Joe Teft

August 27, 2014

Thinking about coaching

I’ve been thinking a lot about coaching (what it means to be an Edtech coach, a learning coach, a sports coach, are they different?) this week. Mostly in relating to professional development for teachers. I think a lot of us know where we want to be, or what we want to do, we just need someone there to help us get there, and make sure we’re doing it while following our school’s vision.

One of the best things about life is change, and my job is constantly evolving. In order to keep up with this, I need heaps of PD, and I’m reading as much as I can. Currently I’m reading this book.

amazon.com

I’m trying not to think of myself as “just” an Edtech Coach, but as a learning coach. While I don’t have the whole skill set yet, it’s something I’m working on.

One of the most important concepts that this book made me reflect on, and I use in my EdTech job is the importance of trust. Moving to a new school means the first thing I have to do is build those relationships with teachers. I’m going to a lot of meetings, listening and supporting, and finding out what they think should be happening. By listening and then acting, I’m hoping that the teachers will know that I have their backs when they want to try something, so that when I want to encourage them to go somewhere new in their learning journey, they’ll know I support them.

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I think it all goes back to the sense of community and connection. If we all feel like we are connected, and we are trying to do the best for learning (students’ and ours) then we need to be open to some direction. Any kind of peer coaching can be helpful.

Getting into classes this week was amazing. So good to see happy kids, and inspired teachers doing their best. We’re starting individual student blogs in the next couple of weeks, working on class blogs and storytelling apps this week. All in all an exciting time to be working with teachers.

August 20, 2014

Consuming or Creating or Both

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I was reading George Couros’ blog today about “work phone mentality“, while I always enjoy his blog posts, this one really got me thinking.

At my previous school, before we introduced iPads to the classroom we gave them to our teachers for six months. The first two months were playing, and like Couros mentioned, not everyone played. Some people used it for personal communication, some looked into how they could use it with students, but I guess everyone who used it thought about how they could use it to enhance their teaching (which is great). But I don’t think anyone used it to try to create something (myself included).

Consuming
I don’t think we were solely consuming (or we were aware of solely consuming), rather I think so much of what we know as educators is to consume and adapt. Rarely are we asked to create change, or stimulate change (well in our students yes, but in the system? I don’t think so).

For the past two years as an EdTech coach, I’ve been asking teachers to create rather than consume with their learners. And I fully support that idea today, but I think I’ve missed out on some of the benefits of consuming, or I’ve been using the word improperly or just leaving off the creating aspect from consuming.

Consuming, creating and the commons

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While I often think of the potential of creative commons, I don’t always think of it as a tool for both creating and consuming (although now that I think of it, I can’t actually imagine it any other way). Coming from a constructivist view point, I believe we build on from our previous knowledge, besides direct experience and then consumption (reading, watching, listening, interacting) to other people’s experience, I don’t know what other ways we can acquire knowledge.

As I head into my classes on digital citizenship, and crediting sources this week, I really want to highlight this opportunity to consume and create for our whole learning community.

August 13, 2014

Making Parent Communication Folders

Screen Shot by Maureen

This week our team has been focused on creating a presentation for delivering information to parents. Before we sent out numerous links for parents, but most of our parents received and email on their phones and clicked links to access the information. Their phones opened many new tabs which made browsing difficult for them. So we decided to use a different approach this year.

Since we are using Google Apps for Education, we decided to create folders where parents can view the information being sent out through one main folder. When they open the folder they get subfolders which will bring them to curriculum, media and single subject teachers.

As a tech team, this seemed pretty straightforward, but we all learned a lot when trying to share the message to administration and grade level teams. While sharing settings were easy to manage and control with a small group of people, it was more difficult when using the same folder in multiple drives (for our grade level teachers), we worked with the sharing settings making people editors for a short period of time and then making them viewers only. This way we could manage how the drives were organized.

