGE thanks to ISTE for making all of this possible!

Saturday, June 22rd - HACK EDUCATION 2013: Audrey Watters of Hack Educationco-chairs our all-day flagship event this year, as we yet again rebrand our “unconference” on teaching and learning (originally EduBloggerCon and called SocialEdCon last year) to “Hack Education.” In our seventh year, this event typically draws 200 - 300 participants from around the world. We start by building a session schedule together and then spend the rest of the day in engaged conversations around amazing topics.

Saturday, June 23rd Evening - AFTER PARTY!: After a banner inaugural partner last year, we’ll again have an unconference “After Party” from 7 - 9pm.  More details to come!

Sunday, June 24th Afternoon - GLOBAL EDUCATION SUMMIT: Another return event, the Global Ed Summit is a 3-hour mini-conference organized by Lucy Gray and me for those interested in globally-connecting students and teachers, and a physical followup to the hugely popular online Global Education Conference.

Monday, June 25 - Wednesday, June 27th - UNPLUGGED KEYNOTES: Still in planning stages, this year we are planning a set of pre-dinner short keynotes by some exceptional folks who’ve strangely never been asked to keynote the actual ISTE conference. Get ready!

 

Monday, June 25 - Wednesday, June 27th - THE BLOGGERS’ CAFE: Also in it’s seventh year now, the Bloggers’ Cafe is an informal, couch-chairs-floor gathering area in the conference center for bloggers, social media mavens, and anyone else who wants to find and connect with others. A beehive of constant activity and conversation, the Bloggers’ Cafe makes it hard to go do anything else once you discover it.

Those interested in sponsoring ISTE Unplugged or a specific event should contact me direct at steve@hargadon.com.

Spread the word, and hope to see you there!

Steve

Steve Hargadon
http://www.stevehargadon.com

180 Questions Around the Web

I seems to have been putting a bit of content out there about the book. Here is what is out there if you are interested:

Voices from the Learning Revolution: The Power of Professional Learning Networks: My Cover Tells a Story

Texas ed tech leader Tim Holt shares a story from the writing process of his first book to demonstrate that what we often preach about personal learning networks is true: Help is out there when you need it.

Youtube Video: 180 Questions 

Miguel Guhlin Reviews “180 Questions”

“The book was replete with links to other resources, and came across as a Keynote slideshow in the questions area. The questions themselves were probing and I could see this book as a great conversation starter. As great as the images with tough questions were, nothing quite beat Tim’s intro at the start. I want MORE audio intros like that, to hear more of Tim’s voice in this eBook, sharing his perspective on these questions. I hope the next version of 180 Questions provides more insight into these issues from Tim’s perspective and are not just text…Tim is a well-developed audio personality.”

ETC Journal: An Interview with Tim Holt author of 180 Questions

“…The teachers should be the ones that are driving the conversation, the teachers should be the ones that are coming up with the ideas to improve student learning, the teachers should be the ones that are coming up with the methodologies. That’s where this book comes in. Hopefully they will look at this book when the conversation about improving teaching and learning in the PLC has run dry. 180 Questions is just conversation starters. It isn’t designed to  take over your PLC meetings; it’s designed to just get you talking back on the topic of teaching and learning and get you back on the topic of how do you improve yourself and how does your professional learning community improve themselves as educators.”

Early Praise for 180 Questions:

Tim Holt is the kind of technology thinker who cuts through the fog like a laser beam. He gets right to what good can come from the invention, innovation or practice. Tim’s sense of humor and willingness to ask the bigger, harder questions give him a unique and useful voice in the field of educational technology. In this book Tim assembles nuggets of useable, inspirational insights and lets them unfold daily for busy practitioners. As you unveil these moments of wisdom daily and allow them to feed your imagination you’ll connect with other minds in other places who are working alongside you in the “eduverse.”  Join us as we seek to inspire young minds, unleash learning potential and ultimately make our world a better place through the fertile, well developed imaginations of children.

Kevin Honeycutt

Thank You for Following Me on Tumblr.

I know that it is a somewhat leap of faith to start following a blogger, and hoping that they will continue to give you useful information. Let me tell you a little about myself, so you can know where I am coming from:

I am the Director of Instructional Technology in the El Paso Independent School District in El Paso Texas USA. I have had that position for 8 years, although when I blog, I blog as a private citizen and not as a representative of my job.

I have been blogging since 2003. My first blog was called “Byte Speed” but after 2 years, I had to take it down because there was some company by the same name and my blog was getting more traffic than their website. That apparently pissed them off enough to sick a lawyer on me.  They gave me a cheap-ass gray-market no-name laptop from Asia that weighed 15 pounds if I gave up the name so I did because they had lawyers and I didn’t. 

I then started a blog called Intended Consequences, and it lasted all the way until Apple pulled the support of iWeb, which was the platform I was blogging on. (iWeb +Mobile Me.) You can still Google Tim Holt Intended Consequences to see all the re-blogged articles that were created at that site.

When that died, I moved here to Tumblr because Will Richardson had just moved here, and he is a guy I respect, and frankly, it looked like a pretty easy place to blog on.  I like technology, but I really like easy technology that just does what it is supposed to do without biting me. MAybe that is why I like Apple so much…

Anyway, back to the point:

I want to thank you for following me. If you haven’t figured it out by now, this Tumblr is a combo Self reflective blog and place where I like to put a lot of web links to to things that interest me. I use the site as sort of my online filing cabinet that I share with the world. As long as Tumblr is up and running, I plan on adding material. I hope you find it useful.

