The Expanding Learning Horizons (ELH) Conference is over for another year and I am left, once again, feeling lost and flat now that I am back in the real world of work and daily minutiae.  I miss the connection with like-minded educators and the stimulating conversations that accompany such connections.  However, I am also mindful of the need for all of us to keep connecting outside the conference if we truly want to keep expanding our learning horizons.

Expanding and Learning are action words.

Maintaining an online personal learning network (PLN) is one of the most important professional development activities I undertake in any year.  I can structure a learning path to suit my own context and needs without leaving home.  I can connect with others who share similar contexts and really learn from them.  It takes time but it also saves time.  Imagine how long it would have taken me to find, research and review six quality educator blogs or wikis on my own without the help of my PLN?  Using my connections on Plurk saved me hours.

Exploring and Sharing are ALSO action words

My PLN also supported my ELH Discovery workshop: Exploring Web 2.0 Teaching Ideas by providing feedback on the wiki I designed to support the session.  Many also indicated their intention to share the wiki with colleagues in the U.S.  Hopefully it will continue to be of use to educators for some time.

The networking during ELH took many forms: Twitter (See #ELH09 for our collection of Tweets); Ning; Facebook and various wikis: elhwikimania and my own Exploring Web 2.0 Teaching Ideas.  However, such mediums are only starting points for exploration and expansion of learning horizons.  It is ongoing connection and reflection, educators sharing ideas and learning together, that will make the most difference in the long term.  Maintaining the passion, learning and enthusiasm of ELH will be the real challenge for all of us over the next year!

My Web 2.0 journey began exactly a year ago, inspired by a few questions at a professional development activity and fuelled by my own desire to understand ‘what all the fuss was about.’

As a way of celebrating this milestone I thought I’d revisit the key discoveries of the past year.  My journey was an informal one, with many paths and many lingering visits along the way.  This blog was my starting point.

Blogging:
One of the first things I did after starting this blog was to explore the amazing array of quality blogs out there.  Many inspired me to develop and maintain the best quality blog I could with my limited talent and experience.

CogDogBlog by Alan Levine proved an excellent starting point.  From there I found the wiki and a list of story tools which fuelled my journey for weeks. I used many of them in my early blog entries and still love the simplicity of tools such as toondoo, slideshare and animoto.

Teacher-Librarian blogs:

As a qualified teacher-librarian I was keen to learn what I could from the online experts in the field.  One of the first gems I found was an Edublogs award winner, A Library by Any Other Name.  I learned about the 23Things Web 2.0 activitiy via this blog and followed it to learn more on my own.

This blog also led to another Edublogs winner, this time a fellow Australian, Judy O’Connell, who maintains the Hey Jude blog.  Judy seems to have an amazing capacity for ‘thinking outside the square’ and has steered me in the direction of many new online connections and blogs, including Dean Shareski’s blog and, one of my all time favourites: Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day.

The PLN:

The blogosphere is the sort of place where each new connection leads somewhere else: Twitter, Plurk, Ning, Diigo groups, Second Life etc.  It got to the point where I was signing up for something new each day.  It was several months before I realised I actually had a PLN of my own, a discovery which immediately led to a blog post…an event which in itself demonstrated how completely I had become immersed in the Web 2.0 world.  Something had happened…suddenly I needed to share my discoveries with other educators, suddenly I felt responsible for helping others learn.  More importantly, I began to see the real potential of the connections I’d made and began to change the way I approached my job and my teaching.

The Shape of Learning: One Size Does Not Fit All

The best part of my learning journey is the way I have been able to shape it with my own interests and needs.  Surely, this is the most effective type of learning?  The blogs I turn to have changed, the tools I race to sign up for are slightly different from last year’s offerings.  My new best tools include:

pageflakes, which I used to build an Earth 2.0 webquest;

wetpaint wikis which I use to host a wiki for my Year 11 English students called English @ 11. While they are still getting their heads around this new tool they are also learning a lot.

