The Internet Grapevine is still local!

Treat your colleagues as you want to be treated. Don't share information that might let others in your local area recognize them. Gather closely for I tell you a tale of poor choices, a tale of a young teacher whose pride overcame her ethics, a sad tale that must be told. I'm the online observer, and I share her tale.

It seems to me that many who use the internet still believe that they are anonymous....that's just not true. One of the teachers in my Professional Learning Network chose to share information about a colleague that was not appropriate, yet this teacher never did understand that sharing without permission is wrong. As far as I could tell, this teacher was spreading gossip.

In the fall of 2011, my Professinal Learning Network was discussing the merits of an individual teacher's form used to help guide student/teacher learning conferences for mathematics. The teacher who shared this form is highly regarded as a technology teacher in our group, yet readily admitted that math is not their strong suit. The negativism and bias of this teacher towards a local colleague seemed shocking to me. I think it may be difficult to trust someone who takes the work of others, downloads it online, and tears the content to pieces.

The teacher in our PLN decided that a colleague's conferencing sheet was not appropriate and shared a link for this conferencing sheet. The irony is that the teacher in our PLN had no problem stealing another teacher's work and sharing this information all over the internet. What was most amazing to me was the fact that they were colleagues in the same school.

Since I didn't know at first that the teacher in our PLN didn't have permission to share the conferencing sheet, I looked over the document. Other teachers also looked it over, since we all share information with everyone in our PLN. Those of us who like mathematics and teaching mathematics found the conferencing sheet to be appropriate tool for teacher use in monitoring student progress. We learned afterwards that the teacher who shared the document with us didn't have permission to do that. I was concerned and frustrated that someone in our Professional Learning Network would do that, yet there it was.

In my experience, teachers collaborate to make a good idea better, but that was impossible because the teachers' work had been displayed online without their permission. Most of those in our PLN believed that some simple changes to the conferencing sheet could help make this a helpful tool for the student. Others thought the form was not appropriate. I thought the form was a very useful teacher tool, yet it could be easily modified for effective student use.

I was shocked that our colleague would do this to a fellow teacher, especially as the teacher didn't know it was being shared among our online group. Without getting permission from the author, it would be unethical to show a copy of it online.

I think it would be a really great idea, if we could consider that the same ethics that guide us at school also guide us, as teachers, when we collaborate or teach online. Ask for permission before sharing a colleagues OFFLINE work. If the work is online and public, you must still attribute the work to the author. This would be a great lesson for all teachers to follow, so they can feel comfortable when teaching online ethics to their students. As the saying goes,

Don't tell me you will do the right thing, show me!

Friendly Friday - Developmental Assets: What Are They?

As children grow and develop, we can reinforce their assets, skills, and actions, that help them succeed and believe in themselves and others.

Say It Ain't So Joe!

Have you ever read an article that really hits a chord of dissonance in your brain? You can't forget it. It is like a car wreck, you want to look away, but you can't. Well, today I read just such a post, written by Mr. Robbo, entitled Are You Engaging Your Children?



One of the poignant, yet (in some cases) true statements was the one I wanted to look away from the most,

I also find it funny that teachers will boast about being computer illiterate, thinking that it will absolve them of any responsibility for not including technology in their classes. I bet these same people would not admit being unable to read or write, but as we move into the future being computer illiterate will also become shameful and embarrassing. To put it simply, future schools will not employ those who don't use technology in their classes and even if they do, the students wont listen.

Are you computer illiterate? Do you need to move into the 21st Century? Is this video a metaphor for what technology looks in your class?

Your school, your community and your colleagues must step up to the plate and work with everyone to develop professional development opportunities to encourage the use of the fantastic tools of interactive online living.

Look for help wherever you can find it and make a "see change" in your professional practice.

Please insist that your school provide appropriate professional development, appropriate working technology and help you move into the 21st Century. You will enhance your professional skills, while your students will experience a quantum leap in their real world education in the 21st Century.

Choices Teachers Make

The core philosophy of the PLN, Personal Learning Network, sometimes called by a variety of names like: Personal Learning Environment(PLE), Personal Learning Community (PLC), Professional Learning Network (PLN), or Professional Learning Community(PLC), remains the collaboration among your peers, professional in their field of expertise, in my case: teaching. When other people, who work to educate and inform their best practices, share their experiences and reflect on how these best practices informed their actions, they become your teacher. This is the reciprocal teaching factor that plays such an important role in effective professional development.

Relating to teachers' choices in learning to know our students and using that information to guide best practice is my focus. Children's interests in the 21st century can be boosted by all teachers and parents, not just by those with advanced resources. With that caveat in mind, this advertisement video does illustrate the point of how we can use technology as a tool to enhance learning while we get to know our students.