So that is what makes this Tumblr site. Thanks for sticking with me, thanks for following me, and if you have a chance once in a while, tell someone about my site. I am not one of the “big boys” in ed tech, so I don’t do a lot of keynotes where I can promote my site and myself, so any hits to the site are appreciated. 

Tim

What is your favorite education-related blog?

My RSS choices have kind of grown long-in-the-tooth, as my feeds look the same now as they did a few years ago. So, I need your help. What  blogs are you reading? Why are you reading them? What new blogs have you discovered?

Thanks for sharing with me! 

Why Should I Share When No One Else is Sharing?

This past week, I keynoted at an event where I pushed the audience to “Share Everything.” I mean really, professionally, what is it that any educator has that is so secret it shouldn’t be shared?

Who has lesson plans that are so incredible that only one person should be allowed to use them? What coach has such amazing coaching strategies that others should not be allowed to learn from them? What marching band formation is so wonderful that no one else should be allowed to even glimpse at it’s wonderfulness?  I simply cannot imagine. Enlighten me…

Even if you are a coach with this years latest and greatest plays, why not share LAST year’s plays? Marching band dudes and dudettes, we have seen your formations last year..share them this year. Some newbie band director could use them!

When you really think about it, not too many of us share. Thus, that is why at the keynote,  I asked everyone to share their knowledge. I think, in the words of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, that we literally have a moral obligation to embrace the technology and to share:

 When we are little kids, what do we learn almost immediately?

That we should share. 

Share our crayons.

Share our drawing paper.

Share your baby swimming pool.

Share your toys.

Let Billy ride your bike for goodness sake. 

Somewhere along the way, we start to pull more into ourselves, and as we get older, that lesson we learned in preschool goes away.  

Sure, we share some things in our lives..but there always is that little nagging idea in our heads about whether I get anything back:

Why should I share when no one else is sharing?

What is in it for me?

When I first started writing my blog, all those years ago, I really didnt think about what would happen. I simply decided to use the blog as an example to my employees of what blogging could be. 

Now, almost 8 years later, thousands of entries written or re-blogged, and three or four different reiterations of my site, (Byte Speed, Intended Consequences 1.0 and 2.0, and now Holtthink), I think that it no longer is even an issue of what I am sharing. I don’t post for others so much as I post to get the ideas out of my little brain and onto a semi permanent location where I can refer back to them.

I don’t do it for the good of the many, I do it for the good of the me.

So really, by sharing with everyone, I am doing myself the most selfish of acts: I am creating a repository of ides and thoughts and resources for my own use later on.

And if someone else comes along and like what I am saving, good for them.

And that is why I share when no one else is sharing. 

Advice to someone wanting to start blogging

Recently, someone asked me to kind of give them advice on what they should do to get started blogging. This person sounds to me like she has a lot to share and would make a great blogger. So. having only met via email, I got this information from her:

She is a scientist! YEA!   She is an african american. (YEA! We need a more diverse group in the edublogosphere!) She wants to start blogging on STEM -related issues. (YEA!) Awesome no? YEA!  

So, with that as a background, I sent here this email: (edited to remove identifying information): 

Dear Potential Blogger:

Warning: Once you really get started, it is hard to stop. Blogging can be addictive.

Now that that is out of the way, here are some thoughts:

You sound like you have A LOT to share! I am going to assume that your blog is going to be directed at teachers more than students.

The first thing you need to do is pick a platform. Me? I am lazy, so I picked one that required very little work on my part other than just writing and hitting the send button. The platform I am currently on is called Tumblr. (http://holtthink.tumblr.com)

Tumblr is VERY easy to use. Essentially one you log in and pick your theme, it gives you a choice of the kind of entry you are making..text, quote, link, video, audio and so forth. Choose the type, and make your entry. (You evan even use the TUMBLR App to make entries while driving down the road…hahahaha)

You can stop and save items in draft form if it isn’t ready for prime time.

So, once you decide the WHERE, you need to decide the what. It sounds like you have a lot of great internal resources to call upon, and I think there is a definite need for minority/female/STEM perspective. (Heck, I often decry the fact that most of the famous education bloggers look a lot like me: White, middle aged, and male.) 

Where to get ideas? Just start writing. Don’t think everything has to be “Journal Ready.” (Some of my best entries were ones that I wrote, pressed the publish button, and went back a lot later and saw my grammar errors.)

Remember you are writing for you.

Write your passion. Throw in a little personal stuff (not too much, there are creeps out there too)  Avoid talking about other people, or revealing confidential info. Just remember that blogging is more like writing a letter to a friend as opposed to journal writing which is writing a letter for colleagues.

If you want to attract a large audience, write in the vernacular. If you want your audience to just be peers, then write for them. Blogs are great places for getting the opinions of others, but don’t be discouraged if you write something and get no response. I get a lot more hits than comments. Most readers just read. I also use my blog as sort of a repository for things that interest me. If I post a blog about it. then I can go back later and find it easily.  

I love to go to conferences and meet people and do interviews, so that is a good start. Read other’s blogs and respond to them on your blog. Talk about controversies and your opinion on things. (Make sure you put the caveat on your blog that these are your opinions and not those of your employer.)

You will also need to get an audience. Advertise your blog by letting people like me and Miguel know when you get up and running so we can advertise on our sites. Put a link to it in your signature line and on your business cards. Got a webpage where you work? Put a link there. When you comment on other people’s blogs, put a link to your blog. 

My best advice: Write your passion. You can’t go wrong. (Unless you real have a weird passion..grin)

Good luck. 

Let me know what else I can help you with!

Tim