Lifelong Learning 2.0

Warning:  personal post coming your way.  Read at your own discretion.

For those of you in my PLN who are close to me, you know that personally, these past four months have been the most difficult time in my life.

It’s ironic, because professionally, it has been a wonderful time.

I am on several waiting lists to find out more information about taking a Master’s course of study in Educational Technology. This is a goal I’ve had for a long time, and hope to be able to afford.   My recent trip to NECC09 has brought me many additions to my PLN, and great friendships that I hope will only continue to grow.  I joined twitter in May and have made many friendships that I treasure.  I was blessed with an amazing opportunity to visit the Edutopia crew at Skywalker Ranch, and engage in educational discussions with 4 of the people I look up to with great regard:  Larry Ferrlazzo, Alice Mercer, Derrall Garrison, and Gail Dessler.  I had the opportunity to have great conversations about social media and exciting ideas about education with Steve Hargadon, a mentor and friend.  I have been able to stay in contact with many new friends from NECC over twitter, skype, google chat, and the iphone.  I have been asked to present at several conferences and to contribute to several local edtech groups.  And…. I was blessed with a new job at my school of Curriculum & Instructional Technology Specialist.  Adding to the difficult time I’m going through, I decided to leave my job of ten years and jump into this new role, in hopes of creating school change.

There are many ideas that I would like to make happen this year as well.

I want to be trained to participate in the edtechtalk groups.  I have interests in contributing more to LearnCentral, using Elluminate for a list of brainstormed webinars I have in a Google Doc.  I’d love to begin co-presenting at conferences.  I want to support new teachers by creating a blogging support network.  I plan to create a Web 2.0 Tech Club for students at my school.  I want to contributing more on Classroom 2.o.  I hope to start a support group for new teachers trying to establish a PLN.  Then there’s that book I started last year…

Time to go OTG

With school starting and a great deal of personal stress to work through, I knew I needed to take a moment to breathe.  I decided to go Off the Grid for a little while.  Maybe a weekend or two.  I had read about the benefits of going OTG from two dear friends, Beth Still and MaryBeth Hertz.  Both are wonderful articles that really made me think.  So I decided to give it a try.

However… I didn’t just go OTG, I jumped overboard and seemed to disappear completely.     Needless to say, my OTG time became, as one friend put it, an extended Cyber-Diet.

Why am I deciding to share this with you?

1. To thank my dear friends. I appreciate all of the sweet messages from my PLN that have been concerned and are hoping I’ll come back soon.   You mean a lot to me.  Your checking in with me regularly on twitter, gmail, and skype has been an encouragement to me through difficult times. It’s nice to know I’m not forgotten.  Even if I’m a newbie and don’t feel like I have much to share, you continue to be there for me.  Thank you!

2.  To let my new followers know that I’m coming back. I somehow keep having people add me to their Google reader and twitter followings, even though I’ve been offline for a while.  Know that I am coming back.  I don’t know how or when, but I hope to be able to contribute, as well as find information that will help me on my quest to make learning more engaging and meaningful for students, support teachers, inform families, and share the journey with you.

3.  Most importantly, to let those of you that may be in my shoes to know that it’s okay to take a break. I know I can’t possibly be the only one going through difficult times, barely breathing, trying to hold it all together; while wanting to continue in lifelong learning, and to make a difference in others lives.

We’re educators. We get busy.  We get overworked.  We get overcommited.  We care about others. We need to keep each other accountable to finding balance. 

I’m here to say that going OTG is healthy from time to time.  Sometimes life can be difficult and it seems that an extended Cyber-Diet is more appropriate. Be true to yourself and listen to your heart.

If you want to contribute to the lives of others,

you first need to make time to take care of yourself.

This is one of those times for me.  I hope my followers, PLN, and friends can stick with me.  I’ll hope you will be there.   Know that when you need me, I will be there for you too.

Photo Attribution:  Train Pulling Out, & Suns by Taic

It was 106 degrees at the outdoor amphitheater in Wheatland. We were all extremely hot, as it didn’t seem to cool down until 11pm. That didn’t seem to affect the energy of Chris Martin as he ran across the stage, jumped around, and pretended to swim on stage during the “tides that I tried to swim against” portion of “Clocks”.  Despite the heat, Guy Berry, Will Champio, and Jonny Buckland joined Chris Martin in an amazing and energetic performance!

