Kentucky Connected Educator Day 24

Digital Citizenship Week takes us across the globe via Kentucky e-learning...

El khdar Abdelmoula

Kentucky-e-Learning Educator

Youssef Ben Tachfin High School

Khouribga, Morocco

In what way (s) are you a connected educator?

I’m always connected or looking for better ways to be connected. ‘Connected’ means that I belong to a global world. I’m connected when I establish collaborative works with other schools through virtual platforms to share and exchanges ideas and projects. I also connect when I participate in virtual professional training courses that bear tremendous effects on my teaching profession and academic pursuit.

How does being connected impact your practice? 

Being connected makes me believe that I belong to a flat world where frontiers are compressed and distances are mitigated. The power I invest in my teaching comes from the incentives that I get from the power of connection. I learn every single day that I’m not alone when I face troubles. I hear people’s stories and build on them. When I’m connected I adopt success and dispel failure. I build scaffolds for my creative ideas and usher them towards the end of the tunnel. Dreams grow into schemes and new horizons appear on the limitless sky of my universe.

One concrete example is when I took some PD courses with Kentucky Virtual School, I learnt much and invested that learning in my actual teaching. I had become better. One time we even had an online collaboration with a class from Kentucky; our students shared cultural insights regardless of distances and had much fun and importantly knew in their hearts that people can have the same dreams and aspirations regardless of their language and the ample materials they have. We all play in a field which is being leveled and we can see each other from a big distance, virtually but truly!

How does being connected impact you as a professional?

I believe in the notion of self-made man as suggested by Benjamin Franklin. The idea of being connected helps me achieve this value of independency to improve my professional life and the life of people around me.  Independency doesn’t mean I don’t interact with other people. It just means I can do whatever they can do but need much room for thinking and unconditional motivational push. I strive everyday to be better person.  I also use other models for success to build on their strengths and avoid their pitfalls. Even when I fail, it is often a good sign that I’ve really tried hard.

What advice or resources would you recommend to colleagues interested in becoming connected?

“Go for it”.  We learn when we are involved. Being connected is the shortcut to being involved. The world has changed tremendously and one needs to move beyond ones’ comfort zone. The only comfort in this busy life is when you know that there are other people just in the other corner listening to you attentively and compassionately.

Abdel was one of several Moroccan teachers who participated in online professional learning courses offered through the eLearning Ky grant. He participated in courses facilitated by Melissa Ferrell and they have stayed in touch over the years.

Kentucky Connected Educator Month Day 1

Donnie Piercey

Simmons Elementary
Woodford County

In what way(s) are you a connected educator?

Connected Educator Month is a celebration of teachers who figured out how the Internet can be their friend in the classroom.  The word “educator” jumps out at me, though.  All of us are teachers of students first-being connected just makes our lessons all the more awesome.  So, how am I connected? 

I tweet (@MrPiercey) to get and share ideas with other educators around the world (who I know are a whole lot more creative than I am!). I started the #KyEdChat hashtag for that reason. There are wonderful teachers here in Kentucky who understand the importance of being connected; solid educators who love sharing many of the creative things they are doing with their students. Check out all these Kentucky teachers on Twitter.

Three years ago, I created a classroom blog for my students and parents. My site is a collection of websites, resources, and videos that I use for instruction throughout the school year. If we play a game in class on our Chromebooks, I'll put a link to it on my blog, so my students can go home and play it. If we watch a great Youtube video in class, I'll embed it on my website so my students will watch it over and over again while they are at home. Why should the walls of my classroom be the place where learning stops?

Lastly, this past May I was given the opportunity to attend the Google Teacher Academy down in Sydney, Australia. Being a Google Certified Teacher is a great honor and (okay, I'll admit it) a whole lot of fun, too. It's given me the opportunity to meet some very prominent teachers; some at conference, and others through communities on Google+. The best part for me though: the 160 students who come into my classroom each day get to experience the Googley goodness, too! If you've never played around with the free Google Apps for Education, you're missing out. Sure, I'm a connected educator, but I'm connected to my students first.  

How does being connected impact your practice?

This year, Woodford County Schools is letting me pilot a 1:1 Chromebook classroom with my 4th and 5th grade students at Simmons Elementary. They’re very powerful tools that I believe can change the way teachers teach here in Kentucky.  My students each have their own Google Account which gives them access to all of the free Google Apps for Education. My big, long-term goal is to use my Chromebooks to run a virtual, paperless classroom.  I know this is a wild idea for an elementary classroom, but I’m all about dreaming big.  Here’s one way that I’m using my Chromebooks to make that dream happen:
Every day, my students take a “Flashback” using Google Forms.  Here’s a sample one from a few weeks back (click if you’d like to take it yourself).   All of their information is instantly recorded onto a spreadsheet, and this is where the really-cool-and-nerdy-teacher-stuff starts.  I learned from fellow Google Certified Teacher Jay Atwood (@jayatwood on Twitter, you should follow him!) about a quick little script called “Flubaroo”. Flubaroo grades my students’ work within a matter of seconds; it even emails my students their results!  Check out this video below to see how it works:

  Boom!  Instant Feedback.