Today, I was reading blog posts among those from my PLN, and I was so drawn to this post, Successful Teaching: Highlighting Students’ Talents, by my colleague/friend, Pat Hensley, also known as loonyhiker, I knew I NEEDED to respond to it. This poignant story of how the teacher can validate or deny a person's ability to achieve in school based on their perceptions prompted me to make this response to Pat's thoughtful reflection of best practice as she experienced it. She reminded me that quality teaching is a choice that teachers make with help from a quality learning community.

I appreciated your reflective questions relating your experiences with your skateboard boy and the yoyo boy in the video. Children have hobbies, and frequently these hobbies are reflections of what they would want to do for work as adults. I am always concerned when these talents are dismissed out of hand.



While other teachers dismissed skateboard boy and his talents, you did not. "I would ask him why he was so good for me and not others and he looked at me and said, 'You like me and wouldn’t let me get away with any of that.' He felt the other teachers didn’t like him but he knew I cared and that made a big difference to him."

I am sure the other teachers may have thought they liked him, but as Dr. William Glasser, MD says in his classic, The Quality School Teacher:
"...we will work hard for those we care for(belonging), for those we respect and who respect us(power), for those with whom we laugh (fun), for those who allow us to think and act for ourselves (freedom), and for those who help us to make our lives secure (survival). The more that all five of these needs are satisfied in our relationship with the (teacher)manager who asks us to do the work, the harder we will work for that (teacher)manager.

Teachers also need opportunities to make appropriate choices, and they deserve principal teachers who are lead managers.

Sometimes not all teachers have the opportunity to work with those who will bring out their best, so they revert to a more coercive stance. I believe schools can be greatly helped if everyone works to make their school The Quality School I hope you don't mind that I have included a link to one of my blog posts, n2teaching: The Quality School Teacher, that relates to yours.

Thanks for this thought-provoking post that reminds me why teachers teach.

Lives of Teachers: Public or Private?

This is my response to an excellent discussion, by Andy Losik, a fellow educator/blogger, on his blog, HCS Geektopia. Below, I have quoted a portion of his posting that relates to problems some teachers have with online content that they have used, developed and placed in their profiles, websites, blogs and other online media.

If you don't think people are really looking at your Facebook pages or Googling you, think again. Here is a blog post from talk show radio host Kim Komando instructing parents how to find all kinds of information about YOU!

A tv station in Arizona ran a November sweeps piece on what they found on Arizona teachers' social network pages. "Teachers Expose Private Lives" dug up all kinds on new hires across the state, told where and what they teach, and tried to confront many on air.

Unfortunately for some teachers, the damage was done a long time ago. People post stuff or make crazy decisions and end up paying for them every time a perspective employer runs their name through a search engine. That stuff just doesn't go away.

You have expanded on a critically important topic that can affect the lives of many teachers.

Having a teen who interacts online, along with myself, I have had some strange experiences that lead me to believe that we may have more to worry about than monitoring our own behavior.

There is a dangerous trend among spammers and SEO's of ill repute to hijack websites, profile pages and public pages of social networking sites such as twitter, jaiku and others.

A few of my friends found our tweets online with different names, and these were part of a dating service. One of my friends was so aghast that she made her tweets private, shared the information with her colleagues and gave some suggestions to combat these thieves. I am of the opinion that might deter some, but not the hard core identity thieves.

My take home story is that we need to educate our leaders, including administrators and parents, not to jump to conclusions without verification and appropriate safeguards (including hearings) for teachers or we will end up with a witch hunt on our hands in a time when we need good teachers.

Through appropriate education on this topic, communities can aggree on standards and determine which teachers are trying their best to do right. We can learn to root out cases of identity theft, overcome a social faux pas and weed out the teachers with real social/emotional issues.

Thanks for carrying on this valuable conversation;D

Where Others Fear To Tread

Through Fear by Martin Gommel
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Sometimes, it can be frightening to be a teacher, and it can really be frightening when the schools that hire you are in turmoil. Yesterday, while listening to NPR's All Things Considered, March 13, 2008, I heard that teachers will be dismissed, programs closed and students shuttled to classes not of their own choosing. I empathize with the teachers in California who will be laid off soon.

This terrible disservice and governmental disrespect, in California, for their children and those dedicated to teaching them, reminded me of a similar experience that happened to me early in my teaching career. Fortunately, the majority of the teachers in the state where I taught stood together in the face of (seemingly) more powerful groups. No one is more powerful than those dedicated to a righteous cause to help the teachers who teach our children.