I’ve also rediscovered the potential of flickr, particularly photographs usable via creative commons licensing.  Other tools which complement flickr are available via Big Huge Labs

My new favourite blogs are

The English Blog: for its cutting edge articles and tools

The Best Article Every Day: for fun and great resources

Free Technology for Teachers: for its outstanding resources

Jane’s e-learning pick of the Day: excellent tools

A Geeky Mother’s Blog: excellent writing, great discussion

The Open Classroom: because I’ve met Jo and love to read her thoughts

and ICT in my Classroom: for ICT ideas and activities in a real classroom.

“Not another wiki” was a comment I heard recently while listening to a group of inspiring educators on Plurk Radio.  It was delivered in a tone which suggested this person had ‘done’ wikis ‘to death’ and was ready to move on.  It brought home to me the diverse range of skill, understanding and experience ‘out there’ amongst educators.

My reality is quite different.  Most of my colleagues have never created a wiki.  I’m sure there are many other teachers out there who don’t really have an understanding of wikis beyond wikipedia and have never really thought about classroom applications because they don’t really ‘get it.’

The power of the wiki

I think wikis have huge potential in the classroom.  They are fantastic tools for sharing information and building knowledge.  They are also versatile presentation vehicles.  Indeed,  the list of things I have learned from my current wiki experiment grows daily and highlights the learning possibilities for students.

What I have learned…(so far)

• How to embed a webpage into a wiki:  Thanks to the Getting Tricky With Wikis wiki!  This makes web pages more accessible and user-friendly, both important considerations for students.
• How to access and use databases such as Press Display to facilitate students’ learning.  Many large local libraries probably subscribe to this database.  Mine does (CCLC) but you have to be a member to access it.  I used this to add a newspaper article, including tasks, to my wiki.
• How to use Glogster to build the Useful Online Resources page in my wiki.  This provided a vibrant, visually appealling vehicle to highlight learning tools available to students.  (I can’t draw so this sort of creativity is really important to me.)
• Read Write Think provides an excellent array of graphic organizers.
• Internet Archive is an excellent resource for educators.  I found some useful public domain audio books here and added them to my wiki so that students can access them for our theme study, ‘Future Worlds’
• The State Library of Victoria’s, Ergo site is an amazing resource that is going to prove very useful over the years.  A visit to the essay writing skills page is a must for teachers and students everywhere.
• How to embed an audio file into a wiki:  This proved to be the trickiest!  Thanks to a twitterer I discovered Divshare and worked out how to do the embedding myself (with a little help from an edublogger post, of course!).

Now, that’s a lot of learning for one little wiki!  Hopefully, my students will gain as much from their own wiki experience in the 2009 school year.

I would love to hear from others with positive wiki experiences.  Please share a link.

I am a definite fan of microblogging.  It has something to do with the quick, sharp repartee that is so like a real school staffroom it is kind of weird.  Teachers rarely get a chance to have long meaningful chats with their professional colleagues during school hours.  There is never enough time! Instead we have the corridor ‘catch up’, often while walking in opposite directions, or quick conversation snippets shared in between meetings, phone calls, classes, conferences etc.  When we need to talk to someone we almost always have to do it quickly and, consequently, by getting straight to the point.  Is it any wonder microblogging just seems like natural communication to me?

Plurk

Plurk has become one of the first places I check when I turn on my computer.  It feels like I’m catching up with colleagues.  The fact that many of them live in another hemisphere is not important.  We are all educators and we are all concerned for our students and eager to learn anything that might improve the way we teach and learn.  We share Important and irrelevant details, wish each other goodnight and good morning (sometimes), moan about day-to-day ‘teacher-type’ problems and learn together about things that are new and/or useful.

Plurkers

I look forward to hearing about the weather in Brattleboro VT USA, not because I care about weather particularly but because it means Skip Z is out and about and his morning ’shout out’ is a Plurkadian tradition.  He’s also a professional colleague whose opinion I value and many of the links he has shared on Plurk have become an important part of my teaching and learning.   Mindelei is another plurker guaranteed to challenge my thinking.  Her passion and enthusiasm are a plurk feature and she loves to ask questions to make ’seasoned’ educators think.  GingerTPLC is another plurker of note.  Her teaching day is a constant reminder of what we are all trying to achieve in our classrooms.   Kevinh has energy in abundance and is clearly a well respected educator.  I don’t really have a spatial understanding of North America but Kevinh seems to be presenting in most of it!

