Guest speaking about being a Tech Coordinator & growing my #PLN. @TC_CMLTD @TeachersCollege

I’m proud to be an alumna of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University where I earned my MA (2001) and EdM (2016) in Instructional Technology and New Media. (The next step would be a Doctorate, but unless I get an honorary one like Bono, I’m not sure I have the willpower to do so…)

Professor Chang, my patient and helpful thesis advisor, invited me to speak with her core seminar students tonight about my “experience and expertise in implementing and learning with technology in the classroom.” I prepared the slides above to lightly outline and illustrate why I think curating a Personalized (or Professional) Learning Network is super valuable. I also included suggestions for how to locate and connect with people synchronously and asynchronously, online and offline, personally and professionally. For inspiration about what to talk about, I turned to the abstract for my EdM paper which is pasted below:

This paper considers that investing time in growing a Personalized Learning Network (PLN) by interacting with other professionals in the field synchronously and asynchronously, online and offline, socially and professionally will lead to the ultimate reward of being a more engaged, informed, and connected educator in the 21st Century. This inevitably will enable access to people and information that will further enrich the educator and their community. There are distinct advantages to building and leveraging a PLN to learn, share, network, and collaborate as a career teacher both online and offline. Additionally, maintaining a personal portfolio is a valuable resource towards professional growth and building your network as it helps educators engage in a metacognitive study of their own teaching and learning, legitimize their online presence, and expand their PLN. Much research points towards the value of growing a PLN and digital portfolio curation and the role these play in a 21st Century educator’s practice.

Notes for “Our Portfolios, Ourselves” at @Teach21c on 11/7/15. #PDchat #edchat #nyedchat

Here is the description of the workshop from the Teach21 website:

Curation is a 21st Century skill, so let’s show how to gather archival evidence of your professional endeavors and classroom projects in a digital portfolio. You’ll learn tips to get started: What to gather? Where to put it? How much will this cost? How to organize it? What settings to use? How to link or embed artifacts? How to connect with others? This will be a half-day workshop from 12:30 – 3:00.

Here are my slides for the workshop:

Yay for another #edcampnyc and mazel tov to @hadleyjf for her new position as Executive Director of @edcampusa!

An empty session board at the start of any edcamp is full of promise. On Saturday, I helped organize another edcampnyc event (our 7th!), and like all other edcamps, it was a day of participant-driven learning and sharing. Attendees arrived and posted conversational strands onto the empty session board, and people who posted to the board were responsible for facilitating a conversation rather than presenting or lecturing.

It takes a village, and edcampnyc couldn’t have happened without generous help from the following angels: The NYEdTech Meetup Group for again sponsoring a wonderful breakfast, Ian Klapper and Alex Ragone of City and Country School for hosting and supporting the event at their beautiful school, Katy Gartside and Ann Oro for their planning and organizing prowess!

Hadley Ferguson is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Edcamp Foundation. Hadley discussed her new role via #SatChat live from @edcampNJ. (#SatChat is a weekly Twitter chat about education and administration which takes place on Saturday mornings.) Hadley then hopped a train and joined us at edcampNYC! Kim Sivick was also in attendance at edcampNYC. Hadley and Kim (and an amazing group of inspiring and innovative educators) organized the first edcamp in Philadelphia (@edcampPhilly) in May of 2010 and later founded the Edcamp Foundation to support and grow the Edcamp movement. This group of awesome people altered the traditional model of Professional Development, empowered teachers around the world, begat communities of educators sharing and learning together, and changed my life.