I faced the most frightening experience early in my teaching career when our teacher professional group recommended a one day walkout to let the Louisiana state legislature know what the effect of our finding jobs in other states would do to their schools.

Amazing! I thought. I just started teaching two years before. Why me? Why should I get involved. I could be fired for participating in the walkout, but our salaries were a pittance compared to teachers in other states. For instance, my salary was 30% less in Louisiana than it would have been in Kansas, at that time. Just as today, teachers made thirty to fifty percent of what other college graduates with similar training were making.

The members of the Lousiana state legislature appeared deaf to requests from schools, teachers and the public, so there we were. A statewide teacher's walkout was called, and the state's school administrators figured out that a majority of teachers really were prepared to meet at the state capitol, in Baton Rouge, and take our case directly to the legislature.

Some of the teachers in my school were only teaching as a hobby or to occupy their time. It seemed to me that they were not as effective as they could be if they had dedicated more effort to their teaching. They could hide within the status quo, so they were definitely opposed to the teacher walkout. The other teachers, mostly the more experienced teachers who really dedicated themselves to their work, were going to the state capitol, in Baton Rouge.

Even though I knew that the walkout was right, I had to think about whether I would participate. A few days before we were to converge on the state legislature, I decided that I would go to the state capitol, supporting my students, my community, myself and my peers.

Right up to the Friday afternoon before we were going to walkout, during the following week, the press was reporting that the teachers could face firing if they walked out. It didn't matter, we were determined. When the governor realized that thousands of teachers would walkout, he called off school for the entire day.

Since school was closed all over the state, the problem of firing thousands of teachers was averted, but we still had not achieved our goal: convincing the legislature that teachers were serious about the necessary pay raise.

On the day of the proposed walkout, I traveled for hours to get to the state house, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Being there was a humbling experience that I will never forget. There really were thousands of teachers. Everywhere, on the streets, green spaces, sidewalks and other flat spaces. As far as the eye could see, there were teachers.

We had come to show our support for those Louisiana legislators who were trying to do right by the the children of Louisiana. There were speeches, group discussions, and most people had their signs. It was a truly historic, appropriate use of the right to assemble and petition the government with grievances. Teachers made their point, and the very next year we received an increase in the base salary.

The teachers in California can always make their point TOGETHER. When they work together, teachers can achieve any goal in education. When they really listen to each other....not just talk at each other.

Listening is a skill that teachers must constantly hone. By doing so, we will successfully achieve our goals for the future of education with the help of our real network.

Teachers go where no one else will go. They work with all children where they find them, and take them where they know they should be.

Teachers follow when others will not answer the calling. Everyone says that they would love to teach, but they usually admit that they couldn't stand up to the rigors and economic distress of the teaching life.

Teachers expand their families to include other people's children, spending hours grading or working at home each evening, weekends and holidays with their school family.

Teachers do what no other professionally trained college graduate will do today: TEACH, yet even when our ranks are dwindling and our hopes for semi-autonomy seem far, far, away...maybe even in another galaxy, states like California are committing unspeakable acts that further undermine teacher confidence in the public system.

What are these unspeakable acts? The continuing destruction of the California Public School System. Watching from another state, this story of California teachers seems like a Greek Tragedy, water torture or death by pinprick, but now it seems that so many multiple pinpricks have created gashes in the California educational
system.

Teachers are being ripped from their students, and students are being displaced, all in an effort to squeeze ten percent cuts from the already distressed public school system.

What can we do to help California teachers survive this unnatural disaster? We can connect with our social networks, and lend our support to our colleagues in California. We can find organizations that will help us support teachers in some way that will work for the California teachers.

I would like to ask these important questions, as a starting place for discourse about this crisis in California Public Schools:
Can the teachers being laid off depend on their peers who aren't being laid off?
Can they depend on their unions?

From a distance, it doesn't seem that they can. This is a sad time in our public life as many teachers think they only are looking out for themselves. In my experience, as a teacher, this tactic is not reliable in the long run. When they ignore injustice in their ranks, it really makes the bystander teachers more vulnerable, because the governmental agents learn that no one will complain if more children, teachers and communities are mistreated.

PageFlake Focus on Science

When I locate new science rss feeds, reputable resources, I add them to my public N2Teaching Science PageFlake. Earlier this month, I found websites that relate to Biology, Chemistry, Oceanography, Physics and other sciences. I hope you will take a moment to look over the other rss feeds in my public PageFlake Focus on Science.

Images created are referenced to Joe Landis, of the National Science Foundation. The original websites fed into this Science PageFlake belong to very reliable science research groups who are participating in the US Polar Year 2007-2008. There is an rss feed for the general public, and you can also find several rss feeds intended for teachers.