I could go on…

If I listed all the Plurkers I value it would take far too long and I simply don’t have the time.  Could I just leave you all with this one piece of advice:  If you’re an educator sign up for Plurk. The Plurk ‘eduverse’ is a wonderful place and you’re guaranteed a welcome!

Just a quick post to share my webquest project with you all…

Earth 2.0:  Is it possible to create a completely sustainable planet?

The best bits about my work on this project:

1. Pageflakes: Using pageflakes as the Webquest Headquarters was a stroke of genius (If I do say so myself!!!) Pageflakes is a great tool for educators: it is flexible, easy to use, vibrant in appearance and the range of widgets available is outstanding!

2. Teamwork: I worked with a colleague to produce this webquest and had far too much fun as a result, mainly because we were able to laugh at ourselves during several ‘manic’ Earth 2.0 moments.  We could have kept going but we had to stop to meet the competition deadline!  (Mark is already talking about our next project.)

An interesting note:  Neither of us had time to take on this project…if you’re an educator there is never enough time! How did it happen then?  We became passionate about the learning, the project and the notion of Earth 2.0.  Discussions led to action; engagement in the task led to refinement and development of ideas and activities. In short, the project became fun for us.  We reacted the way we want our students to react to a new learning task.  There’s a lesson in that for everyone.

3. Local and Global Feedback: We gained valuable insights into the project by asking our students to review it for us.  They thought it would be improved by games so we added games!  I used Classtools, one of my favourites, to put together some simple games based on the sustainability theme and also added the Planet Green Game.  I then asked my PLN via Plurk and Twitter for objective advice.  My  Plurk buddies provided me with some excellent feedback that I acted on straight away. The Plurk eduverse is really something else…I highly recommend you become part of it!

4. Web 2.0:  The possibilities are endless!  2.0 tools help make learning fun and provide teachers with ways to actively engage and challenge students.  In addition to the suite of tools available on Pageflakes we also found wetpaint wiki simple to use and loved our voki characters.  I used Big Huge Labs to create the Earth 2.0 trading cards and EduPic, graphical resources for educators, for the images.

My exploration of blogging and other Web 2.0 tools began in earnest during April this year. At that point my enthusiasm saw me spending most of my spare time signing up for and experimenting with tool after tool, following lists compiled by Web 2.0 pioneers and reading every educational blog I could find. What a journey! Now that I have recovered from the ‘dizzy heights’ of discovery I finally feel ready to share a few of my Top 3 Learning Gems:

· The Google Tools: I’m talking Gmail, igoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs and Google Apps (for Education). I use each every day and believe they’ve helped me more than any other tools. An essential starting point for all educators.  To learn more try this excellent blog post from College@Home: ‘57Useful Google Tools You’ve Never Heard of’

· Edublogs: The blogging world is a vibrant place embedded with passion and enthusiasm that tends to be contagious. Starting a blog (or 5 in my case) is a great way to become immersed in the thinking and challenges of Web 2.0. Edublogs worked perfectly for me because it had simple, easy to follow, films I could watch and also The Edublogger, a fantastic resource for all bloggers.

· Microblogging Tools: At first it was Twitter and then Plurk. I love the sharing and camaraderie these tools allow. Plurk is ‘time-zone friendly’ because the timeline allows me to easily follow and contribute to discussions that happen while I’m asleep. Twitter is not quite as useful in this respect although it is still one of the best and I have made some of my best discoveries via tweets. Both are valuable tools for educators. I’m hoping Edmodo, microblogging for education, will work just as well with my students.

TOP 3 Blogs: The ones I read first are:

· Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day

· Free Technology for Teachers

· Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

All fantastic blogs to follow!  Great resources for educators.

TOP 3 Diigo Groups:

Educational discoveries abound:

· Web 2.0 tools for teachers

· Classroom 2.0

· OZ/NZ Educators

Top 5 Wow-factor tools: (Tools that impress with very little effort!)

· ClassTools: Impress students and teachers with your specially designed games

· Glogster: So many possibilities…higher-order thinking opportunities in abudnance.

· Pageflakes: a great tool for educators; the ‘anything flake’ opens up all sorts of possibilities. Great as the ‘front page’ for our Earth 2.0 webquest.