More than anything, as an EdTech team, but mostly I learned a lot about breaking steps down and differentiation. One of the teams was very comfortable using Google Drive and blogs and they flew through the presentation in fifteen minutes mainly concerned with our privacy settings and size of the drive. Another group (much larger) took an hour to get set up. Some of this was due to our prep, but some of it had to do with the comfort of using the drive. I learned a lot about the importance of knowing your audience. Since I’m new to the school, I had prepared a uniform presentation, but as I am getting to know the groups better, it’s important to start changing how and what I present (all best practice really, I guess this is just pre-assessment).

I have two more presentations to go, but I feel much more prepared for sharing the information, and hopefully making it more meaningful to the teachers.

Next comes the parent step (well a week from now). It will be interesting to see how well the information gets from one place to the next.

August 8, 2014

Back to School

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Well summer was full on, read a lot but didn’t create very much. Going through the presentations we are giving this week and next week, our EdTech team keeps talking about the powerful learning opportunities with creation. Sadly, I’ve been out of that loop for the last couple of weeks.

While we dive into all teacher training next week, the teachers new to the school are getting ready this week, figuring out systems, learning the school, interacting with each other, so far so good I would say.

I bought some screen casting software recently, and want to take the plunge into offering more personalised learning opportunities for teachers, not just with content but with time. I’ve talked about this but at times teachers feel like there is not enough time.

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Part of what I see as my job this year as EdTech is to promote this idea of a “flipped classroom” using screen casting opportunities, an having my google calendar open, I hope will create a way teachers can either access me during the day, or access learning material in the evening, or on the weekends (not that I want people working all weekend, I just want them to be able to learn whenever they want to learn).

June 20, 2014

Being a part of a community

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It’s been two weeks or something since the last post, and this quotation has been floating through my mind.

During my studies in environmental education Aldo Leopold was someone I always admired, but it’s pretty easy to admire someone like this. I’m trying to think about connections and the importance of “preserving the integrity” of the communities of which I’m a part.

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During the summer break I’m going to be working hard at preserving the integrity of my community. I need to continue to focus on blogging, just in order to keep reading, and reaching out to my community of like minded people. So I’m asking for help, how do the rest of you keep going during this time, who do you connect to, and how do you connect (especially if you live overseas)?

May 29, 2014

Being on the other side

It’s the time of year where teacher appraisal is happening, this is the first year where I have been on both sides of the process (thanks to the tech goals our school has and my role as tech coach).

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Like most things, I’ve been totally unaware of how others approach the idea of appraisal. I have been through a number of appraisal methods, and to be honest, none have really worked for me. Regardless I have tried to make the most out of each method and I feel I have grown personally and professionally in all my jobs.

Being on the other end and being responsible for appraising is much more difficult than I originally thought. Everyone I work with approaches their appraisal different. Some just want the box checked and do it superficially, some write out everything they do, some have meaningful reflections but about things I haven’t thought of, or thought would be on an appraisal sheet (I do find them incredibly interesting though), in short I guess, I’ve learned a lot more about being on the other side.

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For almost anything, being able to empathize and think about where others are at help us to grow and develop. I talked to a colleague last night about the importance of qualitative data when doing appraisals. For me, qualitative data is just so much more important than quantitative. By having teachers write what they’re thinking, without it being in a small little box, we can really think about how we want to develop, get away from the traditional appraisal system and create ourselves.

Reading the qualitative reports from my colleagues helped me to understand them better, but also helped me to reconsider my goals and ambitions. I fully believe my reflection process has improved as a result of this process, so I’m really thankful.

May 7, 2014May 26, 2017

From acceptable to empowering

Working with Mel and Nate, like I said before has been a great experience.

I know there are a lot of options for learning together online, and as a group we didn’t talk about this it reminded me of the power of asynchronous learning.

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One of the greatest things about googledrive in my opinion is the ability to learn together without having to always work together. We commented on each others thoughts in our own time, and didn’t always have to have those conversations in real time.

This worked out really great for me since I was out of communication most weekends and we live in different places.

