Australian Virtual Learning Showcase – Day 4

By Mary Worrell

Welcome to the fourth day of our Australian Virtual Learning Showcase. Earlier this week we hosted a PLPLive event where visitors could speak with PLP’s Australian International Cohort teams and ask questions about the projects they’ve developed and started implementing over the last year. You can check out an archive of the session here.

Digital Citizenship
The team at St. Joseph’s College in Sydney worked over the last year to embed technology into its curriculum rather than use it as an add-on. The college also developed a digital citizenship program for its Year Seven boys, implementing Web 2.0 tools like RSS feeds on digital issues and written blog reflections to immerse the students in the curriculum. In their effort to educate students about Web 2.0 issues, the college’s PLP team members also learned a great deal saying, “Now we can better inform teachers about 21st century learning as an integrated approach to new pedagogies for multimodal learning and teaching, or work to develop intensively designed units of work that are driven by the transformative potential of the Web.”

“The integration of technology will only happen if a teacher decides that they are 100 percent willing to give it a go. Nobody can prescribe a technology integration plan that will work for all. It is important for each teacher to personally experience and evaluate the benefits of all of the technologies, plan how they it best fits and discover how it suits their own teaching styles,” said Anthony Rooskie, a science teacher at St. Joseph’s.”

You can read more about the team’s experiences implementing such a program at their school by checking out their presentation.

Australian Virtual Learning Showcase – Day 3

By Mary Worrell

We had a wonderful PLPLive Event where several of the Australian PLP Teams from the International Cohort shared details about their projects. You can check out the archive here.

Welcome to the third day of our virtual learning showcase where Australian teams from the PLP International Cohort are getting the chance to present the projects they’ve spent the last few months developing. This week on the PLPNetwork blog, we are highlighting one or two teams and their projects daily, which includes interesting videos that we encourage you to watch. The teams have worked very hard over the last year and we are excited to see the results of the time and effort they invested in their projects. Please check back daily for updates on the Australian Virtual Learning Showcase.

Mooroopna Secondary College
The team at Mooroopna Secondary College culminated their PLP experience in a video about change. The team’s wiki page features a wealth of links to team members’ blogs and class projects – a great place to gather ideas. You’ll enjoy the great music in this video as well.

Toorak College
The team at Toorak took a fantasy approach to their video “Toorak College’s Adventures in Wonderland.” In detailing the team’s PLP experience one team member wrote:

“I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but for me the experience has been a positive one. I make a comment in our video where I say that I felt like an evangelist in our school prior to PLP, trying to convince others of the need for adoption of new ideas. That was a pretty difficult space to habitat. People have a tendancy to steer clear of evangelists; they represent a maniacal fervour that others find off putting. PLP gave a team of teachers a reason to be involved and a reason to change. From a team perspective, we had members who made huge gains and members who made smaller gains. The sheer fact that our school community has been exposed to and understands to some extent what Wikis and Nings are is monumental in my opinion. We’ve even had Ning discussed at a school assembly and our school publications have included articles that reference the new technologies that have been adopted in our school curriculum. We still have work to do but we are further than we were last year and there are more of us willing to explore what is possible. Pretty darn good outcome in my opinion.”

Australian Virtual Learning Showcase – Day 2

By Mary Worrell

Welcome to the second day of our virtual learning showcase where Australian teams from the PLP International Cohort are getting the chance to present the projects they’ve spent the last few months developing. This week on the PLPNetwork blog, we are highlighting one or two teams and their projects daily, which includes interesting videos that we encourage you to watch. The teams have worked very hard over the last year and we are excited to see the results of the time and effort they invested in their projects. Please check back daily for updates on the Australian Virtual Learning Showcase.

If you’re interested in speaking to some of the teams and learning more about their challenges and successes, don’t miss our public Elluminate session today at 8:00 p.m. eastern daylight time (Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane: Wednesday, July 29th, 10 a.m.)

This Elluminate session is open to the public, so please share this information with fellow educators and anyone you think might be interested in attending.

Original link: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=2007122&password=M.A9AD613E701B0F85C8382F0CE91F92

Short link: http://tinyurl.com/l4jkr3

Here are our Day 2 projects!

