#CyberPd-WOW!

    In the past two Wednesdays, Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine hosted the first week of the #cyberPD title:  Alan November’s  Who Owns the Learning?:  Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, and Jill Fisch hosted the second discussion of chapters three and four on her blog, My Primary Passion.  This discussion of chapters five and six is hosted by Laura Komos at Ruminate and Invigorate.  Stop by her blog to link your posts or visit to see what all the excitement is about! Thanks Laura!

                 I'm so excited, and much of my excitement comes from finally taking the time to sitdown to see what creating a search engine is all about, which comes from Chapter 4, page 58.  
                  I started one that may be helpful to teachers who write with their students, and who may want to search for specific lessons from sites I recommend.  I find it challenging to have thousands of sites come up when I'm searching for different kinds of writing lesson ideas, and often search the same sites, so those are what I chose to include in my search engine.  If you want to check it out, it's at the bottom of my blog site.  At the same time, I came across a blogger tip site here, that gave instructions in setting up a search engine for my own blog, and you can find that search to the right.  That enabled me to get rid of the cumbersome, taking-up-too-much-space cloud of tags in my layout.  



                Visitors can now search for various topics through this new search engine.  I now am imagining all kinds of ways I could help students by narrowing their initial searches in a topic, perhaps especially younger students. It is possible, FYI, to edit and add new sites, too.  Since the book was written, Google has changed the ads policy somewhat. Now you need to fill out a form saying you are a 'not-for-profit' site, like from a school, in order to avoid the ads, or pay to upgrade from personal sites like mine.

                Reflecting about chapters five and six:  I know that it often seems daunting to add more to our learning, but once I started, it didn't take long to figure this out.  And I know even though I have done quite a lot of tech things because I enjoy it, I loved the words from Shelly Zavon the fifth grade teacher at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School:  To be perfectly honest, the children, the students, know so much about computers these days that once we introduced what we were doing, they basically did everything for us.  There's very little learning that the teacher has to do. The students tell us things we don't know how to do. Teaching students how to search for the global perspectives, deeper searches with Google's advanced search tools and others are part of the teachers' responsibilities, but allowing students choice in research and learning is also part of what we do.  

              As for my personal work at my school, where students study individual topics and are taken out into the greater metro Denver area to interview experts in the topics, or view events and processes happening, think how much more those topics can be explored if they connect via Skype to other students and experts outside Denver, outside Colorado, outside the United States!  Another example is thinking about the 6-7 year olds I worked with in poetry this past year.  How exciting it would have been for them to collaborate with another class to share their poems and to share an actual writing time together!  I believe the idea of sharing would have been motivating, and another group could have added a new perspective.  Even more, what if the class could have written on a theme, such as Colorado's nature, and then connected to a young class in a completely different habitat.  They could have learned about new approaches to poetry along with new kinds of flora and fauna.  

             One additional example is one class that has begun keeping bees this past year.  They did have several expert mentors who helped them get started, they have researched, read bee books, talked with other experts, etc.  Yet, after reading these final chapters, I thought how exciting to have connected to more than one class who was studying bees, perhaps also keeping them, and to have shared the 'how-tos', the problems and the successes.  The list of possible projects that could broaden our students' lives is endless.

             Barriers:  The need for time, at least to begin, colleagues for collaboration, administrators for support, parents willing to trust new ways of learning.