We started off looking at the user policies at Mel’s school and my school, and then we thought about what they really meant, and who they were directed towards. In both of our documents it seemed as though we were directing our conversations towards adults rather than students. One of Mel’s primary concerns and I had to agree was that we need to focus on students and how we can communicate directly with them.

We ended up revising the policy and Nate used Comic Life to make the rules look a little less formal and more focused on what students might want to see.

We tried to use positive language and stay away from “don’t” type of material. I feel great about the whole process, taking away negative language, asynchronous communication, working together, everything worked great for me.

Thanks Mel and Nate

April 30, 2014

I want to be passionately curious

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Working with Mel and Nathan over the past couple of weeks has been a great example of what COETAIL is all about. We’re connecting, sharing ideas and experiences and as a result learning more about each other and ourselves. I’ll be writing a blog post soon on the experiences and results of us changing an Acceptable Use Police to an Empowered Use Policy, and so far the experience has been great (thanks google drive).

I’ve been reading lots of the other students’ blogs, and learning more about digital citizenship, and how people deal with concerns like cyberbullying, data loss, and just fear of the unknown. Many of my fellow COETAILers show passion and curiosity where there might be fear. So my wondering for this week is how do we create people who are passionately curious?

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As a teacher at an inquiry based school, how do we cultivate this in our students. Beyond being passionately curious ourselves, how can we encourage students to take risks and jump into things safely?

Online we have access to heaps of data, but how do we use this? Do we use it to reinforce our own beliefs, or learn something new? Do we use this to find people like us, or meet people who will challenge us to learn something new?

One of my reasons for living abroad is to make myself an “other” to live and experience in a place that is not my own, and where I won’t always feel comfortable. I do this so I can learn more about myself, but also reinforce the idea that we are always constantly learning, so I should never really feel uncomfortable.

Again, I guess this goes back to Jeff‘s idea of always being comfortable being a beginner. If I am happy always being in a learning state, I am always going to learn more. But how do we help our students achieve this goal (or should we)?

With Mel and Nathan, I’ve rekindled some passion for digital citizenship. Working with new people has inspired me to think a little different about how we use devices and what our expectations should be. Connecting with others is a wonderful opportunity, and the world wide web allows us to easily make these connections. Sometimes I think we have to give up being scared and just be curious about the experience we are about to embark on, sometimes I think it’s healthy to be a little worried about the “what if” scenarios. But ultimately I want to be able to replace the fear with curiosity.

April 24, 2014

Six (or nineteen) degrees of everything

“If you take me out of it, it’s kind of a beautiful concept”

During the reading of the Six Degrees of Separation article this was running through my head. And I fully agree with Kevin Bacon, it’s a wonderful concept. To think that we all were, and still are connected is pretty amazing.

I use this blog, and twitter to connect myself and others, and happily, just recently, I read it makes me smarter.

Just today I’ve used twitter to connect to my environmental education PLN #enviroed, I’ve connected Nicki and another art teacher to talk about using art and social media, I’ve also met two new educators from the U.S. and Argentina. I use it to connect, share ideas, and wonder aloud.

With my students, I try to get them to use it the same way. Use the power of connections to find out more about what you’re interested in. Connect to other bloggers in the school and outside of it who are passionate about the same things. I have two classes in my school connecting with different schools to talk about How the World Works. I want them to understand that making these connections with others can be a powerful learning experience.

“Yet studies have found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more.”

Giving students the power to connect with people, and allowing them to write for an audience (that isn’t their teacher) means they have to pay more attention to what they are doing/writing/thinking. It can help them clarify their thoughts, and have a more purposeful audience.

I feel like I keep coming back to the original posts for this course, where the students said the teachers weren’t always the people they wanted feedback from. When we open up our learning and share our thoughts (links, embedded videos, etc.) we get feedback and expand our learning opportunities.

One of the things that is scary is the targeted ads, and google searches that are customized, this can narrow down our world. But as long as we keep clicking, and expanding the web (instead of looking at a condensed web) I think we can continue to push our own thinking styles and skills. We can learn more from our community.