Whitefriars College
The PLP team from Whitefriars College, a boys school in Melbourne, developed a blog that serves as a central location for links to the many other blogs and videos the team developed. The blog is also a place for team members to express the change they’ve experienced over the last year with PLP:

“The spirit of exploration and desire to connect to others has been the crux of the Whitefriars College Powerful Learning Practice team’s learning. We have moved from isolation in our own classrooms, in our faculties, in our school, to becoming part of a personal learning network which supports and nourishes us. Our immersion in Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs, wikis, nings, etc. has connected us to people and to new ways of enhancing learning and teaching”

The Whitefriars team has a wealth of information on their blog, including links to many team-produced videos and blogs. We encourage you to visit and take a look around.

Upwey High School
The team from Upwey in Melbourne also developed a blog to serve as a central location for links to class blogs and to detail the PLP experience.

“This blog is our response to the programme and contains a number of reflections and links to products of the process and our participation. We hope that this is a basis for change in the future and that this blog is something that will mark the beginning of a journey for the educators at our school, not the end.”

Please visit their blog and take a look at the many class blogs developed by students and teachers at Upwey. You can also read more in-depth reflections on PLP by Upwey’s team members:

“One thing I did learn was that you have to be willing to ‘experiment’ and hence make mistakes with this medium- judging the usefulness and appropriateness. I was like a child in a lolly shop- what flavour to try first.” – Marie-Josée Mill

Australian Virtual Learning Showcase – Day 1

By Mary Worrell

Welcome to the first day of the Australian Virtual Learning Showcase.

The Australian International Cohort teams have been working on the finishing of their culminating projects . This week on the PLPNetwork blog, we are highlighting one or two teams and their projects daily, which includes interesting videos that we encourage you to watch. The teams have worked very hard over the last year and we are excited to see the results of the time and effort they invested in their projects. Please check back daily for updates on the Australian Virtual Learning Showcase.

We also hope you will join us for an Elluminate session that will take place tomorrow on Tuesday, July 28th at 8 p.m. eastern daylight time or Aussie time (Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane: Wednesday, July 29th, 10 a.m.) where you can learn about each team’s project, including successes and challenges, as well as ask questions of team leaders and members.

This Elluminate session is open to the public, so please share this information with fellow educators and anyone you think might be interested in attending.

Original link: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=2007122&password=M.A9AD613E701B0F85C8382F0CE91F92

Short link: http://tinyurl.com/l4jkr3

So on to featuring our first projects!

Community of Action
The team at St. John Vianney School in Queensland outlines the progress of the team’s project development so far, including reflections from teachers and an original rap created with students.

“Since the teachers involved in the project were already using blogging and other Web 2.0 tools, we decided to focus on the other teachers at our school and use this as a context for creating rich learning experiences for students. We also tried to focus the context of our project with the other classes on a stewardship theme and the question of – How can we give of our time, treasure and talent to support our community? To engage teachers in professional learning and reflection we provided some tasks for them to complete with their classes but found our project was too ambitious for the time frame so far. We have started to make progress but feel that we are more at the beginning of the school’s journey and the next 6-18 months will lead to great things at the school.”

Please take a moment to view the St. John Vianney team’s presentation, “Time, Treasure, Talent: Our Community of Action.” You can also find links to team members’ blogs and Web sites on the team’s wiki page.

Time, Treasure, Talent: Our Community of Action from Ackygirl on Vimeo.

Serving the 21st Century Student
The team at Parramatta Marist High School in Sydney focused its project efforts on “a professional development plan that assisted staff in becoming engaged in meeting the needs of the 21st century student and then equipping them with the confidence and skills to achieve this change in pedagogy,” according to the team’s leader Gavin Hays.

You will find a wealth of information and transparency about the team’s project development on its wiki page, as well as links to team members’ blogs and Web sites. Below is a video the team developed detailing the challenges it faced in meeting the needs of 21st century students.

Australian Virtual Learning Showcase

Save the date!

The Australian teams of the PLP International Cohort will be presenting their culminating projects through the PLP Network blog. Each day during the week of July 27th through the 31st, we will be posting about a team’s project, including descriptions, informative links and artifacts, as well as a video.

We also hope you will join us for an Elluminate session that will take place on Tuesday, July 28th at 8 p.m. eastern daylight time (Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane: Wednesday, July 29th, 10 a.m.) where you can learn about each team’s project, including successes and challenges, as well as ask questions of team leaders and members.

This Elluminate session is open to the public, so please share this information with fellow educators and anyone you think might be interested in attending.