Because he's a Google Certified Teacher and he's always looking to teach people new tools and content to improve their learning, Donnie asked Fund staff member, Renee Boss, to join him for a Google Hangout on Air.  In the video below you will find the answer to the last two questions Renee asked Donnie.  How does being connected impact you as an educator?  What advice or resources would you recommend to colleagues interested in becoming connected?

(Note:  In his teacher as facilitator way, Donnie kept the camera on Renee for the first two minutes of the video chat, so be sure to watch the whole thing to see Donnie and to hear his thoughtful responses to the final two questions.)

Are You Ready for Connected Educator Month?

By:  Renee Boss

We are only ten days away from the launch of Connected Educator Month (#ce13). At The Fund, we have decided to participate, and we would like to encourage you to participate as well.

Not sure what being a connected educator means?  Basically, you are a connected educator when you are learning and connecting to other educators across school, district, state, and country lines.  By connecting beyond your own location you learn and develop your own professional learning community (#PLN).

Over the next few weeks we will finalize our plans about how we will participate and promote Connected Educator Month, but we'll let you in on a few of our ideas thus far.

During October's #ce13


We will highlight Kentucky teachers who are engaged, connected, continuously learning, giving, and receiving from others within our state and beyond our state.  We also hope to showcase collaboration globally because we know Kentucky educators connect with educators across the world.  While one social media platform over another is not necessarily best, we will be using Twitter, Facebook, our blog, Linkedin and perhaps some other online collaboration tools as well.   The point is to be involved!

Our staff members will continue with twitter chats launched by Kentucky teacher Donnie Piercy and encourage educators and community members to join those chats, too.  All of us together have the potential to impact education in positive and meaningful ways.  Join us Thursdays 8 pm #KyEdChat.

We will emphasize digital citizenship week October 21-25 by providing suggestions and ideas for teachers to try in their classrooms with students.

We welcome your ideas, feedback and participation in ways that makes sense to you.

Connected Educator Resources:

The Cruciality of Connected Educators
http://connectedlearning.tv/karen-cator-cruciality-connected-educator-month

The Connected Educator Month Starter Kit
http://connectededucators.org/cem/cem-getting-started/

District Toolkit for Connected Educators
http://plpnetwork.com/2013/09/13/connected-educator-month-district-toolkit-released/

National Association of Elementary School Principals
http://www.naesp.org/communicator-september-2013/sign-now-connected-educator-month-resources

National Writing Project
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/4195

Common Assignment Teacher Shares Views on Innovation

 Guest post by:  Brison Harvey, social studies teacher at Lafayette High School in Lexington & one of the Common Assignment  Study teachers

Innovation inspires change. Thinking of a new way to wash the car or grocery shop can shoot an ambitious business person to the top, reaping the rewards of the invention along the way. It provides an exciting, autonomous and rewarding journey to solving a problem or making the existing world slightly more efficient and enjoyable. Creating an environment of innovation climbs to the top of many corporate goals; perhaps it is time for education to take the same step.

In order to innovate, a teacher needs some boundaries, resources and safety nets. Standards create an adequate starting point for the boundaries that a teacher should not cross. The standards help to create some level of uniformity within the classrooms across schools, districts and states. Likewise, some level of accountability for student growth and achievement creates a certain amount of containment to the innovation. However, that containment is necessary to ensure that students do not lose out in the course of experimenting within the classroom. It may keep the "mad scientist" from creating a monster hole in the natural growth of the students in their classroom.

Inventors in any field need some type of resources in order to create their new invention. "Edventors" also need the supplies to create a new product that will help students learn. The simplest resource to provide teachers with is time. Creating additional time to think, invent, test and revise will help create a more polished and effective result. The largest deficiency within schools across the country has been access to the technological resources, which limit the scope of their growth to their physical classroom. Digital learning requires the doors of the internet to be open to all students at anytime during the learning process. However, all growth does not occur through the tech; some innovation will take place in the improvisation that happens daily in the classroom.

School administrators have the authority needed to support projects and "experiments" within the classroom. The expectation shouldn't be for teachers be successful in every class that they teach. Instead, it should be a constant  stream of ingenuity and creativity coming out of a classroom, with teachers growing and learning from each lesson as much as students. As any teacher will tell you,  the growth of students is uneven and not every assignment has a successful conclusion. Administrators must note this concept, that in the course of inventing new and exciting ways of teaching will not always lead to successful results. However, it is important for "edventors" to track their progress so that they can grow from failures and build upon successes until the project is final. For administrators, it is important to allow teachers to fail so that they can grow even stronger in the classroom.

If teachers take this new mindset of innovation into the classroom, I believe some exciting things will begin to take place. Teachers will want to stay in the classroom. The feeling of some level of autonomy and freedom will make the profession more appealing. Teachers will create some new ways of building student success. Students will be the true winners of this movement when new ideas are spread across states into new classrooms. Teachers will become more invested in their own classroom and effectiveness. Results and assessment will find a renewed meaning for teachers who invent. Just like a chef wants to taste his new recipe, a teacher will want to know if the strategies and inventions in the classroom are effective through the use of assessment.

For educators, the time is now. Invention will key the change of education. Creating an environment of innovation will only benefit the students of tomorrow.