Student Grant Writing – A group for high school teachers and students interested in writing a grant to fund a local school project

Empower Your Personal Learning — Taking control of your personal learning is an important 21st century skill — for students and for educators. In this group, we’ll explore new ways to empower your own professional learning and how to get started.

Writing and Inquiry in the Digital Age — Join a National Writing Project study group seminar as we explore these questions together and share our work and inquiries with the NWP Digital Is community.

Effective Use of Multimedia and Graphics — Participants will explore and apply techniques and strategies to foster deeper learning using multimedia and graphics.

Global Classroom Collaborations – Elementary — Elementary teachers from around the world will discuss, design, and establish collaborations between their classrooms.

Global Classroom Collaborations – Secondary — Secondary teachers from around the world will discuss, design, and establish collaborations between their classrooms.

School of Ed is about hands-on learning driven by each educator’s particular needs and classroom situations. It’s about connecting, collaborating, and creating, not just reading or studying. You can sign up for occasional updates on the School of Ed here.

This move is significant for a number of reasons.

• It saves money.
  This isn’t trivial in these times of budget crisis and cutbacks. Less money spent on instructional materials can mean more money spent on teachers.
  Utah’s pilot program has demonstrated the cost savings possible from the use of open textbooks.
• Technology is optional.
  Utah’s pilot was based on printed textbooks. You don’t have to have one-to-one, or any technology for that matter, to realize the type of gains they’ve demonstrated. Of course, if you take high quality materials and expand their interactivity with technology, you’ll probably see even better results.
• Learning outcomes are not adversely affected and could be improved.
  Utah’s pilot program showed that simply substituting open textbooks for proprietary ones did not impact learning outcomes. Of course, many of us believe that giving teachers a greater ability to remix content to differentiate instruction can significantly improve instruction. Bottom line, though, it’s more about the teacher and the learning environment than the instructional materials.
• State endorsement means a lot.
  There are many barriers to innovative instructional materials adoption. Bureaucratic procurement processes is one. Fear of trying anything different in these days of accountability is another. Utah bypassed a lot of this by not only supporting this project but by actively endorsing it, “encourag[ing] districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.” Kudos to the state and all those who made this happen.

It’s time for more states to become active in encouraging the use of open textbooks and other open educational resources. It’s good for schools; it’s good for teachers; it’s good for kids; and it’s good for the public. Open licensing is a wise use of public funds.

What We’re Planning for 2012

We are planning two new launches of courses for 2012:

• Spring courses beginning March 5 (to coincide with Open Ed week)
• Summer courses beginning in June

Stay tuned to the site for more details. We are currently planning spring courses on empowering your personal learning, digital literacy, global classroom collaborations, creating great multimedia, and finding grants for arts education (a collaboration with high school teachers and students).

If you are interested in participating or facilitating a course, let us know.

What We Learned in the Pilot

We like to think of the P2PU platform as a kind of a laboratory where you can try different things in online peer learning and see how they work. We learned a lot at the School of Ed last year! Here are some of the highlights and lessons learned from our pilot phase.

• What we did
  • Developed and ran seven great courses between Sept. and Nov., 2011
  • Had a total of 163 participants and 233 followers in these courses
    We greatly appreciate the support of the Hewlett Foundation in this work.
• What we learned
  • Interest in these courses was very high, and we had a diverse group of participants, including international and non-educators, all of whom helped enrich the conversations.
  • Great facilitators help make great courses.
  • Asynchronous discussion among the groups (through posts on P2PU) was the favored method of participation. Participation level in online posts was much higher than other activity options (webinars, projects, etc.).
  • Participation peaked in the first couple weeks of the courses and fell off after week 3.
  • Time for teachers is limited, and this sometimes limited participation. [We are considering doing some much shorter, discussion-focused groups this year to engage more people with limited time.]
  • Some participants did not understand or were not prepared for online peer learning. [We are excite about a new "Empower Your Own Personal Learning" course for this year.]
  • Some topics are well-suited for online learning but do not lend themselves as well to peer collaboration. (Fortunately, on P2PU, there is room for both.)
  • There are pros and cons to pursuing formal credit for courses like these. (We didn’t offer credit for our pilot courses and are still gnawing on these issues.)