Original link: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=2007122&password=M.A9AD613E701B0F85C8382F0CE91F92

Short link: http://tinyurl.com/l4jkr3

We hope to see you there!

U.S. International Cohort teams reflect on the past year

By Mary Worrell

Members of the PLP International Cohort’s U.S. teams celebrated the end to their year-long experience together with a culminating event in Fredericksburg, VA earlier this month. Even though it was the U.S. teams celebrating and presenting their projects, teams from Australia and New Zealand attended the event via the PLPLive Ustream channel. It was 11 p.m. for the Australians and 2 a.m. for the New Zealanders, but they were still on hand to support their fellow U.S. teams. (The Aussie teams will have their learning showcase event in July.)

The projects presented at the event showcased the learning of participating teams over the last year. But the event was also about book-ending the PLP experience with another face-to-face event where people who had gotten to know each other online could catch up and collaborate in person.

Alex Ragone and Melanie Hutchinson said each member of the Collegiate School team in New York City got something different from the year with PLP.

“It created some really clear ideas of what we have to do and how we can get there,” said Ragone, director of technology at Collegiate.

“I didn’t realize how far along we’d come until the end,” said Hutchinson, lower school curriculum coordinator at Collegiate. “My whole life has changed and this whole new world has opened up to me.”

Ragone said the Collegiate team started utilizing what they’d learned by dipping just a toe into the pool with some digital communication tools for faculty and parents, but since then they’ve begun to expand and have started to try and communicate what they learned through PLP with the rest of the faculty. For their project, the Collegiate team created a Yammer for their faculty, which Ragone described as an internal Twitter network for faculty members.

“It’s just another place to have conversations,” Ragone said.

For the team at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va., the PLP experience has been more of a journey than anything else, said Hiram Cuevas, director of academic technology at St. Christopher’s, team leader, and PLP 21st Century Fellow.

“When our team started to branch out within PLP, we realized we were growing at different rates, but that we were all growing,” Cuevas said. “There was a realization that it was okay to take your time.”

Cuevas said many of the teachers on his team, and he personally, took the PLP experience as a chance to expand their personal learning networks.

“I found myself gravitating toward increasing the size of my PLN so I could grow personally, but also provide support for my team and support for other teams within the cohort,” he said. “The other thing that two of my teachers have learned is that it’s okay to lurk, but don’t make a habit of doing so. Learn how to be contributors.”

The St. Christopher’s team developed a wiki for faculty members populated with how-tos for Web-based tools and technologies.

“We wanted to create a safe environment and one in which everyone has an opportunity to flourish,” Cuevas said. “We also included tips for working internationally with other schools.”

Susanne Nobles, an English teacher at Fredericksburg Academy in Virginia and a member of the school’s PLP team, said being a part of PLP helped her overcome the overwhelmed feelings she had about technology.

“The year was powerful. They said ‘do this for yourself and that’s enough,’” Nobles said. “I didn’t have to worry about putting it into my classroom. I could spend time figuring it out for myself, but I ultimately did use it in my classroom.”

Susan Carter Morgan, team leader, instructional tech coordinator and English teacher for Fredericksburg Academy, said the team of peers put faculty members at ease when the group presented what they’d been learning through PLP.

“I had a comment after our presentation that ‘this is the first time I’ve been this comfortable talking about technology ever,’” Morgan said. “Having a team of people is wonderful. It woudl be very hard to be alone and have this voice of authority because I’m not an administrator. But we have this team of people research, work on projects, learn for themselves and apply it to their classrooms.”

Morgan said that the PLP model, which involves giving teams little direction in the beginning stages, was initially frustrating but ended up allowing the team to flourish on its own and find its own direction in the learning process.

“Because we took up this intentional time to meet monthly, we grew, pushed back a little bit, and tried to change each other’s thinking. We focused on our thoughtful approaches to teaching and learning,” Morgan said. “We shared things that worked, we learned them ourselves and realized how we could use them in our classes. When we learned together we realized that’s what we wanted our faculty to do.”

Team Ravenscroft went from feeling required to learn about technology to wanting to learn about it, said Kathleen Christopher, academic computing coordinator, team leader and PLP 21st Century Fellow.

“I think the biggest thing that is different is that at the beginning they felt a sense of obligation to participate and try new things because they were a part of the group,” she said. “Now they actively seek out new activities because of their own developing interest in what the tools can help them accomplish with their students.”

