A lot of great people and a lot of “famous” edubloggers (I sometimes wonder what impact that fame has on these conversations- real and virtual, good and bad.) It was really nice to meet a lot of people I’d only written to. Now down to business.
Expanding the Circle – ebc07ec
My take on some of the more concrete ideas-
- Get an active recruitment/mentoring team going as most people are “brought in” by others. This could be planned or happen naturally.
- Don’t be afraid to use the heartstrings to motivate. Teachers are teachers because they care
- Get people personally motivated and then branch out to curricular uses.
- You need hooks for your various audiences – admins, teachers, students, parents
- Social networks are nice because you have a built in audience. There’s no “frontier feeling” that you’re out in the middle of nowhere hoping vainly someone will read you someday. There’s some comfort in that but it’s also intimidating to join a big established network because it feels like the training wheels are off way too soon. Maybe an attractive scenario would be to create a small social network to get everyone warmed up and then move to a larger one.
Steve‘s comment (I’m paraphrasing) that the sessions would have been better on a blog rang true to me. There wasn’t enough time to talk and I’d have liked to draw out some of the conversations much further but it just wasn’t possible. That’d make a good staffdev for blogs- Get a bunch of teachers and give them a complex, controversial topic then let only a few of them talk and only allow a short time for the conversation. Parallel that to the classroom and then show them how the blog/message board would let things grow and deepen without the forced constraints of a school schedule.
conference, lost, ebc07ec, edubloggercon07, necc2007, necc07
I agree that we need to hook teachers personally and I would love a way to do that WHILE addressing curricular or planning needs. Gone are the days we bring teachers in to teach them how to make their family newsletter in order to introduce them to an application that we hope they will use in the classroom. I think you are on the right track with your “staff dev for blogs” idea. We struggle to make time for a solid follow-up/refelction. What better way than to find time by doubling our efforts in job embedded learning. A carefully crafted inital topic and skilled facilitator could direct the discussion toward classroom application.