Archdiocese of Philadelphia Cohort wraps things up
By Mary Worrell
The teams from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia cohort gathered to celebrate at a culminating event last month and share their projects.
Nancy Caramanico, director of technology for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Catholic Schools, said having full participation from all of the district’s high schools enhanced the experience for all the teams involved.
“We have 20 high schools in our system and I was looking for something that would be able to impact the schools,” she said. The district formed their own cohort and invited six people from each school, including teachers, administrators and high school technicians.”We were interested in professional development that harnesses both innovative technology and sound and rigorous pedagogy.
“It was a perfect blend of important parts of the puzzle,” she said. “Having every school involved allowed them to collaborate and connect with one another and share resources and best practices on a broad scale.”
Jim Meredith from Archbishop Ryan High School was initially skeptical when told his school would be participating in PLP.
“When the Archdiocese told us about this, I thought ‘great, something else we have to do,’” he said. “But I got into it and to make a long story short, after teaching AP Government for a few years, I’d never done anything new until this year.”
Meredith decided to take a chance with social networking in his class, but didn’t dive in head first. If he was going to use Facebook in his class, he wanted to do it right. He shared his experiences and ideas with other teams on the PLP Archdiocese of Philadelphia cohort virtual learning community.
“Will and Sheryl talked about Web 2.0 tools and going where the students are. Many adults have such a negative feeling about it like I did, but I thought, if I can just get my students on Facebook and do it educationally and ethically,” he said.
Meredith decided to include his AP Government students in discussions about considering Facebook and his reservations.
“They went crazy in a positive way and I knew I needed to go forward and strike while the iron was hot,” he said. “I had two lessons about what to do on the Internet and use Facebook ethically. I talked about their digital fingerprints. I don’t they ever had an educator talk to them like that.”
Meredith’s class created a Facebook group where they posted discussion topics. The class plans to keep the group going after graduation, Meredith said.
Members of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia cohort shared their projects at a recent culminating event.
Caramanico said Meredith put plenty of time and thought into utilizing Facebook.
“The best part about Jim’s story is that he really thought it through, the ethics and responsibility, the use policy. Everything he did was within the parameters of our existing policy,” Caramanico said. “He talked to the students about the safety piece and conducting themselves online – really modeling safe and ethical activity online.”
While Meredith pursued Facebook on his own, his team focused on cultivating professional development within the school walls.
“We always have the professional development where people come in, they leave, and nothing happens,” he said. “If we showed them success in the building it’s more effective than sending them somewhere. We got some buzz from our presentation.”
Nancy Summers of J.W. Hallahan High School said her team focused its project efforts on promoting collaboration among the teachers and taking small steps.
“At each of our in-services, we discussed things that came up in PLP – changing our approaches, getting away from lectures, interactive work with students, embracing social technology,” Summers said.
The team from J.W. Hallahan decided to focus their final project on professional development for teachers so that the skills and tools could be passed onto students. The team developed a virtual learning community for teachers to collaborate and share ideas.
“The main focus is collaboration and teachers have shared lesson plans and ways to deal with struggling students,” Summers said. “Everybody is definitely more confident with their tech skills. I think that’s the best change -everyone is more open and not afraid to try something new.”
You can read more about each team’s project by visiting their wiki pages below.
Conwell-Egan Catholic High School
The team at Conwell-Egan took an international approach with their project. The school set up communications with another school in Beunos Aires, Argentina using a wiki and Skype. One of the many goals of the project is to give students real-world practice of a foreign language. You can read more about their project here.
Archbishop Wood High School
The team at Archbishop Wood developed a faculty wiki and a faculty virtual learning community. You can read more about their project here.
Bishop Shanahan High School
The Bishop Shanahan team developed a school-wide, virtual learning community involving administration and department chairs as a way to share ideas and information and to lay the groundwork for the rollout of the social network to the faculty. You can read more about their project here.
Kennedy-Kenrick Catholic High School
You can read more about the Kennedy-Kenrick’s team project here.
Lansdale Catholic High School
You can read more about Lansdale’s team project here.
Bishop McDevitt High School
You can read more about the Bishop McDevitt team’s project here.