When the concert started, everyone in the first section were on their feet.  But everyone from the second section and back sat down.  I thought maybe this would just be during the first song, but it continued. A few minutes in, I stood up. I paid good money for this seat, but I wasn’t about to sit through a Coldplay concert.  Someone behind me yelled for me to sit down, but then the others in my row stood immediately, as though to back me up.  Then the next row, and onward, and before the end of that song, the whole section was on their feet, dancing and singing for the rest of the night.

Hello! It’s a concert! It’s Coldplay!

The experience reminded me of this YouTube video from the Sasquatch Music Festival 2009.  Though my dancing skills were much more polished than this guy, I applaud his confidence!

I had hoped to hear most of my favorite songs and the band did not disappoint.

Life in Technicolor,Clocks, In My Place, Yellow, Cemetaries of London, 42, Fix You, Strawberry Swing, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face, Talk, The Hardest Part, Postcards from Far Away, Viva La Vida, Lost, Green Eyes, Death Will Never Conquer, Politik, Lovers in Japan, Death and All His Friends, The Scientist, Life in Technicolor II, The Escapist

..and I knew all of the words.

From the huge yellow balloons being bounced around (during “Yellow” of course), to the insane amounts of butterfly confetti, and repeated opportunities for the crowd to sing along, Coldplay did well in engaging the audience.  The cellphone-wave was a sight to see.  Chris talked to the crowd quite a bit.  Before a solo of “The Hardest Part”, he said he would be a (*!*##) nightmare if he did a solo.  (He was great, of course.  I happened to catch that solo on video.)

The band constantly thanked us for showing up on a Tuesday, in the terrible heat.

We would come on any day, in any weather! But it was insanely hot.

Twice during the concert, the lights dimmed and the band ran up to the crowd, performing in the midst of the audience, to give people in the back a better view. I couldn’t have asked for a better seat, as the first time they moved to the piano set-up on my right.  The second time, they performed their acoustic songs just to my left.  The crowd went crazy during the acoustic version of “Billie Jean.”  And yes, I have that on video too.

Here are a few more pictures from the concert:

The Strawberry Swing video premiered this week on Babelgum.  Chris Martin performs as a superhero in chalk-drawn world.  I’ve thought of how the video would play out, but I wasn’t expecting a superhero and a giant squirrel. See what you think.

Coldplay’s Fix You video on YouTube,  Fix You Live video

The Scientist video

Viva La Vida video

Yellow video, Yellow concert

Catch other Coldplay videos on YouTube

Shows and Concert Schedule

Follow Coldplay on Twitter

The last day of school for students is in a few days.

I’m in project mode. Working on 7 projects this summer.

I’m in a reflecting-on-the-past-school-year mode. Will be blogging about it soon.

I’m in a getting-ready-for-summer-reading-mode. Went on Amazon last night and ordered books.

Here’s my Summer 5 list of books:

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – Seth Godin

I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while.  Of all of the areas I’m interested in, social networking seems to continue to take precedence.  Seth Godin defines tribes as “A group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea. Smart innovators find or assemble a movement of similarly minded individuals and get the tribe excited by a new product, service or message, often via the Internet (consider, for example, the popularity of the Obama campaign, Facebook or Twitter).”  ” Tribes,” Godin says, “can be within or outside a corporation, and almost everyone can be a leader; most are kept from realizing their potential by fear of criticism and fear of being wrong.  Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.”

The Technology Director’s Guide to Leadership: The Power of Great Questions – Don Hall

ISTE published this a year-and-a-half ago.  It is on their top 15 list currently.  The author walks the reader through identifying their leadership style.  As described by Amazon, “Each chapter contains practical activities and exercises designed to assist you as you provide leadership in your organization. Hall explores how to more effectively facilitate communication between you and your team. Strategies are included to help you manage the performance of different personality types in order to bring out excellence in everyone.”

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future – Daniel H. Pink

Have to read this book.  Yes, it has been around for a while.  Daniel Pink, former chief speechwriter for former vice-president Al Gore, writes with a strong, but soothing style that makes me want to read more.  He says “The keys to success are in developing and cultivating six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.” Looking forward to stretching my right-brain senses!

Classroom Habitudes – Angela Maiers

Someone told me at a party a few weeks ago that I remind him of Angela Maiers.  That is the greatest compliment I’d received all year.  If you haven’t taken an opportunity to learn from Angela, you need to follow her on twitter and visit her website.  I attended a webinar with her a few months ago that was lifechanging. (Can you hear how fabulous I think she is?) LOL  Looking forward to reading her new book.  In it, she invites the reader to “explore together the behaviors, habits and attitudes that we’ll know with conviction will ensure our students for success both inside and outside our classroom walls.”

Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World HC – Don Tapscott

I’ve been meaning to read Don’s newest addition to the sequal.  Read this description from Amazon:

The Net Generation Has Arrived.
Are you ready for it?

Chances are you know a person between the ages of 11 and 30. You’ve seen them doing five things at once: texting friends, downloading music, uploading videos, watching a movie on a two-inch screen, and doing who-knows-what on Facebook or MySpace. They’re the first generation to have literally grown up digital–and they’re part of a global cultural phenomenon that’s here to stay.

The bottom line is this: If you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.

I’ll be reading this one along with a Summer Book Club.  The cool thing is that the 4 weeks of the Book Club discussions will be entirely virtual.  I’ll tell you a secret.   One of my goals to stretch myself professionally is to moderate an online book club for the parents at my school this fall, and to lead another one with my PLN.  Participating in this group will allow me to learn from the amazingly talented moderator, who is leading it this summer.   I hope to learn from him, then take that skill to start moderating 3 virtual book discussions each year.  Now that I’ve typed that secret goal, and made it public, I’ll have to actually do it!

If you’ve been reading this new blog since the beginning, you’ll know I am all about valuing people, making connections, collaborating, and helping to make each other stronger.  Please take a risk and consider typing a comment to this post with your summer book list.  I’d love to have others to consider reading in the future.

Secondly, if you plan to read any of these books, let me know.  Let’s check in a few times this summer on  the Summer Reading tab of this blog (wink! wink!), and discuss what stands out for us in the book!  It’s more fun when you can learn together!

Happy Summer!

Relax!   Read!  Refresh!

Creative Commons Photo Attribution: Beach Chairs, by Erinisfunky

Bought myself a ticket to this.

Happy day to me!

Love getting something for free?

Love Coldplay as much as I do?

Coldplay is giving away a free album, as a thank you to their fans.

Download those 9 tunes from their live performance and let me know what you think.

All SO good, but my favorite has to be “Fix You,” number 8.

Of course, I also love A Message, Green Eyes, Yellow, Speed of Sound, and Viva la Vida, Life in Technicolor, In My Place, Swallowed in the Sea, Sparks, Daylight, Trouble, Clocks, etc., etc.

Hoping to get tickets in Sacramento, but would much rather fly somewhere to see them- like in good ol’ San Diego.  Want tickets?  Get them here.

Photo link:  Coldplay

Have you attended an Unconference?  Recently, the opportunity to attend a free workshop on Web 2.0 came my way, and I quickly registered.  (Did I mention free?)

The first of the 2-day conference began with introductions and a few rules of the loosely structured format.  Steve shared the “rule of two feet,” commenting that anyone could get up and leave if this wasn’t what they were looking for.  The first day was interesting, but it was the afternoon session and the entire next day that really took off.

Here are a few notes about the sessions:

Friday’s Sessions…

Google Maps/Earth: Joe Wood presented on creating tours using Google Maps and Google Earth.  I’ve heard him present it first at the ILC, and several times since.  I seem to get something new from it every time.  (Besides the fact that his birthplace seems to change every time he presents. LOL)  He speaks with enthusiasm and a confidence that makes you want to bust out the laptop and give it a try.  And I have.  (More about my park-hoppin’ Google tour in another post.)

Backchanneling: Interesting thoughts were shared by Zack Dowell on this topic.  Back-channeling involves having “sidebar” electronic conversations during a presentation or conference.  I get in trouble for that during Professional Development meetings all the time.  Apparently, some see it as good practice.  Cool!  Zack had us join in on a live back-channel discussion using Today’s Meet.

Storage: One of the participants told us about adrive.  50 gigabytes of storage backup goodness! And free too!

Saturday’s Sessions…

If Friday was a cup of drip coffee, then Saturday would have to have been a iced venti double Americano. I couldn’t get enough.

Blogging: Larry Ferlazzo and Alice Mercer did a fabulous presentation!  They shared tips, tools, and examples of their innovative teaching practices.  Check out Larry’s blog here. Man, can he blog!  He not only manages to add blog content daily, but he often has several posts per day.  Alice’s blog is here. Alice is a computer lab instructor, talented presenter, and blogging queen.  She is a wealth of information.  In fact, I just saw her last night at a CTAP meeting, at CUE, and recently, at this conference.  I told her last night that I’m really not stalking her. Really.

