Tag Archives: VC Community

Training Hosts at the Canadian Space Agency

This morning at breakfast at the Elevate 2008 conference, I chatted with Marilyn Steinberg from the Canadian Space Agency. I commented that I heard their programs fill up quickly, so she described how they focus on quality, particularly how they train their “hosts” – the scientists and engineers who videoconference with the students. Her training program isn’t published or researched, however, Alberta Education is conducting a three year research project on their student programs.

I learned some really interesting things from Marilyn as she described their training program for their experts. Sometimes the best learning is in the conversations at a conference!

Components of the training

  • An annual 7 month training that consists of 2-4 hours a month
  • Three levels of training – beginning, intermediate, and advanced
  • Beginning focuses on room presence when presenting face to face
  • Intermediate and advanced include speaking the same curriculum language as students and teachers, body language in a videoconference, initiating a warm connection in the first 2.5 minutes of the connection, etc.
  • Pairing beginning and advanced presenters in the first face to face workshops at the Space Agency so the beginners aren’t alone

Lessons for communication
Marilyn shared some really important communication points for videoconferencing. I asked her how she learned them, and she said by observing. They’ve been doing videoconferences for quite a long time. So here are a few of her tips.

  • An early tip for their experts is how to engage with students and teachers who come to sessions on-site at the Canadian Space Agency. The experts learn not to turn their back to the audience – “only your spouse should admire your backside” – a humorous way to remember the lesson! Moving around instead of staying in one place to present requires the audience to multi-task and follow you.
  • Don’t point to the kid on the front row. Pointing is very aggressive. Instead, call on the student in the first row with a green shirt – with an inviting smile on your face and your eyebrows raised. The student will respond with a smile and you’ve engaged them and made a human connection.
  • Don’t break eye contact with the audience. She talked about how when you’re thinking, you might look down or up to the left. But this just makes you look really scary and shifty in a videoconference. Their presenters practice in the mirror and with each other in preparation for looking at the audience and not breaking eye contact. She described the results of this training in a session where the students are working in the room under the supervision of the remote host/scientist – and students just approach the microphone to ask questions of the scientist. Clearly the scientist is “in the room” in the students’ minds.

The scientists improve so much in their presentation skills that they come back from their conferences and comment on the poor quality of presentations done at their scientific conferences. They’ve learned so much they’ve become critical consumers of presentations.

Curriculum Connections
The other part of her training program is in depth learning about the curriculum requirements of the schools. The scientists and engineers learn how to use the same language that the students are using in their scientific curriculum. This is so critical! How many poor expert presentations have you seen? Marilyn commented that they are “talking to themselves”, which I thought was pretty funny because it’s so true!

Assessment
A really brave (in my opinion) component of their training is annual assessment. This isn’t just a three year training where you just walk through the workshops and then you’re done. Each year they assess the experts to see what training they need to focus on for that year. The training is tailored to their needs. She didn’t describe how they did the assessment, but this seemed really brave to me. How many guest experts would be willing to go through this? Yet, clearly they are able to get past the initial hesitancy of their engineers and scientists to the point where they value and appreciate the training. They come back and say this interaction with the kids is their favorite part of their job because of the positive feedback they receive.

I look forward to future publications and presentations of the great work that the Canadian Space Agency is doing!

Communities of practice: a social discipline of learning

Welcome to Elevate 2008! Don’t you wish you were here in beautiful Banff!!!

The conference opens this evening with a keynote by Dr. Etienne Wenger, of Situated Learning and Communities of Practice fame.

He began by giving us an overview of how his understanding of communities of process. First, he studied a listserv on myeloproliferative disorders.

He asked, how is this support group a community of practice? In what way are they? What do you see when you look at it as a community of practice and what does this perspective help you see that you wouldn’t see otherwise?

Some questions were also:

  • How can people trust each other enough to share when they communicate only via email?
  • Isn’t the connection with email “too thin”?
  • Is the bandwidth sufficient to help you recognize the practitioner in the other person – so you want to know and to learn from the other person?

We should be careful not to assume the “lurkers” aren’t learning anything from the listserv – the level of participation can be very high – a story of those who left the listserv after their spouse passed away but shared that the listserv was a lifeline for them.

Phrases to remember:

  • from support to practice
  • gaining a voice in research and policy
  • development of learning is a social practice of connecting people with each other and with knowledge.

In another scenario – a bank company brought together people from different countries who were receiving loans to share what they were doing. Imagine collaborative auditing instead of adversarial auditing. Learning from others and how they are doing things…

From a community of practice perspective, you can’t just learn the technique. You have to create an environment to enable the community of practice.

Research sideline: I’m still trying to wrap my head around what a theory is and what it really means. How do theories come to be and how to you recognize a theory if you met one? I am hearing from Dr. Wegner that he looked at the support community and tried to understand what they were doing; from that developed the theory, and it has been used and built upon since….