Saint Pius X High School
The team at Saint Pius X developed a faculty network to enhance communication among faculty members and between schools. You can read more about their project here.
Monsignor Bonner / Archbishop Prendergast High School
The team at Minsignor Bonner and Archbishop Prendergast surveyed administration, faculty and students on their use of technology in an effort to identify experts that can communicate their knowledge to the rest of the campus community. You can read more about their project here.
Archbishop Carroll High School
You can read more about Archbishop Carroll’s team project here.
Cardinal O’Hara High School
The team at Cardinal O’Hara developed a virtual learning community for thair faculty to share ideas and new Web 2.0 tools. You can read more about their project here.
John W. Hallahan High School
The John W. Hallahan team’s project involved developing a virtual learning community for the faculty and in-service where faculty members were asked to create profiles on the community and collaborate on a Google document. You can read more about their project here.
Saints John Neumann and Maria Goretti Catholic High School
You can read more about the Saints John Neumann and Maria Goretti team’s project here.
Roman Catholic High School
You can read more about the Roman Catholic’s team here.
West Philadelphia Catholic High School
The team at West Philadelphia helped team leader Gina Joceville develop a virtual learning community for her honors biology class. You can read more about the project here.
Cardinal Dougherty High School
Cardinal Dougherty’s team developed a school-wide wiki. You can read more about their project here.
Father Judge High School
The team at Father Judge is working to develop a professional digital learning community for the next year. Red more about their project here.
Saint Hubert High School
You can read more about Saint Hubert’s team project here.
Little Flower High School
The team at Little Flower has a detailed plan for implementing school-wide usage of Web 2.0 tools next year. Red more about their plan here.
Mercy Vocational High School
The team at Mercy Vocational developed a cross-curricular learning project for students on Greece. You can read more about their project “It’s All Greek to Me!” here.
Northeast Catholic High School
The team at Northeast Catholic is working on a virtual learning community to immerse teachers in Web 2.0 tools. You can read more about their project here.
Archbishop Ryan High School
You can read about Archbishop Ryan’s project here.
Office of Catholic Education
You can read about the OCE’s team project here.
Illinois-Ohio Cohort celebrates at culminating event
By Mary Worrell
Earlier this month teams from the Illinois-Ohio Cohort gathered at the Marie Murphy School is Wilmette, Ill. to celebrate the end of their year-long PLP experience with a project showcase.
Gail Soriano from the Avoca School District 37 said the PLP experience gave her team a chance to get to know others in the district. The Avoca district hosted two PLP teams.
“It was amazing. The thing I enjoyed the most was working with people in my district from both schools,” Soriano said. “A lot of times we don’t have the opportunity to work with teachers in the other building and from different grade levels. It brought our district together in a way I’ve never seen before – we were working toward a common goal.”
Kim Zimmer, from the other Avoca District team, acknowledged the importance of the collaborative aspect of the PLP experience.
“The transformation came in the conversations we’ve had since – it brought together teachers that might otherwise have never crossed paths,” Zimmer said.
The technology integration aspect of PLP shook a lot of team members up, Zimmer said.
“Which as a tech facilitator was great to see,” she said. “We came out knowing a lot of more about technology and tech integration. I really came away with the concept of a personal learning network – it’s changed the way I do things and the way I help teachers.”
Mark Emmons and his team from Leyden High School had to celebrate failure before they could find the right strategy for implementing their project.
“Like many, we went in thinking we would develop professional development sites, connections between our colleagues, and everyone was going to jump on the bandwagon. We thought 300 teachers would embrace technology,” Emmons said. “The good news is we quickly changed our focus. Instead of throwing a blanket over all of the teachers, we started communicating one-on-one and grew it that way. We started to create evangelists not talking about tech, but talking about engaging students.”
Alison Cox from the Bedford City School District said her team struggled at first before finding their footing.
“It was a long process for us and sporadic initially. A year ago we were disjointed, not working toward any particular goal, but we are now,” Cox said. “The six of us in this district are on the same page and working toward a reachable goal. We’re really excited about the future.”
The Bedford team is developing a wiki to serve as a database of information to share with teachers without having to meet in-person.
Emmons from the Leyden team said the PLP experience was hard, but necessary work.