The Ravenscroft team developed a professional development wiki as a way to pass what they learned through PLP onto their fellow faculty members.

Matt Scully is director of technology at Providence Day School (PDS) in North Carolina and his team’s leader. The team is trying to get faculty members revved up for a professional development day in October to be led by the PLP team.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do is make sure we’re having conversations,” Scully said. “Not necessarily about technology, but about curriculum, differentiation, assessment, and mention where tools can help.”

One of the PDS team members expressed some skeptism at first about whether his students were learning as much through the new methods. After a gentle push from PLP he conducted his own action research project to see just what was happening in terms of student achievement and was surprised at the results, especially when aggregated by gender. It appears that his female students did better using social means to learn and study.

Like Cuevas, Scully said the year-long PLP experience helped him expand his personal learning network.

“It has made all of us very reflective on our practice in the classroom,” Scully said. “We had to step back and ask ourselves why we did what we did and why.”

Each PLP team developed a project to culminate the year-long experience. Please visit their wiki pages to review their hard work and innovation:

Virginia
Fredericksburg Academy- VA
The team at Fredericksburg Academy created a school-wide, virtual learning community to introduce faculty to the idea of reflective collaboration and sharing. They are also planning monthly, after-school sessions to share Web 2.0 tools. You can read more about their project here.

Christchurch School- VA
The team at Christchurch is working to implement 21st century skills and Web 2.0 tools into its existing curriculum. You can read more about this transformation
here.

St. Christopher’s School- VA
The St. Christopher’s team developed a wiki where teachers can learn Web 2.0 tools and see how other teachers have utilized them. You can read more about their project here.

Flint Hill School- VA
You can read more about Flint Hill’s project here.

Norfolk Academy- VA
You can read more about Norfolk Academy’s project here.

North Carolina
Ravenscroft School- NC
The team from Ravenscroft decided to develop a school-wide, professional development wiki to share and scale what they’ve been learning with the rest of their faculty here.

Providence Day School- NC
You can read more about Providence’s project here.

New York City
Collegiate School- NYC
The Team at Collegiate School created a Yammer for the school’s nearly 100 faculty members to share ideas. You can read more about their project here.

Missouri
Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School- MO
You can read more about Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School’s project here

Coming Together

This is pulled from a blog post in the International cohort and posted here with permission.

• Posted by Susan Carter Morgan on March 14, 2009 at 7:49pm

Tags: collaboration, learning, teaching, team, PLP

PLP News from Down Under

By Mary Worrell

A lot of news has been coming out of Australia recently – not all of it good. Last month a brushfire ravaged the province of Victoria killing nearly 200 people.

For Powerful Learning Practice’s International Cohort, the pain of the event hit close to home with team members having family and students affected by the fires. But it didn’t take long for the PLP community to spring into action and try to find some silver lining in the tragic news coming from down under.

Two members of the PLP International Cohort from opposite sides of the world decided to team up and give their students lessons in caring for the global community. Hiram Cuevas, Director of Academic Technology for St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va., connected with Jenny Luca, Head of Information Services at Toorak College in Australia, to meet with their students in a video Skype session. The students at St. Christopher’s made a commitment to help those affected by the devastating brushfires in Victoria, Cuevas said, and what better way to connect them to the event than through first-hand accounts.

Luca’s students and fellow faculty members were impressed that people from so far away could take an interest in their lives, she said. The students at St. Christophers were able to speak with the a receptionist from Toorak College who lost a house in the fires, giving them a first-hand account of the devastation. Without PLP, these two educators may not have met one another.

“PLP enabled Hiram and I to connect and this has led to our schools becoming connected. This International Cohort has been the launch pad for many connections that are proving to be rich and meaningful for our staff and students. This reaching out from Hiram’s school has been a very positive experience that has had an impact on our school community. We are very touched by the care and compassion extended to the Australian people from our American counterparts.”

Cuevas said his school’s involvement with PLP has allowed it to reach out to others far beyond its school walls.

“PLP has armed our school with the potential to develop relationships with other schools from around the globe. The world has become our classroom and the access to information and experiences from resident experts, individuals who were personally affected by a tragedy, or an opportunity to collaborate and share with other students is a powerful model. I look forward to growing my relationship with Toorak to expand and develop additional opportunities for our students to grow.”