· Animoto: Very cool presentations. Impress the ‘too cool for school’ group with this nifty little tool

· Flickr: More than you think! Creative Commons makes this the best starting point for educators looking for great images.  Lots of tools worth exploring too!

However, it’s not really about the tools…

It’s about quality teaching and learning; it’s about being an agent of change and it’s about equipping students and teachers and being an agent of change so that, eventually, all teachers and students are equipped with the skills they need to function fully in the 21^st Century.

Inspired by the amazing ideas and thinking generated at the recent ELH conference I decided to ‘experiment’ with my PLN and begin a collaborative slideshow. (They’re a lively bunch ready for any challenge!)

I wanted to build something for my work colleagues to illustrate the power of the group and show the potential for us all to save time and energy when we work together. At the same time I wanted to encourage reflective thought and build something members of my PLN could also share with colleagues as appropriate.

PLN Power:

The ‘PLN Reflections’ slideshow below is the result of my experiment. It’s powerful stuff; creative and inspirational. Achieved in a matter of days, across several time zones and without any drama, it is a small taste of what can be done. However, the best part is not the slideshow itself but the interactions and enthusiasm that occurred behind the scenes, particular in plurk. I’m already hatching plans for a ‘We are the Children’ equivalent…watch this space!

I recently had an epiphany…the ‘sudden intuitive leap of understanding’ kind NOT the ‘manifestation of divine being’ kind. (In case you were wondering!)

I was at a conference being totally inspired by the thinking and ideas I heard there. (Expanding Learning Horizons in Lorne) Lots of inspiration, lots of great thinking, lots of new tools, lots (and lots) of talk! (Particularly impressed with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and encourage all to check out her wiki)

As I pondered people’s willingness to share their ideas and material with us I considered my own workplace and the many other snippets, experiences and ideas I’ve collected on my own learning journey. That’s when I had my ‘Ah Ha’ moment and everything fell into place:

Essential truths about educational change:

• Education needs to change with the times (Der!)

• Change is not about adopting the latest and greatest tools it is about passion and reflective practice.

• Organizational culture is real and needs to be acknowledged and dealt with for real change to occur in schools.Mindsets do need to change and this is not always easy

• Teachers need to work in teams to build professional learning communities. These shared experiences will help to bring about change.

• Teachers must build a Professional Learning Network: such groups inspire, encourage and focus thinking.

• Professional Relationships are important.

• Teachers need to share their ideas and materials. Professional dialogue needs to be open and reflective.

• Teacher’s teaching is very personal and important to them and this is why change can be difficult.

• Best practice is not a ‘one size fits all’ model: best practice is really what’s best for your students and your school.

• It is important to highlight and build on strengths and positives rather than focus on the negatives and what is not being done.

• Learning new tools, working within teams, building meaningful curriculum and assessment, reflecting on teaching and learning, adopting new strategies more appropriate to 21^st Century learners (etc, etc) is not ‘more work’; it is our work!

• ‘Change by Stealth’ has its place and can be used to change practice and, ultimately, thinking.

• It’s all about passion and vision!

Now what?

Time to actually do something!!!

Connect with a colleague; Start a blog or reflective journal to build skills and understanding; Suggest an innovative program at your school; Form a team; Challenge thinking; Start to build a professional learning network; Share material with a colleague (even when you don’t expect anything in return); Publish your stuff on a wiki and invite others to share; Do something differently and, Consider the possibilities…

Last month on Twitter I had to ask what ‘PLN’ meant…I felt like a real twit doing so and said as much in a tweet. I was inundated with people who A, answered my question, a PLN is a personal learning network, and B, insisted there was no such thing as a silly question. Such responses have typified my experiences since.

For me, so far, my PLN provides (mainly) access to information of interest to me as an educator. I join the Nings they suggest, click on the links they recommend, read their blogs and wikis and follow them on plurk and twitter. Because their interests are similar to mine (education; technology; learning) I usually find their recommendations worth pursuing.

One week with my PLN

Last week my experiences were particularly varied and rich. I ‘spoke’ to people attending the NECC conference in San Antonio. One educator, catzpyjamasnz, used plurk to live blog several sessions. She also provided links to a glogster poster on elearning which caused me to revisit this cool tool for another look.