“You either figure out how this is going to be in your teaching toolkit, or you’ll relegate yourself to the back of the bus,” he said. “When the objective is to use technology, we’re in the wrong place. When technology becomes ubiquitous, that’s when it gets really cool.”
Visit each team’s wiki page below for a peek into how they planned their culminating projects.
Illinois Teams
Avoca School District 37 – Teams One & Two
Avoca Team One developed a menu of tutorials for its teachers called TechBytes. Avoca Team Two focused its project on student blogging. You can read about both teams’ projects here.
Leyden High School District 212
Read about the Leyden High School team’s project here.
Northbrook School District 28
Greenbriar School: Team Sprockets
The Greenbriar team’s project, “No Teacher Left Behind,” was developed with the goals of increasing the use of technology across the building and creating a venue for efficient professional collaboration. Read more about the project here.
Meadowbrook School: Team Polaris
The Meadowbrook team focused its project on enhancing communication and collaboration among staff members. Read more about their project here.
Northbrook Junior High: Team Apex
The Northbrook team aimed to foster online collaboration and professional development for its staff through its project. Read more about their project here.
Westmoor School: Team West ‘Site’ Story
The Westmoor School developed its project with the objective of changing the behavior, temperament and culture of the school to use 21st century learning practices. Read more about their project here.
Sunset Ridge School District 29
The Sunset Ridge team is in the process of developing a wiki for its Sunset Ridge Learning Network, which will focus on disseminating information about a 21st century learning seminar series. You can read more about the project here.
East Maine School District 63
The four East Maine teams focused their project efforts on staff development. You can read more about their project here.
Ohio Teams
Forest Hills School District-Secondary
The secondary Forest Hills team is building a wiki that will share the team’s 21st centurized lessons and foster collaboration among teachers. You can read more about the team’s project and find a link to its wiki here.
Forest Hills School District-Elementary
The elementary Forest Hills team developed a professional learning community for its culminating project. You can read more about the planning involved in the project here.
Bedford City School District
Team Bedford is developing a virtual learning community to build awareness of 21st century skills like collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. You can read more about their project here.
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
Shifts and landscapes–
A well established and beautiful perennial—
Yet a shifting landscape–
And in the fall a careful, nurturing move to a another location.
Then waiting the winter–
Finally, spring followed a long NE Ohio winter—
And a sigh and happiness at finding green leaves that hold promise for blooms of great beauty on a Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonica)–
Perhaps similar to the PLP process—
Accomplished educators in the Illinois/Ohio cohort —
Yet a shifting learning landscape—
Eight months of pushing, encouraging movement to 21st century practice within the community by Will and Sheryl.
Waiting for trailers of team projects that would preview potential for upcoming extraordinary learning—
And with the 4th cohort Elluminate session, the unearthing of great promise in the snippets revealed by teams–
From the titles, tell tale signs of successful shifting!
From Avoca, IL ( http://avoca37.org/ ): Tech Bytes and Blog Wild
From Sunset Ridge,IL ( http://www.sunsetridge29.net/sunsetridge29/site/default.asp ): Budding Bloggers
From Northbrook, IL ( http://ww1.northbrook28.net/ ): Tech Buddy, No Teacher Left Behind, Voicethread, and NBJH NING
From Leyden, IL ( http://www.leyden212.org/ ): Web 2.0 Tools Summary
From Bedford, OH ( http://www.bedford.k12.oh.us/index.asp ): BefordPDShare
From East Maine, IL ( http://www.emsd63.org/ ): PLP
From Forest Hills, OH ( http://www.foresthills.edu ): Out of the Box, Collaborative Learning Connections
Excited by revelations of school Nings promoting communication, of collaboration among school faculties; of opportunities to bring parent parking lot conversations into the school arena and move forward using the affordances of current technology, of book studies via blogs, of students blogging for a global audience, of comprehensive plans for district wide communication and collaboration on best practice, of exemplary examples of 21st century student learning, of innovative projects to change the temperament and culture of a school, of team members becoming experts ready to share with their colleagues—
All precursors to the blossoms at the impending final culminating celebration of the cohort—
And here, a sigh and happiness again, as these incredible educators who embraced the PLP process that enables and encourages shifts become established in new landscapes.