While plenty of virtual community service has been going on surrounding the Victoria brushfires, PLP members are still in the midst of working on their projects. Many, like Adrian Camm, dove into utilizing their personal learning networks in their practice.

Camm, a mathematics and physics teacher from Mooroopna Secondary College in Australia, created a virtual learning community (VLC) for his physics students. He explained the community last month on the School Library Association of Victoria blog “Bright Ideas”:

“I have created a virtual learning community for Unit 3 & 4 Physics that will link all students across Victoria to experienced educators, members of the Australian Institute of Physics and textbook authors from both Nelson and Heinemann publishers. It will provide students with tremendous learning opportunities anytime, anywhere. Students (and educators if they wish to be a part) will have access to a password-protected learning environment, where they can ask for help with questions, chat about careers in physics and have concepts explained to them in great detail. The best part is it’s free!”

Time is always a factor for educators and a frequent discussion among PLP team members, but Adrian shared with the cohort his philosophy in trying to find time to post in the VLC:

“I say, make time. If we want to make substantial changes so that our teaching and learning practices are more relevent with our students world, then we need to make it a priority.”

There have been a few lighthearted threads around the PLP cohorts lately dealing with the challenges team members have faced during their year-long PLP experience, from unforgiving network filters to misunderstanding colleagues to time management.

Amanda Ritter, Head of Business Studies at Toorak College in Australia, has been busy in the VLC explaining her team’s process in developing their projects. But she took a moment to share a “swampy” metaphor in response to a post titled “What has been the ‘muddiest’ point so far?”

“The quagmire of internal, bureaucratic, dirty, red tape that one must continually wade against when implementing something new: all the website blocks and firewalls, internet downtime, computer crashes and when I just don’t have the technical skills to make my clear vision a reality. The mosquitoes buzzing by my ear –“you can’t do that”, “that won’t work”, “what about the content?” – they annoy me but I ignore or swat them and continue on my progress. The negativity of others bogging me down but I push ahead and draw inspiration from others who swim freely in clear waters. Currently striding more and more strongly, making a passage for others who begin to follow in my wake now that the path has been cut. I can now, just in the distance, see the edge of the swamp.”

This is the sort of determination needed to enact change in education and Ritter’s metaphor captured the many challenges educators are up against in these efforts. Ritter’s team is in the midst of developing its project. Transparency is key in the PLP process and Ritter has been very open about her team’s project development.

The project, titled “Building Our Digital Footprint Together,” involves teachers and students developing their online presence in “positive and professional ways.” A digital footprint isn’t the only goal, though. Ritter’s team is aiming to make teachers and students “clickable” while improving digital literacies and competencies with various technologies. Ritter’s team’s project involves many different content areas at her school as well as technologies, from wikis and blogs to virtual learning communities. This team’s project is really a project of many projects, one of which includes creating a closed virtual learning community for year nine English students to collaborate and share their learning with one another.

PLP teams are winding down their year-long experience and many are looking forward to face-to-face culminating celebrations. We can’t wait to see what they’ve learned.

When a community is in need

By Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

PLP is a community of educators and while most of the time the focus is education, we can’t help but get to know one another personally. In a family or community when some of us hurt we all hurt. When some of us succeed we all celebrate.

Many of those in our community from Australia are hurting after a brushfire started last week in Victoria and quickly spread killing 181, according to ABC News, and the death toll is expected to continue to rise. We need to stand with them in this time of crisis. One of our PLP 21st Century Fellows from Australia Jenny Luca started a community where educators can collaborate to help those in need in Australia.

Bottom line – Get your students involved. Join the Working Together site, raise some money, and donate to help rebuild schools and help Australia’s students. The left-hand column of the site has a PayPal button for donations.

I received this letter and have stripped the identifiers to protect privacy. I simply wanted to share to create an awareness that will inspire us to some collective action.

Hi all,

Just need to share this … for those overseas – more than 130 people died in a bushfire on Saturday and the death toll is still rising.

On Saturday, we (my colleagues and friends) lost one of our students in the Bushfire – I taught him from Year 8 through to Year 12 – he got the best score in IT Apps for my class last year. He stayed with his parents to protect their home and all three perished – his older brother and sister weren’t home at the time. He was a school prefect, involved in musicals and drama productions, a great student and topped many subjects. Many of last year’s Yr 12s came in today and the school community is devestated.