A CoP is a group of people who

  • share challenges, passion, or interest
  • interact regularly
  • learn from and with each other
  • improve their ability to do what they care about

can we say…. Jazz!?

Basic model: a social discipline of learning – domain, community and practice.

“knowledge as practice”

“nurturers” are not really the leaders – because there aren’t followers – but people need to nurture the community.

participation, support, and sponsorship are also key parts of the social discipline of learning.

Possible shapes or orientations of communities of practice: meetings, projects, access to expertise, relationships, context, community cultivation, individual participation, content publishing, open ended conversation.

Hmm. Read Around the Planet, vc listservs & social networks,

Learning activities – problems and a bunch more – like solving dialing issues! stay tuned for a new resource on that soon…..

Participation forms model – do we value the lurker or those on the periphery? they might take something from this community and bring it to another one….

Technologies – he’s writing a new book on technology stewardship – crosses from synch to asynch and from interacting to publishing – with the group in the middle. Really cool. Impatient for this one to come out!

Here’s a good question for my leadership program too (sorry for the crossover!)…. what is a body of knowledge? regulatory body, research disciplines, professional bodies, communities, professions, workplace, teaching, etc. “core and boundary learning”…. As a practitioner you “come to embody the whole landscape” of knowledge.

Modes of identification with the community – imagination, engagement, alignment…

What is my role in this system? it’s learning citizenship… multimembership. This is where I am; what is my next step? Learning citizenship is opening new spaces for new conversations…. do you think blogging about VC does that? how about twittering about VC?

Learning is not just accumulating information…

The future of learning ….. the 21st century will be the century of identity. Who am I as a learner? Access to information is less and less problematic. So:

  • meaningfulness and participation
  • trajectory and multi-membership
  • scale and experience
  • technology and geography

You can’t assume that you know what you need to teach students. The shelf life of knowledge is so short. Not so much what can your students do or use what skills? the main question is where have your students visited??! YES! How much have they traveled in the landscape of practices? the teachers who made an impact invited me into who they were…. they allowed me to taste what it’s like to be somebody I’m not yet….

“if you teach to the test, it’s not your fault, it’s the fault of the system”

How do we help children understand the meaning of the knowledge? Not just the technicalities.

This theory puts the emphasis on the meaningfulness of the person as a being.

Question for us to consider…. How can I contribute to the learning capability of my world by enhancing the learning capability in my own sphere of participation?

Process note: “it may be better to hold your question until you’ve talked to others”

Now we’re breaking into groups to discuss…. and my power is running out…. so think about this:

After hearing this presentation, or reading my scribbles, what do YOU think is the implication for our practice in videoconferencing?

Running Your Own ASK Programs

I’m on a mission today to get all my materials ready for the Elevate 2008 conference. Nothing like a conference presentation to motivate a person to get a few extra things done! For a while I’ve wanted to post these notes online about how to run your own ASK program. And now it’s done! So if you’ve been thinking about running ASK programs for your schools, check it out!

Archiving NECC Handouts

I’m cleaning up the announcements section of my blog, so I thought I’d include my NECC 08 handouts link here in a post so you (and I) can find it again if needed.

All NECC 2008 VC Sessions
List of VC related sessions at NECC

NECC 2008 Handouts

Two Successful Jazz Sessions

So, how is your summer going? Going, gone? Feels like that to me.

Last week we participated in the second successful Jazz workshop of the summer. If you’re not familiar with this workshop, visit the website.

The participants and facilitators really enjoy the process of immersion into videoconferencing in the curriculum.

Some features from this summer’s sessions include:

How did your professional development sessions go this summer?

Last Notes from NECC

I’m just cleaning off my computer desktop from NECC and a few scribbles here and there.

I lost two video clips due to somehow losing the sound on them. Very frustrating. But I wanted to mention these two poster sessions in case you missed them.

Dissolving Boundaries in Ireland
Nigel Metcalfe, from the National University of Ireland, dissolvingboundaries@nuim.ie, was presenting about their project to connect kids via videoconference from Northern Ireland and Ireland. The students got to know each other and then worked on projects together in all content areas. You can read more about the project at  dissolvingboundaries.org. I was particularly interested in the research (peer reviewed published research!) section. While the organization supports specifically this project, some of the schools are using VC for other activities as well.

Synchronous at a Distance: Bridging the Gap
The other clip I lost was of Shirley Pickle and Leesa Potts sharing about the Arkansas shared classes distance learning program. The state offers programs to meet the needs of high schools that can’t offer those classes on their own. Leesa is one of the teachers and shared some tips for getting kids to know each other early on with introductions, presentations and other strategies. Be sure to check out the website for the Arkansas Distance Learning Center as you’ll find many tips and tools.