Later, I caught up with the concluding keynote address, thanks to coolcatteacher’s live blogging, and discovered further sites of interest:

http://www.mamamedia.com/ a site for children to learn “technological fluency” via games and other engaging activities. I also found another project to watch, The World Wide Workshop: http://www.worldwideworkshop.org/ . It is committed to developing open source social media technology to enhance learning. I subscribed to the newsletter.

There was a real sense of learning excitement associated with these ‘events’. Although I didn’t feel like I was actually there, I did feel involved in the learning.

New Discoveries:

My PLN also steered me in the direction of these sites. Links I have stored away for future reference and which will help improve my teaching and learning:

Web 2.0 fun stuff: http://www.go2web20.net/ I love these sorts of lists and this one is a very thorough and reliable source of web2.0 tools. Soon, I will explore each one in turn and sign up for those that look useful.

As a twitter user I was also interested to hear about, http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ a tool that promises to improve the current functionality of twitter (a timely beta given the current appeal of plurk!)

Games: I discovered a new video game of interest at http://fas.org/immuneattack/ and also learned how to play ‘Set Puzzle’ http://www.setgame.com/puzzle/set.htm thanks to one of my plurk buddies. (Educational gaming is a particular passion of mine). Another game I learned about via plurk was scrabulous http://www.scrabulous.com/ . I played my first game last week and loved it!

Like-minded online colleagues

Being able to communicate online with people who share my ideas and interests is a huge bonus. They are usually experiencing a similar journey and can advise me. For example, this week a PLN ‘colleague’ sent me clear instructions on how to embed Youtube in PowerPoint via email after a discussion on plurk. Also during the week my PLN offered me advice on a blog makeover, discussed the educational uses of plurk and participated in a storytelling exercise.

I have mentioned in a previous post how useful I find the links provided by oz/nz educators group on diigo. Last week I revisited a comic generator site I discovered via this group: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/ and made a comic strip:

While many people ask their PLNs for specific information I find I get a huge response when I simply talk about a project I’m planning or an idea. People are keen to share their knowledge and experience. Recently I mentioned I was planning a teacher session on using wikis and blogs and got 3 immediate responses from a twitter pal who included some great links:

http://del.icio.us/rosefirerising/web2.0+students

http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

http://del.icio.us/rosefirerising/web2.0+teaching+wikis

Each of these discoveries will impact on my personal learning in some way. I guess the best part about each of them is that they occurred around my family and work life. PLNs are Learning Gems…I highly recommend you build one of your own soon!

I’ve written before about this fantastic project. With the release of Inanimate Alice Episode 4 ‘Hometown’ I am even more convinced that this type of multimedia story is the future of e-reading.

iStori.es

The new episode comes with its own education pack and news of an authoring tool, iStori.es, which is previewed by Alice in this episode. It looks like a fantastic tool to encourage multimedia storytelling, something that students seem to prefer to the more traditional method. I will probably look at ordering it for my school next year.

Learning Opportunities

The learning potential of these stories is enormous…not only do they encourage reluctant readers, they also open the door for so many learning opportunities. Activities that immediately spring to mind after my first reading of episode 4 are:

• Students could use Google Earth to map and highlight features in their own neighborhoods. (Alice explains her new life via a map with clickable points that help to advance the story.) A focus on historical buildings and/or geographical features would instantly lead this activity into History and Geography units.
• Students could easily use their own photographs to put together a photostory of their own, complete with music and words. This would, hopefully, lead to all sorts of discussion points about how music and visuals help to create atmosphere and advance a story.
• General ‘Exploration’ activities: Hints that all is not well in Alice’s current life; possible futures for the family; the importance of Brad; evidence of Alice’s ‘teenagehood’…

Teacher feedback

As an English teacher and Teacher-Librarian I love educational resources which take a ‘new’ approach and which I know will also engage students. I am always looking for something exciting and different so Inanimate Alice is perfect for me. (If it involves technology and reading it’s always a winner!) I passed the resource onto several other teachers, both primary and secondary, and they loved it too. The primary teachers were very impressed and raved about the education pack in particular.