Community is so important to peer learning, and we need you as we move into our next phase. If you are interested in being involved, please let us know!

by Karen Fasimpaur

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

(printable pdf version of this article)

Good citizenship is not just about things that participants in a society shouldn’t do, but also about what we should do. As members of a well-functioning community – whether physical or digital – we are called upon participate in governance, be courteous toward one another, and thoughtfully share certain community resources. In the physical world, our necessarily shared resources include land, air, and water. The digital parallels include bandwidth and data.

Beyond those things that we must share, there are commodities that we may opt to share, whether out of generosity or other motivations. One key difference in the digital world though, is that we can still retain personal ownership of what we share by virtue of perfect digital copies. Sharing comes very naturally in the networked world (some might argue that we share too much) through social networks, email, messaging, photo and video sharing sites, and thousands of other opportunities to create and share content online.

While many of us post to these sites with the intention of sharing, current copyright laws limit the extent of that sharing. Legally, others are prevented from fully sharing, downloading and using such materials in a presentation, for example, without permission from the creator. (There are some exceptions to this in terms of fair use, but the law is gray especially if the resulting work is to be published online. Suffice it to say that fair use is not as broad as many think it is. Also fair use applies almost exclusively only in the U.S., which poses challenges in the globally connected online world.) These restrictions of copyright stand in stark contrast to the technical ease with which these materials can be reused. Just think about the simplicity of copying and pasting, and the frequency with which it is done without regard to copyright or digital citizenship.

For those who want to share their digital content more fully without requiring others to request permission, there are the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which preserve the ownership and copyright of the creator while simultaneously saying to others, “It’s ok to use my stuff without asking my permission as long as you attribute me as the creator.” There are a variety of CC license that extend different degrees of sharing rights, for example, non-commercial use. See the box below and the Creative Commons web site for a complete explanation.

Educators have a long history of sharing. We have always shared lesson plans, exchanged assignments, and traded teaching and learning strategies in order to enrich learning for all of our students. Now in the digital realm, we can extend this by applying a CC license to the educational materials we create that we are willing to share.

As educators, we are compelled not only to exhibit good digital citizenship ourselves, but also to help our students learn about digital citizenship, including the meaning of copyright, the associated legalities, and other licensing options like Creative Commons. Students are incredibly engaged and inquisitive about topics like these, in part because they view themselves as content creators and copyright owners.

Finally, we should help students understand the common good that can come from sharing. In the era of uber-collaboration, they will need these skills in the workplace. Students should be challenged to think about the detriments of online vandalism and other behavior that not only harms collaboration but can destroy content that others have selflessly shared.

We should all be mindful of the benefits of sharing under licenses like CC and how much value we can add to others without decreasing our own digital net worth. Sharing like this could not only revolutionize education but it could change the world.

This is a guest post from Harry Brake, an Assistant Librarian and Media Specialist at the American School Foundation in Mexico City. Harry participated in two P2PU courses this year.

Spending more time with students out of the classroom in Delaware as an educator was an investment not many teachers are willing to make. However, here I am, six years later, after teaching in Delaware for those six, and seeing the very first student I had in those six years getting married, being successful, and being able to use some of the time I provided to help her achieve success. It is true you do not hear the successes, or sometimes see the successes until years later. I remember clearly the teachers that were out the door at the bell. Funny, I remember the students I spent those long hours with after the bell putting together the yearbook, creating a community garden, helping fill out scholarship applications, writing grants for projects we would attend, and that was just a few projects that began the – teaching student how to write grants.

Moving to Mexico started out as a rebellion against all the things I disagree with in education. I sacrificed the very students that helped motivate me to go into the classroom day after day, for the opportunity to be free from state testing, administration rigor that added to the course load, and be more free to help struggling students. When I came across P2PU, I did not think this would be something students could be a part of, let alone would be. However, as I sat there, now an Assistant Librarian in the Upper School Library at the American School Foundation in Mexico City, I was surrounded by student aides (cadets as they are called in Mexico), asking me what I needed them to do. They watched me respond to various articles on line, and often experimenting with programs such as Todaysmeet.com, wikis and other ventures into 2.0 tools I was unsure of, yet they knew. As we collaborated on the “Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning” class together, since several members had to drop out, the new students in Mexico became my support group, and became interested in helping me answer from a teacher’s perspective, as well as from a student’s.