A Tale of Three Cities: Poetry, Performance, Teamwork, Technology, Learning

This presentation at NECC 2008 is by Global Writes. The program brings a writing workshop to the classroom. The teaching artist spend several weeks in the classroom and serves as a professional poet role model in their classroom. The technology is used to bring students together to perform their poems. It’s 4-12th grade students.

Authentic assessment. They have rules for critiquing, praise and respectful criticism. Students feel safer to share because there is a careful structure for feedback.

All of the classes participate in a competition over 2 weeks; 4 sessions a day and then finals. There isn’t a fee (so far) to be in the tournament.

Students give feedback on the writing as well as their presentation of their ideas – body language, pace, gestures, spoken word.

Blogs and podcasts are used to support the writing and reading too. The SlamFam blog is used both by current students and those who have moved on and still post and comment on the work on the blogs.
In some of the cases, the younger siblings came into the class and contributed to the same blog their older siblings were posting to.

Student outcomes include improved attendance, increased motivation, increased self-esteem & self-awareness, enhanced communication and social skills. (A story of a kid who stuttered all the time except when he was performing his poems.)

Teacher outcomes include extended literacy instruction options, collaborative teaching skills, arts integration skills.

They got funding from AEMDD to do some actual research on their program. Three classes at each school studied over 3 years with 4 treatment schools and 4 control.  75% of the kids are still writing poetry. During the research grant the students jumped from 40% planning to go to college to 85% planning to go to college.

The teachers felt more skilled in teaching writing – so the program also mentors the teachers. The data is all just from the Bronx. Now they are collecting data and expanding the program to Chicago to see if the program is replicable.

They are working on creating a replicable and sustainable model.

Shivers up and down my spine while the kids recited their poetry. Incredible!!!!

Model Lesson with Linda McDonald

Wednesday morning at NECC. I’m at Linda McDonald‘s model lesson session. Before the session started, Linda gave the students a lecture on how to behave on a videoconference. It was great to hear her tell them to behave as if their mom or grandma were watching.

A quality videoconference partnership includes three things:

  • higher order thinking
  • all students included and engaged
  • design based on curriculum need

Higher order thinking – focus on application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. Open ended questions stems. If you push kids to the higher level thinking, they will master the knowledge and comprehension level. Teacher as facilitator – don’t answer for the kids.

All students engaged – students in small groups, think time for small group discussion (just mute & talk in groups!!), “learnin’ ain’t quiet”. Keeping a fast pace. Addressing multiple modalities.

Curriculum need – math marvels came from weaknesses on the standardized tests. Timely – has to fit the time that they are doing the book or content. Aligned to how the teachers teach the skills, but still pushing them to the higher level thinking skills.

After the intro, we did several little examples of projects.

I Have, Who Has game. The group is in charge of the clues. The cards have an answer at the top and a question on the bottom. The answer and questions don’t match. The first student reads what they have, and then reads the question. I.e. I have Ulysses S. Grant. Who has the turning point in the Civil War? If you google “I have who has,” you can find examples of how this works. The cards are mixed up amongst the two sites. The answers bounced back and forth between the sites so it’s really easy and really interactive. This is great for a test review.

For Math Marvels
A challenging problem is given to both sites. Both sites mute and small groups try to solve the problems. Then a hint is shared. Then the groups share their problem solving strategies.

Collaborative Writing
The ABCs of writing. Have words that start with a letter, and then write it into a sentence. Here’s an example.

  • America
  • Against taxation without representation
  • Armed
  • Anti-monarchy

Americans armed themselves against taxation without representation and afterwards set up an anti-monarchy government.

Then both classes supply B words, and together write a sentence – one site writes the first phrase, and the other site writes the second phrase. Then, does it match what you know about the topic? Did it stretch your time?

Novel Projects
Kickoff session is before we start reading. The book for this model lesson is Number the Stars. While you’re watching the video clip, make a list of words that come to mind. They activate students schema, make lists of vocab words, etc. to prep for reading the book. After the video, the two sites create a group word wall and share all the words they came up with. Since this class is 8th grade, Linda pushed them to come up with more 8th grade words vs. just sad. So they came up with disheartening, overwhelming, depression.

In the example of the after session, students then work on a story map together. A shared file is created with the two classes.

More Info
See the NECC page to see the resources that go with this presentation.

Components of Linda’s challenge videoconferences: strong lead teacher, pushing the content and instruction to a higher level. Hardly any “talking” or “presenting”. Instead everyone is interacting on the content, with each other at their site, with the teacher, and the students at the other site. Each one is really focused on the content.

Amy Chayefsky's Read Around the Planet Story

At NECC 2008, Amy Chayefsky about a funny sound experience with Read Around the Planet 2008 and the teachers’ reaction.

If the YouTube video below is blocked for you, try this link to the same video on TeacherTube.