Also, one of my colleagues who retired 2 years ago and his wife have not been heard of since Saturday, so we are fearing the worst for him – his kids were taught at the school making it even more difficult.

A new student to the school was very upset this morning and when I took a closer look, it was the daughter of someone I knew (not very well). When I enquired, it turns out her father wasn’t responding to phone calls and hadn’t been heard of for quite some time. Her mother picked her up and they went to look for him.

Hopefully, tomorrow brings some closure on these missing people.

Many families and kids lived in the area and were on high alert over the weekend and continue to be on high alert. Buses aren’t running, so they can’t get to school. Many have lost their homes, livestock, businesses, etc. 3 colleagues lost their homes while about 15 – 20 families lost their homes.

The back of the school property (a back paddock) got burnt which makes me wonder whether our emergency plan good enough if it escalated.

It was a tough day speaking to kids in class today and they told stories about their situation or family or friends not heard of or losing everything. The devestation is amazing.

While we don’t live too close, we are close enough to hear the choppers, smell the smoke, see the haze and be aware that if the wind shifted in our direction for long enough from the wrong angle, there are many green (or dry) wedges that could put our house under ember attack. Fire plan is to just pick up the kids and animals and leave. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to this.

This sort of day makes you remember to live each day like it’s your last.

The following is a repost from Jenny Luca:

Yesterday I posted about the natural disaster that has ravaged the Victorian countryside. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach read my post and offered to help in any way she could. My good friend Angela Stockman, who I collaborate with on Working together 2 make a difference, also wanted to know what she could do to help. Here we have two Americans reaching out to assist those in a country very distant from their own. Why do they want to help? Firstly no doubt, because they are sensitive people with a desire to assist their fellow citizens of the world. Perhaps they are motivated also because they have formed connections through these networks we are working in and feel a link to a country far from their own.

Sheryl spoke with me tonight and has committed to help me, Angela and other educators who may wish to join us, to do whatever it is we can to raise funds to support those in need. The Red Cross has coordinated a fundraising effort here in Australia. What we are encouraging you to do is to join Working together 2 make a difference and post your efforts there. We will set up a paypal account that will direct the monies you raise to the Red Cross appeal. Here’s what I’ve posted on the Working together 2 make a difference site to enocurage participation;

Victoria, the State I live in in Australia, has been hit by a tragic natural disaster that is affecting the lives of many of our country communities. On Saturday the 7th of Feb., bushfires, fanned by fierce northerly winds in 46 degree celcius temperatures, ravaged our countryside, leading to the deaths of 173 people. This figure is expected to rise to over 200 in the coming days as they gain access to affected areas and search homes. Native animals, livestock and family pets were other victims of this disaster.

So how can we all make a difference? We would love to see our education community from near and far band together to support the communities in need. What is needed is money to help schools rebuild, families rebuild their lost homes and for communities to build the infrastructure needed that has been lost in these fires.

What can you do? Anything that will help your students to understand the need to help others when the situation is dire. Be it a sausage sizzle, free dress day, bake sale, whatever it takes to raise a few dollars that can be used to support others. In the next few days, with the help of Sheryl Nussbaum Beach and some wisdom fron Clarence Fisher, we’ll be setting up a paypal account to direct funds you raise to the Red Cross appeal that has been set up to support those affected. Create a page here and let us know your plans. We can support one another and link our schools to a common cause. Let’s show the world how the education community can use the tools at our disposal to connect and support one another for a common purpose.

So, wherever you are in the world, think about helping out those in need here in Australia. And let’s see just how small our world really is when we connect using these tools for the common good.

We would love to see our cohort rally to support this cause. It will be a wonderful example of the power of these networked connections and their ability to form community that cares and supports one another. Think about what your school can do to help. It doesn’t have to be huge, but whatever it is, it will make a difference. Go and visit Working together 2 make a difference and see what you can do.

Managing change

By Mary Worrell

PLP team members and fellows learn new things everyday. It’s when they bring these experiences back to their home schools that the real progress begins.

Blogging in the classroom
Mandy Shulman, member of the Illinois-Ohio Cohort, has been utilizing the network she’s developed through her PLP experience to jump-start a blog for her second-grade class.

“Through the discussions and videos on PLP’s virtual learning community, I became interested in using wikis in my classroom. After learning more about wikis from other teachers through the Ning, and after reading Will’s book, I decided that a blog would better meet the goals I had for my students.”