One specific example became the Nano site. I found that students in my school were doing Nano too, and when they found out I posted in an area on P2PU encouraging others, they all of a sudden thought I was a “cool” teacher for doing Nano too! On a deeper level, creating a toolkit as a final project for the P2PU course on 2.0 tools, I had the idea of students creating videos out of the library, representing the library, as a project using tools under 2.0 that would instruct others. All of a sudden, students were looking over my shoulders in P2PU encouraged that I was involving them in a project, an “adult project” that they could also help advise and be a part of. When I gave them credit in the toolkit part of the wiki, you would have thought they won Publisher’s Clearing House. It was empowering students to empower the educator. Students created a video on how to check out laptops from a portable cart, for teachers and students, in three days, and it is top notch quality made. The motivation? To be represented in my Wiki project and to receive credit from individuals on a larger plane. It was easy to see I was getting more out of my free P2PU course than similar teachers that were enrolled in Master’s courses. They often questioned what I was working on that involved the students. Was I getting paid? Let me say this, the best internships, jobs, and educational resources I have received have been free, providing priceless relationships with educators from all over the world, communication with some of the most creative students that reminded me why I wanted to be involved in education, while opening my mind to possibilities that existed beyond the initial course or activity I was involved in.

P2PU does not rely on the value of credit, monetary awards, or lauding your efforts in front of a stadium.Finding a way to provide information that YOU can give others in the form of conventions, presentations, and involvement for other educators makes P2PU NOT a one stop educational fix. One course in P2PU allows you to create other ideas, other plans, other projects that build on the first. This is worth so much more when students can be a part of the process. Never in P2PU has it stated or implied students could not help active educators out in thought, planning, or projects. In doing so, I found I had the strongest motivation to participate in more classes, create more classes, and work with students in their medium, technology, in forming classes in P2PU that strengthen education with the very students that are needy for something different. P2PU is certainly about peers among other peers, just don’t be surprised if some of those peers represent a younger generation than yourself. :)

The article itself is open-licensed so feel free to redistribute if you like.

The Global Education Conference is a fantastic free, online event going on all this week.

On Thursday, Nov. 17 at 11:00am Eastern Standard Time, Anna and Chris Batchelder and I will be presenting a session on the P2PU School of Ed.

You can tune in to our session here on Thurs. Hope to see you online!

First, the idea to remix an open math textbook into an interactive Moodle course (and perhaps more) has been spun off into a whole new P2PU seminar group. This will start Dec. 1 so if you are interested, please join us.

Secondly, we’ve been bouncing around some ideas for different course (learning group?) formats. One idea has been to do some shorter courses that are largely driven by conversation. These groups could have the potential to have a greater number of participants and then might lead to some longer, deeper learning experiences. Possibly project- or challenge-based?

In a conversation with Bud the Teacher the other day, we brainstormed this a bit. Bud suggested the idea of having some smaller groups actually design these projects or challenges — perhaps a sort of online maker faires for teachers.

So how exactly do you assemble a course/group to build something of their own design without first knowing what that thing they are building is?

Perhaps this grows out of one of those shorter, discussion-driven groups, perhaps even a “massive” one (100+ people). So say, as an example, you have a two week group to explore the question — What could a classroom based on something other than a textbook or a canned curriculum look like?

Spend two weeks discussing and exploring and see what grows out of it. Perhaps some small groups coalesce around some ideas or projects, and they spin off into more in-depth attempts to build something together.

What do you think? Sound interesting? Have ideas for other good questions to explore? Want to play along?

Credit: Choo Yut Shing

Unfortunately, to date, these have only been available as pdf files. Pdfs are good for printing, but not much good for other uses, like putting on mobile devices, interacting with, making movies, etc.

The great thing about open licensed content, though, is that you can remix content like this.

So this summer and fall, I’ve been working on taking these pdf files and remixing them into PowerPoint presentations, separate jpg art files, and interactive VoiceThreads (with audio and the ability for students to record their own audio).

original pdf:

ppt:

Voicethread:

All of these resources for almost 80 stories are available  on Curriki, along with ideas for using them.

Thanks to FreeReading, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bon Education for inspiring the idea to do this and to Steve O. and David Wiley and his Educational Productivity Pledge (see P.S.) for the impetus to move ahead with it.