Speed Demos: The lightning round speed demos were faced-paced.  I heard about slideshare, scribd, delicious, diigo, and jing, to name a few.  Even though I am familiar with these tools, it is fun to see how teachers use them for learning.  Steve shared that even though he is not a huge Twitter fan, he organizes his seven Twitter accounts using Netvibes.  (Yes, I said 7.)

Here are 3 Things I Learned about Myself from this Conference:

I love the format of the unconference.

It is organic and fluid, allowing for diversions and restructuring of ideas.

It is collaborative, allowing for brainstorming and trouble-shooting.

It is more intimate, allowing for deeper conversations.

I value networking.

Anytime the focus of the sessions turned to social networking, I was all over it.  I am active on at least 5 Nings, and 2 other social networks.  I value people.

Participants took over the agenda by volunteering to  share ideas, present, or ask questions. This opened doors for networking at the breaks, and even to this day in subsequent online communication.  Larry Ferlazzo shared links with me with samples of student work, to answer some questions I had thrown out.  Alice Mercer invited me to get the word out in our efforts to plan follow-up meetings in Sacramento.   Several teachers gave me suggestions for a virtual open house project I’m tackling.  The discussions continue in a forum post on CR20, offering great feedback.  Zack Dowell asked me to be the K-12 Liaison for a Web 2.0 conference coming up next fall, at Folsom Lake College.  Networking can not only bring greater results, it has the potential to help us become better people. I’ve always preferred the team teaching model. Vince Lombardi said it well:

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
- Vince Lombardi

I need to take bigger action steps.

Steve Hargadon was kind enough to chat with me and gave me a couple of “pep talks” over the conference breaks.  He asked questions of which he seemed to already know the answers.  He encouraged me to take bigger steps and told me that he belived in me.  I was inspired!  And I took his advice immediately.  Several things have fallen into place since then.  When sharing about these opportunities in an email yesterday, Steve responded that I’m becoming a “web 2.0 mover and shaker”. Wow!  I’m not sure about that, but I do know that my professional development, educational goals, and perspective have been movin’ and shakin’ and I can’t wait to see where it takes me!

Many thanks to Steve Hargadon, of Classroom 2.0 and Melissa Green, of Sac City College, who hosted the event.

Disappointed to find this out today!

Very disappointed!

Check out a virtual tour of the innovative new stage for the 360 tour.

Photo: U2

Check out Scientific American’s spotlight on Tim Berners-Lee.  A proposal he wrote twenty years ago became the blueprint for the World Wide Web.  The celebration took place earlier this month.

Read here to find out more:

•    Facts about the Web’s Creation

Read a few interesting facts about the Web’s early days.  “Information Mesh” was one of the early names suggested for the Web.  Another option was “The Information Mine,” of which the author, Mark Fischetti, shares that “Berners-Lee thought the acronym, TIM, was too egocentric!”

•    The Mind Behind the Web

I enjoyed reading about Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for the Web.  It’s amazing that it has come so far, so quickly.  It reminded me of my first experiences exploring the Internet.  Back then the service I had charged by the minute.  I would sign on,hurriedly gather information (as much as was possible with dial-up), and quickly sign out, in hopes that the bill didn’t get too high.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“By 1990 Berners-Lee had a fully formed vision: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked,” he thought. “All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to anyone else. There would be a single, global information space,” a natural resource like air and water. The task left to him was to marry hypertext and the Internet.”

•    Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born

In this article, Mark Fischetti writes about the early days of the Web:

“Berners-Lee accessed the first Web page, on the first Web server, using the first Web browser on Christmas Day 1990. Why did it take until 1993 before the public became aware of the creation?”

“Once Tim and Robert Cailliau established that the Web worked, they wanted to spread the word. After getting CERN to buy in, Tim spent 1991 flying around the world meeting with people who were interested in hypertext and the Internet and linking to create Web browsers to access what was a growing repository of information on Tim’s CERN computer. He also encouraged enthusiasts to start their own servers. From there, listservs helped spread the word; so did university computer science programs, which saw the coding of browsers and servers as a great way to get students to experiment. (One of the best known of these projects was headed by the University of Illinois’s Marc Andersen, who would later transform his creation into the Netscape Web browser.)”

“Tim began to get concerned, though, about universities and companies like Microsoft creating their own networks that might compete with the Web, or charging for content, which would violate his core principle: that everyone should be able to communicate freely with everyone else. To stop this from happening, he got management at CERN to release all of his source code under a general license so that any programmer anywhere could use it for free. He thought that if the whole world was building the Web together, no one company could take control of it.”

What do you remember about the early days of navigating the world wide web?