To get things going, Mandy met with her PLP 21st Century Fellow Judi Epcke a number of times to map out how she wanted to use the blog, what blogging host to use, etc. After only a month of working with the blog, Mandy saw growth among her students.

“I have already seen growth in our reading, writing, and technology skills. They have an interest in reading and writing, and communicating about their writing with others through comments. Rather than writing for a teacher and receiving one person’s opinions and thoughts, they are writing for a wide audience, and love receiving comments from their peers in our class and around the world.”

You can read and comment on posts by Mandy’s students here.

Testing out Second Life
Larry Kahn is Director of Academic and Information Technology at The Kincaid School in Houston, TX and a PLP 21st Century Fellow. After hearing about the virtual environment Second Life, Larry created an account and an avatar, but that was about as far as he got.

“I never did anything with it. I set my person up, sat at the welcome area and never got back to it.”

Larry connected with other educators through PLP interested in learning more about Second Life and decided to explore the virtual world with them. Second Life is an expansive, virtual environment where one can wander aimlessly, however, educators have utilized the environment for virtual field trips to recreations of landmarks like the Great Wall of China. Kahn said tagging along with others interested in leveraging the program in the classroom put him at ease.

“I would recommend people get together with a group of educators who have experience. It’s great for educators to go into Second Life through lense of education, because it’s a huge, diverse area.”

Having fellow PLP team members and educators vet the world of Second Life for him gave Kahn a chance to sit back, enjoy virtual exhibits like the one put together by the Holocaust Museum, and think about the potential of using it in the classroom.

Bringing PLP home
Hiram Cuevas is the Director of Academic Technology at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, VA and a PLP team member from the International Schools Cohort. Most PLP teams are getting started on their culminating projects and Hiram’s is no different. His team is looking for ways to connect what they’ve learned through PLP to the rest of the school and they’ve decided to do this through a school-wide wiki of how-tos for Web 2.0 tools, technology issues, screencasts and other learning opportunities for faculty. Hiram’s team is made up of faculty members from across the academy.

“Our team is pretty diverse and that was intentional. We wanted to try and drop seeds all over the school, not just in one core area. We wanted to get the most bang for our buck and have representation across the curriculum.”

The team has their own wiki going to track the tools and technologies they’ve utilized and how.

These projects are all the different things we’ve completed. And we started off by looking at the individual instructor. Rather than try to force technology down the students’ throat, we made an effort to make sure the technology selected was indeed appropriate.”

Some team members have utilized video conferencing in Skype to stay in touch with students while they’re away.

“We had some teachers go down to Mexico and they wanted to continue to instruct their class while they were away. They communicated with their class through Skype and were able to interview native Spanish speakers with the boys.”

Connecting through projects
Thomas Cooper is Technology Integration Coordinator at The Walker School in Marietta, GA and a PLP 21st Century Fellow. Recently Thomas has been educating PLP team members on the many possibilities of using Google Earth in the classroom through our Fellow Tool Series. He has helped develop a number of projects for his classes and for other teachers utilizing Google Earth, wikis and Skype, among other tools. The most recent, Land of Hope, launched last month to explore the factors that affect human migration. Technology students at Thomas’ school, as well as students from schools in Utah and Connecticut, are all participating in the project.

Students from the various schools are reading books on migration and discussing them regularly with their classmates and on the project wiki. During the course of the project students will develop videos on their book and migration and outsource graphic design work to Thomas’ school’s technology students, giving participants experience with outsourcing. Students will also create layers in Google Earth showing the push and pull factors influencing particular migrations.

“Eventually after we map out the migrations, we’ll look at the commonalities between them. We’ll be identifying positive effects and how we can use those to influence immigration policy.”

Thomas’ aim is to eventually have students raise money for a charity of their choosing that deals with children and labor and/or immigration issues, but for now that is an optional part of the project. His ideas for projects come from personal interests. In the case of Land of Hope, it was his anthropology background.

“I take an interest, and then ask how I can fit it into a class. I go into the literature and find a body of literature that supports it, because I want children to read something. I’m very interdisciplinary.”

“It has been exciting to watch Thomas develop and grow as a two-year alum of Powerful Learning Practice, especially in the realm of managing change,” said PLP Co-founder Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.

You can see more of Thomas’ projects here.