Besides hanging with Hadley and Kim, it was gratifying to greet many familiar faces, many new faces, and even folks who had never been to an edcamp before. It was also awesome to follow the tweets generated during the day and gather/promote these from the @edcampnyc account. There were some great topics offered, and luckily many sessions had notetakers or someone who started a shared GoogleDoc. See our November 2014 session board with links to any notes below:

I’ve had a few people ask me for advice on how to organize an edcamp. Here are some bare essentials:

1. Attend an edcamp!
2. Reserve a Gmail account with edcamp***@gmail.com (where *** is your theme or geographic location).
3. Use the Google Drive associated with edcamp***@gmail.com to create a digital spreadsheet for your event’s schedule (this can be linked and embedded on your event’s website).
4. Use this Gmail address to reserve edcamp*** on Twitter.
5. Reserve edcamp*** on a blogging platform (like WordPress or Blogger) to communicate details about the event. Buy the edcamp***.org, edcamp***.net, edcamp***.com, or edcamp***.info domain name if you like.
6. Add your event’s info to the official edcamp wiki.
7. Find a space to host your event, preferably a school with a robust Wifi network, easy to locate rooms and bathrooms, projectors or screens in classrooms, a large common area for announcements and networking, space for a physical paper schedule, space for breakfast set up, and hopefully one who will foot the insurance bill.
8. Locate a breakfast sponsor.
9. See what help the Edcamp Foundation can provide in terms of sponsor and insurance.
10. Set up a ticketing page using Ticketleap or Eventbrite or Meetup to handle registration.
11. Promote! Use Twitter (get other edcamps to tweet about your event), your PLN, Google+, Facebook, call schools directly, contact graduate schools of education…

Notes from yesterday’s #BabyNYCIST app share. #edchat #isedchat

Yesterday we had an App Share at our BabyNYCIST meeting hosted by the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. K-5 technologists from a variety of NYC indepedent schools gathered to demo some of their favorite iPad apps. (These BabyNYICST meetings are a spinoff from the more techie/geeky NYCIST meetings.)

Here are some of the apps that were shared:
WordFoto – “turns your photos and words into stunning works of art” – shared by Lan Heng from Ethical. Lan also showed great examples of iPad ePub books that her students have published. They designed their books using Pages, these incorporated word processing, Keynote presentations that were exported at videos, and images. The Pages files were exported using the simple ePub feature. Lan said that next year, she is going to use InDesign to make a yearbook and then ePub for iPads. Lan also demo’d Book Creator.

Voicethread  – “create and share dynamic conversations around documents, snapshots, diagrams and videos…Anyone can join the discussion from their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC” – shared by Ellen Baru from The Cathedral School. Ellen likes the iPad version of Voicethread more than the web version. She also uses little microphones from Chill Pill (I’m pretty sure she was talking about the Rap Cap which are ridiculously inexpensive).

Explain Everything – “easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations” – shared by Marina Benasuli from Horace Mann. Explain everything is described by its co-creator, Reshan Richards, as ShowMe on steroids.

ShowMe – “turn your iPad into your personal interactive whiteboard…allows you to record voice-over whiteboard tutorials and share them online.”

FlipBoom Draw – “Create cartoons that come to life on your iPad” – shared by Wendy Semsel at The Churchill School.

Paint With Time – “explore how the world is changing by controlling the flow of time with your fingers in this new app” – also shared by Wendy Semsel.

PuppetPals – “create your own unique shows with animation and audio in real time…simply pick out your actors and backdrops, drag them on to the stage, and tap record…” – shared by Judith Seidel of Friends Seminary. Judith said that her K teachers chose PuppetPals over Toontastic, but she likes Toontastic for the older kids since it incorporates a story arc.

Pages – Judith also shared how 3rd graders make Alphabet books in Pages for their K buddies. Next year she may use BookCreator because of how well it integrates with Lion.

Book Creator – “the simple way to create your own beautiful iBooks, right on the iPad” – shared by Ellen Nickels and Scott Lerner from The Dalton School. They like Book Creator’s simple interface for integrating text, pictures, drawings. They find it easier than Pages for the smaller kids. They plan to do projects with SonicPics and ShowMe soon.

Other things shared:

• Chris Jung from The Little Red Schoolhouse showed WebDAV and iAnnotate
• Naomi Ickovitz from The Ramaz School spoke about Evernote
• Jim Anderson from The Packer Collegiate Institute showed off his ZAGG keyboard for iPad
• I shared one of my favortie standby apps, Audionote
• I met Lizabeth Arum who does Education Outreach for Makerbot. She directed me to http://curriculum.makerbot.com/ to see lesson plans!